REDIRECTED TO MAYBEMAIMED.COM: Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

Tech geekery in both my professional and personal life has kept me away from this blog for a short while, but it was relationship angst that initiated the suspension of my time here. I got upset with Eileen for one reason or another (it doesn't really matter for this entry).

When you're in a relationship—any relationship—it can be hard to express being upset. When you're in a relationship that's specifically structured around power imbalances and the notion that things are unfair, it's that much harder to express being upset. Being actually angry doesn't always even present itself as an option.

Something somewhat astonishing to me is the fact that a lot of people who are enticed by the "things are unfair" idea seem to think this kind of emotional repression is actually the way such relationships are supposed to work, and that there's nothing wrong with that. Some people even use phrases like "Master/slave relationship" or "protocols" or other intelligent-sounding words to codify this behavior into a full-fledged system or "lifestyle."

Ultimately, this is not actually so hard to understand. Like so many other things, this behavior is an example of people structuring their relationships around their fantasies instead of structuring their fantasies around their relationships. The trap is in a particularly persistent blind spot most people have: their sexual desires.

Kink in Exile articulates one manifestation of this so clearly that I simply have to quote her:

I have seen more than one d/s relationship that seemed to be founded on at least one of the partner’s fear of being an adult and having to make decisions. Explain to me again how you willingly give power to your master or mistress if you don’t have that power to begin with? Submitting has to come from a place of power and control over your life, otherwise what’s the point? Otherwise you are not handing control of your life or even your evening over to your dominant, you are seeking out a caretaker.

Of course, doing anything like this is what we tech geeks call a Bad Thing. When people do this, they consistently fail to identify distinctions between different components of their relationship to one another and in doing so they often fail to address even the most basic of relationship concerns. In other words, a slave in a "Master/slave relationship" is still a person in a relationship first, and a slave second.

There's this concept of layers, or more technically a stack, that is fundamental to the construction of many things in our world today. The basic idea is that one layer builds upon the things it receives from the layer beneath it and provides things to build upon to the layer above it. In this way, a robust and reliable system can be developed—and maintained—by segmenting different pieces of the system.

I think that a D/s relationship could benefit from a construction similar to this. It's the way I think about my relationship with Eileen. I am at once her friend, her lover, her boyfriend, and her slave. Indeed, I am her slave because I am her boyfriend, and I am her boyfriend because I am her lover, and I am her lover because I am her friend.

Our relationship developed in a decidedly organic way; right place, right time, right person. I'd been playing for long before I met her, and I'd been looking for submission in a number of venues. When I didn't find fertile ground, I thought maybe submission wasn't for me. That's why I was a self-described bottom and not "a submissive." Of course, I'm submissive now to Eileen but this is because submission is the top (or last) layer that rests upon quite a few other things.

It turns out that, at least for me, any meaningful submission requires a foundation of both friendship and sexual attraction. Only once these things are established does the opportunity for submission seem to be present.

Being aware of this construction helps in many ways. One of the first questions I ask myself these days when confronting some kind of emotional obstacle (or novelty) is: "In which layer does this interaction belong?"

For instance, it's clear that asking for her permission before I allow myself the pleasure of an orgasm is an interaction that belongs in the D/s dynamic we've engaged in. Thus, it's a higher-layer interaction, and it relies on the well-being of lower layers. Contrastingly, cleaning the bathtub because it's dirty and we don't want our drain to clog is probably something that belongs in the friendship layer; I'd do that for any roommate, not just one that sexually dominates me. As Tom puts it, doing nice things for each other is one of the lubricants of a good relationship.

For the first time in over a year, I asked Eileen for a break from orgasm denial that weekend when I was feeling upset. I had already accidentally had two orgasms, felt terrible about them, and was in an emotional state in which I couldn't deal with maintaining that explicit D/s dynamic because the boyfriend dynamic was having trouble. Of course, this was an extreme case, but it serves as a useful illustrative example of this concept in action.

This entire concept is, of course, a drastic simplification of emotional interactions. Obviously, I clean the tub sometimes because I am submissive, and I'll ask for an orgasm because I'm Eileen's lover and my own sexual gratification is served by the asking. The difference between theory and practice, is, of course, that in theory practice is the same as theory whereas in practice they are different.

That said, the point still stands. When there are problems, you need to address them at the layer or with an approach that actually confronts the issue, instead of sidestepping it. That's what Eileen and I do when we have issues to work out. She never pulls the "but I'm your Mistress" card when we're not dealing with an issue that's a part of the D/s layer. It would be harmful to do so.

Back in June, I began writing down some of my thoughts regarding how technological advancements, particularly telecommunications technologies, have changed the way people relate to sex and sexuality. I've been thinking about this sort of thing for a very long time, but what finally solidified it in writing was the deadline of August 25^th, the day I was scheduled to do a one-hour long presentation on the topic for The Floating World.

Thankfully, despite weeks of worry, I managed to get way more than enough material to fill an hour and gave what I think was a rather engaging talk. The feedback was positive and quite a few people seemed to get a lot of new ideas out of my presentation. That was my goal; I wanted to get people thinking.

Finally, after a week of procrastinating, I've managed to re-work a fair portion of my notes into a sort of white paper on the subject and post them online. While far from what I would consider complete (there's not even an ending, for instance), it's certainly dense enough to post and share with the rest of you.

If you were at my presentation last weekend, a lot of this is going to be the same (there is little new material). However, if you weren't able to attend and want to know what the hell my presentation was all about, check this out.

I'd love to hear feedback on the content or suggestions for improvements. At the moment, the thing is pretty much a copy-and-paste affair from my haphazard, plain-text writing style, so please forgive the lack of hyperlinks and whatnot for the time being. When I have more motivation (and less emotional haze, as I do right now) I'll see if I can go back through it and clean things up.

In the mean time, enjoy my white paper on Sex and Technology: How technological innovation pushes the boundaries of human sexuality and vice versa.

Also, if you're really interested in this sort of thing and are lucky enough to be able to work out the logistics, you may enjoy learning about Arse Elektronika, a three-day conference hosted by Kink, Inc. all about technological innovation in the pornography industry. If you do go, please tell me about it, you lucky bastard.

When I was a child in elementary school, a friend turned to me and said one day, "Hey, what color is that crayon?"

"Blue," I said.

"What does it look like to you?" he pressed.

"Um. It looks blue," I said.

"What if it looks green to somebody else?"

Hmm. Now here was an interesting thought I had not previously pondered. How would I describe what this blue crayon looks like to someone to whom this crayon looked green. I first thought that I could use the word "green" to describe "blue" but quickly realized that method of color-swapping would fall apart when I needed to explain what green looked like to me. (Would I call it blue? We'd be back in square one, only with the terms reversed—even if it "worked" to avoid a situation wherein I was handed a green crayon when I wanted a blue one, the colors would still look "reversed" to the other person.)

This elementary thought experiment is not just relevant to recess periods in schools. It's something everyone grows up trying to figure out and is an example of the budding awareness in children that different people think about things in different ways.

The exposure to this thought started me thinking about how to use words to convey meaning. Eventually, after this question had been percolating on the back burner of my mind for literally years, I came to an ever-evolving (for lack of a better word, pun intended) conclusion that the only way to convey meaning perfectly and be assured that my meaning had been understood perfectly—that is, understood in exactly the way it was intended—was only possible through some kind of Vulcan-esque mind-meld telepathy communication mechanism that I'm probably never going to get the chance to experience in real life. That's a pity, really, because the fact of the matter is that verbal communication is a pretty pathetic substitute for mind-melds.

The problem of trying to figure out whether or not someone really understood you is very hard to solve. In computing, guaranteed-delivery protocols like TCP have built-in methods for acknowledging the receipt and integrity of a message (TCP uses flow control algorithms and checksums for this). That is to say that when the sender transmits a message, it waits for an acknowledgment from the receiver that says it has been saved correctly. (Technically, this is still not guaranteed to be perfect but it is extremely reliable.)

However, human communications are not always so simply verified. There is no checksum I can calculate for my message, for instance. People do often use similar protocols to that which computers use for the purpose of acknowledging receipt of a message. Sharing a telephone number is a pretty good example: "My number is 555-5555. Did you get that?" "Yeah, you said 555-5555, right?" "Yes, that's right." "Great." See how much back-and-forth there is? That's all a (social) verification protocol.

However, the more abstract or emotional the payload of your message gets, the greater the uncertainty of successful verification becomes. Little wonder couples fight about "not being understood" over and over and over again. Communication isn't just a matter of transmitting a message, it's about receiving (and believing) an acknowledgment that states the message was understood as it was intended. That's quite a tall order, especially when you consider how difficult it is to express your own emotions accurately in the first place. (It is for me, anyway.)

So what can you do to help mitigate this situation? I strive for precision. I say what I mean (transmission) using the most accurate words (payload) that are most likely to reproduce the originally intended meaning (checksum) in the listener (receiver). Yes; precision such as this is actually a learned skill.

But there's still a problem here. What if the person I'm talking to thinks of green when I say blue? (Even this is not so abstract a question when you consider I am partially colorblind in reality.) Clearly, we have a miscommunication. That fact might not even make itself evident immediately, but it probably will at one point or another if we keep interacting.

More to the point, what if they think of binary gender ideals when I say I'm bisexual? (After all, that's what my blog's tagline labels me as—a submissive and bisexual man. More people read that tagline than have read this far into this particular entry.) Do I use another word, such as pansexual, to try and get readers thinking about gender fluidity and try to steer them away from making an assumption about gender that I think isn't true?

I've chosen not to do that for this simple reason: when I say I'm bisexual, I'm not talking about gender fluidity, I'm talking about my own sexual orientation.

The claim that the word bisexual implies two binary genders isn't one that is actually a part of the word's literal definition (though it has become so engrained in today's understanding of the word that you'll find this assumption even in most dictionaries). People will tell me that "bi" means two and therefore bisexual means "one of two sexes" (like bicycle, literally "two wheels") but this definition still assumes that the "bi" in bisexual is talking about two singular points—man and woman.

Instead, possibly because I never liked riding bicycles and while still a child I was diagnosed as bipolar (a medical condition that causes one's emotional state to swing wildly between euphoria and depression), I have always understood the word bisexual to refer to the range between two points, and not just two points, and, even more to the point not just a range of gender identity but of sexual identity and gender role and a whole lot of other things, too.

Gender theorists such as the estimable Kate Bornstein talk a lot about the existence of many different axes of various qualities that, together, make up a person's gender identity. However, at their fundamental level, these axes all have this in common: they are a range between two points. That's what the "bi" in bisexual means to me.

That's the only thing that makes any logical sense for the "bi" to refer to that doesn't also have some kind of assumption concocted from cultural subtext. After all, sexuality is generally accepted even in the mainstream to refer to psychological, spiritual, physiological, social, and emotional makeup of an individual.

That's why I don't like the word pansexual, by the way. I don't think it's quite as precise.

That doesn't mean it's wrong to use the word pansexual to describe oneself or to use it for the purpose of raising awareness of issues relating to gender identity (in fact, I encourage raising awareness of gender identity issues in whatever way people want, as long as they're nice to each other about it). It does mean, however, that using the term pansexual (like its near-synonyms polysexual and omnisexual and a slew of others) validate its use for a more ambiguous meaning. It makes the term obtuse. I don't like that.

Overloading terminology in that way causes problems for people who wish to be precise in their use of English to maintain accurate communications.

It is not my fault that people are ignorant of gender fluidity, even though it is occasionally problematic for me that they are. However, I don't see why I should have to dull my communication tools (the English language in this case) in order to accomodate their ignorance. Instead, would it not be more mutually beneficial to simply educate these people about the gradations of gender identity that exist? And would it not be more effective to do this by specifically discussing gender fluidity rather than overloading a perfectly acceptable term used to describe a perfectly legitimate sexual orientation (namely, pansexual) for this secondary purpose?

Is this love of precision too idealistic to work? In a casual sense, yeah, probably; I consistently have to define the words I use to remind people to take me with utter literal understanding, for the most part. (Even the word literal, by the way, has its etymological roots in scripture—in literature and writing.) But then again, I've found that this works exceedingly well once people learn that what I say is what I mean and what I mean is all that I've said.

It also makes people aware of just how much subtext they assume is present in their communications with other people after they start seeing how often and to what extent they have added it to conversations with me. Communicating with subtext is all fine and well (really), but it is dangerous to do so without intending to or without an awareness of what part of the message was subtext and what part was not.