Just like there are people who think that having control over more parts of their submissive’s life, or memorizing more slave positions or having more elaborate protocols means they’re somehow more dominant, there are people who think more extreme or harder play somehow makes them more kinky, or better at being kinky.

So we’re clear, that’s all total bullshit. Even if we could measure and compare how dominant people are in any meaningful way, it wouldn’t fucking matter. What matters is whether you enjoy your power exchange, not whether some random dickbag thinks you’re domly enough. Same with how intense your play is. If pushing your limits, challenging your friends, or wowing a crowd is what does it for you, great! If you’re doing especially showy, intense play because you have something to prove, why bother? Isn’t kink supposed to be about getting your desires met, not going along with what everyone tells you about what you’re supposed to like?

Not only is it kind of sad and pointless to play for other people instead of for your own joy, but judging people’s play by your standards of intensity is just fucking stupid. For an experienced needle bottom, taking three needles is probably nothing. For a life-long needle-phobe, those three needles may be more intense than a beating that leaves them black and blue. For someone who has only just started to accept that he’s kinky, three needles might be scarier than the thought of picking up and moving across the country. If you aren’t intimately familiar with everyone involved in a scene, there’s no way you can accurately judge how intense it is for them.

Given that judging how intense other people’s play is basically impossible and would still be totally pointless even if it was possible, why do we still do it? I think it’s just the nature of social animals to compete for social standing. We all want to impress the people around us, we all want to be one of the cool kids, and it’s easier to wow people with a flashy suspension than it is to wow them with the emotional intensity of a subtle, psychological scene.

However, just because it’s natural doesn’t mean we have to keep doing it. It’s natural for me to be extremely irritable when my blood sugar gets too low, but that doesn’t give me a free pass to say whatever I want to people when I’m hungry. Instead of just talking about the flashy, obviously intense scenes (which I’m just as guilty of as anyone), let’s talk about the fun, lighthearted scenes too. And the quiet, intimate scenes, and the scenes where it’s not necessarily obvious that the players are pushing their limits. If we want people to stop thinking that the more extreme you are the better, we have to stop acting like that’s the only way to get attention.

Happy Pride Day, everyone! Being the ragey person I am, I’m delighted by a celebration that’s basically a huge middle finger raised to everyone who’s enough of a douchebag to believe that there’s anything wrong with not being straight. While I realize that the LGBT community in general and pride parades/pride week celebrations in particular aren’t perfect, I really love the core message of “Fuck you, I refuse to be ashamed of who I am”.

What I really, really don’t love are the ignorant assholes who whine about how there’s no straight pride parade. That’s because we don’t fucking need one, you stupid fucks. Here are just a few things I’ve never had to worry about, just because I had the dumb luck to be straight:

• I have never had to worry about being thrown out of my home because I’m dating a man. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, “20% of homeless youth are LGBT. In comparison, the general youth population is only 10% LGBT.”
• I’ve never had to worry that I’ll get beaten up because I’m straight.
• I’ve never had to worry that I’ll lose my job because of the gender I’m attracted to. It’s still legal to fire people for being gay in 29 states, and for being transgender in 34 states.
• I’ve never had to worry about being kicked out of a club or volunteer organization for being straight. The Boy Scouts of America only recently decided that as of January 1st, 2014 they’ll stop kicking out gay kids, if they have to, they guess.
• I’ve never had to worry that because of my sexuality I might be turned away if I need help from a homeless shelter or foodbank.
• I’ve never had to worry I’ll be kicked out of my church (if I had one) if they found out I was straight.
• I’ve never been told that being straight is a sin, or that I’ll go to hell, or that I should spend my entire life celibate.
• I’ve never had to worry that people will treat me differently if they find out the gender of the person I’m dating.
• If anything happens to me or my partner, I know that no one would be so inhumanly cruel as to keep us apart because we’re straight.
• If I get married, I’ll still be legally married if I move to another province or country.
• Slang terms for my sexuality are not used as insults.

The pride parade is a form of pushback against that oppression. Straight people are not oppressed for being straight, therefore the only parade you whiny little shits are going to get is someone playing the world’s saddest song on the world’s tiniest violin. If the biggest problem in your life is that you don’t get a parade in your honour, you have it pretty fucking good. Shut your face and be grateful.

You’d think the fact that not all submissives enjoy pain and not all dominants enjoy inflicting it would be fairly obvious, but sadly there are people out there with some pretty fucking stupid ideas about how this whole kink thing works. Thanks to the pervasive myth that all subs are masochists and all doms are sadists, people get judged on how intense their play is and get all kinds of shit when they fail to “measure up”.

Sure, it’s disappointing when someone you’re interested in turns out to be totally incompatible with you on a kink level, but lashing out and telling them they’re not a “real” whatever is just blatant douchebaggery. Suck it up and move on. If it’s just extremely important to you to let people who you’re not even playing with know that they’re doing it wrong, then congratulations, you’re an asshole. It’s none of your fucking business how people you’re not involved with play (as long as no one’s being harmed, of course). Seriously, how does it affect you if Jane Q. Dominant doesn’t inflict the daily recommended allowance of pain on her sub?

I happen to be a sadist, but I firmly believe that if you can’t think of anything to do with a sub besides inflicting pain then you just don’t have much imagination. You may not want to do any of the thousands of painless things you can do with a sub, but that doesn’t mean those things don’t exist. Come on people, haven’t you ever heard of pet play, tease and denial, bondage, tickling, watersports, obedience, service, sensation play with sensations besides pain? Service alone covers a huge range of fun things you can do without inflicting any pain.

On the other side of the slash it’s all well and good to love pain, but if a sensual dom can’t make you feel submissive the fault is as much yours as it is hers. Don’t blame your limited range on her, jerkface. It’s great if you can take a beating, but what else are you good for? As much as I like hitting people with things, I also have errands to run, projects to work on, meals to cook, and housework to do (well, I would if the ridiculously adorable boyfriend didn’t take care of all the cooking and all the cleaning that the housekeepers don’t do).

Not being interested in pain absolutely does not mean you’re a bad sub or a bad dom. Anyone who thinks it does is a jerk and deserves to have their tragic lack of imagination pointed out.

Wheee, I’ve been blogging for two whole years! I mentioned that to my boyfriend, and being a smartass the first thing he said was “So, are you going to talk about ageplay?”

Hey, why  not? Let’s talk about ageplay.

…

…

So, uh, I don’t actually know much of anything about ageplay. I’ve listened to a couple of podcasts where it was at least mentioned, it comes up now and then in Fetlife groups I read, but that’s about it. If I get anything completely wrong here, I’d appreciate someone letting me know.

Here’s what I do know: ageplayers, much like furries, get unfairly dumped on. Sure, there’s a level of ridiculousness in dressing up like a tiger or wearing a diaper, but is that really that much worse than arbitrary slave positions or S/slashy speak? At least the tigers aren’t making their writing pointlessly difficult to read. If fursuits and crayons don’t do it for you that’s fine, but there’s no need to be an asshole about it. And while we’re talking about assholery, ageplay is  not about pedophilia. Come on people, if you wouldn’t run out and bang a little kid in grownup style clothing, then why would a pedophile be interested in an adult dressed in childlike clothing? Also, plenty of people do ageplay in a totally nonsexual way.

When somebody mentions ageplay, the first thing I think of is diapers and crayons. Adult babies/diaper lovers are probably the best known part of ageplay, but they’re not all of it. Age play just means role-playing an age other than your physical age. If a middle-aged couple role-plays being teenagers sneaking out of their parents’ houses to make out down by the river, that’s age play and hey, no diapers involved! And of course there’s the ever-popular naughty schoolgirl, an idea that’s been beaten to death both in mainstream media and in the scene.

As bored as I am of the whole schoolgirl thing, there is a reason it’s so popular. That kind of age play, like so much of the stuff we do, is about power, innocence, and breaking taboos. And it conveniently involves people who are physically, if not mentally/emotionally mature. The power part is fairly obvious, who is less powerful than a young girl (particularly if you’re role-playing her teacher)? Then there’s innocence. Closely related to power, enjoying being the one to give someone a new experience is not exactly a rare kink 🙂 There’s also the power differential involved when only one of you knows what you’re doing. And finally, there’s taboos. Anything forbidden becomes tempting just because it’s forbidden, giving a huge erotic charge to both things you’re not supposed to be doing, and people you’re not supposed to be doing anything with.

Given that age-play can involve such fundamental kinks, it’s kind of surprising it’s not more popular. But of course, even the weirdos need someone to look down on. I guess “your kink is not my kink but your kink is okay” only applies when it’s convenient.

Work has been taking over my life lately and I have precisely no time to write a real blog post. Have some links to tide you over 🙂

First, a couple from the always awesome Tacit:
Some thoughts on ethics, safety, and conduct in BDSM: Part I

BDSM Ethics Part 2: Some Thoughts on Making the World Better

And a couple from Edward Martin III:

The Fix Is In

We all need mirrors.

And a few from all over:

A Field Guide To Creepy Dom

How to avoid problem people

Nine Real Self-defence Tips

Enjoy!

Not so long ago a very sweet vanilla woman posted on Fetlife asking for relationship advice – her husband is submissive and wants her to dominate him, but kink just doesn’t really do it for her. She loves her husband and wants him to be happy, but she’s struggling.

Most people had useful advice for her (the usual talk with your husband, figure out what he really means when he says he wants to submit, see if you can enjoy some kinks for how much they turn him on, even if they don’t really do it for you), and some people had incredibly shitty, self-centered, and completely unrealistic advice.

If someone is already uncomfortable with kink, telling her to try “really taking control” by denying her husband an orgasm for longer than usual is the exact opposite of helpful. Seriously, the only thing I can think of that would actually be less helpful would be to tell the poor woman she’s obviously not a dom and should give up on the whole kink idea.

Another man, who was clearly thinking with his dick, first gave the not-so-terrible advice of going along with her husband’s plan to try switching (him taking the dominant role while she submits) which could have given her a better idea what her husband wanted, but unfortunately followed it up with another comment suggesting she perform a scene he outlined (in detail, because obviously the problem is that she doesn’t have enough people telling her what to do) without any thought to whether the original poster or her husband would be remotely interested in it.

The whole debacle made me think of this comment of Dev’s on a post of maymay’s titled “‘Finally! Something that speaks to dominant women!’ they said”

“It drives me nuts that every enquiry or discussion about femdom is about how to make it hotter to submissive men – as though that is the problem with femdom, that submissive men don’t find it hot enough. It’s crazy.

I don’t mean to imply that men (submissive or otherwise) are so easy they just find any old thing hot. That’s just a pernicious stereotype. They are actually, surprise, people, and all like different things, and need to work just as hard as others to figure out their own preferences.

But, generally speaking, the complaint of submissive men is that there aren’t enough dominant women, or that their own partner won’t dominate them. And the solution to that is adamantly not “Let’s figure out exactly what’s hot to the man and do more of that.” If you don’t make it hotter to women, they won’t play.

Not every woman is going to enjoy being dominant anyway. We have our own sexualities too. But for a woman who might, or could, or does enjoy being dominant, it has to be based on what’s in it for her. Otherwise she’s just doing you a favor, which is fine, but then at least don’t make her lie about it, please.”

Maymay’s post and Dev’s comment are both from 2008, but they’re just as relevant today as they were five years ago. I think the last line in particular does a lot to explain why so many submissive men complain about not being able to get their partners to dominate them.  If you tell someone you want her to be in charge and do whatever she wants to do, then tell her exactly what to do, when to do it, and what to wear while she’s doing it, it’s not going to take her long to figure out that you don’t actually want her to be in charge at all. No wonder vanilla women get confused and unhappy when they try to “dominate” their submissive boyfriends! Not only are they expected to do all these weird activities they don’t enjoy, but they’re supposed to somehow feel like they’re in charge when they’re actually doing exactly what they’re told, and they constantly feel like failures as doms because they haven’t uncovered some magical wellspring of lust for activities that just don’t do it for them.

Submissive guys, you can bitch about how few dominant women there are, or you can keep acting like the entire scene revolves around your cock, but you don’t get to do both. For people who supposedly worship women, some of you have remarkably little interest in what it is we want.

People like to say “submission is a gift”. To a certain extent I understand that – personal submission (that is, submission to *me*, not to the nearest dominant woman) is hugely valuable to me. It feels like an incredible gift because I don’t truly understand what the submissive person gets out of the deal. Like giving a gift, submission isn’t submission anymore if you force someone to do it.

However, there are some very important differences, too. A gift can’t be taken back when you decide someone is mistreating it. A gift is given freely, without any expectation of getting something in return. A gift is just given, it’s not something you have to earn. Submission isn’t any of those things.

Submissive people have the right to stop submitting whenever they damned well feel like it, whether their dom is a jerk or the relationship just isn’t working. You are not a bad submissive if you decide to end a relationship that isn’t meeting your needs. You’re not a bad submissive if you have needs at all, but that’s another rant. It doesn’t matter if you’re collared or you signed a contract or swore you’d never leave, you always, always have the right to change your mind.

While I do believe that submission isn’t submission if you’re only doing it to make your partner feel like they owe you something, I also believe that submissives have a right to either get their needs met or end the relationship. If you accept someone’s submission, you need to hold up your end of the deal. Maybe all your partner wants is someone who will give them the opportunity to serve without getting uncomfortable with it and insisting on doing things for them. Maybe they need to feel dominated, maybe they need to feel owned and cherished, maybe they need some play now and then. Whatever it is a submissive person needs out of the whole exchange, they have a right to need it. A dom who takes and gives nothing back is not a dom at all, but a leech.

Finally, I believe dominants should earn their partner’s submission. Or more precisely, I believe submissive people have every right to judge potential partners and decide whether they’re worthy of submitting to. Not that trying to be a good person entitles you to anyone’s submission, but it can’t hurt for doms to ask themselves why someone would want to submit to them. If you’re not willing to keep your word, to be honest about what you want and what you have to give, to know yourself well enough to do that, to look out for your submissive’s best interests, why should anyone submit to you?

Submissive people are awesome, but calling submission a gift leads to all sorts of stupid ideas about what you can do with it after it’s given.

Cunning Minx of Polyamory weekly has a clever piece of advice for polyamorous people that I’m going to borrow and rework a little for kinky people. What Minx says is “What would you do if you were monogamous?” the point being that non-monogamous relationships aren’t magical beasts with nothing in common with monogamous relationships. I think a similar idea would be useful for kinky people.

For example, it’s sad how common it is to see submissive people asking if it’s normal for dominant people they don’t know and have no agreements with to order them to address the dom a certain way. What the fuck? How is that even a question? If you were a vanilla guy on a vanilla site who messaged someone and got ordered to call her Mistress, you’re write her off as a complete psycho, but somehow on Fetlife that shit is okay?

Being kinky is not some bizarre alternate universe where doms get to order around any sub they come across. You don’t suddenly become a second class citizen when you start calling yourself submissive. Anyone who treats you like you are has spent far, far too much time jerking off to Gor novels. When we run into people like that I think we should ask ourselves “What would I do if I wasn’t kinky?” If a certain behavior is unreasonable in a vanilla context, what makes it reasonable in a kinky context? Sometimes there are good answers to that question, such as “we knew this was a high protocol party and read the house rules before we bought our tickets”, but far too often I believe the answer is “I think I can get away with treating you any way I want.” That’s not kink, that’s blatant douchecanoery.

Another particularly irritating example is the ever popular “You have to ask my permission to talk to my submissive”. That one’s a huge pet peeve of mine because the people who say that really don’t seem to understand who they get to give orders to and who they don’t. Pro tip: you only get to order people around if you have a specific agreement with them. If you want to forbid your submissive to talk to other people without your express permission, go nuts! If you want to forbid me (or anyone else who has not clearly agreed to submit to you) to talk to your submissive, go fuck yourself. I’m quite happy not to talk to either one of you if you insist on being a pompous dickbag, but I am most certainly not going to take orders from J. Random Asshole. If it’s not okay in the vanilla world to assume your personal relationship agreements apply to everyone, why the fuck would that be okay in kink-land?

I completely understand why people (particularly submissive people) would be afraid of accidentally offending someone and getting a reputation for being a jerk, but I think asking yourself “What would I do if I wasn’t kinky?” is a good way to figure out which one of you is being an asshole. And if the idea of submissives calling you on your shit scares you then congratulations, you’re the asshole!

One of the most common objections I see to ideas like being able to name abusers on Fetlife and the Fetlife predator alert tool is “false accusations!!!11! what about all the false accusations?!!1!” What about them, you stupid fucks?

For starters, while the data on false sexual assault accusations is terrible, what little there is simply does not show that false accusers run rampant, merrily destroying men’s lives. To quote the linked article:

So if the percentage of reported cases with false accusations is measured at 4%, how does this egregious harm compare to the big picture?

Just under 1.5%. For the record, 2% is the average false criminal accusation rate per the FBI. This is certainly not scientific, and it can’t be. Too much of this analysis rests on the unknowable – that which is never calculated or tabbed. The point of the exercise is to show the potential impact of conservative impact expectations. The point is to show that the data used to justify these positions doesn’t do what you want it to do.

Or have a look at this Huffington Post article which says that:

The “trailblazing” research, the first of its kind, has discovered that false allegations of rape and domestic violence are “very rare”, with only a very small number of cases where there was enough evidence and it was considered in the public interest to prosecute.

Given how rare false sexual assault accusations actually are, why does every goddamn discussion about sexual assault or any attempt to prevent it get derailed by misogynistic shitbags whining and crying about false accusations?

Shockingly enough, it’s because they’re misogynistic shitbags (and let’s not forget how closely intertwined sexism and domism are). It’s the only logical explanation.

If false accusations in general were important to those wastes of space, every discussion of non-sexual crimes like murder, assault, theft, and vandalism would be equally choked with pointless whining about how important it is not to just believe the victim, and reminders that people’s lives get ruined by false accusations of murder.

If racially biased false accusations were important to the “false accusations!!111!” whiners, we’d all hear a lot more about how Arkansas police beat Barry Lee Fairchild until he confessed to a murder he didn’t commit, Illinois police coerced 10 black teens into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit, Chicago Police Detective Jon Burge  and his officers tortured hundreds of people until they confessed, and NYPD’s stop and frisk policy is used to harass disproportionate numbers of black and Hispanic men.

If justice was important to those little shits, they’d be delighted to hear about strong cases and good policework putting rapists behind bars.

But sadly, none of those things happen. What does happen is pathetic manchildren dealing with their fear and hatred of women by derailing every discussion about women being victimized and trying to discredit every survivor who dares to so much as tell anyone she was raped.

I honestly don’t know what’s so terrifying about a discussion not revolving around men, but it’s not unique to discussions of sexual assault. It’s basically impossible to talk about the incredibly misogynistic portrayals of women in video games without some asshat jumping in to say that the men are objectified in games the exact same way women are (they’re not), game producers are just doing what sells (bullshit), and women don’t play games so it doesn’t matter anyway (lie). I’m not sure how these people make it through the day if they’re so fragile that they can’t bear to read an article about ridiculous bullshit in video games without having to make it all about them.

That’s pretty sad, but what’s worse is the horror these men seem to feel at the (ludicrously overstated) idea that any woman might ever, in any circumstances, have the tiniest bit of power over any man. It’s no coincidence that the crime they’re most eager to discredit all accusations of is the one seen as something men do to women. The victims of that crime don’t matter to them at all, all they seem to care about is the purely ridiculous idea that with one word from a woman the police will whisk them away to prison, never to be seen or heard from again. As an aside, that’s not how it works. If you’re going to be afraid of someone falsely accusing you, be afraid of the cops. If you read any of those links up there, you might’ve noticed that they, not female victims, are the ones who decide who to accuse and then beat a confession out of.

Also, all of those links up there are about people going to the police with their accusations. As stated in my last post, kinky people have a multitude of very good reasons not to bother taking sexual assault accusations to the police. Given that, the worst people in the scene really have to worry about is their reputations being damaged, which could make it harder to find play partners. Oh noes! Clearly the sky will fall in and the Earth will crash into the sun if it takes more work for you to get your perv on.

Derail and whine and cry as much as you want to, just remember that if you’re going to do that you might as well wear a sign that says “I’m a misogynistic/domist shitbag who cares more about my reputation in the scene and my continued access to pussy than I do about your safety”.

“Just call the cops.” This is what unspeakably stupid people say when confronted with the terribly inconvenient fact of abuse in the kink community. Are you fucking kidding me? Have you spent your entire life with your eyes tight shut, your fingers in your ears, in a cave, on fucking Mars? That question is absolutely serious. I honestly do not understand how someone can live to adulthood without ever seeing a sexual assault victim’s name dragged through the mud and every decision she ever made torn apart in the news. And that’s if anyone even reports on it – if a man get assaulted, it doesn’t even make it into the news because nobody believes it’s even possible for men to be victims of assault. And transwomen don’t make it into the news until they’re murdered, which is [sarcasm] clearly their own fault [/sarcasm]. Obviously it’s too much to ask that men react reasonably when they discover something they don’t like about their sex partners.

It would be great if we as a community could dump this whole mess on the cops and wash our hands of it. In a perfect world, we’d be able to. In a perfect world, every single person involved in law enforcement would spend months if not years learning the details of every unusual subculture they might run into in the course of their duties. They’d learn how to tell marks left by consensual kinky play or martial arts practice or sports or theatre from marks left by abusers. They’d learn how to tell a consensual d/s relationship from an abusive one, a responsible dom from a domineering asshole, confinement for fun and power exchange from kidnapping/unlawful imprisonment. And that’s just the kink community. What about activists, particularly the angry ones? Punks? Streetkids? Members of non-Christian religions? People from non-Western cultures?

It would be awesome if all law enforcement officers took all those years of schooling, and that’s certainly a worthy cause to lobby for, but what are we supposed to do in the meantime? Put our fingers in our ears and shout “La la la I can’t hear you” when people in the kink community report abuse?

As badly as the so-called justice system failed Rehteah Parsons (if you don’t have time to read the link, she was gang-raped, publicly humiliated using pictures her rapists took, and even with those photos the worthless sacks of shit who “investigated” her case somehow couldn’t find enough evidence to lay charges. She killed herself), it would only have been worse if she was kinky. When a woman is raped, every decision she has ever made is now wrong. She should’ve worn a different outfit, not had so much to drink, kept a closer eye on her drink, not gone to that bar, not hung out with those people, not gone home with that guy, screamed louder, fought harder, run faster, been more suspicious, carried mace with her every moment whether she was awake or asleep, devoted her entire life to mastering a martial art. Not to mention, she should obviously have gone to church every Sunday, and been a virgin who was waiting for marriage and had never so much as had an unsupervised date with a boy, because everyone knows if a woman has ever had sex willingly before, she’s now used goods and has no right to decide whether or not she wants to have sex again.

Now, imagine that woman is kinky. Imagine trying to explain negotiations and hard limits to the kind of ignorant trolls who think that being willing to have a frank discussion about sex means you’re a filthy whore who deserves whatever she gets. Imagine your parents, your siblings, your schoolmates, your teachers, and those church friends you obviously have if you want a hope in hell of your rapist getting convicted, all knowing that you’re a sick freak who probably enjoyed what happened to you. Imagine losing your job, your kids, your housing for being a filthy pervert. Imagine the kind of harassment (I refuse to call it bullying, that’s a pathetic attempt to pretend harassment and assault magically become cute and harmless when they’re committed by minors) you’d get when everyone found out that not only did you “have sex” (rape is not sex, at best it’s masturbating with another person’s body), but you “had kinky sex”.

If after all that you can still say “just call the cops” then congratulations, you’re a lost cause. Kindly fuck off, the best thing you can do for victims of sexual assault is to keep your worthless mouth shut.