How to have a protest!

U.S. publication The Atlantic has published parts of a US English translation of the advice that was being emailed amongst protesters prior to the Egyptian demonstrations beginning.   The pages translated and published outline the protests' demands, their strategic aims, the tactics to achieve those aims and finally, advice on how to counteract the non-lethal weapons of the police forces (sadly, the news reports currently state that live ammunition has been used and people killed).

Although the advice pamphlet asks specifically that the document not be transmitted by "Twitter or Facebook", because the Ministry of the Interior routinely monitors those channels of communication, The Atlantic writes, "We're publishing this piece of ephemera because we think it's a fascinating part of the historical record of what may end up becoming a very historic day for Egypt."   I am writing about it here because I think that I have seen similar documents in the past, produced by anarchist or environmentalist protesters in this country; the chief difference between those documents and this one is that this one wants protesters to be positive and to seek to win the police and army as allies.   UK anarchists tend to view them as unalterably the enemy.   I am also writing about it because I think it is very important given the state of protest in this country to have the very useful advice presented here to be widely available.   Given the recent reports about how the police spied on activist organisations in this country, it seems likely that the police in the UK would know about this sort of thing already.   The Atlantic say that they have avoided any of the specific information so as to protect the protesters while the action is still taking place, so what remains is fairly well-known.   It still makes one of the most concise and comprehensive outlines for protesters.

Pleasure and Pain and no SM?

Just watched a fascinating programme on BBC1 in which Michael Mosley (not to be confused with Max Mosley, whose choice to mix pleasure, pain and Nazi roleplay was the subject of a tabloid scandal and lawsuit and stuff a while back!) explored the connection between the two, and how they work in the human brain, neurochemistry and so on.   He covered all the things about oxytocin, dopamine, seratonin, endorphins etc.

I was surprised that he didn't talk about masochism in particular, because with "sex" appearing as the number 2 "most pleasurable thing" (right after "family and friends") in the programme's survey, you'd think that the question of "what about people who get turned on by pain?" would have occurred to the producers, given that the title was about both pleasure and pain.

However, there were several points that helped me understand a bit more about how my own masochism might work.

Mosley talked about the role of dopamine in sexual pleasure, and in particular mentioned about how it gets turned off once orgasm is reached with seratonin being released to bring you down (which helped explain why my SSRIs inhibited my ability to achieve orgasm when I was taking them, I didn't know that it had that role).   He also looked at oxytocin, and the ways in which this functions as the bonding/love chemical in romantic and familial relationships.

In a test on "who handles pain better?" they had a loved-up couple as one of their test variables to test whether oxytocin also had a pain-inhibiting role, which it seemed to do quite nicely - more on that test in a minute.   He also spoke about dopamine as having a pain-inhibiting role to help in "fight-or-flight" situations.   The role of endorphins was explored by looking at the "high" reported by chilli-eaters (capsaicin being a good way of stimulating endorphin release).

It's quite common for masochists to need "warming up" to handle more pain, or handle it better, and the release of endorphins to deal with the pain enables us to take more.   It's also reported often that being turned on already (i.e. having a good dose of arousal chemical dopamine in the blood) also makes a difference, even if you haven't been warmed up properly.

What was more interesting was when he talked about "higher-level" processing of pain, and I was disappointed that this psychological as opposed to neurological or neurochemical branch received quite a short amount of time in the programme.   It would have been really interesting to learn about the difference between the common "subdrop" (come-down after an endorphin high) after a really good session, and the less common but also reported "subdrop" after a heavy but not enjoyed punishment - one that didn't seem to involve a pleasurable "high".   But it did raise some points familiar to masochists everywhere about some of the differences between consensual/pleasurable pain and non-consensual or non-pleasurable pain.

Our intrepid presenter went to have his legs waxed, which I am sure I would have enjoyed more than he did.   Here, he talked about how anticipation (apparently, there are people who kink on it - called "extreme dreaders") and context affects pain response.   Mosley explained that whether we perceive the pain as maliciously caused can have an effect (so, the fact that he was in a professional, caring environment made the pain easier to bear), as does the perceived cost-benefit (or "reward" as he put it) balance works (which for him wasn't that great because he had no real desire for smooth legs - I, on the other hand, would love to have smooth legs so probably wouldn't suffer as much as he did!)

Again, much of this is familiar to masochists and submissives in the BDSM world.   The difference in sensation or response between a spanking for fun or for punishment is a common topic.   One thing from the world of masochism that didn't get a mention was the effect of how in control one feels over the pain.   When we talk about "good" or "bad" pain, one of the most common distinctions masochists make is between medical conditions and deliberately caused pain.   For example, my gout when it was bad was not something I could persuade my brain to enjoy, because it was indeterminate in length and out of anyone's control.   (It also happens to be caused by tiny needle-like crystals in the joints, and needles are a type of pain that I don't enjoy under any circumstances - I tried eroticising the blood sample needle at the GP and it still didn't work for me.)   The programme only talked about chronic pain in the sense of painkilling drugs and prescription medication.

That last parenthesis brings up another issue that would have been really interesting to see discussed in more detail.   While Mosley mentioned a couple of times that the systems that control pleasure and pain stimulate the same areas of the brain, which is why one person's pleasure is another person's pain and vice versa, it wasn't in any way explored that there are some types of pain that we enjoy and others we don't.   For example, the capsaicin kinksters at the chilli-eating contest presumably really enjoy the burning-tongue sensation produced by that chemical.   But I wouldn't presume that they would also enjoy a good caning!   Some of them might, others might not.   For me, needles and cutting are complete no-go areas for pain, but others really enjoy them.   I love to take spanking and hot things, and suspect I might really enjoy a caning as long as I can actually manage to take it.   Others, again, don't like those.   So I would have loved to know how brains work differently between good pain and bad pain.   (I did volunteer for a study that was going to explore the difference between masochists' brain responses and non-masochists, but it never got the final go-ahead.)   This isn't just about anticipation and the rest of it, because I never know what sort of pain I will enjoy until I try it for real (for instance, I didn't know I would enjoy being scratched hard until I tried having someone do it to me.   That moment also involved a lot of dread/anticipation just before!   (The sadist who did it to me said "you enjoy it too much!" when I asked for another go **grins**)   I'm sure there must be 'nilla examples they could have looked at  (for instance, the capsaicin kink and Mosley's experiment with bungee jumping) to study this difference, or at least mention it.

I mentioned the experiment/stunt the programme did to explore who can take the most pain.   The categories that they compared were: men, women, loved-up couple, redheads and foul-mouthed students.   Apparently, redheads are supposed to have a genetic connection with higher sensitivity to pain, whereas cursing or swearing while apparently experiencing pain is believed to have a genuine pain-relieving effect.   This last theory was emphatically not upheld by the experiment results!   The redheads did appear to be more pain-sensitive (which may be one reason why I have a particular "thing" for redheads - as a sadist, I like it when my partner feels it more!) and, as mentioned, the loved-up couple seemed to cope very well (which means that a loved-up S/M couple will presumably get more done before the safeword gets used).   Men seemed to manage a lot better than the women did in this particular experiment, but I don't know how that reflects what happens in bigger and more properly controlled experiments!

I appreciated that Mosley made it clear that pain and pleasure are multi-dimensional in the neuro-chemical side as well as in the psychological side - a lot of pop-science things treat it as if it's just one chemical variable "more is this, less is that" kind of thing, but this show managed to explain that it is complicated.   As I've discussed here, it seems there may still be more that we don't yet know about how pain and pleasure works.

Telegraph and Daily Fail have a problem with stopping kids hating

The Telegraph newspaper (and the Daily Mail, in a similar article using many of the same words) writes that, "Teachers logged more than 10,000 confrontations involving primary school students making racist insults or derogatory comments about homosexuals in 12 months." They add that, "A further 20,000 “hate crimes” were recorded against secondary school students such as using the phrases “white trash” or “gaylord” during playground squabbles." (I'm going to assume that "white trash" was a long way from being the most frequently heard racially-based insult, but it's the one that is seen as most trivial, and therefore better for the case made by the Telegraph and Daily Fail).

This, according to the Telegraph and "experts", is a bad thing not because racism and homophobia are bad things, but because:

“I feel that childhood itself is under attack,” Adrian Hart, from the Manifesto Club, a civil liberies group, which obtained the figures.

“It’s absolutely the case that these policies misunderstand children quite profoundly."

I'm going to pause right there to make my first point, which is: I would suggest that childhood is under worse attack when children are the targets of unopposed racism and homophobia. And no, I don't think it makes a difference whether the racism or homophobia comes from an adult or a child.

The argument followed by the Daily Fail and the Telegraph is set out by Mr Hart:

He added to the Daily Mail: “Racist incident reporting generates the illusion of a problem with racism in Britain’s schools by trawling the everyday world of playground banter, teasing, childish insults – the sort of things that every teacher knows happens out there in the playground.”

And of course, if you happen to grow up to be straight, then the use of homophobic terms such as "gaylord" to insult people does turn out to be just harmless banter. If as you grow up you discover that you happen not to be happy with straighthood, however, then it's just the beginning of your problems.

Mr Hart says that this "generates an illusion of a problem with racism in Britain’s schools". I say that it reveals that there is a genuine problem with racism amongst our young people. If race-based insults are seen as insulting, then that must imply that being of a certain race is also seen as despicable or making a person less worthwhile. Likewise with homophobia and being gay.

If we allow those insults to go unchallenged, then we teach young people that it is Not Okay to be gay, or to be Black, or Brown (note that the term "white trash" has to qualify Whiteness to make it something worthless; race-based insults don't often have to do that for people of colour!) We teach them that racism and homophobia are normal and acceptable. Mr Hart, indeed, wants us to believe that it is normal for children to be racist and homophobic and we should allow them to be! But then, how much harder it is to persuade the gay folks among the class that they're okay, and to prevent the PoC from being subtly pushed aside in all manner of ways? I mean, how do they think that the children who made 20,000+ offences in secondary school learned that they could do so, if not by hearing and using those same insults at primary school?

The Telegraph writes, "And nursery school staff reported several dozen such bullying incidents involving young children despite most not understanding the meaning of what they were saying."

But I'm willing to bet you remember it meaning something bad, and then you grow up and learn that you are that "something bad", and then you feel bad, and the people around know that you are something bad, too, and that makes it okay to hate you.

Now, I'm not so sure that reporting and recording these incidents as black marks against students' names is necessarily the right approach - the Mail article says that schools pass the records on; the Telegraph article simply states that:

Racist incident forms were then created that required teachers to name the alleged perpetrator and victim, and spell out what they did and how they were punished. Schools can keep these details on file.

However, be that as it may, the suggestion that is implicit in the tone of the two newspapers' articles, and explicit in Mr Hart's vile outpourings, is that these incidents should not be of any concern to us because they are "normal". I say that it is precisely because they are normal that we should be concerned and we should seek urgently to make them less and less normal! If we want to put an end to racism and homophobia, we're not going to get very far if we allow our children to teach racism and homophobia to each other.

Some thinky thoughts about porn and standards and such

In the discussions surrounding the story of Kink[Inc]'s live "deflowering" stunt and the follow-up, Clarisse Thorn raised some questions about the standards that sex-positive campaigners are using to judge these issues, and would expect of a "good" porn company. I don't have sure answers for them all, but I have recorded here my feelings and thoughts on the subject as best I can. These answers are best viewed as not hard and fixed, but an examination of where I'm at right now.

What does an ethical porn company look like? A feminist porn company?

It should go without saying that an ethical company (regardless of their business) shows proper regard for the safety, health and well-being of its workers as a minimum. The details of what that looks like in porn are debated between and amongst health professionals and sex professionals, and when we through in BDSM kinks to the mix there are extra considerations about safety as well. I tend more nowadays to the "risk-aware consensual kink" acronym than the famous "Safe, Sane, Consensual" (if only because I prefer to replace the problematic word 'sane" with "competent"), but there is still a duty of care by the business towards its employees.

Consent also should be a given, but what does valid consent in a porn (or for that matter, BDSM) environment look like? It isn't just, "yes, I want to do this!" but should look a lot more like the standards require for medical research, where the term "informed consent" is used. This term is also common in sex-positive communities and kink communities to describe the threshold for valid consent.

I would expect an ethical porn company to want to be clear with a performer exactly what was going to happen to her in such a way that zie understands the risks (i.e. is risk-aware) and is able therefore to say that zie finds them to be acceptable risks for hir to take. One of the continued criticisms of Kink[Inc] over the "hymen-gate" issue (as it's now being called) is that the performer Nicki Blue appears not to have been given accurate information about the anatomy of the hymen or what happens to it when one has sex for the first time. This calls into question the quality of their preparation and informed consent standards.

These are all "care for the performer" issues that should be well enough known amongst sex-positive folks that I didn't need to reiterate them here (although for visitors not involved in sex-pos campaigning, it's a useful recap).

A lot of the debate around "hymen-gate" has been focussed on presentation, marketing and appearances, however. Given a company that functions ethically in respect to its employees, how does an ethical, or feminist, porn company present its works?

What kind of art do we expect a sex-positive porn company to produce?

A lot of the time, I like sex, and therefore porn, to be dark, sweaty and screaming. Other people have very different tastes. We can't call it "sex-positive" unless the art a porn company produces is allowed to cover the widest spectrum of styles and deeds (bearing in mind that to cover those deeds they must remain within the ethical constraints of looking after their performers properly, and maintaining informed consent).

One very important thing is to distinguish clearly between what is fantasy and what is reality. I have some very scary fantasies, including rape fantasies and women-in-peril fantasies where it's not always the case that the victim is rescued at the end. There is porn out there to cater for these fantasies. For instance, I have seen some very enjoyable quicksand porn where the implication in the scene is that the victim sinks without trace. However, the video also finishes with seeing the performers wash the muck of the "quicksand" from their bodies after the shoot - the fantasy was the quicksand "death", but the reality is that nobody died or was harmed, and everybody had a fun time.

Porn doesn't just show storyline/fantasy scenarios, however, and I also don't think it should be limited to those. Other types of porn might be called "roleplay on set" and "reality" porn. These both take place not in a scene depicting a story location, but in a set clearly intended to be simply a location for porn fucking to take place. Here there is less story and much more focus purely on the sex. The distinction between "roleplay-on-set" and "reality" is that in the first, after the performers are introduced, they adopt roles appropriate to the fetish. In what I'm calling "reality" porn they behave consistently throughout, acting as if they have decided off-camera to have sex, and then they "just happen" to have a camera focussed on the location where that sex is going to take place. If they are playing a role, they are in role before they appear on camera.

One of the reasons why Nicki Blue's vaginal virginity losing scene raised concerns is that, in terms of the particular fetish being portrayed, it was being presented as "reality" porn in the sense I've described here. Thus, while it may be about Ms Blue's fantasy of "breaking her hymen", that fantasy is being presented as reality. We are told not that we will see actors playing roles, but people doing something real. Since the fantasy that was being presented as real was based on false information about female anatomy, this seems to represent an unacceptable blurring of fantasy and reality.

So it's this "consistently-in-character" style of "just going for it" where I think that boundaries need to be laid. Where we have some clear signals that what we're seeing is make-believe (either because the performers only go into character after they've been introduced, or because there's a whole storyline to the scene) then the fantasy is clearly inside the "fantasy" box, and though the lines might be blurred, it's still distinct enough, and we can see where they are drawn. But where "reality" porn is involved, the observer is effectively inside the box with the performers, meaning that the viewer can't see the box clearly. It looks like it's really real.

When that happens, then I think sex-positive porn has to look like sex-positive sex: while the initial negotiation phase may have taken place off-camera, the sex that is on-camera should be of the "consent is sexy" variety. For example, if the man is going to call the woman a bitch, for example, then we need to see explicitly that that's what she wants him to call her. That may be in the advertising blurb, or it may be in the scene itself (e.g. as they're fucking, she tells him to call her a bitch). Essentially, for me at least, when I see a performer say "no" in that type of scene, I don't know if that's a roleplay "no" (and she has a safeword to use to stop the shoot if there's a real problem) or a real "no" (and therefore that what I'm seeing has just morphed into sexual assault/rape).

How much latitude do we allow them to work within the fetishes of their users, which may occasionally sound politically incorrect?

I think that my previous comments give my answer clearly. As long as we can see that it is pretend, make-believe, stuff, that's fine. When it looks real, it has to play nicely.

What exactly would be sex-positive, non-phallocentric, and/or non-heteronormative?

Sex-positive: We start with the "consent is sexy" criterion outlined above. There's no boundaries on the type of sex that can be counted as sex-positive, it's about the way the performers and/or characters relate to them that matters. When we're dealing with fantasy settings, of course, it's a little bit different because fantasies can involve all sorts of coercive, violent or forced scenarios. With that, the key is to say "this is fantasy, and fantasies are okay" - as discussed in the previous answers. In general, the attitude should be Your Kink Is OK.

In the "hymen-gate" scenario, I think most commenters are agreed that Nicki Blue's kink (this fantasy of first vaginal sex to be on live streaming broadcast) is OK for her to have, and it's okay for Kink[Inc] to help her fulfil it. There are more questions about the conception of it being her hymen being broken, not least because that's not accurate anatomically. I find myself squicking at the idea of what I think customers might bring to, and take from, this thing, and that is problematic because there is always the suspicion of some sense of elitism about it (i.e. the dubious notion/intuition that "it's okay for me to have these fantasies, but it's not okay for you to have them, because I have x,y,z qualification to do so and you don't"). Part of that squick - the legitimate part, perhaps - is based on the way the first press release was worded, with its conflation of "innocence", "virginity" and "hymen". That seems to me to be sex-negative because it demotes other types of sexual contact, and it fetishises those things beyond the specifics of Nicki Blue's fantasy placing some objective and special value on them.

Non-phallocentric: This is difficult for me to answer. Some fantasies are necessarily penis-based: indeed, Nicki Blue's fantasy was specifically of having a cock (and not some other body-part or object) do the deed. So I don't think it's possible to judge from a single scene or item of output from a porn company whether its work is "phallocentric" or not, because some bits inevitably will be phallocentric - that's just the nature of the fantasies that those pieces fulfil! But in a wider sense I think it is possible to look at whether the phallus is made central to the presentation of the work, whether the phallus is always at the centre of the various works produced, and so on.

I can't recall who or where (I thought it was Figleaf @ Real Adult Sex but haven't been able to find the post there), but someone wrote a piece a while back noting that porn tends, whether or not it shows female orgasm, to end when the male ejaculates. This is the essence of phallocentrism. The exception tends to be BDSM porn, where sometimes the sequence is [set of BDSM kink activities] - [woman denied orgasm] - [more BDSM activities] - [woman masturbated to orgasm]. Some people would not describe this as genuinely "sex", however. I think that a porn company with a wide range of scenes in their output, appealing to various types of kink, that show sex continuing after ejaculation (and even, after loss of wood) would be unequivocally non-phallocentric. Such sex could include many of the types I suggested in my "different virginities" post.

Non-heteronormative: The epitome of heteronormativity is Penis-in-Vagina sex, and in particular holding that up as the "gold standard" of sex against which all other sexual activities are lesser or not even sex at all. This was definitely the problem with portraying Nicki Blue's scene as being unqualified "losing her virginity" and even "losing her innocence". The further away one moves from that one-man-and-one-woman-PiV scenario, the further one moves from the centre of heteronormative sex. I say "centre of", because adding more women to have PiV sex is still pretty heteronormative. Adding more men to have PiV sex with the woman (as in the Kink[Inc] scene with Nicki Blue) is also pretty heteronormative. Annoyingly, such is the way that sexuality is normally portrayed, two women having sex with one another and with a man also falls into heteronormative structures - that scene typically gets classified as "straight sex" by porn marketers, whereas two men having sex with each other and a woman is considered "bi". Similarly, heterosexual oral sex is often treated as a precursor to PiV sex (i.e. as foreplay) rather than as sex in its own right (and so the presentation remains heteronormative) while heterosexual anal sex is often (though not always) portrayed as "extreme" in some way - moving beyond the boundaries of "proper" sex but in the other direction (making PiV the standard to which we must return).

One of the biggest ways to get away from heteronormativity might be to get away from phallocentricity. This removes the primacy of PiV (or indeed, penis-in-anywhere) sexuality and opens the field to sex with other genders and other routes.

In constructive terms, what guidelines could we offer?

I'm not sure how qualified I am to give specific guidelines, and wuld prefer to leave that to people who are already professionals or have experience in the industry. I have presented in this post my feelings and thoughts on the values that might instruct those guidelines, and probably some ideas about those guidelines have appeared in amongst those thoughts, but I don't want to make a clear statement that would, to my mind, be speaking out of turn.

At some point, Kink has to be allowed to describe the actual fantasy in fantasy language, in order to attract people who think the fantasy is hot. If they can’t do that in their press releases or in their banner ads, then where can they do it?

To my mind, a press release should be about facts rather than fantasies. One might factually describe a fantasy that one intends to recreate, but in that case there needs to be a clearly expressed "fantasy box" - the revised version of the Kink[Inc] press release shows how this can be done (although their new version was still imperfect). It labels clearly "this is what is going to happen" and then "this is what it is going to portray".

Advertising materials are a wider category than press releases alone. I would think that there may be some parallels with book publishing here. The blurb that appears on the back of a novel would generally talk exclusively about the story to be found in the pages, giving enough information to titillate the reader's interest. However, when a publisher makes a press release about the same book, it tends to talk about what the author was trying to do with it. It places the novel inside that "fantasy box" and discusses it as a fantasy that is created by those outside the fantasy.

In the same way, while press releases about porn shoots should stick to the facts (or at least, put the fantasy in a box), in the blurb about porn we can talk in fantasy language to "attract people who think the fantasy is hot". Do banner ads count as blurb? I think probably yes - in the same way that the adverts for novels tie into the fantasy, not the facts of the novel writing. I think that the issue with the banner ads in the "hymen-gate" case was more that they blur the reality and fantasy too much, which was one of the key points about the whole presentation.

Follow-up to the Kink.com Virginity Story

My original post is here.

Miss Maggie Mayhem has a new post about Kink.com's live event of Nicki Blue losing her vaginal sex virginity, in which she reports that the owner of Kink.com, Peter Acworth, has responded personally to the criticisms surrounding the marketing and press release for it.   Indeed, that is how the press release now represents the event, largely.

Here are the two versions, one after the other.

Old:

SAN FRANCISCO — Kink.com will stream the deflowering of young virgin Nikki Blue in a ritualistic ceremony live on the Internet on Jan. 15 at 7 p.m.

The ceremony will be held on The Upper Floor of Kink.com’s headquarters, the San Francisco Armory. Prior to the event, a trained expert will insert Kink.com’s official hymen-cam to validate that Blue’s hymen is still in place and that she is a true virgin. Once her hymen is confirmed, the evening will proceed, the company said.

“We will start the evening by tightly binding Ms. Blue and introducing three Kink.com legends: Mark Davis, Jack Hammer and James Deen,” said Kink.com director John Paul “The Pope.” “Fans will vote for which of them will take Nikki’s virginity. Once the voting is complete, we will move to the sanctum, which will be dressed as a ritualistic chamber with candles and ceremonial tools. She’ll be placed in the circle and the winner selected by fans will deflower her. The other two will then join the ceremony and make her airtight.”

Kink.com founder Peter Acworth adds, “To our knowledge there has never been a model lose her virginity live and streaming on the Internet, nothing has, or will, parallel the event taking place on The Upper Floor later this month.

“We strive each and every day to bring the best possible content to our customers and sacrificing Nikki’s innocence is in perfect alignment with what our fans expect and deserve.”

And new:

San Francisco — January 12, 2011 — Kink.com, the largest producer of authentic kinky adult entertainment, has announced that it was chosen by 21-year-old virgin Nikki Blue as her venue of choice for her first-ever vaginal penetration in a live ceremony on the Internet. The event will be held on The Upper Floor of Kink.com’s headquarters, the San Francisco Armory, at 7 p.m. on January 15, 2011.

In line with Kink’s mission “Nicki Blue came to us with a very strong fantasy of having vaginal sex for the first time and breaking her hymen among a group of like-minded individuals. Because of our mission at Kink to demystify and celebrate sexuality, we decided to engage all of our resources to help her fulfill her personal fantasy,” says Kink.com executive producer Chris Kientz.

“An honor to be chosen” “We at Kink are deeply honored that Nicki wanted to celebrate this event on Kink.com cameras, in front of our community of members,” says Peter Acworth, founder of Kink.com. “We are in the business of fantasy fulfillment and we hope to make this celebration as pleasurable and gratifying for Nicki as possible.”

Viewers vote on who will fulfill her fantasy “We will start the evening by tightly binding Ms. Blue and introducing three Kink.com legends: Mark Davis, Jack Hammer and James Deen,” says Kink.com director John Paul “The Pope.” “Fans will vote for which of them will take Nikki’s virginity. Once the voting is complete, we will move to the sanctum, where the winner selected by fans will deflower her. The other two will then join the ceremony and make her airtight.”

I certainly think it's an improvement. The new text places Nicki's desires much more firmly at the centre of what is going to happen, talking much more clearly about her role in setting it all up. While the original press release made it all about delivering "content to our customers", the new press release describes it as providing a "pleasurable and gratifying" fantasy-fulfilment for Nicki. It has also made the terms specific. The hymen and virginity are no longer treated as synonymous in the new text, and the term virginity is qualified as specifically vaginal virginity, which is consistent throughout the new press release except for the part that's copy-pasted from the old one, where the term 'deflower" is used. That part, however, can perhaps be written off as referring to what the viewer-fantasy representation is.

At the Kink[Inc] Behind Kink website, Peter Acworth writes his mea culpa thus:

Instead of showing our gratitude to Nicki for choosing Kink to fulfill her sexual fantasy — to break her hymen during her first vaginal sex experience in front of thousands of fans — we marketed it in a way that relied on sexist tropes and myths about the female body that we should not have perpetuated. And that fact was rightfully brought to our attention by bloggers who hold us to a much higher standard than that. We truly thank them for it and are gratified to see issues surrounding female sexuality, virginity and sexism being discussed in public forums —even if it was as a result of our screw up.

The controversy also sparked some very serious internal discussions at Kink about where things went awry, what our values are as a company, and how we can do better in the future. For now, we're 100% committed to helping ensure that Nicki's first vaginal sex experience on Saturday is an amazing, unforgettable experience for everyone involved. We hope to see you there.

I'm actually quite ambivalent about this, but I am (marginally) going to come down on the side of Mr Acworth here. I'm not totally convinced by the apology, but that's at least partly because I am sceptical of every single corporate/business apology ever in the history of humanity, past or future. But Mr Acworth appears at least to have a) recognised and identified the precise and genuine complaint that has been made against his company's actions and b) actually taken some action already to address the complaints. That's a lot better than a lot of businesses ever do. He also makes a commitment to do better in future, but many companies say that, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as the saying goes. I will remain sceptical until I actually see them do better. It seems that Clarisse Thorn also shares these doubts about the genuineness and importance of the apology.

As far as I can tell, the video interview with Nicki Blue has not been re-edited, so the "myths about the female body" that Nicki expresses in that video are still a part of the marketing in that sense; however, we can say clearly that those are Nicki's personal views and a part of what is important to her about the event, and on that basis I am less inclined than I was to criticise Kink[Inc] for leaving it as-is (though I still think it is not great). I also feel that it stands as an indictment of sex education in the USA, and would hope that links to accurate information would be made available around the live event.

Maymay, whose posts about this story have been among the most critical of Kink[Inc] and their presentation of the event, has more to say. In comments at Miss Maggie Mayhem's follow-up post, he remains suspicious, and perhaps articulates more clearly the vague sense of distrust that I mentioned, but had put down to my distrust of corporate business in general. In particular, he is less willing than I have been to give Kink[Inc] a pass on allowing Nicki Blue's dubious understanding of anatomy to remain a part of the way the present the case:

That said, I suppose you didn’t feel compelled to dispel the misinformation in Mr. Acworth’s apology, just his press release?

…Nicki feels that Kink is the place where she can best live out a fantasy she’s had for many years – to break her hymen during her first vaginal sex experience…

Or did we all just uncritically read past that little slip?

And, in reply to someone making more-or-less the same argument as I have here, he writes:

I think one way to remind ourselves how pervasive those myths are are to stop calling a fantasy based on bad info “a fantasy,” and start calling it by its more appropriate name: a delusion.

...

the more I read of Ms. Blue ..., the less trusting I become of Kink, Inc.’s “serious, in-depth” conversations about consent and so forth with her.

I'm not willing to be as strongly suspicious of Kink[Inc] over this point as Maymay is, but I think that I do share to some extent a sense of unease about the continued misrepresentation of the female anatomy and expressed some of that already. And I think it's a valid point that, if the real medical facts have not been imparted to Ms Blue about what's going on, then how far can we trust the depth and value of the conversations in planning the event?

The best that can be said is that Kink[Inc] have done better after some serious prodding by some activist-y types but still fall short of the ideal.

***

Miss Maggie writes:

It is also a reminder that speaking up can affect real change in the world. It doesn’t matter who you are and what you do to live, thrive, and survive you are going to face issues that make you uncomfortable. Yes, there are problems in the world of porn. There are also problems in our city councils, local branches of the PTA, religious organizations, grocery stores, you name it. Calling out racist comments when you hear them is what helps prevent genocide. Reminding people that it isn’t acceptable to touch others without their permission helps prevent sexual assault. Teaching people about the differences between sex and gender in our schools will reduce the violence that people experience when they’re just trying to pee in peace. Coming out of the closet to friends and family will make it possible for people to be able to marry the person that they love. Regardless of how I or anyone else defines virginity, I hope that by talking about something as seemingly little as a press release that people will have conversations about virginity and that the layers of shame, guilt, and oppression over women’s bodies will begin to lift.

I believe this because I see it happen all the time. No one is insignificant in the battle for social justice. We all have the power to shape our communities.

It is incumbent upon us as campaigners to call out our own side when we/they fall short of the ideals and values that we claim to espouse. Change cannot come if we allow ourselves to be compromised in the way that Kink[Inc] did here, and we cannot correct that compromise unless someone calls us on it.

And, as Miss Maggie points out, the small acts and voices do, eventually, add up and get heard. We can change the world.

Different versions of virginity

Following the web debate that's going on over Nicki Blue's decision to have her first vaginal sex on a pay-to-view live web stream, and in particular the way that she and Kink.com have put forward the old myth that (a woman's) virginity begins and (more literally) ends with the hymen, I started to think about what virginity means to me, and in particular about all the different ways people talk about virginity.

I came up with a list, probably incomplete, of different ways in which - in a sexual context - I feel that I lost my virginity, or indeed still have it.

This list requires a few introductory notes. Firstly, by "X-in-Y" I am referring to the person inserting tab X into slot Y is losing hir X-in-Y virginity; the person losing hir Y or "X sex - Y" virginity is the person whose slot Y has had an X inserted into it - e.g. the terms "Finger-in-Vagina" and "Finger sex - Vaginal" are reciprocal - I lost my "Finger-in-Vagina" virginity when I inserted my finger(s) into a partners vagina; at the same time, if it was her first time receiving that form of sexual contact, she would be losing her "Finger sex - Vaginal" virginity. Special mention for "Vagina-in-Mouth" - by the formulae I've described here, that corresponds to "receiving cunnilingus".

I've more-or-less sorted these into "sex" and "BDSM" categories, although there's probably some overlap and it's hardly precise delineations I'm using here.

The observant reader will notice that I referred to these as virginities I feel I either have, or have lost. But I am a basically cis male, and have listed vaginal forms of sex in here. Some would argue I can never have such a virginity and can't lose it either. I just say that this is about how I, personally, feel about these acts. On one level, it is about feeling that I wish I had a vagina so that I could lose my vaginal forms of virginity, and experience vaginal sex for myself instead of just reading about it.

In all of these, I feel that I have lost my virginity only if I have done the act with someone else; I don't feel that I have lost my anal virginity from fucking myself with a dildo in my arse, for example (and that reminds me, I haven't mentioned toys in this list - I did say I felt it was incomplete!) I would only feel I had lost my anal virginity if someone else had put their cock (flesh or strap-on or other) into that particular hole.

In the list, I've noted those that I feel I have or haven't lost, and where I haven't, whether I want to at some point. (This is a bit like a BDSM checklist in that respect!)

I think that's everything I need to say in introduction, so now - the list!

• Vaginal _ Not, want to but can't
• Anal _ Not, want to
• Cunnilingus _ Not, want to but can't
• Fellatio _ Not, want to
• Penis-in-Vagina _ Lost
• Penis-in-Mouth _ Lost
• Penis-in-Anus _ Lost
• Vagina-in-Mouth _ Not, want to but can't
• Finger sex - Vaginal _ Not, want to but can't
• Finger sex - Anal _ Not, want to
• Finger-in-Vagina _ Lost
• Finger-in-Anus _ Lost
• Fisting - Vaginal _ Not, want to but can't, think it would make me very nervous to try but would want to try it.
• Fisting - Anal _ Not, want to but very nervous about it (see above!)
• Hand-in-Vagina _ Have tried with previous partners but my big bass player's hands seemed too big and didn't want to risk forcing it
• Hand-in-Anus _ See above
• Same-sex _ Not, want to
• Opposite-sex _ Lost
• Kissing _ Lost
• French kissing (kissing w/. tongues) _ Lost
• Bondage (Top) _Lost
• Bondage (Bottom) _ Lost
• Sadism (doing) _ Lost
• Masochism (experiencing) _ Lost
• CP - e.g. flogging, spanking, caning, crop etc (Top) _ Lost
• CP - e.g. flogging, spanking, caning, crop etc (Bottom) _ Although I have been spanked briefly, it didn't feel like it crossed a line so I don't feel like I have lost this one. Want to, though.
• Hot things (Bottom) - e.g. wax, branding, etc _ Not, but want to
• Cold things (Bottom) - e.g. ice, refrigerated toys, etc _ Not, very ambivalent/uncertain about willingness to try
• Electroplay _ Not, VERY VERY want to!
• Cutting (Top) _ Not, don't want to
• Cutting (Bottom) _ Not, VERY VERY don't want to!
• Tit/nipple torture (Top) _ Lost
• Tit/nipple torture (Bottom) _ Lost
• Domming _ Lost (a lot!!!)
• Subbing _ Not, but want to go far enough to feel like I had crossed that line!
• Public sex/play _ Lost

I have done hot and cold things with submissive partners, but for me as the Top, neither felt like I had crossed any sort of boundary.   Therefore, I don't feel like they represented a virginity that had been lost; however, as a masochist I certainly feel that those new experiences administered by someone else would feel like that had happened, so that's why they appear only from the Bottoming perspective.

It's not for me to tell someone else whether or not any particular act makes hir not a virgin any more, that is down to each individual's boundaries and sense of self, I think.   But I do think it's interesting to note how I personally would feel about it and how I would internally categorise it if I were to put it on a simple binary (instead of the multi-variable versions implied by the above list).

Personally, all "slot X into tab Y" for X=fingers, hands, penis or mouth/tongue and Y=anus, mouth or vagina falls into the category of "losing virginity" (note that this definition includes "tongue into mouth", i.e. French kissing, but I'm not sure that that example would feel to me like, when someone told me it, that I, personally, would think of them as sexually active in the same way - I'm not sure I would feel like it had crossed that particular boundary.

I think context and reaction play a huge part in how I feel about it when it comes to BDSM activities - assuming that no "tab X into slot Y" had taken place, but a person's first overtly sexual experience was some form of BDSM activity then I would start to think in those terms, but I think I would completely be guided by how the person felt about what they had done or had done to them; if it had turned them on so powerfully that they felt a bridge had been crossed then I would definitely call that losing one's virginity.

After all this thinking, and the remarks I've made before, during and after the list, my thoughts all lead back to one thing: that virginity is psychological, and personal.   Although we do have certain social constructs surrounding the idea or ideal of virginity, what really matters in terms of what it feels like - what it means - is, well, how it feels to the person who feels it.

And that's all I've got.

[EDITED TO ADD:]

BradMillersHero @ Nobody added hir own answers (zie's put "unable" on the Penis-in-Y elements, but not leaping to assumptions about hir gender identification) on a post talking about how we define virginity, and also introduced a few of hir own virginities to the list, which I shall add here. Zie also introduced dildo, food and object sex, for which here I am going to put as many "X sex - Y" and "X-in-Y" forms as I can think of, e.g. "dildo-in-Y" is I put the dildo in someone else's Y, and dildo sex - Y is where someone else put their dildo in my Y (as with the format used in the former list). The answers that appear here are my answers, not those of BradMillersHero. As before, "not" means I have not lost that virginity (i.e. I haven't done that deed), whereas "lost" means I have lost that virginity.

Some of these didn't feel for me like losing a virginity, or I don't feel like they would if I did them, so I've marked those as (blank).

The additions to the list:

• Dildo sex - mouth _ Not, want to try
• Dildo sex - vagina _ Not, want to but can't
• Dildo sex - anus _ Not, want to
• Dildo-in-vagina _ Lost
• Dildo-in-mouth _ Not, want to
• Dildo-in-anus _ Lost

• Object sex - mouth _ Not, want to try
• Object sex - vagina _ Not, want to but can't
• Object sex - anus _ Not, want to
• Object-in-vagina _ Lost
• Object-in-mouth _ Lost
• Object-in-anus _ Not, would be very wary of inserting anything not designed for the purpose.

• Food sex - mouth _ Not, don't want to
• Food sex - vagina _ Not, can't and wouldn't want to
• Food sex - anus _ Not, don't want to
• Food-in-vagina _ Not, want to
• Food-in-mouth _ Not, want to
• Food-in-anus _ Not, want to

• Food licked/eaten from body
• Licking/eating food from body

• Drinking urine _ Not, would be willing to try
• Have urine drunk _ Lost

• Scissoring _ Not, want to but can't
• Water sports administered _ Lost
• Water sports received _ Not, want to try
• Scat administered _ Not, don't want to
• Scat received _ Not, very very don't want to
• Group sex _ Not, no particular desire to
• Masturbation _ (blank)

• With (cis) man_ Not, want to
• With (cis) woman _ Lost
• With trans man _ Not, no particular desire either way
• With trans man full-op _ (blank)
• With trans woman _ Not, no particular desire either way
• With trans woman full-op _ (blank)
• With hermaphrodite _ Not, no particular desire either way
• With intersex _ Not, no particular desire either way

Now, I've put masturbation as (blank) because in the original text of this post I wrote that for me, "I feel that I have lost my virginity only if I have done the act with someone else." Masturbating another/being masturbated by another is mostly covered by other entries in the list, whereas for me, personally, I didn't feel like my first masturbation was a loss of virginity, partly because of that definition I described. I do notice that the following entries (again, using the format above, so "in" means "applied to"...) are missing:

• Clitoral stimulation - hand _ Not, can't but would like to
• Hand-in-clitoris _ Lost
• Vulva/labia stimulation - hand _ Not, can't but would like to
• Hand-in-vulva/labia _ Lost

While there are objective physiological differences about a full-op trans person as compared to a cis person of the same gender, for me personally, my intuition is that those differences would not feel to me like a different type of person/body, any more than one person differs from another, so it doesn't feel to me like a different virginity than losing it with a cis person. Therefore, I have put them as (blank) in this list, and have put the (cis) in brackets because as far as my virginities are concerned, I see cis man and (post-op) trans man to be the same thing, and the same with cis and trans woman. By "no particular desire", I am saying that I would be open to sexual advances from trans/hermaphrodite/intersex folks but have no real urge to seek out such an encounter. I suspect my lizardbrain is still a little bit binary-obsessed in that respect, but as I say, I'm open to it.

Kink.com earn a FAIL over virginity fetish stunt

[If I see new posts or articles referring to this story, I'm now adding them at the end of this post]

Update post here, with info on how Kink.com have responded to the criticisms.

Lissy alerted me to a post by bart_calendar discussing the latest publicity stunt and press release (link NSFW!) for it, by BDSM/fetish porn company Kink.com.

[EDIT TO ADD] It turns out that Miss Maggie Mayhem, whom I've referenced further down in this article, has covered most of my concerns far better than I have.

Now, Kink.com have a relatively good reputation for their approach to sexuality (as we'll see below where a kink.com model who also works in sex education discusses the matter), and in general I feel that they are a good example for the porn industry. That said, just because someone is one of the "good guys", shouldn't mean they get a pass - if they do something dumb or harmful or stupid, we do have a responsibility at least to point it out.

The press release reads:

SAN FRANCISCO — Kink.com will stream the deflowering of young virgin Nikki Blue in a ritualistic ceremony live on the Internet on Jan. 15 at 7 p.m.

The ceremony will be held on The Upper Floor of Kink.com’s headquarters, the San Francisco Armory. Prior to the event, a trained expert will insert Kink.com’s official hymen-cam to validate that Blue’s hymen is still in place and that she is a true virgin. Once her hymen is confirmed, the evening will proceed, the company said.

“We will start the evening by tightly binding Ms. Blue and introducing three Kink.com legends: Mark Davis, Jack Hammer and James Deen,” said Kink.com director John Paul “The Pope.” “Fans will vote for which of them will take Nikki’s virginity. Once the voting is complete, we will move to the sanctum, which will be dressed as a ritualistic chamber with candles and ceremonial tools. She’ll be placed in the circle and the winner selected by fans will deflower her. The other two will then join the ceremony and make her airtight.”

Kink.com founder Peter Acworth adds, “To our knowledge there has never been a model lose her virginity live and streaming on the Internet, nothing has, or will, parallel the event taking place on The Upper Floor later this month.

“We strive each and every day to bring the best possible content to our customers and sacrificing Nikki’s innocence is in perfect alignment with what our fans expect and deserve.”

So far, so icky. For the record, Nikki Blue is identified elsewhere as a "diminutive science nerd 21 year old".

Before I get to discussing all this, though, I want to bring in a couple more sources before I piece my own views together.

On bart_calendar's thread, one response is from a Kink.com model using an old LJ profile under the name msmaggiemayhem and I think it's worth looking at what she has to say:

On one hand I applaud a woman who decides exactly how she wants to have sex. This is best press exposure a woman new to porn could ever hope for and she's going to get more work as a result. Good for her! The pay for performers in porn has dropped a lot in the recession and the gigs are drying up as more and more studios fold. On the other hand, I think it's an archaic definition of virginity with some dangerous implications. Outside of porn I do sex education and it kind of pains me to hear people go on at length about virginity when other sexual acts (like anal sex) pose a much higher risk for things like HIV and other STI's. It's even more disconcerting when I hear that same concept reiterated again and again by teens all over the country. The bottom line for porn is making a product that will sell, but Kink has also prided themselves for being very sex positive and this is a bit of a contradiction.

Msmaggiemayhem also provided personal references for the men involved (having worked with all three in the past, and a link to the video of Nikki Blue's interview. As msmaggiemayhem explains, in the video, Nikki Blue describes how the idea for the event was essentially hers.

[EDITED TO ADD] Clarisse Thorn links to an interview with Nikki Blue by Fleur De Lis SF, who plans to conduct another interview with her after the shoot. The answers there seem to contain much the same information as the other sources, with a bit more detail on some aspects so I'm not quoting it here, but worth clicking to get an even full picture - link might be considered NSFW by some.

So the video of the interview is the final piece of evidence before I put my thoughts together. I won't link to it directly (you can follow the link through msmaggiemayhem's comment if you're curious and okay with NSFW stuff) but here's the parts that I picked out as being of interest.

Firstly, I would like to observe that in at one point in the interview Nikki Blue identifies as being raised in "the South, in Tennessee" and explains that as a result she didn't know anything about enemas, sex toys or anything else, "until I hit 18 and then my world just exploded". She explained had been sexually playing with herself anally for several years before then, using her hands and fingers.

The quotes I wish to pull out from the video are these:

I'm everything but innocent. I am just ... kinky, and I've done so many different things.

...

The hymen is located about 2 inches inside you. The day you become a woman, it gets pierced slightly because the blood starts to go through. And basically, that hymen can only be broken through, tampons, repeatedly using tampons; fingers; or the first time you have sex.

...

I want as many people to see it as possible because I want to show people what a hymen is, what makes a person a real virgin versus someone just saying, "Oh, I'm a virgin," when they're not. And this is like one thing that I can really give the world that, you know, no one else has.

Now, hands up who spotted the big inconsistency between this and the press release?

No?

The press release talks about "sacrificing Nikki’s innocence". Nikki herself says, "I am everything but innocent." [Emphasis mine]

The FAIL continues, however, with both Nikki Blue's and Kink.com's discussion of an intact hymen being the true indicator of virginity (as opposed to, you know, not having had a sexual relationship with anyone yet!) As Lissy and I discussed via IM, by this definition it seems that some women (contrary to the claim of Nikki Blue in her video) lose their virginity to balance beams, stretching at the gym, riding saddles, you name it. It also makes me wonder whether this means that no man is ever a "real virgin" since men don't appear to have a hymen at all? Equally, Nikki Blue describes anal play, oral sex and clitoral stimulation as not being sex; this is part of what msmaggiemayhem finds so problematic about the whole thing.

What really bothers me about this, however, is that continues to uphold the fetishisation of virginity, which is deeply rooted in the idea of women (and particularly, women's sexuality) as being property. While the Kink.com materials do not make any reference to this, the fetish is clearly there both of "lost innocence" (which we've established is false advertising in this case, as Nikki Blue herself admits!) and "ownership". They are linked in the notion that somehow the first person to fuck a girl (and thereby break her hymen) has a special place forever as her first, because he's corrupted her. And this is what the draw is. It's why Natalie Dylan's virginity reached a value of at least 3.8 million dollars, and it's why it might be expected that this "live deflowering" would draw more viewers than a regular staged shoot - and in particular, why it would draw more viewers than a similarly staged live streaming using the same "ritualistic" elements with a woman who played the role of a virgin being ritually deflowered, but whose hymen's status was unknown. The implicit idea (especially as viewers are going to vote for which of three men will be the one to do the deed) is that the viewers will vicariously participate in taking ownership of Nikki Blue's body. Not all the viewers will see it that way, I am sure, and most who do won't recognise that about their own virginity fetish, but all the same I think that is what underlies a lot of it. [EDIT TO ADD] Interestingly, an anonymous commenter at Clarisse Thorn's piece about this alleges that it is known to Kink.com that Nikki Blue has had vaginal sex and therefore the whole thing is a sham - which if true would mean that the whole thing actually is the roleplay scene that I posited!

As msmaggiemayhem pointed out, Kink.com are in the business of making sexual video that sells, and the virgin fetish is one that will help them sell their live feed without a doubt. Also, Nikki Blue's body is hers to use as she wishes, and if she's having fun with the whole thing (or even if she's just making the best use of her assets to get on in a capitalist world) then more power to her sword (or sword sheath, since "vagina" literally means that!) However, that still means this is a backward step as far as Kink.com's credibility as a sex-positive business goes.

[EDIT TO ADD] Clarisse Thorn picks out a comment at bart_calendar for mention:

But another person, who I totally agree with, wrote:

I want to be outraged by this, but honestly? She’s probably getting a lot more consideration and respect than most girls do when they lose their virginity. At the very least, this is being planned and she’s presumably ok with it.

Seriously! My first time was consensual, but it was awful, and I didn’t get paid. (Note: I do think it would have been really bad for me, personally, to have sex for money when I was Ms. Blue’s age or younger. I try to honor the choices of women who choose to have sex for money, while acknowledging that it would be a soul-searing choice for many women.)

I certainly agree with this (see the links I provided from Figleaf!) and certainly I am happy for Nikki Blue that she's getting what she wanted, planned, attentive, etc. On the personal level for Nikki Blue, I have no problem with this. It's the wider social messages that I have been trying to explain as the problem.

The final observation I have again ties in with what msmaggiemayhem was saying, in particular her concerns about sex education. The USA, and particularly the Bible Belt states, are well-known for having very poor quality sex education because of the whole "abstinence-only" thing going on over there. Nikki Blue talks briefly in that interview about how little she knew about sexuality from education when she was growing up in Tennessee, and just maybe it is that poor quality sex education that is responsible for the way in which she presents the concept of virginity and its relationship to the hymen. Television documentaries have pointed out that in Texas many young people use the term "technical virgin" when they have had oral or anal sex but not PiV sex, and in general abstinence-only not only doesn't prevent people from doing high-risk unprotected anal sex, it also doesn't reduce the number of pregnancies, implying that it doesn't result in abstinence either! But what it does do is perpetuate the idea of ownership of a woman through her cunt - you're the first guy to stick your cock up it, it's yours. So there better be a way of telling whether or not it is, and someone decide that was - the hymen.

Once again, I don't think this type of "event" causes the social problems it brings to light, but it is perhaps symptomatic of them.

Incidentally, this reminded me of a piece by Figleaf over at Real Adult Sex, where he'd found an article explaining that the hymen is unlikely to break after puberty anyway (though it can do), because adult levels of oestrogen render it flexible and elastic enough to accommodate a penis comfortably. Figleaf also offers advice for how to conclude a woman's virginity without hurting them (the advice goes whether she's got a hymen or not).

[EDITED TO ADD:] I just want to nod in the direction of Maymay's provocatively-titled piece, in which he identifies this as part of a general failure of the supposedly sex-positive values at Kink.com (or Kink[Inc] as he feels they should rightly be labelled, a label that I think is certainly appropriate for a porn company).

Figleaf has also expressed his view that this is actually just par for the course with Kink[Inc] and actually, sex-positive activists shouldn't be too surprised at the pandering to the sex-negative views of (some of) their customers.

Pippingeek wrote, based on this story, about the social fetish of virginity.

Help Wanted for Project "Your Personal Kink" at the Leather Archives & Museum

Clarisse Thorn has put out a request for interviewees for a project about kink when people aren't that connected to the wider/public scene in BDSM.   She has asked, and I am happy to do so, that readers of her blog should post one or other of the press releases on their blogs.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


Contact:

Clarisse Thorn

773.761.9200

clarisse at leatherarchives dot org


The Leather Archives & Museum, a cultural center in Chicago devoted to preserving the history of alternative sexuality, wants your help documenting sexual practices that are not widely discussed. Do you enjoy giving or receiving a little pain during sex, such as spanking, biting, or scratching? Do you fantasize about being overpowered or overpowering your partner, including using ropes, handcuffs, or other restraints? Do you role-play during sex? We want to learn about your experiences through an interview.


We are seeking interviewees whose sex life includes various "alternative" practices. Interviewees who do NOT often participate in adult sexuality workshops, sex parties, or educational meetups are especially encouraged to respond.


We respect your privacy. Anything you tell us will be kept under an anonymous name, if you prefer, or your real name only if you are comfortable with such disclosure. Interviews will be recorded and stored at the Chicago location of the Leather Archives & Museum. They are not being collected for a specific purpose at this time, but may be used for future museum exhibits and will be made available to researchers and scholars who use the museum's collections for study.


Interviews may be conducted in any way that makes you feel comfortable — by email, phone, an online voice service such as Skype, or even in person if you happen to live in Chicago. Again, we completely respect your privacy; if you get in touch, we will gladly work with you to figure out how to keep you feeling safe and comfortable throughout our discussions. Whether you have just started looking into this kind of sexuality, or have been exploring for years, please consider getting in touch with us.


The point person for this project is Clarisse Thorn, who can be reached by email at [ clarisse at leatherarchives dot org ]. You can also leave her a voice message if you call the Leather Archives at 773.761.9200.


ABOUT THE LEATHER ARCHIVES & MUSEUM: The Leather Archives & Museum is devoted to preserving the history of alternative sexuality. By sharing your experience with the Leather Archives & Museum, you will be helping us document sexual practices that are not widely recorded or understood. The Leather Archives & Museum is located at 6418 N. Greenview Avenue in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, IL, USA; you can visit the website at www.leatherarchives.org.

You can see the release intended for distribution on BDSM community websites here. I've also posted it at And You Thought I Was Sweet.

Returned, refreshed, revived!

I've been away for the past fortnight, celebrating the holidays with family and friends, and generally taking a good long break from blogging, internet date searching and so on. As it turned out, a couple of things came up while I was away that I felt required immediate bloggery, but in general I have enjoyed my time away from the keyboard.

That said, it feels very nice to be back. A change can do you good, to be sure, but in the end sometimes the things you're with most of the time are the things that are valuable to you or work for you. So I find with my life. After a while, I feel ready to slip back into what works for me, and part of that is blogging.

So here I am, back again, saying "'ow do!" to 2011.

I'm not big on new year's resolutions, I have 3 this year. One of which is just to keep up with last year's solitary resolution, and another of which is a resolution I actually made before the holidays came around. Each one has clear criteria for success or failure and has a specific outcome in mind so that I can know whether I have completed the resolution (or at least am doing well at completing it).

They are:

1. Continue being pro-active in seeking a partner. (Measured by whether I maintain the same amount of initial contacts, and whether or not I manage to pluck up the courage to make a first move in r/l situations)
2. Investigate and find a way to get into adult movie performing
3. Join at least one local sports team (the cricket club and possibly a pub football ('soccer') team)

Winter nets may be coming up soon for the cricket club and I may be able to get into the Sunday 2nd XI (I'm no better than that) if I go along. The adult movie thing, readers may recall from my earlier posts about exploring that idea. And last year's resolution was to be pro-active in seeking dates/a partner (and it worked okay, here's to better success in 2011!)

Since #1 worked well last year, I am hopeful that I will be able to do all of these, though what success I will have in the results of that remains to be seen.   But marking the resolution a success is not dependent on whether the endeavour is successful - I succeed if I join the team, the team winning (or selecting me to play!) is not relevant to the success of the resolution, for example (and not being cast in any adult movies is irrelevant to whether I did everything else to put myself forwards for it).

I'm resolutely not looking back at 2010 in any other way; onwards, forwards, to happier times!