REDIRECTED TO MAYBEMAIMED.COM: Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

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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.

Perhaps this should be three separate posts, but whatever. In preparation for Floating World, Jefferson from over on One Life, Take Two has asked for some reader participation. The topics are absolutely fascinating so I couldn't help but offer my input:

1) Do you blog about sex? Let me know your site, your reasons forblogging, and your experiences as a blogger.

My experiences blogging are somewhat unusual because I have been blogging since before it was called blogging. Back in 1995, I set up a web site for bipolar youth on which I kept a semi-regular running journal. I was 12 or so at the time. My life since then is a remarkably open book. I find that blogging is one of the key techniques I use to maintain self-awareness and self-observation. I do this about sex, but I also do this about friends and family life, social events, and my work life. Making things public just makes things more accessible. I've gotten correspondence from people and have friends I would not have had other wise. To date, I've never experienced a profoundly negative effect from public blogging.

I keep getting warned that one day this is going to bite me, and you know what, maybe it will. But I've already gained so much from my own openness that it seems like a silly thing to fear the potential backlash of the future. I am much stronger now anyway, more confident but also more of a success in other people's eyes. It becomes very difficult, I believe, to point at someone and say "You're bad because of this or that" when you are presented with all the other things they have done that you don't have any problem with.

Those of you who only read this blog may not know about the other topics I write about elsewhere, and those people will probably not wander on over here to read about kink and BDSM. As a result, while I am just one voice, I am a voice for many things. It's that kind of diversity that gives people their strength and which makes it hard to demonize any one aspect of a person's life.

2) What are your experiences with male bisexuality? I'm interested in your personal experiences as well as those involving friends, lovers and/or communities. Anyone is welcome to reply; you needn't be bisexual or identify as male to have an opinion or experience to relate.

I'm a bisexual guy. Bisexuality is hard: there is very little community identity because I don't know of any bisexual guys (or girls?) who are *only* bisexual. Everyone is bi but also kinky or heavily involved in LGBT activism (from which I've noticed the B and the T get dropped very frequently), or something else such as polyamory. Indeed, I am guilty of this myself. It's been to my own detriment, in fact, because while I strongly desire male-male experiences I have been focused elsewhere.

It doesn't help that community norms typically marginalize male bisexuality, and it is infuriating that female bisexuality is actually expected to be par for the course. (First because, hey, I want some of that same-sex action, too, and secondly because don't you think this is completely unfair to the women who aren't interested in other women?) I often shy away from meeting gay men because all too often they dismiss my homosexual interests as merely a passing fad. Or sometimes the reverse case, where my heterosexual interests are inauthentic. To this I say that they have clearly not been reading their own "liberation" material.

Furthermore, the notion of claiming a bisexual identity because it is the cool thing to do, annoyingly dubbed "bi chic" and thankfully not nearly so big a social stigma anymore as it was in the mid-1990's, casts nothing but more shadow over an already veiled identity. Conversely, there is the popular notion of "forced bi", wherein self-declared straight men have irresistable fantasies about being forced into sexual encounters with other men. (Oh, and that's another thing that pisses me off: guys who say they are bi for the sole purpose of getting women. But that's a whole 'nother rant.) When I was in high school and trying to understand what my body was telling me, I struggled for longer than I'd like to admit with the binary idea that I was either gay or straight, but that bisexuality was not an option.

What is it about such black-and-white simplicity that is so attractive to so many people? It's easy, but it's false. Once again, the diversity and fluidity of my gender identity is extremely important to me, and is something I think is actually a healthy thing for everybody to have an understanding about.

3) What are your experiences and interests on g spot and p spotstimulation? Do you enjoy them? Are you frustrated by an inability tolocate them, or to stimulate them?

Kind of dovetailing off the last item, one of the reasons why I am a little hard-up for male-male action is because I absolutely love receiving anal sex. This is primarily because the prostate stimulation is so intense for me. Maybe I'm just wired differently than most people (though I doubt it), but prostate stimulation is so incredibly spot-on (no pun intended), that I am convinced it's one of the most perfect developments in the natural world.

I've never had any problem stimulating my prostate. I've been doing so as a regular part of masturbation since my very early adolescent years (about 11 or so). I started by first pressing my fingers into my perineum and gently rubbing across it. Eventually I began to anally penetrate myself with my fingers. Thank goodness for flexibility! When I masturbate this way, I feel like orgasm approaches much, much quicker than it would otherwise. It's a wonderful addition to sexual play, one I enjoy a lot. I've since bought toys specifically for this purpose, such as the aneros helix. At times, it's actually difficult for me to avoid ejaculating when sexual stimulation is supplemented with prostate stimulation. When I met my current partner, Eileen, we quickly took to strap-on sex in part for this reason.

However, another aspect to our prostate stimulation playtime actually stems from our orgasm control and chastity kinks. Prostate stimulation is a central part of many submissive men's chastity regimes for reasons of perceived prostatic health. In addition, the incredible arousal I experience when my prostate is stimulated makes me super horny. Eileen calls it "stoking my fire" when she fingers me. It's very effective for sexual teasing because many men, myself included, can't ejaculate powerfully via prostate stimulation alone if they can even reach orgasm at all. The net result is that I get more horny, but can't relieve my arousal. That, of course, is the point.

I need the excuse, so even though I don't really get meme's, since Mistress 160 tagged me, I might as well play along. Besides, I wouldn't say no to her anyway.

Seven random facts about me:

1. I have only 1 scar, even though I should probably have a lot more considering the things I put my skin through. It's through my left eyebrow.


2. For most of my teen years, I took medication to treat bipolar disorder.


3. At one point in my life I had gained a little over 60 pounds in 60 days.


4. I not-so-secretly want to be tied up with ethernet cabling. Preferably a CAT 6 cable, but CAT 5 will do in a pinch.


5. I've never held a "real job" for more than 13 consecutive months.


6. I've presented on a number of kink-related topics at TES, CV, and will soon also do so at Floating World


7. I was once an audience plant in a play where all the actors, myself included, performed naked.

I know exactly who I'll tag with this one:

• Kink in Exile


• Eileen


• Tom Allen


• Richard


• Calico

Here is the obligatory part of the meme:

Each player starts with 7 random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write their own blog post with their 7 things as well as these rules. You need to tag 7 others and list their names on your blog. Remember to leave a comment for them letting them know they have been tagged and to read your blog.

Oh and random fact number 8: yes, I am totally a "player."

Cousin Kevin isn't the only one who's tired of white on black designs. Less design is what I need. So there. :P

More writing would be nice, but with computer thefts, lots of work, and insane moodiness, I've not been one for writing lately. In a rather exciting reversal of fortune, however, Eileen's been writing tons, so go check that out if you haven't already. It's good and stuff.

I've been completely remiss with this blog. I shan't give excuses because, well, what good would that do? Instead, some quality reading material that I've found—or that has found me—recently.

• Bishounen Works is the fantastic web site of P.L. Nunn, renowned yaoi fan fiction author and artist. I've known about her site for, god, ages now and it has long since been a bookmark in my collection 'o naughty sex sites. She's got a ton of fantastic artwork, if you're into that sort of thing (I am).
  
  However, recently Eileen discovered several specific pieces of fiction that have quite literally rocked our world. They are absolutely wonderfully horrific tales of torture and abuse and are certainly not for the faint of heart, but their extreme violence and unabashed eroticism make them true must-reads for anyone who finds the fantasy of non-consensual BDSM (rape, kidnapping, captivity, torture, etc.) arousing.
  
  I don't often feel the need to place such disclaimers around links, but these are very extreme stories. They are also purely fantasy, an important point to keep in mind.
  
  Here's a brief list of some of my favorites so far.
  
  
  
  
  • Bloodraven - a fantasy world where invading Ogres capture and enslave humans finds one such man taken hostage for the sexual amusement of his new Ogre master.
  
  
  • Walking with the Dead - Okay, I haven't actually read it yet but Eileen says it's filled with all sorts of sexy hotness. :)
  
  
  
  
  Reading this kind of intense stuff is sometimes frighteningly sexy. The thought of having my life ripped away from me and being thrust into non-consensual slavery wherein I am abused day and night to the point of exhaustion and near-death almost daily at once fills me with several kinds of lust. I am pretty sure for obvious reasons that the eroticization of such a thing would quickly vanish in the face of being confronted with such a reality, but other emotions would not. The bloodlust, fighting instinct, would be stroång, and it's more than often that feeling, too, that I crave when I want to play with pain really hard….


• Dominatrix Next Door - This extremely intelligent pro-domme's blog is clearly in its early stages, but is already home to some wonderfully insightful posts about sex work, and what that's actually like. In case you missed that, this is a BDSM professional's blog who calls her profession sex work, and that alone should tell you just how observant this young lass is. I've been reading some of her writings for quite a while now and I'm always interested, and sometimes humbled, after reading her perspective on things.


• Behind Kink's Free Documentaries - Of course, I'd be remiss not to mention Kink.com's wonderful new announcement that they have made access to all of the Behind Kink documentary videos absolutely free. This comes right on the heels of Kink.com's recent mention in the New York Times and is exactly the right thing for them to do, and it is the first move towards making the pornography industry something that will really benefit from, instead of being hampered by, the advance of technology and media sharing. If you have yet to watch a few of these, go check them out. It's not always what you think.

I've been found out! More and more of my non-cyber friends, the ones who know me in person, have been finding this blog. And, strange, I haven't even written anything in like, three weeks. (Apologies, by the way, as if I actually owe something to readers. That's another post, though.) Of course, it isn't really that hard to figure out who I am. This seems to be concerning a select few of them, mostly because they are kind and caring individuals who don't want to see me "ruined" or "outed" in a negative way.

So, a couple of points are, I think, due to be made.

First, let's face it, I'm already out and there's nothing I can or really want to change about that. This means that there's too much out there about me for me to go track down and sanitize (as if this sort of thing was dirty to begin with, which I think is a silly notion). I've written a ton of stuff about my sexuality, but so have others. I'm mentioned in at least three main stream media publications that I can think of, though not by full name, so there's just no turning back now. If I'd had any hopes of running for public office, which thankfully I don't, I wouldn't have won anyway.

Second, and more importantly, there's very little power someone can wield over me by exposing me as kinky. See point one for why. The fact that I'm already out about this sort of thing is precisely what prevents this from being a vulnerability. Yes, if certain people found out about my sexual proclivities, I may be in some financial duress, but this is not a major concern for me for at least two reasons. The first is perhaps the more important and it is because I am appropriately discreet. I am careful about keeping my personal life out of my business and this would be the case even if my personal life were not so atypical. (Nevermind the fact that the Internet is proving more and more each day that my personal life is actually pretty darn typical.) The second reason is in part based on this first one and is that I would have a number of questions for the colleague who found this blog and read enough of it to trace it back to me. In fact, that would be a delightful conversation!

A friend and reader pointed out to me rather bluntly that I am not actually interested in true anonymity, but instead only care for a "comfortable layer" of it. This is an astute and accurate observation. None of this would actually hold any meaning if it were really anonymous. It's only powerful because it's really, truly, me, actually authentic.

The truth about anonymity is this: you can't be out and be anonymous. You can't be free while being invisible.

Over a very, very late lunch (or early supper), Eileen made the rather endearing comment that she was somewhat intimidated by the profuse amounts of blogging and writing that I do. My response surprised me. I told her, "Well, all subs write more than doms," and just as I said that I asked myself if it were really true.

Now, I certainly can't speak for everyone and I typically dislike over-arching generalizations except when they are understood to be such a thing, but I really do think that submissives typically write more than dominants. In fact, to be even more specific of my own observations, most experiencial writings are publisehd by female submissives, most fantasy was published by male submissives, and most "how to" articles and technically-minded material was published by male dominants. This is an interesting observation in itself, but on the whole my observation is that subs write more stuff.

My theory on this is very straightforward (by which I mean completely unfounded, untested, and underdeveloped): submission is ultimately a very internal process, whereas domination is far more externalized. In other words, submission is largely passive and receptive and domination is active. (This sounds a lot like sex psychology 101, right?)

My hypothesis is thus, perhaps as a result of these properties, submissives (by which I mean myself) tend to take the opportunity to write--and especially blog, due to it's easy push-button publishing nature--to externalize their own submission. Certainly domination also requires high degree of self-analysis, but dommes who play with their subs regularly are already externalizing a lot of things, and perhaps don't have the desire to do so as much as subs seem to.

So there's my completely underdeveloped theory as to why subs write more than dommes do.

On an off-topic but tangentially related topic, finding the wealth of femdom material online that I have is rather new for me. I've never been that interested in it because the last time I really looked for this sort of material was ages ago, and it was really hard to find anything at all, much less anything good. Furthermore, all the femdom stuff I found was so focused on D/s and light play such as light spankings, sissyfication, verbal humiliation, and orgasm control (not that there's anything wrong with any of these; please, bring them on!) that there was very little material about the really fun stuff like hour-long singletail whippings that left men's backs bloodied, threaded piercings used for bondage, torture and interrogation scenes, and brutal cuttings and intense knifeplay. It's just not that easy to find female dominants talking about playing much physically at all. (Of course, I'm really thrilled to have begun finding exceptions to that remark!)

These intense things are, of course, not everyone's cup of tea and that's okay, but they are at the heart of most of my deeper fantasies and so I sought them out where they were available: fictional erotic literature. Granted, these things may not be written about nearly as often because they are really hard to do well, or even at all. Do you have any idea how much preparation an interrogation scene takes? A really involved one that lasts more than a night? A lot!

Ironically, this is the second time I'm writing this entry because my Web browser ate it the first time. How utterly frustrating! Grr on it! Of course, I think the first entry was far more interesting and insightful. Oh, and it was longer too.

Lately I've been writing a ton...of porn! Whether it's called pornography or erotic art, or whatever, I love erotic works of any kind. And I'm a die-hard creationist. If I see something that's interesting or exciting, I often want to make something similar and have it be at least as interesting and exciting. So, I've been writing a lot about sex lately.

Now of course, I've been "writing" about this and other stuff since I was a young boy, but there's a distinction to be made between writing and journaling. Even though I have no trouble having fantasies or using my imagination to come up with ideas, it's very hard for me to write about things that aren't entirely factual. This is why I end up doing a lot of technical writing and why I end up reading so many technical manuals.

I used to write creatively more often than I do now, which is a shame. I had so much fun. Seeing others around me get into creative writing (practically all my friends are freakin' English lit majors) has finally rekindled that spark inside of me. So what did I do? I went an applied for an author account at the Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository. Oh, yeah, and I wrote a couple of porn short stories, too. I'm not sure I want to post them here, though, so we'll see if the author account goes through and I'll link there if it does.

For posterity, here's what I wrote as comments on my application to the ASSTR admins:

I've been writing erotica for many years in an on-again-off-again sort of fashion but absolutely always enjoy it beyond most other forms of solo sexual pleasure. Perhaps this is because what I write always seems to be a mix between fantasy and reality, but there's something incredibly satisfying about finding the most effective way to put words one after another such that your meaning is clear--and arousing.

I've never "applied" for an account to post my stories before because I never felt like sharing them publicly, usually out of embarassment that they are no good. However, I've been writing both anonymously and non-anonymously on the Internet (blogging, if you will) for about a decade now, ever since I was a preteen and well before it was "cool" to do so.

This is kind of a new experience, and one that I have followed through on because I want now to share my writings with "the public." I'm eager to see what will come of it.