My writing in general has been put on hold because a number of other projects have taken precedence. Overall, it’s been a really positive thing for me to step away from this (and other writing projects). I’m now fostering relationships with people I love, learning new skills, becoming stronger and healthier, feeling challenged in really positive ways, and returning to things I’ve set aside for far too long. With writing (here and elsewhere), I’ve always felt a certain pressure — I feel positively guilty when I’m not working on something, not creating something. Right now, I don’t feel that sense of guilt. It’s very freeing, to be able to enjoy something and not immediately feel compelled to document it.

…but I know I can’t avoid that feeling for too long, of course. I already feel the pull back to a screenplay I wrote a first draft of a year ago. I’m reading a fantastic book on a pet subject of mine, and I inevitably turn to thoughts of interviewing the author for a magazine I’ve written for in the past, of perhaps even writing a follow-up book on the subject incorporating some new ideas and…no. Not now; not yet. Now I need time for day-to-day life, for friends, for playing games and music, for collaborating with others, for having fun, for absorbing ideas and words instead of generating them.

I might return to this some day. In particular, I’d love to return to the zine format and come up with “Issue 2″ of Subversive Submissive. Right now, though, it’s time to put this aside for other things. Thanks again to everyone who’s read this over the years, and don’t hesitate to email me if you’d like: subversivesub at gmail dot com. So long.

My reasons for continuing this blog are completely different from the reasons I started it. When I first began writing here, all I wanted was to give voice to the thoughts I’d been wrestling with for so long and to find support from others who thought like me — to find reassurance that I wasn’t alone. Thanks to this blog and that support from everyone who’s read it over the last few years, I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted: I no longer feel overwhelmingly ashamed or afraid of my desires; I feel confident in my sexuality; I have a better understanding of different BDSM subcultures and histories and can articulate both defenses and critiques of them.

About a year ago, I realized that my blogging had a secondary goal: to be the source I’d hoped to find when I went looking for intelligent, radically minded kinky folk, and to reassure others that they were not alone. I started receiving a number of comments and emails from people expressing gratitude for my thoughts, my stories, and my openness. At the same time, I began to put more energy into Anarkink — organizing meetings, ensuring our presence at the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair, and helping to plan a party. I created a FetLife group for kinky anarchists; I printed a zine; I received several requests for interviews. I began to realize that my identity as a writer was now overwhelmed by “Subversive Submissive,” and that the only real work I was producing that was being read by others (except for the non-credited writing I do as a part of my job) was my personal reflections about kink and sexuality.

I’m in a quandary. I enjoy writing on here — I do still find it interesting (and often cathartic), and it seems that others still find it somewhat helpful to read about my struggles with and thoughts on kink. I really like having the connections with other kinky bloggers that I’ve made over the past few years, and I miss the cross-blog conversations that I used to take part in on a more regular basis. But kink is simply not as enormously fascinating to me now as it was even a year ago; it’s now simply a normal part of my life, not something new and exciting that I want to process, dissect, analyze, and share with others. And the more I grow into my identity as a writer, the more I realize that I don’t want to be a “sex writer” — and that practically speaking, anyone who frequently writes about sex, even if she writes about many other things as well, runs the risk of being pigeonholed as such. My reasons for anonymity are several, but one of them is definitely my fear that connecting my real name to my writing on here will mean that I will forever be resigned to a role as “that woman who writes about kink and anarchism.”

So I have a lot that I need to figure out, right now. I don’t think I’m quite ready to stop writing here, but I need to find a better balance with my other interests and to decide whether or not I need to quarantine my writing about sex from everything else I share with the world. Here’s looking forward to finding the answer in 2010.

At any rate, I’ll be back in December. Have a good month.

Here, then, we have the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom. A second characteristic is closely connected with this, namely, that play is not “ordinary” or “real” life. It is rather a stepping out of “real” life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own . . . . Nevertheless . . . the consciousness of play being “only a pretend” does not by any means prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture and, temporarily at least, completely abolishes that troublesome “only” feeling. Any game can at any time wholly run away with the players. The contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid. The inferiority of play is continually being offset by the corresponding superiority of its seriousness. Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play. Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness far beneath.

—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture

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This month, we’ll have a facilitated discussion of what it means to practice BDSM as an anarchist. On the one hand, we have anti-BDSM arguments proclaiming that any type of BDSM play gives legitimacy to domination and submission as models for human relationships, and on the other, we have BDSM players who assert that anything they do and say is absolved by the fact that it turns them on. Some celebrate BDSM as a way to play with power, turning it on its head and perverting it for our own pleasure; other kinky folk are staunchly opposed to the idea of BDSM as merely “play,” and see “dominance” or “submission” as deep, constant aspects of their personality. If we are anti-hierarchical, can we also engage in (or support) relationships that are rooted in hierarchical models? Where do we draw the lines, if there are any to be drawn? We’ll look at a bit of BDSM and leather history, touch on the second-wave feminist backlash against BDSM in the 1980s, and identify specifically anarchist arguments against BDSM as a practice and as a subculture—and we’ll round it out with a discussion of concepts like “consent” and “play,” to see how these elements might help us make sense of What It Is That We Do.

Thursday, October 29
8-10pm
at the Long Haul Infoshop
3124 Shattuck Avenue / Woolsey in Berkeley (2 blocks from Ashby BART)
The space is wheelchair accessible and there is an accessible, gender-neutral bathroom.

To get to the point, the issue at hand is an episode of “This Week in Kink”, a podcast put on by the folks that run FetLife. On this episode, which aired over two months ago, one of the guests invited on the show said the following:

I firmly and strongly believe that it is a woman’s role to be submissive to a man. . . . I think that women in the past couple of hundred years have gotten entirely too high on their own power and eventually need to be slapped in the fucking head and put in their place.

A couple of years ago, I would have crusaded against this man and against the people who run the podcast. (How dare they allow such a thing to be broadcast.) I’d have demanded an apology and a retraction. Today, my reaction is a sigh and a shake of the head. What an asshole. I browse the comments on their page and leave one of my own. And I’m done. Next.

I did a bit of link-hopping and read Maymay’s take on the issue, in a post called “Don’t You Fret, Sexism Is Alive and Well in BDSM.” His post addressed a lot of stuff I’ve also written about — basically, making the point that while anti-BDSM feminists are wrong in their assessment of “BDSM = patriarchy,” we should acknowledge that there is a lot of sexism in BDSM as a culture and in how a lot of people practice it.

He linked to a blogger named Delilah, who writes that what troubles her the most about this is not that it was said — there will always be bigoted, ignorant jerks in the world — but that “in the BDSM world, where we’re meant to be playing with power, subverting some traditional norms and amplifying others to erotic effect, there are people who still truly believe this kind of outright nonsense. Even worse, that someone with such opinions is such a strong voice in the community.”

To me, what this says is not that there is a troubling streak of misogyny or at least sexism in the BDSM scene, but that (as I’ve written before) the values of the BDSM scene are fairly mainstream. Rob may be more outspoken and brash about his sexism, and it comes coated with d/s-specific language, but I strongly sense that the root of what he’s saying here is actually what the majority of men and women think — that there are biological differences between men and women, that these differences create “natural” inequalities between the sexes in some ways, and that the feminist demand for equality goes against woman’s natural role in the world.

Of course, none of this means that I’m throwing up my hands and saying, “Well, if the rest of the world thinks I should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, I guess I’ll start taking off my shoes.” I’m still angry. I still argue. But I’m not outraged; I don’t feel like I should expect the world to not be sexist, and that this individual person has just violated that unspoken agreement. I go out into the world expecting that most people I meet will have, on some level, an understanding of gender and gender roles that I do not share and that I feel is harmful to me in some way. I expect exactly the same thing when I encounter people in the BDSM scene. (The unfortunate difference, of course, is that within the world of BDSM, “this is my kink” can be used to justify stereotypes and prejudice, and thus people like Rob can speak a little louder than they would, perhaps, on the street.)

Perhaps I’m just having a very cynical day. But perhaps not.

My breath came in clumsy gasps as I stumbled up the stairs to my apartment, a burning in the back of my throat from the cold air I’d been gulping down. I had pushed myself home on my bicycle as fast as I could, pedaling blindly through dark residential streets and swerving my way around cars on the major roads. My face was sticky and wet with tears.

Slamming the door behind me, I suddenly froze, listening for signs of movement elsewhere in the house. Good, I thought. Nobody home.

I dropped my bag on the kitchen table and headed straight to my room, where, despite my own assurances that I was alone, I closed and locked the door. Truly alone now, I expected that my throat would loosen and that great, heaving sobs would come spilling out, a release of emotion, of anger and grief and humiliation. I prepared myself, and waited, but nothing came — I felt numb with tension; I couldn’t relax enough to cry.

She had smiled at me. She had smiled, nervously, as she walked past me, and I had put up an awkward hand to wave “hello.” “Hello,” I wanted that little wave to say, “I really like you, and I can’t be in the same room with you without thinking of you fucking my boyfriend, which is what you were doing three nights ago sometime between eleven at night and two in the morning. I think you’re an awfully nice person, honestly, and I want to walk over and punch you in the face.” And she had passed by without saying a word, and I had quickly, discreetly, fled the party as soon as she’d left the room.

What had she been thinking? What had her smile meant? What had mine meant to her?

Images flooded my brain. Her mouth on his cock. His finger pushing slowly inside her as she moans. His eyes watching her face as she comes. Stop. Her head on his bare chest as they curl up together in her bed. Stop!

I suddenly became very aware of the silence in my room, in the empty house. Sirens blared as a cop car sped past my window, somehow enhancing the feeling of isolation and solitude. I sat down on the floor, legs crossed. The anger had been unexpected. The anger was what had disturbed me so much. And what intensified that anger even more was the fact that it was totally, completely unjustified. This was what I had consented to. This was what I wanted.

Her mouth…his hands..their bodies…

My own body twinged as I thought of him, and I wished he could be there with me. That the images in my head would become real, with her mouth replaced with mine, her body, her desire becoming my own.

No.

No, that isn’t what I want, I thought. Not really. If he were here right now with me, the sex would be tense, and I would kiss him and not be able to keep myself from thinking of her. And then I would break down, unable to continue, and we’d both be miserable. No, that isn’t it, at all.

I closed my eyes and focused on the silence and my breath, centering myself and regaining perspective, clarity, focus. That is what I want. Focus. Being here. Being okay with being alone.

And then I opened my toy drawer, pulling out boxes of needles, a sharps container, disinfectant, and paper towels, methodically spreading them all out before me. I stripped my shirt off, cleaned off a patch of skin, and then pulled out a handful of needles, choosing a variety of sizes and colored tips.

This is my time. My body, my pleasure. It doesn’t matter that he’s fucking someone else; it doesn’t even matter if he were fucking someone else right this minute. What matters is that I’m here, now…

I pushed in the first needle.

I’ve realized that the reason I have felt so profoundly hurt by my partner’s having sex with someone else is that my sexuality is an incredibly sensitive and deeply intimate part of my identity — which isn’t the case for him. It’s taken many years for me to be okay with not only my sexual identity as a submissive but just with the idea of myself as a sexual being at all; for most of my life, sex was something big and terrifying that I engaged in somewhat reluctantly and while holding a lot of myself back. In my family, sex was probably mentioned all of two or three times throughout my adolescence, and then only in combination with the words “don’t” and “be careful.” My memories of these brief conversations with my mother are marked by feelings of extreme discomfort, embarrassment, and fear — both on her part and my own. In fact, this could be said about any of my conversations with my parents around personal issues or problems. And as I got older, I mirrored this in my relationships with friends and others — avoiding discussions of serious issues; minimizing and dismissing emotional problems; lying about my scars during phases of self-injury; hiding the fact that I was at times unable to function because of depression, anxiety, and overwhelm; and never, ever talking about sex. In large part, this is still true today. Even with my trusted partner of four years, I often lapse into a headspace in which I can’t bring myself to actually voice the thoughts in my head, or sometimes even speak at all, when having conversations about difficult or highly personal issues.

All of which brings me to a paper on non-monogamy and identity that I recently read; it’s very academic, and I strongly disagree with parts of it, but it brings up some interesting points. Most significantly, the author writes that many (if not most) women in our society are taught to define ourselves in terms of our relationships with others, and specifically in terms of our (monogamous) sexual relationships. Because of this fusing of a monogamous person’s identity with that of her sexual partner, when the partner chooses to have a sexual relationship with someone else, the person feels that her identity is being changed in a way that she didn’t choose for herself. The author writes, “When the monogamous person says, of her lover, ‘I’m selfish; I don’t want to share,’ she may not necessarily be thinking of her lover as a child thinks of a toy or a bag of candy. She may rather be saying that she does not choose to share herself, to extend herself to include this new person, who is not a chosen part of her self-assumed identity.” It is a sort of “forced relating.” And as long as a person defines herself in part or exclusively in terms of her sexual partner, this sort of pain and vulnerability will continue. The real problem, the author argues, is neither monogamy nor non-monogamy but the idea that real emotional intimacy and identity can only be tied to the person or people you’re fucking; both monogamous and polyamorous people may feel that “sexual coupling defines and is the hallmark of closeness between human beings; that being sexual is being intimate; and that sex is almost the only route to warm physical contact between adults.”

And this leads to the big revelatory conclusion: The real solution to my issues with non-monogamy is not to just start dating other people myself (which I’ve considered), nor is it to cut myself off completely and regress to the hyper-independent ideal that I used to aspire to (which I’ve noticed myself already doing). The solution, or at least a large part of it, is to actually form intimate relationships with people I’m not having sex with. To let myself cry in front of my friends. To talk to people in person about the things I currently write about anonymously online. To learn how to touch other people without feeling awkward and uncomfortable. To not allow my sexual relationship to be the only outlet I have to get the love and affection and reassurance I need. I can’t stress how difficult these things are for me. But I’ve already begun testing the waters — and it’s not quite as hard as I thought it would be.

A month has passed since then, and I think I’ve done pretty well. I’ve been feeling pretty confident about the two-month mark, a trip my partner was planning that would include visiting a girl he’s interested in. I felt this would be a good first step — someone I didn’t know, someone I didn’t have to interact with socially, someone I knew wasn’t in any way a threat to our relationship, because she lives halfway across the country. I felt like I was ready for that.

Then my partner decided he wasn’t going on that trip. And I realized that I was tired of trying to ease my way into things, trying to take baby steps that were getting us virtually nowhere. I was actually looking forward to his traveling to visit this girl, because I’ve been anxious to see what it’s going to really feel like, anxious to figure out whether or not I can actually handle this kind of relationship. So last week, I told my partner that I didn’t want to put off the inevitable, and said that I wanted to just “officially” declare our relationship open.

For the past few days I’ve been teetering between “doing really well, considering,” and “fucking miserable.” On Saturday night, at a show, he ended up making out with a girl we’d both met relatively recently — he’d previously told me that he thought there was a mutual attraction there, so it wasn’t all that unexpected. He did everything right: he made sure I knew, before he went to the show, that this girl was going to be there; he gave me lots of affection and reassurance; he didn’t let things progress too quickly with the other girl, and made sure to talk to her about me and about our relationship; he let her know that this was a new thing for us, and that it might be difficult for me to deal with at first. He called me from the show to let me know exactly what had happened, and said we could talk it all over when he got home. And we did talk, and we both cried and held each other, and then we played a few games of Boggle. (Which actually made me feel far better and more normal than any amount of talking had been able to accomplish…)

The next day, the girl was over at our house for a regular Sunday-night event that we host; she’s been coming regularly for a few months, which is how we met her, and it would have felt strange to me if she hadn’t just shown up as normal. But I couldn’t look at her, when she came in — not because I was upset with her, but because I just had no idea how I was supposed to behave. Should I take her aside to talk to her? Should I just say hello, smile at her to let her know that we’re cool, and leave it at that? Should I act like nothing’s happened? And how do I behave around her friends and roommates, who probably have some idea of what’s going on?

I was expecting to feel jealous, isolated, left out. But that’s not entirely what I’m feeling. More than anything else, I’m feeling awkward, unsure of myself, and worried about what other people are feeling and thinking. Instead of feeling abandoned by my partner, I’m finding myself feeling worried that this other girl will feel left out and hurt when my partner is affectionate with me in public but not with her. At the same time, I’m afraid of people knowing how painful this is for me, watching me to see if I’m doing okay when we’re all in the same room, asking me how I’m feeling. I think that to most people, I come across as an extremely together, sensible, healthy person. That’s the face I’ve cultivated my entire life, because I’ve always been reluctant to show anything I consider to be weakness or vulnerability. And right now, at a time when I’m feeling pretty fucking vulnerable, my first concern is to keep up that protection, keep people from seeing what I’m feeling — even when I don’t exactly know, yet, what it even is that I’m feeling. Even worse, because this particular girl is a part of my social circle, I’m afraid of showing or talking about how much this is hurting because I don’t want to alienate her or make people feel like she (or my partner) is doing anything wrong. I don’t want to make mutual friends feel awkward for being in the middle. Yet I also really don’t want to keep pretending that I’m doing okay.

…and this is all the rush of everything happening in a matter of days, and I know that not everything needs to be resolved right away, that these things take time. I’m being buffeted by strange emotions and unexpected feelings, and until I can make some sense of them I expect that I’ll continue to feel this self-consciousness, this not-knowing-how-to-behave. Looking forward to getting to the other side of this.

Lately I’ve noticed a definite increase in interest for bondage imagery, porn, entertainment and personal play that depict harsh incarceration, kidnapping and interrogation. I am not sure why this is, but it’s happening. Maybe it’s a war-weary culture’s subconscious search for a coping mechanism, maybe it’s over saturation of images and discussions of governing body violence, maybe it’s a desensitized culture seeking stimulation… Maybe it’s just another sexuality trend as they do come and go…I don’t know. I am disturbed, though, that so many who enjoy consuming or acting out fantasy actions of detention and incarcerations don’t seem to think of the reality of where these images come from. We chatter on about bondage is freedom and art and so on, but so often it just feels like lip-service to transgressiveness when we’ve nothing to struggle against. Maybe the fascination in bondage is the side affect of hermetically sealed safe lives in search of some signs of being alive? I just don’t know.

A person hooded, on the floor, naked and cuffed.

If the only context or response that one has to this image is a fun Saturday night of role playing at the local kink party, are we starving our own humanity? I’m not saying that we should not play with our dark fantasies and archetypes, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the real world human events that necessitate these narratives.

The thing that’s so interesting to me about this is how closely it resembles the argument that I’ve heard time and time again from radfems and anti-BDSM folks: we’re playing with imagery that comes from real-world oppression, and we’re not thinking about the implications of that. We are thus in danger of “starving our own humanity” by immersing ourselves in bondage-as-fetish, isolating our minds from the notion that someone bound and gagged could be anything but a person having some kinky fun. The difference, of course, is that where the radfems believe that any engagement with bondage or d/s play desensitizes us and helps support the patriarchy/oppression, Midori argues that we shouldn’t give up playing with “dark fantasies and archetypes” but should instead simply increase our awareness of where those fantasies and archetypes come from, acknowledge that there are deeply disturbing real-world counterparts to what we do for fun.

For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with the idea that exploring bondage fantasies creates an immunity to recognizing real-world oppression — I think that immunity is deliberately cultivated by those institutions that profit from oppression — but it is really refreshing to see someone so immersed in mainstream BDSM culture articulating such a thoughtful critique of that culture. More, please.