The Semantics of BDSM vs. Kink

I recently had the pleasure of dinner with someone who had traveled from another state to give a presentation at my local dungeon. Over dinner, we discussed his leadership work with his local Next Generation group. (For those who don't know, "The Next Generation" or "TNG" is a common name for BDSM-centered social groups for younger adults, usually age 18-35. There is no central TNG leadership as far as I'm aware, but there are TNG's in many cities throughout the U.S.) One of the changes he's been trying to make in his local TNG, he explained, was semantic. Instead of using the acronym "BDSM," (Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism), he refers to the groups' members exclusively as "kinky." Instead of "munches," they have "meet and greets."

"What's the difference?" asked everyone at our dinner table after the dungeon presentation.

"Oh, there's no difference at all, really. But for some reason, it seems to scare people less. When I tell people that I'm into BDSM, I get all the scared looks. But if I say I'm a little kinky, people are more likely to smirk or find it hot. It's more 'naughty' and less scary. Even if I'm doing the exact same things."

Which launched a conversation on whether or not we should be obligated to worry about scaring people outside the community. If we really cared what mainstream society thought of us, we probably wouldn't have met in our local dungeon in the first place. Regardless of vocabulary, openly embracing alternative sexuality requires a certain amount of ability to ignore judgment of others.

"But," he argued, "it's really not for vanilla people. I mean, greater acceptance is a perk, but I think de-mystifying is more important to people who are kinky but are still scared to admit it. If changing the semantics makes them feel more comfortable about joining us, then that's great."

Which brings back my clear memories of worrying that kinky desire made me a bad feminist, and/or crazy, and/or unlovable, and how those worries decimated my self-esteem in college. I can't say now if I might have read and absorbed SM 101 earlier if it had been called "Kink 101." (To maintain my honest disclosures, I still haven't read SM 101.) But I can't begrudge anything that might help nervous, newbie kinksters feel less freakish than I did.

At the same time, though, I fought hard for my acceptance of BDSM and for the courage to start going to munches. So I have an instinctual resentment to any implication that I ought to be more considerate of people who still think my lifestyle is scary. I know that it isn't. Most of my first munch revolved around a game of Scrabble. The first time I saw other people having sex in front of me (at my first BDSM party), I was eating brownies on the other side of the room, and the couple people I knew there were eating brownies with me and quoting Monty Python. I keep a public blog about my scary, scary sexuality now, and yet (alas) I still spend more hours per week in my fluorescent-lit office cubicle with bad coffee than I do actually having kinky sex. I don't feel even a little bit scary, and caring what other people think is exhausting.

So I'm unlikely to entirely drop the words "BDSM" or "munch" from my vocabulary. I use "kink" and "meet and greet" interchangeably with them, because they mean the same thing. But I can't help but wonder whether or not changing such semantics really would work for changing minds, or how one would even find closeted kinksters to ask them.

Sexy Violence in the Pentecostal Hell House

For two primary reasons, I generally avoid writing about the American Moral-Majority-type Evangelical Christian movement. First, I think they already get overwhelmingly more attention than they deserve, and second, I don't want to humor the part of their binary-based ideology that classifies every person as either (a) Christian or (b) sexually liberal, and defines both camps in part by their mutual enmity. But I'm going to break my own boycott for a moment, because I was that enthralled by This American Life's recently repeated episode featuring Hell House.

As Ira Glass explains about ten minutes into the episode:

In 1999, documentary filmmaker George Ratliff read about a church in Cedar Hill, Texas, which is a suburb of Dallas, that was staging a re-creation of the Columbine Massacre. That church, Trinity Church, was putting on a haunted house, called Hell House. They'd been doing it every year for years, each Halloween. The Columbine scene was just one scene of about a dozen. There was also an abortion scene, there was a scene where a gay man dies of AIDS, and a scene where a mom meets a man on the internet and then deserts her family for that man... And the point is: Devils are around us, trying to trip us up, every day. Sin is real; the devil's real; so you better get right with God.

Which I was ready to dismiss as more generic conservative preaching - until I heard the actual sound-clip of teenage actors reenacting the death of Cassie Bernall (renamed "Carrie"). George Ratliff narrates the extreme violence onstage, including real handguns and props, and then we hear hysterical screaming and sobbing teenage voices: "Do you believe in God? Yes! I said do you believe in God? Yes, I believe in God!" and a gunshot. This was recorded in October 1999, only six months after the actual shooting. And despite my lifetime of secular liberalism, the sound-clip spooks me exactly as much as it's supposed to.

It unnerves me because, as intended, the impassioned shrieks make me momentarily forget my rational arguments about there being more than two potential lifestyles in all of human possibility. The violence shocks. It's terrifying, and thereby riveting theater. Staged violence has been holding audience attention at least since Oedipus killed his own father and then gouged out his own eyes, more than four hundred years before Jesus was born.

But fear makes an ironic tool for promoting chastity, because fear is sexy. That's how it grabs such rapt attention in the first place. Fear and good sex both defy reasonable arguments; they both tap us into powerfully primal, impulsive forces. Personally, few things snap me into a feeling horny as instantaneously as a lover's hand firmly on my throat. Fear forces me to focus all of my attention, and to give up the illusion that I can control everything. It's sexy as hell.

I can only imagine that, if I believed that everyone without shame of their sexuality went to hell, hell would be even sexier.

Which George Ratliff notices while watching the 2000 Hell House auditions:

The girls all want to be the suicide girl or the abortion girl, because those are the roles where you get to scream and cry and emote the most... Nearly everybody wants to play a sinner. Nobody wants to play a saint... Maybe it's just more fun to be evil onstage than good. Maybe playing a church-going, God-fearing Christian is just not that interesting if you are a church-going, God-fearing Christian. The organizers usually have to go out and recruit some hapless kids to play the good Christian roles...

If you ask the teenagers straight up if they have fun pretending to shoot their classmates or do drugs at a rave, they're all good Christian kids and know better than to admit that they enjoyed themselves... But Hell House is the biggest event of the year for Trinity Church. After three weeks of performances... the kids all get dressed up to the nines for an event that is the equivalent of prom night for them. They call it the Hell House Oscars.

He then plays a clip of Pentecostal teenager Liz Simmons accepting a "Suicide Award" for her portrayal of a character who goes to a rave, "sips her spiked drink, freaks out, gets gang-raped, and ends up killing herself, after admitting that her dad had molested her as a child."

It's too easy to point out all the levels of absurdity and offense of the premise, from the explicit blaming-the-rape-victim to the implication that just listening to non-Christian music will kill you. What's more interesting about Liz Simmons's acceptance speech is her Texan-accented cheeriness:

Well, I couldn't have done it without my rapers, so thank you Brent and David. And I just want to say it was really an honor to do this part. At first I was real uncomfortable with it, you know, when I heard that I was going to have to raped, and I was like, okay, what's that gonna be like, but it ended up being a lot of fun, and- [Laughter.] Okay, wait, I didn't say that right. No, I just really got to, got to meet a lot of people that I didn't know, and I had a- [Laughter.] Okay, this is only getting worse.

And then it would be too easy to point out that Liz Simmons didn't learn anything at all about drugs, or suicide, or rape, or even correct vocabulary word for "rapist." Obviously gaining a deeper understanding is not the point. The intended point is to panic teenagers out of sex and violence.

And the reason that so many teenagers audition for Hell House - and the reason so many other teenagers will pay $7 to watch - is that they've already figured out that portraying sex and violence is exciting.

Queering Heterosexuality

Part of straight privilege is a general lack of expectation to question if or how we're really straight: People are usually assumed straight until they come out otherwise, and that gets the stamp of "normal."

But "normal" is such a vague and unhelpful way to write oneself off. Recently, I was reading the excellent essay anthology Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire, ed. Merri Lisa Johnson, and I came across Merri Lisa Johnson's plea for what she calls "queering heterosexuality": straight people adopting tenets of the queer rights movement, such as, "less restrictive gender roles," "nonreproductive sexuality, justified by pleasure alone," and "the nuclear family as one relationship configuration among many, not the norm." Because challenging rigid definitions of love and sexuality benefits everyone. Then, as I ponder my own "queered heterosexuality," I find myself daydreaming again about my friend J.

J and I met when we started high school, and we quickly became best friends and partners in our adolescent angst. One night when we were sixteen, I was comforting J over having recently been dumped by her boyfriend, and J declared in grand adolescent fashion that she hated all men, and from now on she would just be a lesbian. Single myself at the time, I told her that I agreed. And we repeated that we were totally serious - so we kissed each other on the lips. My heart somersaulted. And she started laughing with what I understood to be the glee of rebellion, and not really the glee of attraction to me.

After that, our "lesbian relationship" became one of our many inside jokes. We never got as far as kissing with tongues, and we continued to agonize over various cute boys (and agonize that our crushes undermined our status as autonomous, empowered women). But we would rage together against the boring narrow-mindedness of the suburb where we lived, and we'd walk through the mall holding hands and occasionally kissing on the lips, and then we'd claim disappointment when the strangers around us failed to react with any shock. I moved to another state a few months after the first kiss, and we wrote many long letters to each other. Her envelopes were always addressed to "Annabelle L.L. River," and only I knew that "L.L." stood for "Lesbian Lover."

The longer the "joke" went on, the worse it started to sting me when she would laugh about it. Because, I realized gradually, I really did want to do more with J than hold her hand at the mall. I wanted her. Her casual touch electrified me. But I didn't have any idea what to do about it, because I feared that revealing my genuine lust would ruin the "joke." Anyway, we were straight. We had to be straight, because we couldn't get rid of our lust for boys. J was the only girl I'd ever felt the same way about, and we were both pretty femme. Her exception to my heterosexuality bewildered me.

In the years since J and I lost contact, I've come to accept that sexual orientation doesn't work as a binary of either (a) straight or (b) gay - not even as a "tri-nary" including (c) bi. I prefer the Kinsey Scale by sexologist Alfred Kinsey, which sets up orientation as a continuous spectrum from 0 - 6, with 0 being exclusively straight and 6 being exclusively gay. Which still isn't a complete model, since he didn't leave clear space for transsexuals or intersex people. Anyway, I still usually call myself "straight," because it's briefer and simpler than calling myself a, "1 on the Kinsey scale," and because I'm madly in love with two cis men. But I've had a handful of very sexy encounters with women since I gave up the idea that I "couldn't" because "straight."

Later in the same essay anthology, Merri Lisa Johnson words it this way:

I recognize this reluctant identification now as common among bisexuals, never feeling quite bi enough, thinking only equal attraction and equal sex with men and women qualifies as "real" bisexuality. Those feminist porn stars on the west coast who make sex-ed videos with their cohabitational male and female partners are the "real" bisexuals; I'll just sit in the back and sneak out early.

...I lean toward being a heterosexual-identified bisexual woman... but bisexuality infuses my identity in small ways... and in large ways as well, like recognizing how fine the line is between friendship, desire, and fucking, challenging neat divisions like het/homo, mind/body, intellect/erotic, friend/lover. It's just not that simple.

So maybe by someone's definition I'm actually bi, but then, who's deciding exactly how much same-sex experience and/or desire tips the scale? And more importantly, who cares? There are no one-size-fits-all labels, and heterosexuality could use a good queering.

Havelock Ellis and Olive Schreiner: A History Mini-Lesson

For all the increasing mainstream news coverage of polyamory, most articles still take the perspective of "exposing" something very new and innovative. Which I understand, because most people haven't heard of us. I've had a lot of positive coming-out experiences to a lot of open-minded people, but I've never come to out to anyone outside the BDSM Scene without having to explain what "polyamory" actually means. Certainly the campaign for visibility is a relatively recent phenomenon. The word was only coined in 1990, and The Ethical Slut only published in 1997. Before that, the terms "polygamy" oddly classified us with authoritative patriarchies (like Mormons), or phrases like "open relationship" inappropriately trivialized our "secondary" partners. Even "open relationships" get sensationalized as a modern phenomenon; a recent CNN article claims, "The 1970s introduced the concept of 'open marriage.'" (Emphasis mine.)

And many poly people enjoy the idea that we're doing something totally revolutionary. And maybe we are, in the sense that we have so few conspicuous precedents to follow. Except, if one reads the right history books, one finds that contemporary poly people aren't as original as we often credit ourselves. Which comforts me, because representing "The Next Sexual Revolution" puts a lot of pressure on my quotidian life, and hearing that my life "is enough to make any monogamist's head spin" makes me feel freakish. So I've started studying my history.

Starting with My Other Self: The Letters of Olive Schreiner and Havelock Ellis, 1884-1920, ed. Yaffa Claire Draznin, 1992. For some background history, Henry Havelock Ellis was one of the first published academic sexologists, and Olive Schreiner was a feminist author. Despite living in Victorian society, they formed a close, occasionally romantic friendship based on their equal intellects. The letters are full of philosophy, book recommendations, constructive criticism of each other's writing, and their shared passion for women's rights - when controversial women's rights included the right to vote and the right of married women to own property. In 1890, Ellis married Edith Lees. "Edith was a lesbian and had a number of affairs with women during their marriage, just as Havelock Ellis has some passionate (if asexual) affairs with other women; the two regularly discusses their respective affairs with each other." (Draznin, p. 468).

Excerpts that particularly warmed my heart:

I have just been going through Miss [Caroline] Haddon's paper which arrived again for the third time this afternoon. It is still more improved and is really a splendid paper... It is no longer a mere plea for polygomy. She says, for instance, that some women need for their mental development not only a large amount of sexual indulgence, but variety. I shall send it to the Westminster [Review] now.
-Havelock Ellis to Olive Schreiner, December 18, 1884

I must live to write that story I've had in my head so many years, about the woman who marries a man who's loved another woman as a mistress before and how she gets the other woman so beautifully to live with them. What Aldis says about monogamy being our present highest aim but something higher coming after it, I've felt so long but never seen expressed anywhere.
-Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, July 7, 1885

I see she [Caroline Haddon] represents you as saying that all marriage must be monogamous. But that is a mistake - is it not? - unless you have changed your opinion lately. You would not set down any rigid dogma like that which weakens rather than strengthens one's position. There must always be variations under natural and healthful conditions.
-Havelock Ellis to Olive Schreiner, February 2, 1886

I believe the only remedy for the agony and suffering that sex inflicts is absolute truthfulness and openness. Not after you are found out but before!! I do not believe a man or woman ever enters on a real sex relation with a man [or] woman without knowing they are sexually attracted to one another. If it is only a few hours before you would have time to tell the person whose sexual life you had forever bound with yours what you are feeling.
-Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, December 12, 1911

So much for the "new" sexual revolution and my own strangeness.

Adventures of a "Bad Girl" with Sinus Congestion

In the cultural binary between "good girls" and "bad girls," I definitely spent my formative years as a "good girl": I got straight A's, mostly didn't drink or smoke pot until college, and I was too insecure to act on my slutty fantasies. But then I became a sadomasochistic polyamorous adulteress who writes about sex on the internet, which I'm told now qualifies me as a "bad girl." So today I was waiting in line at Walgreens to buy Kleenex for my runny nose (you know, the way that "bad girls" do) and I was highly amused to see that this month's issue of Cosmopolitan proclaims on its cover: "Bad Girl Issue: For Sexy Bitches Only."

The magnificent Evil Slut Clique has already intelligently skewered the November 2009 issue of Cosmo (as they've done to previous issues), and I should confess that I didn't actually spend $4.29 to bring the magazine home to quote it more accurately. But considering my own "bad girl" credentials - and the long line to buy Kleenex - I caved to my curiosity and flipped to find out which "bad girls" made the honor list. And there in the top left corner of the page was Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, First Lady of France, and a reference to her infamous quote, “I‘m monogamous from time to time, but I prefer polygamy and polyandry.”

And maybe I'm just naive, but I got excited. I dislike Bruni's husband's politics, but has Cosmopolitan really caught up to the possibility of honest non-monogamy?!

Then I turned the page for tips on how to be a better "bad girl." Top of the page: Get really good at telling white lies, so you don't get caught. First example: If you tell your boyfriend that your ex wasn't at the party you went to, make up more details about the party where you "didn't" see your ex.

I'm sorry, but lying doesn't make you a fun/sexy/exciting "bad girl"; it just makes you a liar. More lies will make your first lie more believable for a while, but then you'll need lies to protect those lies, and then to avoid getting caught you'll need to remember all the lies. The truth is easier on the conscience, builds much stronger relationships, and is much easier to remember. Besides my genuine confusion: Why would seeing an ex be worth lying about? Polyamory isn't for everyone, but if your significant other becomes intolerably jealous that easily, and/or doesn't trust you, and/or doesn't have any reason to trust you, then do you actually like dating them?

But wait! If I reject monogamy, and I reject dishonesty, does that make me a "bad girl" or a "good girl"?

Surprise: It's like celebrating "bad girls" reinforces another false binary, and doesn't actually liberate anyone.

Embracing the "woo-woo" in kink

For many self-identified sadomasochists, BDSM is an expression of spirituality as much as sexuality. And I should disclose that I haven't been one of those people, because I've never been highly spiritual. I enjoy certain religious rituals too much to call myself an atheist: The rituals generally mean time with my family and large quantities of food, and who can argue against that? From my religious standpoint, a story doesn't have to be literally true to be relevant or powerful, and I generally prefer the world the five senses.

But there's a sizable overlap between the Western polyamory subculture and pagan subculture. Stick around the poly or BDSM scenes long enough, and you're bound to hear someone quoting Raven Kaldera's Pagan Polyamory: Becoming a Tribe of Hearts or Easton & Hardy's Radical Ecstasy: SM Journeys to Transcendence. You're bound to hear people talking about their play in terms of energy work and chakras and tantra. There are whole workshops on spiritual BDSM. And I've always reacted to it the same way that I react to more "mainstream" religions, which involves faith that it works for other people, but no personal inner connection.

I try not to offend people by using the phrase "woo-woo" - but I do have a lot of respect for people who sometimes refer to their own spirituality as "a little woo-woo." Humor and self-awareness make almost anything more accessible.

So about a week ago I attended a presentation on negotiating spontaneous mini-kink-scenes, and I jumped up as a volunteer because I'm exhibitionist. And then the presenter announced that this was going to be the "woo-woo" portion of the class. He asked me if I've worked much with my chakras before, and I admitted no. He said that that was fine; all I had to do was maintain eye contact with him, and he would open up his own first chakra and then pass the energy into me. Which, I have to admit, sounded pretty woo-woo. But I focused into his eyes, and - even though we had never met, and five minutes earlier I had found him charismatic and intelligent but not especially sexually attractive - I suddenly felt an enormous wave of very real sexual tension. After a few moments he broke off eye contact to speak to the audience again, and I felt flustered, almost dizzy.

I took my seat again and snuggled up to my husband, and the class went on. About ten minutes later, the presenter asked how I was doing again, and I honestly answered, "Fine." He nodded and pointed out to everyone, "See, we were working up some great sexual energy for a minute there. But now our connection is mostly gone, because she took the energy and passed it on to her partner there. Which is great; that's exactly what polyamory is all about." To which I say: Indeed.

The next day I was still pondering the notion that "woo-woo" energy-passing from opening up certain chakras might work on me after all, and I finally started skimming Radical Ecstasy. (My husband got a copy as a present from an ex-girlfriend, and neither of us had ever read it.) I had always assumed that it would be inaccessibly "woo-woo" to a secular girl like me, but then I read Janet Hardy's passage:

What is sacred, I think, is attention... If all I can think about is how much money there is in my checking account and whether the $200 tire will last twice as long as the $100 one, I miss the astonishing realization that the tread under my hand passed through the rain forest and the steel mill and the conference room of a Madison Avenue ad agency and the shipping department of Costco; and that handing my credit card to the clerk has connected me with hundreds of people I'll never meet, with trees I can't climb and a factory whose workings I don't begin to understand; and that I breathed in molecules from those people's skin and oxygen exhaled by those trees and pollution floating in the air from that factory before I ever considered buying the tires.

It is with some reluctance - well, kicking and screaming, honestly - that I've come to conclude that the energy, or kundalini, or life force, or whatever it is we are writing about in this book, is absolutely real: when something lifts me off the floor and slams me against a wall, that's evidence enough for me. But nothing about it strikes me as particulary "spiritual." To me, it's a physical energy, just like electricity: a form of energy that we don't have the right instruments to measure yet.

Now if that's spiritual, then everything is spiritual. And, yeah, of course everything is spiritual, but used that way the word has no meaning - when I look up a word in the dictionary, I like to find a more precise definition than "See also: all other words in the dictionary" - so we're back to the beginning.

And once I actually pay attention, I find that some tenets of "woo-woo" spirituality aren't so different from my own beliefs after all.

Filament Magazine: The Thinking Woman's Crumpet

To clarify from my celebration of "Dress Like a Whore" Day: I do understand the Feminism 101 concepts of the "male gaze" and its companion objectification, wherein women are reduced to bodies existing only for men's pleasure. There is already a huge assortment of feminist treatises showing how objectification and unrealistic beauty expectations damage women. But then, however problematically, none of my Women's Studies courses have stopped me from feeling a great erotic charge from intentional exhibitionism. So for years I've been working to articulate how I, as woman, can occasionally enjoy the role of the flashy slut without being reduced to "only" a slut. (Step one is the deliberate choice.)

And then a fellow kinky female friend introduced me to the brilliant Filament magazine, subtitled "The Thinking Woman's Crumpet." Instead of fighting the erotic "gaze" as inherently evil, Filament fights for straight women's right to gaze at men.

To put a philosophy behind its glossy pages of beautiful naked men, editor Suraya Sidhu Singh writes in Volume II:

It's hard to imagine how a society in which women are seen as erotic subjects by men, but men are not seen as erotic subjects by women, can also be a society in which broader equality exists... The vista in every newsagent suggests that being an erotic subject is a gender role, not a personal choice.

And continues on Filament's FAQ page:

Surely popularising erotic images of men legitimises degrading images of women?
‘Erotic’ and ‘degrading’ are polar opposites as far as we’re concerned. It’s natural to be attracted to viewing the human form erotically, and there is nothing inherently degrading about the subject being less clothed or more aroused. In conducting our research we’ve been heartened by the kinds of things that women are asking to see, namely more erotic imagery that depicts the subject as a person, not a sex object. We’re proud of catering to such twisted fancies.

These things research says women like in an image, it would be safe to assume men like the opposite?
No, in fact, that would probably be wrong. If anything, research suggests men and women find similar image qualities erotic.
The assumption that women and men are chalk and cheese is perhaps what led erotic image aimed at women to be so unappealing to women in the past. Erotic images for men are almost always shot in colour and in recognisable locations, and the models are usually looking at the camera. Meanwhile, supposedly erotic images for women are usually in black and white, shot on a plain studio backgrounds and often, the model’s whole head is out of frame. There was never any evidence to suggest women liked that kind of thing; it arose from the assumption that male and female erotic tastes were oppositional, which is wrong.

But what's especially refreshing about Filament (and little other pornography I've found on the internet or newsstands) is that it also presumes its readers' intellect. Instead of selling itself as "naughty," Filament intersperses between its nude photographs well-written articles that aren't necessarily "sexy." For example, Issue 2 includes a history of England's 19th-century prostitution laws, one woman's experience raising a child with cerebral palsy, and an explanation of the Afro-Brazilian art of capoeira - along with advice for strap-on pegging. It's almost as if they think women who want to look at and/or fuck pretty men also enjoy intellectual learning!

Which really should not be a novel idea, but then, I've never seen a magazine quite like it before.

Filament is based out of England but ships anywhere in the world. Support them.