Kink In Exile

[I wrote this after talking to a friend about some very politically incorrect fantasies. However, I've been thinking a lot recently about things that are taboo in the queer scene or the alt sex scene including showing vulnerability as a top, and it's been hard to write about those. I am a part of a community, and even if it's a community based on breaking taboos it is still pretty firm on it's boundaries and systems of inclusion. So this is a tease and I promise something that was actually scary to write next week.]

Sometimes I write something and am immediately moved by the desire to delete it. I am not ready to fess up to it, or I worry that left to stand on it’s own it is too off putting. It will be misunderstood and so to the chagrin of every journalism professor I’ve ever met I will add more words. I will add qualifiers until the original statement is so muddled it could not offend anyone if it tried.

But you know what? Sometimes those scary places are worth going to. I was having a conversation with a friend about eroticizing torture, as in real life people are going to die torture. That was not a comfortable conversation for me to have, but it is provocative. It is wrong and bad and dirty and that is what makes it hot. Sexuality is a really complex thing and sometimes I am shocked by the things that turn me on, but hiding it doesn’t make it go away. We’ve tried that, we know.

This is why we have things like SSC* and RACK.** Some things are just not ok. Torturing people in real life is not ok; genocide is wrong and I hope we can all agree on that. But these things make for a rich tapestry of sexual fantasy. That’s the key word – “fantasy.” I like to make people suffer because I know that on some level through the paradox of kink they enjoy it. They enjoy it even while they hate it, and hate me for doing this to them. This is their fantasy as well as mine, and while it may borrow from a vast library of real life violence and exploitation its true origin is still desire and consent.

* Safe, Sane and Consensual.

** Risk Aware Consensual Kink

I sat down to write a post about playing in blue jeans, but I’m actually more curious about how other people related to fashion in the scene.

Certainly there are things that are iconic – black leather, PVC, corsets, collars – but how do they actually affect your play?  Do they change your scene experience?  Does putting on fetish-wear change your headspace?  Does seeing your partner in leather pants trigger a different set of responses than the little black dress?

Personally I own four custom made corsets, but I’ve been known to wear them with jeans and no make-up just as often as part of a full out fetish outfit.  I like dressing up, I like playing on collective memory and triggering all those lovely subconscious associations we harbor.  But more than that, I love breaking the rules, and for better or worse I have gotten the impression that “thou shalt not play in daywear” is one of the rules.

So tell me, just between us girls, when you play what do you wear?  How does it make you feel?

[This was originally posted in my private blog, but I thought I'd share it here as well.  Apologies to those who read both. ]

When thinking about beauty there are a few things at play – one of them is beauty as defined by the society in which it is found.  This I think is a quantifiable thing, models either measure up or they don’t.  They are either tall enough, skinny enough, clear skinned enough, small nosed enough or they aren’t.  By these measurements a 6ft tall 120 pound blond blue eyed Russian model is clearly more beautiful than a 5’3” 250 pound American suburban housewife.  This is determined not so much by the people who have personal relationships with these women, but by art directors, fashion editors, photographers, and other people who are paid to know what beauty is.  To some degree this is biological (babies will reach for pictures of pretty ladies more readily than for ugly ladies) but a lot of it is cultural (those babies grow up to be women who are more likely to buy dresses modeled by size 2 women than size 10 women even if they themselves are size 12).

The other side of this issue isn’t so quantifiable in my opinion.  The part where I can say that beauty is not a matter of measurements but rather of attitude is in the personal and romantic relationships that these women have.  You see, it is fairly easy to find a beautiful woman, dress her up, get a good makeup artist to work on her, and photograph her from flattering angles.  However, if she continuously complains that she is ugly, if she in fact believes that she is ugly she will ruin the image.  Confidence is hot, and here is the kicker – confidence can compensate for imperfection.  No, this is not reflected in the beauty industry, but most of us don’t make money off of our beauty.  Most of us are worried about what our lover or the guy at the bar will think. 

I take a certain amount of interest in how I look, and I invest the time and energy whether through yoga or makeup to maintain that.  However, what I consider pretty is not what the girl next to me on the subway might consider pretty.  I am going for a look that appeals to a certain subculture, and beyond that I am going for things that make me feel sexy. 

Again, confidence is hot.  You’ve seen this before – you have seen girls who sizzle and sparkle; they are irresistible and yet they are not necessarily model material.  And you have seen girls who could be drop dead gorgeous become so neurotic about their imperfection that they lose any appeal they may have had.  Context is also important.  Some things are universally appealing (symmetry in the face for example), others are culturally dependant (American women use self tanning lotions while Asian women spend hard earned money on whitening creams).  Still some are personal (I have taken advantage of my petite frame when it comes to finding partners, but I’m sure there are plenty of people who think tall women are far more appealing.)

The beauty industry presents its ideas of the ideal form and the ideal woman, but real life and real people are far more nuanced and diverse in their interests.  This is not a flaw of the beauty industry – I like to see tall skinny models wearing impossibly high heels even if I will never be one of them.  What people fail to realize is that they are not obligated to imitate those models.  I don’t really think they were ever asked to do so in the first place.  People are shown a pretty picture but it is pretty in its own context.  You are not expected to imitate the image, only the concept or the mood, and even that only if it makes you feel hot.  You are pretty; pretty enough, in fact, to bring men to their knees, not because you are the right height and the right weight or because you have the right skin color, but because you found the right men with the right interests and desires.

He is leaning forward just a little, grasping the mantle.  I’m not hitting very hard, but I am starting to feel the weight of the flogger in my shoulder; later I expect a massage.  The flogger has little metal rings woven through the leather, and they leave a collage of tiny red crescents on his back.  The rings jingle and make me think of Christmas.  He tenses his back at the sound and I wait for him to relax before delivering the blow; quick, and sharp before he has a chance to respond to the telltale jingle.

She is lying on my bed as I test the candle on the inside of my wrist like an over protective mother warming her first bottle.  We are young and dumb, but we have the good sense to do our research.  We have the benefit of the internet too, and so armed with normal, white, unscented household candles and the knowledge that my mother will not be home for days we take our first stab at this kinky sex business.  All the cool kids are doing it. 

Years later there is another girl, this time she is laid out in a dungeon.  No longer scared or tentative, I still test the temperature of the candles on the inside of my wrist.  I know she can take the heat, and so I focus on pushing her mind.  She is sassy, and I love it, but I admonish her none the less.  I ask her for the things I know she doesn’t want to give and wonder if I’m not making a mistake.  But I have learned since those first few steps that sometimes you have to give them what they hate to keep them coming back.

I don’t usually do memes but I was tagged by Maybe Maimed, so hey why not. Here are seven random facts about me. I will try to make them kinky to keep this whole thing on topic…

1) The first thing anyone ever taught me how to do in terms of kink was a Japanese style body harness.

2 ) I got my nipples pierced on a whim while doing photography homework at a tattoo parlor.

3) I heal outrageously fast, and it takes a lot to bruise me in the first place; I’ve always resented the later fact.

4) I keep an excel spreadsheet of the people I sleep with.

5) I accidentally found the first ever lesbian BDSM party in Jerusalem while I was working near the old city. I think I have a homing beacon built in.

6) Most of the men I have slept with have been somehow connected to the computer field. This is a survival mechanism passed down through generations of women but updated to better ensure my survival in the modern era; I can kill my own bear but I can not fix my own computer.

7) I am turned on by intelligence. Really in that sense I am a snob, but more than anything else I look for intelligent and nuanced discourse. Oh, and I at one point did manage to carry on a conversation about Marxism while being fucked…don’t get me started on Marxism.

I know, I know, I promised you sex and instead I’m giving your political rants. I’ll put a 50 word porn short at the end; does that make it better?

Anyway, some of you may be familiar with the global gag rule. It is basically a Bush administration policy that forces any organization that receives AIDS or family planning related funding from the US government to teach abstinence. This doesn’t affect most people in the US, but it puts me in a very hard place.

It means I have to choose between funding and effective education. I can talk about HIV and STDs but not about sex. Or I can give up $5,000 worth of funding per project, which may not sound like much, but in the developing world is actually quite a bit of money.

This is where my biases and values come into play. I will not teach sex as dirty and disease ridden. I consider communication and relationship building skills to be a large part of STD and HIV prevention, and as such they are valid components of my training programs. Abstinence is a valid choice, but saying that it is the only choice will leave my students woefully unprepared to make safe and healthy decisions down the line.

So I compromise. I need the funding to do my job, but I will not teach an abstinence only program. So I bring in team building, and communication. I talk about myths and facts of HIV under the protection of “disease prevention.” I buy condoms with non-government dollars, but in the end I leave the conversations about sex as a positive thing to other people with less restrictive funding. And you know what; this is one of those things where my values cross professional boundaries.

I do not stop being sex-positive when I walk into the office, or even when I sit down to apply for US government funding.  I go back and forth on this a lot. There is a voice in the back of my head that tells me time and time again “it’s just sex, it’s not that important.” It says that when I get upset about abstinence education and when the thing I miss more than anything else about America is the alt sex community.   But sex is important, whether or not it’s supposed to be it is important to me, and my sex-positive philosophy informs the rest of my life.

And I did promise you a 50 word porn short (though I apologies if those of you reading my private blog have already seen this):

There is something about a crisp starched white dress-shirt that is more risqué than black lace can ever hope to be. It hangs unbuttoned exposing one shoulder, framing the tanned skin over her collar bone. Her nipples peek out casually, perhaps a bit suggestively, from under the stiff white fabric.

No, this is not actual content, but it is a fun exercise. Actually this is an idea I stole from another blog, Down On My Knees. You can check out his list here. And if you get the chance, please add your own favorite thing about being kinky in the comments section.

1. Community – The power and love I’ve felt playing in my community is like no other. We might not like the same things but there is common ground in deviance. Also, I love knowing that there is a history to what I do; that there were people who did this before me and they left a path to follow.
2. Transcendence – In yoga we talk about finding the edge, and then finding sweetness and joy in the pain. We do the deep physical work so that we can touch upon the deep emotional work that needs to be done. I find peace in chaos and pain, and there is nothing quite as zen as a very heavy scene. (And of course everyone’s edge is different, and everyone’s definition of “heavy” is different.)
3. Freedom – There is power in naming. There is a lot of freedom that comes with fundamentally believing that you have a right to pleasure, and pursuing that without excuses, without guilt, and without fear. We live in a world full of taboos and constrictive social mores, being kinky, or being openly kinky at least, requires us to first do the often difficult work of breaking free of those taboos.
4. Communication – Sex is not a secret; it is not something to hide, and do in shame. If you can not talk about it you should not be doing it. I love the fact that the people I meet in the kink community talk about sex, they talk about desire, limits, wants, and needs. I find this to be extremely valuable.
5. People – I have met some of the most interesting people through kink circles. Maybe this is just about the parties I’ve had the privilege of attending, but there are few other places where I could find such a high concentration of interesting, creative, and outgoing people. (Take over educated, over paid creatives, mix in a few techies, add whips and chains, sprinkle with a really well chosen selection of music, and stir until Italian existentialist porn emerges.)
6. Connection – This is a whole new level on which I can interact with a partner. Kink adds a whole new layer of intimacy, sharing, and trust to relationships. It also creates a new paradigm for interpersonal interactions. Kink can be an expression of sexuality that doesn’t actually involve intercourse, and it is a context in which boinking strangers is a lot more acceptable than in the vanilla world.
7. Fantasies – Well, the fact that I get to act out my fantasies rather than hiding them away. I get to do things other people only read about and that is something I think is really damn cool.
8. An investment in my orgasms – This may be a strange perversion all it’s own, but I like being able to lay down hard earned money for something that serves no purpose other than to get me off. I get off on having my credit card people know about it, and I feel like this somehow prioritizes my sex life a little higher. And boy oh boy does kink come with some high end gadgets.
9. Shoes – This is a natural progression from number eight, but I just thought I should point out that I have a thing for shoes, especially for the negative space between the heel and the ball of the foot. If I am going to wear six inch heels I would really like to have someone around who is going to appreciate that, and perhaps kiss my feet.
10. Passion – I was having a hard time coming up with a tenth thing for this list so I took a little break and read kink blogs for a while. I am amazed by how passionate they seem. I am amazed by the community I am a part of and by the people who day after day lay their cards on the table and fess up to those dirty dark secrets. I am awed by the passion, boldness and spirit that I see in the kink community. These are people who make the decision over and over again that their desires, their wants, and their needs are worth pursuing political careers be damned.

I used to have a custom made button that said “don’t touch without asking, if I say no stop asking.” I am a very friendly kind of girl, but one thing I can not deal with is people who will touch without permission. I don’t just mean blatantly sexual touch either; I don’t want you to slap my back any more than I want you to slap my ass unless I said you could.

Why do people think it’s ok to touch without permission?  And why does this happen a lot more in mainstream interactions than kink or other alt sex circles?  Do other people find this to be the case as well?  I mean there are plenty of people in alt sex circles who will push boundaries, but in my expirience even they understand that consent is a community norm.  The common scenario in my expirience with mainstream circles is that someone will touch me in a way I find inappropriate, I will ask them to stop and they will at best look a little confused but stop, but more often than not say something to the effect of “oh I don’t mean it that way” and continue the behavior.

How does being in the mainstream give you license do things like this?  And does this mean that I can get drunk, slap my vanilla friends on the ass, assure them that I don’t mean anything by it and that will be acceptable?

This week has been pretty work intensive so I thought I’d post something that has to do with work as well as sex…

Before I was kinky, before I was poly, or really any stripe of slut I was a safer sex educator. I was based in a queer community where we knew what condoms were, and how to use them. We knew the risks, and the statistics. Really it was an easy job.

This week I’m at a conference with some other NGO types, and we’re sitting around drinking coffee and talking shop when I get some very important advice: “Don’t do the condom over a banana trick here.”

Why? Because those in my trainings who are not already convinced that condoms will either a) give them AIDS or b) make them gay will go home with their banana, stick a condom on it, and put the whole kit and caboodle on the nightstand.

This makes sense. I work in an animist culture – when the rains come you put a boar’s head in your spirit house to keep it from flooding. A condom on a banana makes perfect sense. But how do you teach STD prevention to a group of people who have never talked about sex?

You need some kind of foundation to build on. Safer sex without context does not work. This is why we need to be talking about sex honestly and openly. These conversations need to happen. Sure they need to happen in an age appropriate and culturally appropriate setting, but they do need to happen.

We need to bring sex out into the open because until we do we can not curb the spread of HIV. And we can not address the public health crisis that results when migrant workers return to their homes and bring HIV to their wives if the migrant workers lack the motivation to practice safer sex and their wives lack the knowledge or power to insist on condom use and testing.