Kink In Exile

I did warn you that posting would be suspended in the event of political instability or malaria, and while I don’t have malaria I am making a rather unexpected trip on rather short notice to a hospital in Chiang Mai. This means that instead of writing a real post I am frantically looking for my passport and cell phone charger.

Normal posting will resume shortly (by next Friday at the latest I assure you). In the mean time I’m going to take this opportunity to spotlight a blog I have been reading of late.  Sexgeek is a blogger after my own heart. I am both delighted to learn that I am not the only person who gets a kick out of research and incredibly jealous of her recent trip to the Leather Archives in Chicago.

Come back next week for commentary about Sex Exposed — the book I have just finished about pornography and feminism — and ranting about Big Sister in the bedroom.

Oh, and if you happen to be in Chiang Mai and want to have a drink with me comment here. If I am still alive I’d be curious to know who’s reading my blog.

I am reading Bodies of Inscription, which is an anthropology thesis about tattooing communities.  I do not have any tattoos – eventually I will find a place on my body for that grotesque I have been thinking about for years, but that’s beside the point.  The reason I am interested in the book is because the author, Margo DeMello, is a member of the tattooing community and she also did extensive academic work related to it.  This is of interest to me because I want to do sociological work dealing with the BDSM community.  More specifically I want to examine how participation in an established sexual community of interest affects private sexual behavior.  The hard part of course is that I consider myself a member of the BDSM community.  

I’m curious if any of you have found yourselves in similar positions.  On the one hand this might give me greater access to interview subjects and events.  On the other, I risk becoming either biased in my research or an outsider in the BDSM community.  I have no political agenda in my research interest.  As much as I admire the work of authors such as Califia, Queen, and Sprinkle, my academic interest lies in community sociology rather than political activism.  Still, I wonder if it is possible to do academically sound work in a community you are personally attached to.  I almost feel if it was more honest if I did have a political agenda.

“I reserve the right to write about any aspects of my sexlife.”  If you’ve slept with me recently you’ve probably gotten this warning. 

I have been known to interrupt sex for photography.  It takes a certain amount of insanity to sleep with me in the first place.  A friend I’ve been involved with commented “you really aren’t on board for there being such a thing as too out, are you?”  He was right.  I’m not. 

I am trying to think of a way to explain this, but it just doesn’t seem like the kind of statement that requires justification.  Perhaps it requires clarification…

I think people are entitled to their secrets, but I am entitled to my self-respect and so I will not be one of those secrets.  If you want to make sure that your friends never find out that you are having kinky sex I suggest that you do not have kinky sex.  If you can’t own it you probably aren’t ready to do it.  At the very least save yourself the frustration of having me throw expensive objects at walls* and find someone else to be your dirty little secret. 

In case you couldn’t tell this is a lesson I learned the hard way.  I think we all make our own choices, pay our own prices, and reach our own conclusions.  The conclusion I reached was that the ability to live my life with honesty and purpose is worth the hatred, discrimination, and various other forms of social disapproval thrown at people who walk outside the status quo.  This is my choice, and you are of course entitled to make a completely different and contradictory one.  What you are not entitled to, however, is to ask me to change for your sake.  If you don’t like how I live my life then don’t become a part of it.  Really, it is that simple.  I do not walk into the lives of monogamous vanilla people and ask them to change for me.  I do not go around finding people who have sensitive jobs that prevent them from being out and trying my darnest to out them. I expect the same consideration and respect for my life choices as the people who do not wish to be out demand for theirs. 

These however, are the personal arguments.  I am a social creature and a political one at that so I thought it would be appropriate to point you in the direction of some political discourse on the matter as well.  Pat Califia writes a great deal about publicizing and outing S/M sexuality.  My understanding of Califia’s thesis primarily from his work Public Sex is that the personal oppression that we experience when we fear the loss of our jobs or our children in the event that our participation in S/M activities is discovered, and the legal threats we come under as sex workers are part of a much large context of systematic political oppression.  The personal is political – the rallying cry of the feminist movement – highlights the fact that through the understanding of and rebellion against systematic oppression we can change what we have previously seen and dismissed as personal problems.  If we each hide in our own closets with our stash of S/M porn we will each be safe until we are discovered.  If we all stand up and refuse to be kowtowed by an outdated system based in Christian mores we might start working toward a world where our sexuality is not subject to fear, shame, and political repression.

“It’s the state that makes the personal political by interfering in private lives.  We must choose between the quiet suffering of such punishments alone and the exhaustion and pain of publicly opposing it.” (Public Sex, p.146)

* No expensive objects were damaged in the making of this post.

I was thinking about making a post that tied in with the Boston fetish flea, but a self indulgent post about being in exile didn’t sound very interesting, luckily this came along…

I live in a country with pretty strict government censorship, so when friends send me music, movies, or even photos I tell them to burn what they are sending to unmarked CDs and label them “Family Photos” or something similar.  This morning (last night in Boston) some friends of mine were having a post Fetish Flea party, and they were kind enough to call me during it.  You see I left the US about a week before a kink event and among some of my friends it is kind of a tradition to call and pass the phone around during parties.  Anyway, one of my friends was telling me that they took some pictures at the play party and would send them to me.  “We’ll call them family photos,” she said.

It struck me as really sweet, because you know what?  Those are my family photos.  The people I play with are part of my family.  My lovers, and former lovers are my family.  The friend who tells me I am fucking nuts as she is writing “safe-call, 10pm” on a sticky note, and then still unlocks the door for me when I get home at 4am covered in cuts and with the biggest fucking grin on my face is part of my family.

So anyway I love you all and I hope you had a lovely time at the Fetish Flea.

And as a side note, the Boston Fetish Flea was the first public BDSM event I attended in America; it was on my 18th Birthday.  Also, I realized yesterday that it has been more than 5 years since the first time I mustered up the courage to go to a BDSM club (yes I was scared — it was about as intimidating as anything sexual in Amsterdam could have possibly been).  Somehow, I still feel like a newbie.

Welcome to the net generation
One of my favorite wordpress features is the ability to see what terms people google to end up at my blog.  Did you catch the use of the word “google” as a verb there?  Anyway, I find it fascinating because it gives me a window to the secrets people keep between themselves and the World Wide Web.

One of the kink experiences which a lot of people I know describe and which I think will become less and less common is feeling like you are the only one.  I admit there was a time when I thought that I would never find the kinky people in real life, but I never had the feeling of being alone and broken.  I had the internet.

I wonder sometimes if I would have been kinky without the internet.  I know I’ve said before that I was born this way, and I believe that wholeheartedly, but what would I have done about it.  Sure, if I was very lucky I would have met the right people, or found the right magazines, but what if I wasn’t so lucky?

For those of you who were kinky before the internet what did it look like?  When and how did you get the language to talk about it and with whom did you talk about it?  How did being kinky feel before you had the words or the context to describe it?

I had a conversation with a friend a little while ago about fantasies and how some of mine would leave the casual observer wondering “where’s the kinky sex.” In general I am a very hands on likes to cause pain and see the reaction or likes to be hurt without all the pomp and circumstance kind of girl. However, when it comes to topping men in specific I get really into head games and service.

So a little bit of background; at one point I did freelance photography work as my primary source of income. Most of my work involved model portfolios and soft core porn sets for the alt sex market. There was a lot of time spent editing porn. I mean a lot. If this sounds fun to you, you have probably never been part of porn production. However, this fantasy comes out of all the hours spent at my desk cursing models for daring to have birthmarks on their thighs…

I want an attractive young man kneeling by my desk. He is nude except for a collar, and he is off a little to the side so that if he looks up he can see my computer screen. But he does not look up. He keeps his head bowed and his hands folded in front of him until I need him. He is not here in a sexual capacity, though he is aroused by his predicament (it’s my fantasy, shut up!). Really his main purpose in being here is to refresh my tea cup as needed and otherwise make himself as non-intrusive as possible.

From here there are many possibilities…perhaps he fidgets too much and distracts me, in which case he’d have to be punished. Perhaps I chide him, asking if he has grown bored and give him something to think about like nipple clamps or perhaps a butt plug. Maybe I just tell him what his punishment is going to be and let him think about it while I finish my work.

Maybe he is being exceptionally good. I tell him to make me a cup of tea, and when he returns with it I have him kneel right next to me. I might grab a fistful of hair and pull his head back, pinch his nipple with my other hand — hard enough to make him whimper — then laugh and send him back to his place beside my desk.

So many possibilities…

What was the first image of BDSM that you remember seeing?  Did you stumble across it on the internet?  Did you find your parents’ porn collection when you were in highschool?  Did you know someone who knew someone?

For me it was always just there.  My parents kept the sex reference books on the living room bookshelf (though I was still naive enough to ask my mother what oral sex was after watching a special on the morning news about how to explain the Clinton affair to your children).  lets just say I was a late bloomer.

There is one incident that left me fascinated long before I figured out what I was fascinated by though.  This was in a deli in Manhattan.  I must have been about 14 or 15, and I was at a deli in Manhattan and this couple walked in.  The woman was wearing these incredibly tight red pants and as they were waiting at the counter the guy slapped her ass.  She moaned.  She just moaned in the middle of a deli somewhere in midtown on a Sunday morning –  I still remember the sounds; the sharp slap followed by her moan.  she seemed to have physically lengthened like she was going to turn into something altogether unreal.  I don’t remember their faces anymore, or really my reaction, just those very tight red pants.

Continuing with the theme of kink and reality I’m curious as to what motivates us to do this.  I’m sure there are a lot of different reasons, motivations, and explanations just as there are different styles of play.  What are they?  What is the primary thing that drives you to BDSM?  How did you find this?

I maintain that I was born this way.  Then again, I was raised by outrageously permissive, pacifist, over-educated, liberals.  Maybe this is just my teenage rebellion against an atmosphere of egalitarianism.  Ok, maybe not.

I get off on kink, yes.  But beyond the immediate gratification of what makes me wet, I can’t imagine life without kink.  I don’t want to imagine it; it wouldn’t be my life.  A lot of this ties back to the fact that I believe that the pursuit of pleasure is fundamentally healing.  Hedonism will save the world. 

When we embrace our desires instead of fighting them or judging them we are more comfortable with ourselves.  We are more open to other people’s ideas too, because we are not in a position to feel threatened.  Treating ourselves and our desires with loving kindness allows us to walk more gently in the world.  

I am sitting here trying to find a way to write that those brutal, vicious things we do to each other in dungeons, bedrooms, and back alleys help us walk gently in the world.  The bite marks on my lover’s neck are an expression of loving kindness.  The scars on my body are a part of the healing path.  And this is so obviously a contradiction, and yet, for me, it is such an obvious pairing. 

I am reading Anne Rice’s Exit to Eden in which her characters use BDSM to explore and confront real-world violence.  However, what I mean by healing is a lot more subtle, and a lot more personal.  BDSM is not a tool to change the world.  It is a tool that brings me more in-tune with myself.  It is a space in which I can not lie to myself, and a space in which I don’t need to cover up my desires.  It is personally healing, but it also falls squarely in the domain of the wealthy – not because you need money to play, but because you need leisure time to think about this kind of thing.  While there are accounts of romances in concentration camps, those busy surviving do not, by and large, have time for hedonism.  Make no mistake, while we might address real world power dynamics in our play I doubt that those affected by real-world, systematic, violence are spending precious time sexualizing genocide and famine. 

That said, how do those of us who do have time, interest, and access to the BDSM scene use it?  Is it another bullet point on your sexual resume?  Is it a fun game to play on the weekends, and not really think about the rest of the time?  On the other hand is it an identity?  Or perhaps a tool for exploring your identity?  A healing tool such as described by Dossie Easton in her talks on shadow play?

I seem to be having a lot of conversations and reading a lot of posts about the different styles of BDSM play out there. I don’t mean one fetish vs. another so much as the way one groups of people engages in the pursuit of their fetishes vs. another group.

Personally, I don’t go for protocol. I like rules and mores because they are fun to break, and prod at.   Kink is a large part of my identity but it is surrounded by other aspects of my self identity such as geek, photographer, yoga student, and more recently humanitarian aid worker.   I tend to not get along too well with people who expect the entire world to follow their protocols.

Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for old guard traditions, but I am damn glad that I was born in a different generation.  What I will not abide by is people of my generation using our community’s history to push their own style of play on others.

I tend to play in a very loose fashion.  You can set very strict rules for a scene, and you can have protocol in a scene, and that’s hot, but it is distinctly different than real life.  However, I’ve met people who even if they are not in a d/s relationship carry their scenes through their everyday life.  This might be as blatant as the assumption that all women are submissive (or conversely that all women are superior to men) or as subtle as believing that every relationship inherently has a top and a bottom.

I was discussing this with one of my partners last night and he likened this kind of kink absorbed lifestyle to orthodox religious beliefs.  This kind of makes sense in that it creates a moral structure of a sort, and a system one can abide by.  However, in that sense my commitment to being a geek, or even sexually radical in my own style can be likened to religious affiliation.

To a large degree this is a personal difference.  While I would not be happy playing in an environment where roles were strictly adhered to and protocol held sacred, I know that others get their pleasure from rules, protocols, and strict adherence to d/s roles.  That said, there is a point where a line into reality is crossed in a way that I can not comprehend and further want nothing to do with.

What is a “real slave?” Keep in mind that I work in a country where human trafficking is a problem.  In that sense a real slave is an 8 year old girl sold or kidnapped into (often sexual) slavery.  What we do as practitioners of BDSM is between consenting adults.  It can be very real in that the emotions and physical sensations are real — we do not pull our punches, and the blood is real — but we are there because we want to be there.  The bottom line is we are bleeding because we want to be bleeding.  Consent is what separates this from abuse, which is why I get very confused when I hear people reminiscing about how they wish this could be more real.

The other part of this consenting adults business is the word “adult.”  Seriously, if you are engaging in BDSM you need to be an adult, not just in so far as the age on your driver’s license but in your cognitive and decision making capacity.  I have seen more than one d/s relationship that seemed to be founded on at least one of the partner’s fear of being an adult and having to make decisions.  Explain to me again how you willingly give power to your master or mistress if you don’t have that power to begin with?  Submitting has to come from a place of power and control over your life, otherwise what’s the point? Otherwise you are not handing control of your life or even your evening over to your dominant, you are seeking out a caretaker.

So tell me, what role does protocol play in your life?  Is kink a regular part of your life or something you do one weekend a month?  And if you are in a d/s relationship, how do those very real power dynamics interact with the reality of you being a free citizen?