REDIRECTED TO MAYBEMAIMED.COM: Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

I cycle a lot. (Not a surprise, really, for many reasons, but moving on….) Sometimes I'm all submissive and hurt-me-use-me and sometimes I'm not.

I haven't felt very submissive lately. Not "not submissive" in the sense that now I'm a top or a dominant, not like "oh, see, you're a guy so you're not really submissive anyway." I fucking hate that crap, which is the same thing as "you're a woman so you're really a submissive, at least a little bit."

I feel like anyone, anyone who's expecting me to get down on my knees for them is going to get smacked upside the head. Get me on my knees? Hah. Laughable. Because secretly, you see, I am actually the incredible hulk and when I am irritable or angry—or not feeling submissive—I become the emotional equivalent of a raging juggernaught. Only way you'll see me on my knees is in seven-inch thick steel, because I could break anything thinner and I would actually take a bullet before I voluntarily unlock my knee.

I don't like that I don't really understand why or where this comes from. I probably would enjoy the seven-inch thick steel, but I'm probably too ornery to actually make it a good scene.

Maybe it's been all the tech geekery that's turned me off from the submission for now (temporarily, I assure you; this has happened before). I spend all my time "being productive" and then when I'm feeling this way playing just feels like a waste of time. Like I could be doing something better with my time, as stupid as that sounds.

I am very picky about who and what gets access to my time. My time is very valuable to me. I only have so much of it. I've already used up 23 years of it. I loathe the idea of wasting anything.

I typically don't spend time thinking about things I don't care about. I get angry at people who I need to interact with when they are slow, physically or mentally. Of course, sexual playtime is hardly what most would call a waste of time, but I digress.

Naturally, this is sometimes problematic relationship-wise. Eileen calls it "not being in sync" (or something like that?) which sounds an awful lot like biorhythms, something I'm skeptical about at best. Still, there's no denying the cyclic nature of everything about me, which itself would be a complete summation if I were willing to accept it as such. (I'm not, of course.)

When "not in sync," however, what happens? One of us gets frustrated, in the bad way, about not getting to do what we want. "It's been a long time since you've wanted to get hurt," Eileen tells me a lot. "You used to get all moany when I pulled your hair, now you just say 'ow.'" I had to remind her: "I was all moany at the fact that there was a beautiful and sexy dominant woman paying attention to me. The hair pulling always made me go ow." (Yes, Eileen's attentions were my first that count. Being pissy about that is another rant entirely.)

Relationships cycle just like I do. Or maybe my relationships cycle because I do. Whatever it is, it's pissing me off. But don't try to put me on my knees because I will hurt you.

While switching up my computer set up, something along the way has caused a problem with my web server, causing it and Orgasm Logger to come down. Unfortunately, I'm not able to remedy the situation right now and tomorrow is a work day, which means I'll have to put this on hold for a while. So, unfortunately, I have to announce that Orgasm Logger is down and expected to remain that way for the immediate near future. Hopefully this issue will be resolved come the weekend.

Advance apologies if this causes any inconveniences for anyone using the site.

Update: So it turns out that the problem with the web server was, unfortunately, a catastrophic hard drive failure. Literally, it was working one moment and on the next reboot I could hear the platters spinning around loosely inside the drive. Thankfully, I have a very recent backup from September 11^th that I'll restore to working order as soon as I'm done with everything else. (This means if you've recorded an orgasm or made an account after September 11^th, you may need to re-enter your data. I'm sorry about that.)

To make a longish story short, I've taken the opportunity to completely rearrange my hardware set up here, consolidating a number of different machines together and upgrading the server from which I was first serving the Orgasm Logger site. It'll also make my life at home a lot easier, which I'm looking forward to.

The site is still down, though now the dedicated server is nearly ready. I hope to have the site back up before the work week starts, but this may have to wait just a few days longer. I do appreciate everyone's patience.

Update: Orgasm Logger is back up and running, restored from a backup made on September 11^th. If you find that some of your information is missing, you may have to re-enter it. Again, I'm sorry about that. Otherwise, if you notice any problems, please don't hesitate to email me about them. Thanks for your patience.

Speaking of culture, even though I rarely do this, now for something completely different:

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.

This Kink on Tap is kind of an extended addendum to our previous episode where we talk about and introduce the topic of sexual teasing and denial and chastity play. If you haven't listened to that episode already, I strongly urge you to do so.

The best part, however, is that Tom Allen from the Edge of Vanilla joined Eileen and I to talk about his personal experiences. Of course, the advantage of having someone on the phone is that you can ask personal qusetions and get immediate, personal responses.

There's no shortage of that in this converastion, where Tom shares a lot about his own reasons for enjoying chastity, the way in which this kind of sexual power play developed in the relationship with his (very blessed) wife, and of course why this kink in particular is often thought of as being very "vanilla." I couldn't help but share some of my own opinions and experiences as well, and Eileen does the same.

Lest you think that Tom's always this cerebral, however, don't forget about his super-hot chastity porn. My own fantasies tend to drift towards slightly more painful tastes, but that doesn't stop me from being the first to admit that I've sprung more than my fair share of hard-ons looking at Tom's stuff.

As always, I hope you enjoy this episode of Kink on Tap and invite your feedback of any kind (though especially regarding audio engineering) either as comments here or by emailing kinkontap+feedback@gmail.com. Have something you want to hear talked about or a story you want to share? Write to me at kinkontap+viewermail@gmail.com (and don't question why it's called viewer mail, 'cuz I wouldn't know what to tell you).

It's time for a brief interlude during all my ranting on porn. Let's get back to some of this practical stuff.

This time, because I can, I want to talk about what every big sexuality community web site does wrong and what they can do to fix it. Because, frankly, alternative sexuality organization web sites suck my big fat web developer's dick. (There is plenty, though not an overwhelming amount, of geek-speak ahead. If you want to flame me about that, don't say I didn't warn you.)

Before I rip into these web sites though, let me first acknowledge the incredible hard work that I'm sure mountains of volunteers must put into these things. No one is making money off these sites and, as such, it's understandably a lot harder to spend the time doing things well. The fact that this stuff is even up online in the first place is really a credit to a lot of people's passions and commitment. Three cheers for all of you! (Seriously.)

Okay, now that you know all of this is just a good-natured jab to try and make things better, let's get into the meaty parts where I totally rip your web site to shreds and tell you how badly you're stuck in the last century.

In the true style of proper web copy (more), here is my conclusion first:

Most BDSM organizations' web sites utterly fail in their mission to attract people to their events because they are intimidating, hard to use, and decidedly uninformative.

And, the natural fix for this problem:

Make BDSM organization web sites friendlier, easier to navigate, and immediately useful.

You can stop reading now if you don't actually care about this stuff, but if you do, are at all curious, or—and especially—if you manage one of the web sites I'm talking about, please keep reading. You'll thank me when you're done.

The Design Problem or Don't Scare Away the Newbies, you idiots!

TES's web site serves as a wonderful example of this first point, that BDSM organization web sites are stupidly intimidating. Why? Here's why: when the average kink-curious person is searching for BDSM web sites and they see TES's sad design, here's what they're thinking:

• It's an inverted white-on-dark design so clearly what they are doing must not be normal or okay. (This person is already probably surfing the TES site under the cloak of darkness in their computer room hoping their spouse or their parents won't walk in on them. Why are you making it seem like that's the normal way to get information about kinky sex from you?)


• It uses lots of colors intended to signify scary things, like deep red and lots of black and mettalic colors, so they must be really dangerous people. (Do you know how much courage it has taken this person to even consider going to a kink event? Why are you making them feel like their fear is justifiable?)


• They have really tiny text for things I'm interested in (like all the main event descriptions) and really big text and graphics for the things I'm not (like their own logo and big welcome banners), so maybe they're not actually the group for me. (Don't you get that this person has come to your web site for information about how to be kinky in their own lives? Don't focus on the welcome message, which nobody cares about, focus on the reason they're coming to your site in the first place!)

This is classicly fucked-up design and is unfortunately all too common. The net result is that these types of designs make people feel anxious and afraid and turn site visitors away from the rest of your content pages. Don't do that.

Contrast this general design sense with, for example, the Polyamorous-NYC web site. While it has other problems, design is not one of them (for the most part).

Whereas TES has lots of light-on-black, some horrendous yellow color, and lots of big red headlines and a logo that looks like the blade to a guillotuine, Poly NYC has several pinks, a neutral beige, some blues, and white along with a picture of three people smiling and holding hands on the home page.

Which site feels more welcoming to you? If you were a hot and sexy 18-year-old looking to explore alternative sexualities, which group would you feel safer checking out first, based solely on the web site's design?

I think BDSM people really like to brag about how incredibly intense and perverse they are. After all, we kink hard on danger but this is no excuse for confusing your fantasy with your real-life goals, you morons, so stop that shit right the fuck now, okay?

In fairness, TES is not the only group that suffers from this design problem. Dom Sub Friends, the Lesbian Sex Mafia, and to a lesser extent Gay Male S/M Activists do as well. But TES is by far the worst. Sex stores have the same problem. Contrast something like Purple Passion's web site with, for instance JT's Stockroom. The difference is night and day, literally.

The Usability Problem or Stop Making It So Hard To Browse Your Site, asshat!

This is big, so let's start somewhere that's got a big database. DSF is often cited as having a great database of links. But in reality, it's not great, it's just massive.

Granted, massive can be a facet of usefulness. After all, eBay is fucking massive. You can find just about anything you can kink with on eBay. (Or Amazon, by the way.) However, the distinguishing factor between eBay's database and DSF's database is findability, not size.

To an untrained eye (by which I mean, evidently, by DSF's web site administrator's eyes), findability just means "use a search engine." (DSF doesn't use a search engine on all their resources pages, just some of them, by the way.) This, unfortunately, is totally missing the boat.

Why you need to think about what you're doing or Obviously you're too busy jacking off at the computer

First of all, how do you think search engines work? They work by analyzing structured data to produce information that is ultimately relevant to the user's needs. Do you think all that data just structured itself? No, someone had to structure it, someone had to think about how to present it, and someone had to think about how to do all of that in a way that meets the user's goals.

Taking this out of the theoretical and back to the practical, let's take a closer look at DSF's resource pages. First thing you notice is that they have a "BDSM Resources" page on which there is an incredibly strange, unnatural distinction between "Organizations and Forums" and the rest of their "BDSM Resources". Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't you consider organizations and forums to be BDSM resources on a BDSM resource page? Why the separation? What's the point?

It's pretty common knowledge that only the most persistent users will click through a web site to find what they're looking for. Most users will click on one or two links and if they haven't found what they're looking for, they'll go back to their search engine of choice and try all over again. Then lather, rinse, repeat. As a web developer, every decision you make impacts your users, so you damn well have a good reason for doing something. If you don't, you're doing it wrong.

Of course, this problem is much easier to tackle when the volume of information you have isn't as large. Look at NYBOL's web site to see the complete opposite spectrum of the very same poor architectural problems. What is that? An entry for the "let's see who can make an entire web site on a single web page" contest? They don't even have a lot of information and they have given absolutely no thought to how their content should be structured.

There are two primary navigational modes users are accustomed to on the web. These are search and browse. Listen closely because I'm only going to say this a hundred billion times: users search when they are answering a question or trying to solve a problem. Users browse in order to learn about a problem or to gather information. When you think about how to structure the content on your web site, you need to think about how users will interact with this content in those two modes of navigation.

As an example of a web site that does this relatively well (and which took me a grand total of maybe three or four hours to implement, literally), take a look at the way Conversio Virium organizes its content.

• Main navigational tabs provide hierarchical structure to the content of the web site. The constitution is in the about CV section, the presenter guidelines are in the meetings and events section, and information about specific leadership positions are in the membership section. Makes sense, right? (Admittedly, it's not always so clear moving forwad, but hindsight is always 20/20.)


• The single search bar in a prominent position at the top of every page searches all the content on the site. (Being objective, I will also note that the serch results page for CV does need a lot of work. I did only put about three hours into the implementation of this site, you recall.)


• Content is organized according to strict guidelines using categories and an events calendar, allowing faceted navigation so that users can either search or browse the site and end up at the same content by following a variety of paths.


• Finally, the content itself cross-links to other relevant contents. Posts link to other posts. Events link to previous posts. News items link to events. Static pages link to each other. The more links you have, the easier it is to find what you're looking for.

These days, this sort of thing is actually pretty easy to do at least decently well. Simply knowing how to make good use of a content management system helps a lot. TES uses Mambo, but they failed to provide the kind of faceted navigation of their site that CV provides for their's, and so their CMS isn't as useful to them.

I could get all technical here and start talking about why these sites should be getting rid of their URL cruft, why they are browser-hostile (fucking overuse of frames and JavaScript), and a dozen other topics, but you'd all be bored and obviously no one is reading this anyway. So, hoping that we've got this point down, I'll just move on.

Make Yourself Useful or Stop Trying to Top Your Users, you freakin' sex addicts!

If all of that isn't enough already, let's talk about one last point. (I promise this'll be the last point I make and that you can all go back to jacking off at your own brilliance soon, as I too will do.) Usefulness. This is the most important point out of all three of my points today, so if you're scanning this post and want to read just one point, I hope it's this one.

You need to make your web site useful, or no one will use it. Well, duh, but what does that entail? Here's the process, broken down into really simple steps:

1. Find out what your members want to do.


2. Make it possible for them to do that thing they want using a web site.

I swear, that's all there is to it. Let me give you some examples.

The BDSM calendar that no one uses

Almost every single site I linked to above has some form of events calendar. TES and DSF both have so-called "dynamic" calendars. GMSMA, LSM, and Poly-NYC, among others, have so-called "static" calendars, which are really nothing more than unchanging pages that have some information about their next event. The problem with all of these calendars is that they are either totally useless or not-as-useful as they could be for the following reasons:

• You can only view them on the page they're published on. If I am interested in DSF meetings and GMSMA meetings, then I have to make my own page or my own calendar that combines both of these group's information.


• You can't safely link directly to events because the location they are published on eventually changes (such as when being archived). If I want to link to an LSM event, I can't, because the event itself isn't a permanent fixture anywhere. Instead, I have to link to their events page and hope that my site users find the event on the page, if it's still there.


• Moving data out of this calendar into any kind of actually useful form is nearly impossible. Copy-and-paste is a waste of everyone's time (computers were invented in order to obviate the need for humans to perform repetitive tasks).

The group with the absolute worst calendar scheme has to be OneTaste NY (and why is a fucking MySpace profile the thing that comes up on Google when I search for that phrase, by the way?), which—despite having a relatively decent calendar on their web site, actually—chooses to email me a massive hunk of HTML vomit every few weeks with their entire calendar for the month stuffed into it. Yuck! Why don't you promote your web site calendar instead and offer an iCalander subscription feed or something like what CV does? You have the technology! You can rebuild it!

The only people who use these calendars are either devoted members of the club already, in which case you could probably force them to jump through rings of fire and they'd still do it just to get a look at the calendar, or are the people creating the calendar, in which case why do you even need a calendar since you already know what's going on when? Answer: you don't. You just suck at web development, is all.

(As an aside, there are a number of email-only subscription newsletters dealing with alternative lifestlye events. These aren't really web sites so I didn't say anything about them, but a word to the wise: please stop writing out these emails as though they are really long love letters. If you're going to put out a newsletter in plain text as an event listing, for god's sake, use some kind of convention to indicate the thing is actually a list, okay?)

A final note: all your print calendars need to have your web site's calendar address on them, and you do actually have to change your web site calendar once in a while to keep it up to date. What's the point of a calendar with the wrong information on it? Sheesh.

Anyway, moving on….

Other Web Sites Are Your Friends or The point of a link is to link you to something, dimwit!

The mentality of "stay at my site longer" is sooooo 1995. I'm serious, there's nothing you can do to prevent web site users from going to another web site. Just give up the whole idea that your one site will ever be the be-all and end-all of information about any topic in the world right now, because if you don't you'll never be able to make a good web site for as long as you live.

Instead, actively embrace the idea that the more outbound links you have that go to good places the better your site will be. Why is this so? Because users like being linked to good, interesting information. They appreciate a useful service, whether that be in event information, educational material, or whatever else you can offer them. The way to do this is with links. So for fuck's sake, link liberally!

In the BDSM community world, this means you need to link to other group's web sites! Why is it that the only community web site I know about that links to other organizations on every page is Conversio Virium? (May, you made the CV web site. Oh, right, thanks. I forgot.) Seriously, why the fuck does TES not link to DSF? Or to LSM? Or to GMSMA? Or to MaST? Why does GMSMA not link back to TES?

Why are all you arrogant fucktards so concerned with recruiting members instead of actually being the useful, educational, supportive organization you so proudly claim to be? None of you are actually doing what you so nobly claim to do, and it's about time you got off your high horses and started actually doing it. And you know what, the best tool you have to do that with is your web site. So come on, GET ON IT!

And by golly, I didn't even get into the really fun bits like implementation and search engine optimizations. I mean, seriously, why is CV's site the number one hit on Google right now for the search query "floating world bdsm"? That should be embarassing.

That was the end, but here is an outtake for humor's sake

Let's start with none other than The Eulenspiegel Society, the self-proclaimed oldest and largest BDSM education and support organization in the United States. Smack-dab on the top of the home page, TES proclaims their web site to be, and I quote, the official TES® web site. As if there are hordes of unofficial TES web sites out there on the Internet. They even italicize the word "official" to make it stand out more, to remind us that we are actually at the center of the BDSM universe. Please, get over yourselves, TES web site committee members. Neither you nor your organization (and especially not your web site) is that impressive.

While we're on the topic of italicizing things, by the way, take a look at how they've italicized it. Do you know what this code is called?

<P ALIGN=Center> <FONT SIZE=+3>Welcome to the <I>Official </I>TES</FONT><FONT size="6"><B><SUP>®</SUP></B></FONT><FONT SIZE=+3> 
        Web Site.</FONT>

No? It's called HTML vomit, that's what it's called. font elements have been deprecated since HTML 4.01, which became a W3C recommendation on the 24^th of December, in 1999. Did you hear that? Nineteen-ninety-fucking-nine. What the hell are font tags still doing on your home page? Has it not been updated since 1999?

To be fair, this exact problem plagues pretty much every web site built by people who don't actually know how to work with the Web, which includes the vast majority of every so-called self-proclaimed "web designer" out there, which is also, coincidentally, apparently pretty much every tech-savvy kinky person in existence.

Morale of the story? Get someone who knows what they're doing. And yes, they will either be very generous or they will charge you through the nose—and yes, you're gonna like it.

A major problem many people have is the inability to draw distinctions between one thing and another. This is especially true when the separation between two things are gradated. To simplify the problem, most people resign to black and white distinctions, this or that, tearing things apart that are inherently interwoven together into what they perceive as separate strands. It's as if they believe doing so will magically reveal all that which created the thing in the first place. But they are misguided, at best, and purposefully destructive at worst.

Many things about me are more than the sum of my parts. While it is certainly possible to break these parts away from one another, doing so reveals information only about my constituent parts in their new, isolated context. I should know; I continually undergo this exercise as part of watching myself growing older.

Possibly the saddest of things to fail to distinguish in my opinion are the emotional paradoxes brought on by sexual fantasy. It creates a situation where most people structure their relationships around their fantasies, when they should be structuring their fantasies around their relationships.

Trinity said it another way:

I was honestly flummoxed (though not surprised) when he didn't understand. Wouldn't it be better for someone to accept your service because you're you than because you're a boy?

I mean, I get the whole "I'm just one of many, depersonalized, a number in a harem" as sexual fantasy. But the guy in question is so obsessed with asserting he's not talking about fantasy when he is... that befuddles me.

Fantasy is fine and great, when clearly marked.

As did Richard:

For other men it is just another sort of hot sex fantasy. But they don't know how to distinguish the source of the thrill from actuality.

A couple of women have based lucrative careers on promoting this: Sutton, Abernathy.

And there is a legion of telephone prodommes who invoke the rhetoric as a means of attracting clients.

Unfortunately, the rhetoric is sexually exciting at first glance and too few people are trained in the skills required to control their own immediate gratification to put thought into their emotions and see the rhetoric's flaws.

Inequality turns me on. As a result of that, I enjoy fantasies of female superiority over males when I'm feeling like submitting to feminine authorities. Long have I had dreams, like most submissive men, of being objectified and degraded because of pieces of my identity: my gender, my physical attributes.

Some fantasies are quite vivid. I remember one from when I was barely a teenage boy (maybe 13 or so) of being captured by a race of women who kept me bound in a dark cave (where there were other such helpless male victims in abundance) with a substance similar to super powerful spider's webbing and whose only contact with me would be to feed me food and drink and occasionally come to "collect" my ejaculate. A classic fantasy, really, undoubtedly from the mind of a youth twisting science fiction imagery to suit his preferred sexual expression.


As I grew older, I maintained the same fantasies, but the imagery changed somewhat. Instead of science fiction, I more often used personal experiences as fuel. As I was more-or-less in school at the time, school-grounds were a favorite locale where the girls (and sometimes certain boys) could take sexual advantage of me in all manner of creative ways. The image above has been a favorite source of this kind of fantasy for many years now.

In that way, I enjoyed the fact that I was as skinny as a twig and frightfully anemic. My sexual fantasies of being overpowered actually dissuaded me from taking care of my body and ensuring my own health back then.

That's the kind of inability to distinguish fantasy from reality that I'm talking about. When it's so personal, as that is, and when you crave something so much, as I did, you don't want to let reality get in the way of your fantasies. There's not anything wrong with trying to live in reality more elements of your fantasies. I do that all the time. But I'm only successful when I take reality into account.

Doing anything else is foolhardy.

I've been thinking about this all day, intending to satiate myself with my own musings, however I think that the firestorm of outrage could use a little level-headedness. Not that the outrage is misguided, unexpected, or even inappropriate. I'm pretty outraged myself, but outrage does very little to ease my own need for understanding. Only rational thought can fan those flames.

Smart people are very good at rationalizing things, by the way. History is full of examples of smart people doing lots of things with lots of reasons. Reasons are one of the things humans are best at manufacturing, even though we are not as good at reasoning about them. We construct meaning for our own purposes very much in the same way that we eat or drink or breathe or sleep. We are built to do it even though it can be pretty difficult to accomplish at times. We can't help ourselves, and it's rather a helpful thing that we can't, too! It would be pretty horrible to live a life without any meaning, wouldn't you say?

Understanding that is the first step towards rationalizing your reasoning, whether you are trying to reason through thought, action, or emotion. (The latter is particularly difficult due to our particular neurological evolution, but possible nonetheless.) In other words, know that your reasons are meaningful only because you have given them meaning. If it were not for that, your life would be meaningless. It should not be a disheartening insight if you understand the empowering nature of such a statement.

But I digress. This is about the idea of supremacy, that one person, place, or thing (we'll call these options a noun, collectively) is superior to another, different noun. Here are a few examples of nouns that I've heard many people compare with one another throughout my lifetime:

• Apples and oranges.


• Glasses and contact lenses.


• City dwellers and suburban dwellers.


• Democrats and Republicans.


• Americans and foreigners to Americans.


• Men and women.


• Heterosexual people and people who are not heterosexual.


• Light-skinned people and dark-skinned people.


• Jewish people and Christian people (and Muslim people and Hindu people and on and on and on).

Here's one funny thing about such comparisons, in case it wasn't clear to you from the list above: each set of nouns contains members which share an enormous number of characteristics. In my experience encountering comparisons intended to determine superiority, this rule of likeness has never been broken. Actually, I am eager for the day when it will be. On that day I will have met someone "truly" deranged.

Apples and oranges are both fruits, glasses and contact lenses are both corrective eye-wear, and (I did focus on the human comparisons purposefully) the rest are all humans. I have never heard an apple compared to a Jewish person, for example, nor have I heard a woman compared to a pair of glasses. Why? Well, naturally, it's because the comparison to determine superiority in a way people can get emotionally invested in requires the act of measuring both nouns against the perceived value of a common property.

That is to say, in order to determine that one thing is superior to the other and have people care about it, your measurement must measure a characterstic that both things have. If you instead measure a characteristic that only one of your member things have then no half-thinking or half-feeling person would give your comparison any meaningful meaning. (See what I did there? I went back to the meaning thing from the beginning of the entry. Remember that. It'll come up again, I promise.) What does it mean to make something meaningful? It means to give that opinion weight, to use it as the basis for your reasoning and the motivation behind your actions, whatever they may be.

There are some very smart people who use this argument to try and prove the idea of absolute superiority of one form or another, citing nuance or complexity to hide their absolutism. The previous link, in particular, leads to a man named Alexis's writings, who believes in the potential superiority of all women over men.

Alexis (who is very clearly superior in his intelligence when measured for such things by means of analyzing his grammar, punctuation, vocabulary, and the like), says the following—after a very long-winded but informational digression about the merits of apples over oranges or vice versa—about making such comparisons:

My point: accepting any measure as a guideline means that one option will not rate as high as the other option. And it is the measure that is argued, not the superiority of the two options. Statistically, by changing the measure you change the results.

Preceeded immediately by this (in my opinion very accurate) statement:

If we could ever get two people to agree on the subject of what measure could be used as a guideline.

This is, unfortunately and unsurprisingly, a circular argument. A measure of superiority without defining superiority of or in a specific something is not a persuasive argument because it is statistically (and otherwise) meaningless. (Oh, there it is again! Did you see it?)

To combat that very simple point, reasons are concocted. For example, the argument changes from an absolute statement "Women are superior to men" to a qualified statement "Women are potentially superior to men" to a theory "Women are potentially superior to men if they can be shown to be smarter/stronger/better/whatever" to a belief "Women who have been proven to be smarter/stronger/better/whatever are superior to men." Is it just me, or is it smelling a little One True Way® in here all of a sudden?

God bless our puny mortal souls and our meaningless lives. (Sorry, I couldn't help myself. The opportunity for satire is rather irresistable.)

The problem with all this is, I dearly hope, obvious by now (especially since the really smart female supremacists said it first, even if they may have missed the point a little): you're not going to get everyone to agree. The disagreements aren't about measures to use for determining one gender or sex's superiority over the other. They are about the idea that any one measure or collection of specific measures are an accurate depiction of unqualified superiority whether it is applied to gender, race, religion, or anything else.

I can disprove absolutist remarks stated as fact. I can't (and won't try to) disprove belief. Neither can they.

Wow. How anti-climactic. I know, I'm almost disappointed, too.

In reply to my previous post, Eileen left some prodding comments. (I love it when she prods me.)

How can we make the spaces for everyone wider? CV is doing a fantastic job of it; what else can be done?

CV succeeded in creating a space that does not feel fragmented because there was more than just tolerance and acceptance, there was invitation and inclusion. At the same time as we celebrate diversity and showcase our differences, we are also welcoming.

It's not what you do, it's how you do it. Communities can learn a lot from that mantra. Everywhere else I look I see groups built upon expectations instead of invitations. Their party line is, "Come here if you are interested in BDSM and you are gay." The "Join us if" mentality is exclusionary, an odd thing for a marginalized community to be based on, I think. The end result of such things is the current state of the sexuality communities: fractured and divided and so utterly, utterly siloed.

Instead, why not just say, "Join us." No qualifiers, there's no need. Rules of civility and organization operations are no hindrances to this sort of thing. And of course, don't just say it. Do it!

Dom Sub Friends (aka DSF) has what is probably their view of a very inviting tagline: The Friendly BDSM Society. But go to a meeting and you'll be greeted by the most adamantly heterosexual, maledom/femsub group you're likely to meet in New York City. They may be friendly, but they are anything but inviting if who you are is someone like me. On the other hand, they are probably a great find for people who are looking for that sort of thing. (In which case I recommend them—they've never been anything but friendly to me.)

Naturally, communities will organize around their own cultures, and what they determine as criteria for valuing BDSM activity is not mine. It makes sense, then, that I would not find this group inviting. It also begs the question: would they find my culture inviting? Maybe not. (As a side-note, this is why I am very much not worried about people who may pose a threat to CV taking over the population of the group. They simply have better places to go than our little oasis. To quote our current president of vice, we're really pretty boring if you're not actually interested in learning about BDSM with an open mind.)

Therein lies my point, however. They don't need to find my culture inviting, they already have one. I, on the other hand, don't. There are no erotic art shows I know of that display imagery such as that in Van Darkholme's Male Bondage photography book. As a matter of fact, I don't even know of any other books that do such a thing.

Should we start making our own porn? Should I take photos of you? Should we pitch a fit over spaces, or work to make the spaces different, or leave the spaces altogether? And then, will what you're working to make and what already exists ever have significant cross over?

I don't know. I hope there will be crossover, because even though I don't feel welcome in their community I certainly appreciate their presence as a community. Sexual rights are important for everyone. Their presence strengthens my own stance, as mine strengthens theirs. It is not impossible to stand together and still be different, but it is impossible for me to stand with them when I can not call anything of theirs my own and when there is nothing else for me to claim for myself.

Maybe they don't even want anything to do with me, but I guarantee that I'm a voice they'd be better off having on their side, especially with the recent climate of sexual oppression and misunderstanding growing stronger every day. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: for some reason, sex and education seem to be the two topics that otherwise smart people consistently behave very stupidly about.

I don't want to go to the same parties as these other people do. Neither of us would have a good time. My griping isn't because they have a community, it's because mine is practically non-existant. What's sprung up in the past couple of years is truly extraordinary, and I am in the unique position among my tiny social circle of being able to remember what it was like before. I want to cultivate it, and make it grow.

Does that mean making my own porn? I don't know. I'd be willing to try it. There is no greater equalizer than currency. If selling my brand of sexuality earns it a top spot on people's radars, why shouldn't I try for it? That's what I admire about Tristan Taormino. It's too bad she's not a submissive guy. But then if she were a submissive guy, like I am, would her brand of sex sell at all? Would mine?

There is no doubt in my mind that there are other people who have not been lucky enough to find a place where such acceptance and intelligence has coalesced and these people are still looking for it. I hope they keep looking, because I am, and one day we might find each other.

Being loud helps you get noticed. Maybe I am just trying to rouse my little corner into making a little more noise. I feel I have been deafened by the never-ending rhetoric of others that so many people have written about lately.

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.

A lot of people think BDSM is an all-or-nothing sort of arrangement. Either you are my slave and do everything I ask of you, or you are not and shouldn't be wasting my time. Either I am always, absolutely forever and constantly at your feet and abiding by protocols or whatever, or I am not, and I never play that way. Either you are a pain slut and there's nothing you can't take, or pain's just not your thing and don't ever want to be really hurt.

All of these things are pointedly untrue, though this misconception is popular not only with the mainstream vanilla folks, but with many BDSM players and kinky people as well (which is endlessly frustrating). It certainly offers some explanation of why kink can be so scary for people who don't understand it and who are not at least intrigued by the acitivities. The fact that extended play time such as the extremes described above is actually a common, lustful fantasy offers, I think, a very plausible explanation to why so many people even of the kinky inclination think such a thing is true. And perhaps, though I have reason to doubt some of the claims I have heard, there really are people for whom "24/7" literally means every second of every day.

In the realities of day-to-day life, play time that lasts more than a couple of hours is very, very hard to come by. Beside from the fact that we all have "Real Jobs" and a life to lead outside of the bedroom, it's hard to stay in, for instance, slave headspace when you are constantly surrounded by your personal belongings at home or even at a friend's house. This was not something I ever anticipated being problematic for certain scenes such as longer-term ones, though it is. It's also particularly problematic for other certain kinds of scenes, namely singletail whipping. Again, not something I'd have guessed.

Another point of note regarding the length of a scene is the definition of what precisely a scene is. Two weekends ago, when Eileen and I were at a friend's house for a party (a vanilla party--not all the parties I go to are beat me, whip me affairs) we do as we always do, and I was ordered rather plainly to fetch her drinks from time to time. This was not a dramatic event, but it was not subtle either. It was only after our friend pointed out how strange it must seem for those in attendance who did not already understand our dynamic that we even noticed that it seemed like anything remotely like play at all. Was that a scene? Not for us. It might have been for some of our friends, though.

It's the fact that our dynamic is that way at all that makes it appear as though we do the kind of 24/7 play that you hear people talking about with awed tones, but I think this is actually kind of silly. I don't really consider myself a 24/7 slave with any of the weight people seem to place upon that phrase, I just find the juxtaposition of day-to-day life and servitude enjoyable, both erotically and otherwise. That makes the line between scene spaces and vanilla spaces very, very blurry sometimes, though that is a side effect rather than a direct effect of how Eileen and I interact.

There are, however, certain things we have done expressly for creating play headspaces for longer periods of time. Some of these things are play-specific, and others are again blurry, as above. For instance, a little over a year ago, Eileen bought me a rather heavy locking leather and metal collar. When it goes on me, I know she wants to play. The collar usually stays on a lot longer than the scenes last, and this helps keep some of those slavish emotions around after the beating is through. When we play at night, sometimes she uses the collar and some of our lengths of chain to secure me to the bed for the night to the same effect.

Being leashed or hitched is also a way to actively induce a desired headspace, and is also something that often can last quite a while.

Aside from that collar, I also wear 5 lengths of small jewelry chain all the time. They are placed around my neck, each wrist, and each ankle, and they are have no clasp with which I can remove them (so I don't). They're my "everyday collars". Recently, Eileen's been very turned on by the "harem slave" idea, and so she's added a sixth length of chain around my waist that she calls "utterly decadent."

All this decoration does not leave me unaffected. It's very much like wearing the heavier, locking leather collar, only with a different twist. Rather than being her pain toy, the whipping boy, I'm her cherished posession, and quite often her sex toy. There's something intensely erotically humbling about being equated in some way to a favored vibrator.

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.

I've been a bad boy. It's nearly Thursday and I've yet to get to my Wednesday Wanderings posting this week. I don't think I really have the readership who cares, but I've not been very good about posting lately and I certainly want to write about the events of the weekend and this past week. They have been amazingly wonderful, and the explorations into D/s that Eileen and I are doing right now is pushing us both in new—and exciting—directions.

However, once again, tonight I haven't the energy to draw it all together and so instead I'll make note of some of the recent goings-on elsewhere that I've found to be interesting. Rather than try to continually find great new stuff (because, damn, that's really hard—there isn't really that much great stuff out there, really, and even if there is it's hard to find), I'll do the ol' some old and some new link list.

So without further ado, this week's Wanderings:

• Bitchy Jones's Diary: Fuck Me, and Fuck Me Again - Bitchy Jones has, in traditionally beautiful Bitchy style, posted about her frustrations with the ideas of penile-centric sex and what it means in the realm of Femitydomity™ and the kink world as a whole. I loved these posts because I can relate to large parts of them, and I can see how I completely don't relate to other parts of them even though I can agree with her points. As usual, that is what the topic of BDSM (or kink, if I must, Bitchy ;) will do to folks. Everyone's got their own point of view because it's such an intensely personal topic. I love that about this subject matter. Anyway, long story short(er), you should go check out these posts.


• MWK's Weekly Wankcast - In the vein of new stuff, I followed some links on timidboy's site that led me to Mistress Wycked Kitten's "Weekly Wankcast," a podcast of teases and all sorts of other such wonderful things of that nature. I'll admit I have yet to listen to a single one from start to finish, but the excerpts I've been picking up sound very hot. As an information junkie and technologist, it's exciting to see people take advantage of new media in this way. Props to Mistress Wycked Kitten for being one of the first ones on the map in this space, and I certainly hope more will join her soon. Hell, I've got a ton of ideas myself....

In other news, it appears that a majority of bloggers (save Bitchy, of course) haven't been that active this past week, myself included. Richard and Alexandra are finally together again, and I wish them the best of times and a lot of fun while they spend their time together. Tom Allen's been spending a good deal of time responding to comments on his recent entries and as I'm somewhat more familiar with Tom's story from ages ago, I'm remaining a little quieter than most. Tom, you're becoming quite the little superstar. :)

For me, the past few days has been a whirlwind of activity in the non-kinky areas of my life. Suffice it to say that I'm voluntarily unemployed (or will be very soon) and am starting to freak out a little bit about it. I'm in that situation where I have no clue what my life will look like one week down the line, and this is both a freeing and somewhat frightening experience.

Eileen and I have enjoyed way, way more play than we normally do, as well, so there's a lot to write about. Almost too much, in fact, because I've been mulling the experiences over for days now and am no where nearer to writing about them. In some ways, I'm not sure I really want to quite yet, because they were awesome and personal and I don't have much of a basis for understanding them beyond the experience itself. I'd love to play that way some more in the future, and keep exploring these areas. And I know, I'm being way vague, which is totally unfair to readers. But hey, I may be a subbie but it's still my blog—and don't worry, you'll hear allll about it soon enough. :)