Snarksy

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March 22, 2014 by Snarksy

Meandering

How often do you hear people discussing the chronological fluidity of sexuality? In my life, I rarely am party to these conversations. A lot of positive work has been done around fluid and queer sexual identities—from the basic idea that being bisexual doesn’t mean needing to ‘pick sides’, to the complexities of Judith Butler’s notions of performativity. These conversations are awesome and important and there should be more of them. We still live in a world that erases bisexuality and a kink scene that treats switching as less real or serious on a daily basis.

But there are many ways to be fluid, and time is one of them. A lesbian who marries a man doesn’t stop having been a lesbian when she identified that way. That I thought I was straight once and dated a woman this year doesn’t mean I was a latent queer all through high school. It seems unfair to the younger person I once was to retroactively re-write that identity. I know I wasn’t hiding a lust for ladies at that time, and while one could argue that labels should be of limited importance in our lives, once declared, they ought be respected.

I think that some folks fear that admitting our sexuality can change with time means it might not be innate and that if it’s not innate we’ve lost our rationalization for why we deserve to exist. And I definitely understand this, because arguing that sexuality is immutable, the way our society perceives race and gender to be immutable, is helpful in some instances, to winning legal rights. And also because for many people, their sexuality does feel totally immutable and they have been bullied their entire lives over whether they should change this fundamental part of themselves that they know they could never change.

But the common stranglehold on naturalizing discourse can limit nuance. I don’t mean this to shame people who are committed to defending queerness on the basis of being ‘born that way’. But it’s a fact that some people feel they chose queerness, and that counts too. And there are all the other ways of living that are not considered default in society—trans* identifies, polyamory, kink, etc. Some of these are understood as choices, and some as ‘always have beens’. That’s okay. You deserve to have the consensual life you want, regardless of why you want it.

But one person’s sense that they have always been immutably gay or (straight, or queer, or poly, etc.) doesn’t mean other folks haven’t had a more fluid experience. And it is hard to get people to talk about the way sexuality can change with time. This isn’t even about exploring the ways labels can inherently be limiting—though that’s important too. What worries me here is that there are so few models on how to change those labels. All we really have is ‘coming out’ and that is reserved for telling friends and family that we’re a little bit less normative than they once believed we were. I never ‘came out’ as queer because when I first began exploring it, I wasn’t even sure it’d stick. I’d spent years exclusively chasing (cis, normative, masculine) dick. But I really disliked the idea of ‘questioning’ because I didn’t feel confused, I just felt curious.

Like, discovering a new talent doesn’t mean you’ve lived your whole life in denial, and discovering a new band doesn’t mean that you lived your life in a music-less hell-void, and for me, discovering that touching a vagina was fun and not scary didn’t say anything about my life before discovering that. There is no model for ‘hmm, I’m not really sure’ that doesn’t assume confusion. But I like to live every day with a bit of the ‘hmm’ and have never felt confused about this. I am very confident in my not-knowing of what tomorrow will bring. It’s not some form of existential unrest—it’s just a present I haven’t unwrapped yet.

So I want more conversations about the way sexuality can change. I want my ‘hmm’ to be validated.

You may have read last year about Chirlane McCray, former member of the Combahee River Collective, political strategist, and wife to NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio. In 1979 she wrote an article for Essence (which I have yet to find a copy of) entitled “I am a Lesbian”. Now she is married to a man whose election has thrown her into the national spotlight. When Essence asked her in an interview last May, “So how did you go from being a lesbian to falling in love with a man?” She replied, “By putting aside the assumptions I had about the form and package my love would come in. By letting myself be as free as I felt when I went natural.”

Many articles about McCray have erroneously described her as a ‘former lesbian’. McCray has never said this about herself. We don’t know what kinds of words McCray likes to affix to her identity. We don’t know if there are any. When asked if she was now bisexual, McCray replied “I am more than just a label.”

So, the external’s in McCray’s life have clearly shifted. That she would go from Combahee to NYC’s First Lady was hardly a predictable trajectory. How she feels internally has potentially shifted too, but she’s not interested in defining it for an audience. She told Essence that “Labels put people in boxes, and those boxes are shaped like coffins.”

Sometimes a piece of writing has a clearly defined ‘hey, please do this thing’ that they build up skillfully throughout the essay, ending with a strong, engaging declaration. I’m not doing that here. I don’t have anything more clearly articulated for you than ‘maybe talk more’. That’s pretty much it. I don’t want to tell people how they should feel about their own sexualities (doh.) I don’t want to tell them what kind of words they should use. I don’t want to tell them they need to talk the way that I talk.

But I’m not the only person whose sexuality is not immutable. I’m not the only person who’s found bliss amidst the flux. This much is obvious. So why, when I know so many fabulous queers in my life, is fluidity in terms of time so rarely discussed? Not everybody’s self-exploration is a forward march of progress. Sometimes it’s more of a meander. And basically, I just want more talk about meanders.

I have trouble traveling in straight lines, but at least the views are really nice.

To be honest, I didn’t even start using the word queer to describe myself until I needed a codeword for ‘none of your damn business’. Queer is many things to many people, but to me it was just that I got tired of explaining to people that I wasn’t straight, but had only dated men. That I didn’t care about being a woman, but didn’t mind it either. That bisexual, genderqueer, sub, bottom, poly or the other word’s I’d tried mostly felt like a lot of fanfare around something that I didn’t think needed so much fanfare. I adopted queer because it’s so ambiguous and vast and ill-defined that I thought it might mean people would leave me alone.

I am so different than I was even a decade ago. I can’t imagine who I will become in the next ten years. This doesn’t make me nervous or unsure. I have never felt more grounded than when I realized I could be okay with just not-knowing.

Not knowing gives me joy and I want more folks to share this with. I want ‘I don’t know’ to be a type of brave. I want to know tomorrow might surprise me. That sexuality is a lifelong walk. That it’s the road but not the street sign. That the road can have several street signs. That I’m not expected to be able to summon myself for you in words. That if you think you need to know something about me you’ll ask that thing about me. That a lack of label won’t scare you away. That a label won’t scare you away.

I want to know that the labels won’t scare me away. I want to find some folks to join me in my meander. That is what I mean when I wish we talked more about fluidity and time. It’s not everybody’s walk. Some people simply know. And that’s okay. But for those that don’t? Or who always know but for whom that knowing changes? That’s okay too.

In an interview with HuffPost Live, McCray expressed that she definitely wouldn’t have expected to be where she was 35 years ago when she penned that first article for Essence. I get that. Though I lack the years and wisdom of McCray, as I was coming of age a decade ago I wouldn’t have predicted my life right now either. I don’t wish I’d known back then what the future held. I just wish I’d known how okay not-knowing was.

So may we all have good traveling conditions in the year to come, whether we are on marches or on rest-stops or on meanders.

Archives

January 6, 2014 by Snarksy

A Brief History of Kink Online: 1996 – soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm

(This post is part of a series about the history of kink online.)

Today I am back to discussing one of my favorite parts of Internet history: Usenet.* In the early 90s, Usenet was one of the only places where kinksters could connect to each other online. The first major newsgroup for kinksters is called alt.sex.bondgae (a.s.b) and started in 1989. In the mid 90s, however, a.s.b became increasingly overrun by spam, leading users to form an alternate newsgroup in 1996—soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm (s.s.b-b).

S.s.b-b was similar to a.s.b in many ways. A large number of frequent participants were folks who had simply migrated over from a.s.b in search of a forum with a little less spam. When working on my thesis research around rape and BDSM I did not find a significant  difference between the types of conversations going on in these two  forums. (I’d gladly be corrected by an experienced user, however, if such folks wonder by!) In many ways, s.s.b-b was a.s.b part 2.

It is worth noting, however, that within the Usenet-verse, s.s.b-b and a.s.b had some relevant differences. On Usenet, all groups belonge to categories called  hierarchies—for a.s.b it’s ‘alt’, for s.s.b-b it’s ‘soc’. Different hierarchies generally cover different topics, are managed by various groups, and operate under different guiding rules. The ‘alt’ hierarchy is a free-for-all of topics with no need for user approval to create new newsgroups. ‘Soc’ is part of a more regulated group of hierarchies** which require  a voting process to approve each new newsgroup’s charter.

As part of the ‘soc’ hierarchy, soc.subcutlure.bondage-bdsm also had access to anti-spam bots—a plus, given the reason for migrating from a.s.b. was largely due to excessive spam. And s.s.b-b also faced a different Internet culture at it’s inception than a.s.b had. When a.s.b started, very few spaces had ever existed on the Internet for discussion around kink.*** By 1997, copies of the s.s.b-b FAQ were surfacing on the Internet for people who did not access to Usenet, and Internet providers such as AOL were providing a larger audience access to Usenet.

The s.s.b-b newsgroup is an important part of kink Internet history—and, though the popularity of Usenet died down significantly starting in the early 2000s, you can still see a few stragglers having legitimate conversations on s.s.b-b—here is a post from last weekend.

Click here to check out s.s.b-b for yourself, over at the google groups forums.

 

*In the early 90s, for folks who were privileged and nerdy and winners of a certain geographic-lottery, there was an online community of newgroups (which are a lot like message boards) called Usenet. And Usenet is one of the very first places kinksters ever had to gather online.
** Known as the Big Eight
*** One of the only, BBS, is referenced in this post; H/T @ Peter Tupper 

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December 23, 2013 by Snarksy

Sorry, Not Sorry, But Your Silence Around Abuse Is Not Helping

Some folks have pointed out that this post creates an unnecessary binary between abusers and abused, and this is a legitimate point I want to acknowledge. The cycle of abuse definitely means that some abusers were once abused themselves, and those people deserve support and compassion through their recovery. Thanks to the folks who called me out on this.

To explain why I wrote this post the way I did—in the kink scene the needs of abusers are almost always placed in binary against the needs of survivors or potential future targets of their abuse. Silencing abuse is not going to help an abuser stop abusing, and it definitely won’t protect anyone from more abuse. It is possible to call abuse out for what it is, and demand it’s end, without vilifying abusers as irredeemably evil, and I would encourage that.

Everybody has an excuse for why abuse needs to be silenced. There always is some circumstantial reason. Reputations must be preserved. Acting on uncertainty is surely the greatest of all sins. It never is our place to talk, our place to judge, our place to warn. That place is always elsewhere and away from here. Here is a place where you wouldn’t want to be mean to someone who was nice to you, or lose your invitation to the more exclusive play parties, or get labeled as that person who always casting labels (even when deserved). Here is a place where we don’t deal with problems that obviously must belong to people who are not people we feel we can hold accountable. Here is a place of silence.

It has to stop. Abuse cannot be silenced. The fucks I have to give for the excuses are few and far between here. I am tired of excuses, and denials, and the screwed, uneasy faces people make when they think you want them to help you stop abuse. The fact that you liked somebody once doesn’t make their abuse okay. The fact that things aren’t ‘your business’ doesn’t make abuse okay. The fact that you are uncertain, that you risk failure, that intolerance for abuse does not make you a ‘white knight” and often isn’t simple still does not make tolerating abuse okay. Abuse is not okay. Tolerating it is not okay. Shrouding it in silence is not okay. Things are not okay. Your scene is not okay.

Look, I’m not trying to say I’m perfect here. I have been silent about abusers. This is not something it is possible to be perfect on. I have bit my tongue for fear of repercussion. I have been kind to a known abuser because I did not want to lose an activist opportunity he was connected to. I understand the barriers, and I struggle with them daily. I keep lists in my mind of creeps, and lists of who I trust and can’t trust to tell who I think the creeps are. I am not charismatic or well known enough for a public call out to ever be effective or even helpful. I often feel helpless in my attempts to make things safer.

But I try. And you need to. We all need to. Failure to try is unacceptable. It is tempting to avoid confronting abuse because we know we might be imperfect, that we risk failure, that innocent people could be hurt, that we could be hurt and, perhaps most importantly, that all eyes will be on us asking that we justify these risks. And I get that. But innocent people are already being hurt, and if you don’t think that allowing silent abusers to tear down the people around you is hurting you too, then I don’t want to know you. In which history book did you read that abuse and manipulation and violence are best fixed with silence?

I try to live the words I preach. I pull people aside, and I tell them what I really think, and I ask them, on the basis of their love for safety, and for others, and for the feminist values that we both may share, to reconsider their views on certain people. I ask them to keep my story stashed for later. I refuse to invite known abusers to my parties or to go to the parties where they’ll be. When abusers are unavoidably in positions of power within my life I do my best to subversively talk shit behind their back to everyone I trust not to fuck me over. I do my best to be someone whose opinion you can trust. I am very clear about my feelings on abuse and often find I’m entrusted with more stories because of this.

Just the other day I was meeting with a friend and found out that an abuser we both know received some complicated, but well deserved, retribution. I mentioned that I had been tempted to take an action someone else took, and was glad that it’d been done. My friend was less certain—they were concerned that this person had a story they couldn’t escape, that no amount of self work would ever free this person from their history of abuse.

I told my friend I didn’t care. That while I ultimately believe abusers can rehabilitate themselves if they truly are invested in the task, protecting an abuser’s healing process is not my job. That I don’t care if I am ruthless in the task of making clear that abuse is not acceptable and that survivors are my first priority. This is not about lacking compassion. I have compassion in spades when it does not conflict with preventing abuse and honoring survivors. But the process of the abuser is not top priority, and I wanted my friend to be very clear about that fact.

I have no idea what my friend thinks of our interaction. I am glad I said something though. I am glad my friend knows me as someone who will work to help survivors, who can be trusted with stories of abuse, who is understood as someone who will use these stories to help but will have the discretion to not be reckless in that process. This is not something that happens overnight or that is random or accidental. I’ve spent five and a half years cultivating my position as someone who can be trusted to help others deal with abuse and rape and violence.

You can cultivate that too. It doesn’t take five and a half years, though if you are willing to commit that, it will certainly doesn’t hurt things. But you can also help by deciding today to say something when you hear something, to put survivors and abuse prevention before reputations and convenience, to make clear to those around you that you do not play around when it comes to speaking out.

We need to adjust our calculus about what matters to us as kinksters when fighting abuse. Silence is not a known agent of positive social change. We need to discard it. We need something better. We need a willingness to try and a willingness to fail, and for explicit failure to not be so costly that we let silence implicitly fail for us instead. Everybody has an excuse for why abuse needs to be silenced but nobody deserves the havoc that this wreaks. It’s time to speak up.

Archives

December 17, 2013 by Snarksy

This Last Week on A.S.B.: Procrastinator’s Edition

So! A few months ago, I started a new kind of post I like to call “This Day On A.S.B”. I wrote a lot there about why I love doing these posts so much, but basically old Usenet folks are quirky as shit and the content is weird, endearing, educational and vaguely sociology-ish in ways that you can’t really predict until you just dive in. I personally think it’s a damn shame that the current TNG crowd is often totally disconnected from kink roots or history. I get that most of us (myself included) aren’t really interested in old-guard mores and I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with that. (Times change.) But 20 years ago—in the misty fog of memory us millennials call the early-Internet, kinksters had a lot to say that is still relevant today.

All that being said—I found some awesome links, a week ago, but didn’t write them up until today, so—I present to you this *last week* on a.s.b ., a la December 10th, 1993:

Sexy Amazons

In this post Jim Woodward invites you to join his new alt.sex group centered on ‘Amazonic female domination’ and ‘Amazonically proportioned women’. Bless.

The Welcoming Committee

Here, Alan Smith publishes the third draft of a welcoming letter, giving newbies to a.s.b. an idea of how it all began, along with a bit of the the a.s.b. ethos. One of my favorite parts:

We’d rather you were careful.  Read the FAQ.  Get something nonporous between your body fluids and your partner’s.  Remember the litany “safe, sane, consentual.”  *ALL* bdsm activity is inherently dangerous to all parties, so take care of yourselves, okay?

We’d rather you didn’t post personals here.  This is a discussion forum, not a meat market.  Try alt.personals.bondage.

We’d rather you were open and accepting.  This sounds kinda pompus, but it really boils down to “you don’t slam my kink and I won’t slam yours.”

A Snarky Follow-Up

To this light-hearted post about a local munch in the Boston area.

And one ‘minor musical point’, apropos of seemingly nothing.

That’s all for this post folks. Thanks so much, and more when I get time!

Archives

November 15, 2013 by Snarksy

Topping From the Bottom Is Not Actually a Bad Thing, Part 2 – In Which We Realize That “Consensual” is the Only Official “Way to Be” in Kink

This post is a continuation of a series on why I hate the idea of “no topping from the bottom”. Catch Part 1 here.

A few years ago I remember being at a small house-warming party with friends from what was then my local kink scene. I had decided I was probably not going to play much while at that party—this was partly because my social anxiety makes enjoying exhibitionism really difficult and even without the anxiety, I’m not terribly excited by public play. But it was also partly because I didn’t trust negotiating to go well in a public setting. This wasn’t born from a specific past experience or any memorably bad encounters with participants in my scene. It was because I had learned, from a series of micro-agressions, that socializing as a sub nearly always meant conceding something I hadn’t initially intended to.

These concessions were often minor—“okay, I guess a little chocolate drizzled down my breasts won’t hurt” or “well, that paddle is a bit larger than I intended, but it will probably be okay.” And having chocolate licked off my breasts by friends didn’t leave me feeling traumatized. But it did partially erode my trust of public-sexy times. If negotiating on the fly wasn’t going to be easy, then I just wasn’t interested.

Towards the end of the house-warming I finally decided that a small amount of spanking with my partner, and some close friends, would be okay. At first it started nicely, but when the sensation got more intense than my liking, my request that folks back off was not immediately honored. Without really discussing it, everyone else had assumed that we were stop-lighting, and I was hesitant to call the more ‘dramatic’ safeword that my partner and I were used to using because I wasn’t upset in a Big, Dramatic and Must be Processed kind of way. (And this is how I had been taught by some of my scene mates that safewording is best used.) I finally grabbed my partner and muttered in his ear “I am not enjoying this, and need you to ask people to back off.” He did, and they did. But at no point did anyone realize—me, them, or those who were around us, that what happened was seriously fucked up. We hadn’t established our safeword before going into it and I felt like I had been bullied, in the guise of lighthearted teasing, out of my firm no. And these are people who I trusted—still do trust—who I know to have honorable intentions in their play. But the culture of expectations around public, ‘casual’, ‘not-really-a-full-scene so why negotiate like it is one’ play was that fucked up.

There is a real culture of a no-topping-from-the-bottom police in the organized BDSM scene. It is often couched in identity policing, as in, “it’s okay to say no to your dominant’s request, but only if you admit that means your not a real sub.” Identify policing is fucked up enough, but what is most egregious about this mindset is that it actively harms consent by defining good submission against un-sexy, mid-scene, “woah, let’s not do that” kinds of negotiating. There are many articles online that make what could be an okay dynamic (in which you define for yourself what you do and don’t want your ideal partner to agree with in a D/S dynamic, and then search for a partner who matches you in those ways) and instead create a dictum on the essential identity of the Sub and the Dom.

There are going to be the people who want to stop me and say “no, you don’t understand us. We’re just talking about [24/7, hardcore, d/s, old-guard] dynamics, not that more casual [top/bottom, bedroom-only, soft-core] stuff. Topping from the bottom is bad because it defeats the purpose of our negotiated [insert-here] dynamic.” And that’s totally fine, as far as it goes. But then these posts should all be about “why I choose to not re-negotiate or push back against requests my partner makes mid-scene, or even while we are making dinner” and not “what you are doing is wrong, let me teach you how to fix it.” What’s more—even if a person truly is topping from the bottom in some definable sense—it is flat wrong to assume that’s even a bad thing, because there are plenty of people who are really into that.

The reality is that the majority of the organized BDSM scene is not currently engaged in a full-time 24/7 dynamic where the submissive partner has decided to consciously and consensually cede all decision making to their dom. It’s not okay to redefine the word subsmissive to match your lived reality at the exclusion of all the sub-or-bottom identified people who are really okay with the way they are bottoming, thank-you-very-much.

And the Society of Janus should have known better. We all should. Negotiate whatever you want for yourself and your partners—as long as you are all happy about it, why would I care? But it absolutely must stop there. Declaring the Ways to Be in kink is harmful. There are no definitive ways to be except consensual. And pushing screeds against topping from the bottom actively harms some people’s ability to negotiate for what they want, and for their consent to be respected.

It’s hard to wrap my brain around how so many people are so willing to dis “topping from the bottom” or give in to crap about what it means to be a “true” submissive or dominant. And while, if you wanted to sit here with me all day, we could trace the structures of power within the BDSM community and link them back to mainstream society, examine how femininity is either conflated with or traded out for submissiveness in out-of-scene power dynamics, debate the significance of labels in creating essentialist understandings of sexual identity, analyze how a dominant sexual identity comes with social capital and undue privilege, and arrive at a very detailed analysis of exactly who is benefiting by pushing around the idea that expressing your desires could make you bad at bottoming or bad at kink, I don’t think it needs to be that complicated.

So I am going to skip straight to the part where we all acknowledge that coercing people (even in jest) out of advocating for their wants, desires and needs is just shitty, and that it’s crazy how many folks have trouble understanding this basic fact. That it’s crazy that in a scene with my own friends, we had trouble knowing how to properly use safewords, and that it’s crazy that we’ve reached a point where we think it is okay to sarcastically shame types of negotiation on the signage in public play spaces.

Top, switch, or bottom from whatever position you fucking want to—bottom, sideways, hanging upside down on a rickety-old ladder, virtually, while sleeping, or knee-deep in a very large bucket of purple paint. As long as your partners are consenting, that is your right. That is among your most basic of rights.

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