of fame and money: on paying bdsm presenters

In the past couple of days, I’ve noticed a couple of posts making the rounds of the interwebs on the topic of payment for presenters at kink/leather/BDSM events. As a long-time sex and kink educator I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, and figured here would be a good place to share them. Bear with me. This is not a short post.

For starters, I have a great deal of respect for the way Mollena Williams, who seems to have kicked off this little trend, has articulated her point of view. Her post, entitled “Why You Should Pay Me,” most especially points out the ways in which classism and racism work to ensure that if you aren’t paying your instructors at a kink event, you are very likely to end up with a preponderance of presenters who are white and relatively well-off, which perpetuates the idea that these folks are better suited to be teaching us all things, and which further marginalizes the non-white and non-well-to-do voices that we could best stand to learn from. Go read her post. It’s excellent and spot-on.

That said, I’d like to bring a bit of a different perspective to this question. It starts with event models.

In my experience, there are two main general types of BDSM/leather events. I’m not so much talking about weekend-long events vs one-nighters, or gay vs pansexual vs dyke events, or fetish parties vs play-focused events, or what have you, although all of these distinctions exist. Rather, I’m talking about event philosophy.

Shopping malls and potlucks

The first type of event is what I describe as a “shopping mall” event. At this type of event, you pay your hard-earned money to show up and be catered to or entertained. The fee tends to be higher, and the reason for this is that the organizers do everything for you. They rent a spacious hotel or conference centre. They bring in big-name presenters from all over the place. They have glossy programs and a laundry list of sponsors and advertisers. They have a vendor area where vendors pay to set up a table so that you can pay to get your hands on their goods. They have entertainment. They truck in dungeon equipment. They have (paid?) staff. They are very likely to have a keynote speaker, which often requires a separate ticket. They sell merch with the conference logo on it. They are a commercial endeavour. Their purpose is to get you together to spend money and have a great time, which usually includes a daytime roster of workshops and a nighttime series of play events, though there are variations on this format. I realize that my description here might come across as critical, for those who know me well, but I honestly don’t think there’s anything wrong in principle with this type of event. I have attended, and enjoyed, dozens if not hundreds of “shopping mall” events. They can be awesome, or crappy, or a totally mixed bag. “Shopping mall” events are like going to a Madonna or U2 concert. You pay a lot of cash for them, and you expect star power, a top-quality performance, a giant crowd, lots of slick schwag, and memories you’ll talk about for years.

The second type of event is what I call a “potluck” event. At this type of event, you may pay an entrance fee, or you may not. There is probably a sliding scale. They are run largely, or solely, by volunteers, and they may require that everyone who attends put in some volunteer hours. They ask local presenters to come out and share their skills. They might be run in a less conventional format, such as the “unconference” model, where attendees show up the morning of the conference and put their topics of interest on a board rather than having any official speakers at all. They usually include some sort of play party, but they rely on the equipment that’s available at local play spaces rather than setting up their very own dungeon. They happen in bars, community centres, community members’ office boardrooms during off-hours, run-down warehouses where punk bands rehearse. They are advertised almost exclusively via social media. They probably don’t have a printed program, or if they do, someone printed it out as a Word document and photocopied it the morning of the event. I realize that my description here might come across as laudatory, in a sort of “rooting for the underdog” kind of way, but I honestly don’t think there’s an intrinsic higher quality to this sort of event—once again, they can be awesome, or crappy, or a totally mixed bag. “Potluck” events are like going to an open mike at the local pub. You pay relatively little cash for them, and you expect a homey vibe, variable performance, a small crowd, amateur schwag or no schwag at all, and… well, you hope to have memories you’ll talk about for years, but really you’re mostly going to meet people and hang out with friends.

Now, of course, these two models are by no means entirely discrete. Many organizers come up with creative blends of the two. Here is where the politics come in. I actually would like to see the two models become a lot more differentiated, because as it currently stands, the places where I see the most problems with the “pay or don’t pay your presenters” question are the ones that try to blend the two, and end up exploiting presenters, however inadvertently.

The question of money

The “shopping mall” model, generally speaking, makes money. Or at the very least, it tries to. Whether or not an event is a not-for-profit isn’t really all that relevant—as Mollena points out, all “not-for-profit” means is that the profits from an event go directly back into that event rather than into the pockets of the people who run it, outside regular salary if applicable. It doesn’t mean there’s no money, it means there’s nobody splitting dividends at the end of the weekend. The “potluck” model, generally speaking, makes no money, possibly loses money, or operates as a not-for-profit insofar as if they do make money it goes right back into the event; the difference is that generally these events aren’t paying anybody, organizers included, so there is no question of salaries.

In my not-so-humble opinion, if anybody is personally making money from your event, then everyone who works at it should be getting paid. It doesn’t have to be a lot of pay. But pay should happen. This doesn’t mean you, as a “shopping mall” organizer, absolutely shouldn’t ask for volunteers. Lots of places in the world that pay people also have volunteers, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as—and here, again, my own opinion—you are restricting a volunteer’s responsibility to something they can do in one to four hours, that task is (generally speaking) something that one can do without any special professional skills, and you are compensating them for their time with roughly the equivalent in benefits, such as free event registration or similar. The volunteers “pay” for their event attendance by doing their time, or from another perspective, you “pay” them for their time by letting them in for free. If you are bringing in professional educators to work for you at this sort of event, then those professionals should be compensated for their time in the same way that you pay for your web designer, your bookkeeper, your security staff, your program printing costs, and so forth. If you think that professional kink and sexuality educators are less valuable than your bookkeeper, you really need to ask yourself why that is—and I’ll get back to that point in a bit. But basically, if you follow this model, then you stand a greater chance of getting a diverse range of professional presenters at your event who value their calling enough to have devoted a whole fuckload of work to acquiring the presenting skills and knowledge that made them “big names” in the first place, and that is a Very Good Thing.

In my equally not-so-humble opinion, if you want to organize an event where you don’t pay your presenters, you should hold yourself to the standard that nobody else gets paid either—yourself, as an organizer, included. You are all collectively performing a community service. Note that this by no means guarantees that your event will be more inclusive, along the lines of what Mollena’s talking about—generally, well-to-do white people have more ability to volunteer their time than more marginalized folks, so an all-volunteer event may reproduce all the same representation problems she so eloquently brings up. In other words, I am not necessarily advocating for the “potluck” model as being more progressive—in fact, on this count, it may be less so, because it relies on people who have time available to donate, which means you are more likely to get people who are white and well-to-do on your presenter roster. There are, of course, ways to work around this, which I will not discuss in this post but for which you can see at least one model if you look at the website for An Unholy Harvest, the event I co-organize with Jacqueline St-Urbain (more on that below).

This way of seeing things is my best attempt at sorting out the fairness question, and it’s one I’ve developed over many years of thinking about this stuff pretty intensively. I apply this perspective both to my own career as a presenter and to the events that I organize.

The question of fame

I was chatting with a non-kinky friend not too long ago (bless my aging brain, I forget who), and somehow the conversation got around to the question of academic fame. She said something about how one day I was going to be famous and people were going to pay me to come speak at their universities and conferences. I told her that I’m already there, just not in a purely academic sense, and she expressed some surprise. So I found myself explaining the concept of “kink-famous.”

In short: if you are kink-famous, the rest of the world might not have a bloody clue who you are, but in leather/BDSM/kink circles, you are Well Known. People want you on their event line-up because it means more people will show up to see you perform or listen to you speak. People link to your blog, get excited to meet you, ask for private consultation work with you. People might ask you to write a book, or perform in their porn film, or speak on their panel. People line up to demo bottom (or maybe demo-top) with you when you teach. You are a draw.

On rare occasions, kink-famous people become known outside the leather/BDSM/kink world—I’m thinking of full-time pervs with mainstream crossover appeal, such as Midori and Tristan Taormino, who have built solid careers as writers, speakers and entertainers. But these are exceedingly rare. And while I have the greatest respect for the quality of their work and the success of their careers, it is no coincidence that these ladies are classically gorgeous, slim, feminine, without visible “perv markings” (big tattoos, piercings, etc.) and often, whether they wish to or not, pass for straight. This stuff isn’t their fault, and it doesn’t mean their work is any less excellent—and their work is indeed excellent, and deserving of all the praise it gets. This is just how privilege works.

And I’ll be totally honest with you here: to the extent that I, too, fit these same criteria, I, too, may continue my own trajectory into the mainstream spotlight, whether or not that is what I’m aiming for. I am not disparaging the quality of my own work, here, either. I am just pointing out that if I were fat, black, a wheelchair user, super-butch-looking, male (yes, being male is actually a disadvantage in this particular career stream, and that’s a whole other topic), not classically pretty, sporting facial tattoos, and so forth I simply wouldn’t have the same opportunities ahead of me in my chosen career (well, one of my chosen careers). Unlike Mollena, I do not have a race card to play, because I am white. Unlike me, Mollena will justifiably play the race card over and over again, as she has done countless times already, because people will still treat her differently because she is black. Nobody will tell me they’re paying me to be pretty, slim and white when they ask me to speak, but they will be, even if they aren’t doing it on purpose. This is awful. It’s awful for those who don’t have as much crossover potential as I do purely because the world is fucked up. It’s a different, and certainly lesser, kind of awful for me, because I’ll never truly know how much of whatever success I achieve comes from my privilege versus my real skill. Really we all lose out on this one in the end.

And this is how fame works. It ruthlessly builds on existing advantage and ruthlessly makes things more difficult for people with less existing advantage. Sure, people transcend the unevenly-stacked odds all the time. Halle Berry did win an Oscar, after all. But that doesn’t make those odds any less real. And this is a big reason why I don’t trust fame one bit on its own terms, for all that a fair bit of it has come my way over the years, and I suspect more is on the way.

Now, in today’s world, we live in a culture that values fame as much as, or possibly more than, money. “Lifestyles of the rich and famous.” “Fame and fortune.” These concepts are linked in our collective imagination even if, practically speaking, they are not necessarily linked at all. Many of the world’s richest people, you have probably never heard of, because they make their money quietly, in business, or by inheriting it from family members. And plenty of the world’s famous people don’t have a lot of cash. Joe Shuster, the creator of Superman, ended his life practically destitute. Leonard Cohen had to come out of semi-retirement and touring again because a crooked financial advisor took him to the cleaners. I could go on. (And yes, these guys are both Canadian.)

In the leather/kink/BDSM world, we often treat the opportunity for fame as being “payment” that should stand in lieu of cash. This isn’t surprising. People do it all over the place, and kink is no different. Andy Warhol said that everyone would get their fifteen minutes of fame, and he was right. Fame is intoxicating. Applause can get you high for days. Admiration is a drug. This is no small thing. And frankly, for some people, fame is in fact better than cash—especially if they are already making plenty of cash elsewhere. Cash is in some ways much easier to come by than fame for most of us. So given our hunger for fame, it is dead easy to get a lot of people, particularly people who have established paid careers in other fields, to present at events and develop entire “kink-famous” careers without making a dime for that work, and possibly while shelling out plenty of their own money to attend the very events they are presenting at. (Even if they are given comp tickets to an event, travelling to kink conferences costs a shitload of money, as does staying in hotels and the like.) The intoxication of fame can be well worth it for some.

The results of this aren’t intrinsically bad—in the sense that it is entirely possible for people to become excellent presenters in this manner. So I’m not disparaging the quality of work provided by presenters who don’t ask to be paid. I am, however, saying that this practice creates a very uneven playing field.

A not-so-brief aside: my own story

Skip this part if you’re just interested in the politics. Read it if you want to hear how I’ve navigated all this weirdness myself. It’s a long section because, well, life is like that. I’m putting it in here partly for transparency, partly to satisfy my own integrity, and partly because I’ve had a lot of people ask me about this in private over many years, and I think it’s valuable to put this stuff out in public where it can be discussed openly.

In 1996, I left home because it wasn’t a safe or happy place to be for a young queer gender-fluid sex-positive feminist. I put myself through full-time school working up to 90 hours a week as a desk clerk and retail salesperson, usually with two part-time jobs at once, sometimes three, because I didn’t qualify for student loans (and don’t get me started on how fucked-up that was, and how bad it sucks to be really fucking poor and not have enough to eat for many years in a row). In 1999, I got my first professional job as a translator, shortly before graduating debt-free and bone-tired with a BA in translation and a minor in women’s studies. It was an excellent job, with Cirque du Soleil, and I remain eternally grateful to all the people who bent rules and made exceptions to get me into it.

I came out into the queer, poly and kink/SM worlds—yes, all within the same year—in 2000 after many years of being privately queer, kinky and poly-minded. I immediately got heavily involved in queer community organizing, and haven’t ever given that up. I attended my first major sexuality conference in 2003, and it was a watershed moment for me: I figured out that I had to devote my life to this somehow. Sexuality, BDSM, gender, relationships—these topics dominated my mind in every waking hour, and they continue to do so to this day. They had before I ever studied translation, but I never thought I could make a living at being insatiably interested in sexuality, which is why I pursued a field I knew I could make money at.

So when I got home from that conference, which was in the last week of August that year, I immediately called up the director of the undergraduate sexuality minor at my alma mater, and asked him how to get into the program immediately. I must have sounded pretty determined because he worked the system for me and I registered a few days later (thank you, Tom Waugh). From 2003 to 2006 I paid out of pocket, using every entry-level cent I could spare, to complete all the credits for that minor part-time. I spent all my money on books about sexuality (to date I’ve got nearly 1,000), attending films and workshops and panels about sexuality, and travelling to sexuality conferences. I’ve attended something like 150 weekend conferences alone at this point. I went into debt to pursue this knowledge. Not a little bit of debt. A whole fuckload of it. Close to 40 grand over the years, if you really want to know. I still haven’t paid it all off, though I’m only about seven grand in the hole at this point. And they don’t give you student loans for this stuff. I’m talking credit cards and other higher-interest options. I didn’t have a plan—I just kept jumping at opportunities and trusting the universe that somehow this would all work out.

2003 is also the year that I began to get actively involved in organizing leatherdyke community events in Montreal. I started teaching at kink events in 2004 (thank you to the Unholy Army of the Night for being my very first such opportunity), and I started blogging in 2005. I’d realized, after pursuing this knowledge for a few years, that I had stuff worth saying, too, and that the perspectives I was developing weren’t exactly the same as everyone else’s. So I pursued those opportunities. And of course, because nobody was offering to pay me for any of this, I did it for free.

By 2005, when my job situation started going south, I decided I wanted to tackle a freelance career in order to free up my time to further enable my pursuit of this knowledge and career path, though I couldn’t have said at the time what I thought that career path would look like. All I knew is that every time I taught somewhere, it led to people asking me to teach somewhere else, and I just kept saying yes because it was… well, it was my calling. Plain and simple.

So I took the minimum amount of paid translation work as I could take in order to afford to live (as cheaply as possible) and keep learning, reading, writing and teaching about sex. I made a point of taking notes, whenever I attended a seminar or lecture or conference, not only about the topics being taught, but about how they were being taught. I learned about pacing, and purpose, and (how NOT to use) PowerPoint slides, and handouts, and how best to work live demonstrations into a workshop. I learned how to use my existing public speaking skills to put a crowd at ease, to make them laugh, to make them think, to challenge them just enough to make them productively uncomfortable. I learned voraciously, partly by watching people do a really fucking good job at these things (thank you, Midori, among many others), and partly by watching people do less than good jobs at them.

My blog started to gain a regular readership, which came as a shock to me. Realizing that I had actual readers, I worked to hone my arguments and make my writing more interesting. This led me to seek out other places to write, so I contributed to a couple of non-paying community papers and magazines. In 2005, when I took the freelance plunge, I also took a wild chance and pitched a queer column to the Montreal Mirror, despite having no journalism credentials, and the strength of my tiny portfolio led them to take a chance on me (thank you, Patrick Lejtenyi). While I never got the column I’d hoped for, they started taking regular pitches for articles about queer and sexuality-related stuff, and all of a sudden I was a Real Writer, getting paid for my work, which in turn led to other paid writing work.

Occasionally, people started offering to pay me for my teaching work, too. It started slowly, with $25 gift certificates to HMV or bottles of wine, and ramped up over time. I learned that community conferences of most types don’t pay their presenters, but I decided to see them as opportunities to build my reputation as a presenter which would then lead to paid work down the road. And it worked. I built a CV. I started teaching at sex shops, which see payment as par for the course because of course they are for-profit businesses (thank you, Venus Envy Ottawa, for being my very first). I started teaching for student groups, which are funded by student fees and have budgets to bring in speakers.

After a few years of this, I started to find myself teaching six, seven, sometimes ten times a month, mostly for free, never for more than a hundred bucks a pop, and often at my own cost. I started to develop a strong reputation as a presenter, and I worked hard to hone my craft. I kept pouring my money into it, because it is what I was meant to do and this seemed to be the way to do it. I got really good at finding discount flights, booking long bus trips, sleeping on strangers’ couches and paying my way by being by turns unobtrusive and relentlessly charming, depending on the situation. Hotels? Are you kidding? Who can afford hotels?

At some point in there I asked a couple of trusted friends, also sex and kink educators, for some advice on how to charge a fair fee. The economics of this thing are complex, but it distilled into this: if you ask people for money, they will give it to you. If you don’t ask them for it, they won’t. If you think you are worth $100 a workshop, that’s what they’ll pay. If you think you’re worth $500, that’s what they’ll pay, too. If you organize a well-known event, write a respected column, or publish a book, you can hike your fees.

For some reason, despite all this, I felt horrifically guilty asking for money outside the sex shops I knew were making cash for what they did. I had been immersed in the message that this is all about community, and so I should be working for free (even though I paid to attend conferences). I had been systematically discouraged from asking for pay because really, this is all informal and I wasn’t officially qualified (even though there is quite simply no such thing as an official qualification for being a kink educator). I had been given the extremely mixed message that the value of what I had to offer was both huge—as in, I am wonderful and amazing and my very name would draw people to a conference or event—and pretty much nil—as in, it makes perfect sense to pay a craftsperson for a leather flogger, but education? That’s not worth anyone’s money. In short, I had been very effectively drawn into a system that actually doesn’t make much sense.

In 2007 my close friend Jacqueline and I co-founded An Unholy Harvest, which to this date remains Canada’s only weekend-long leatherdyke event. In 2008 I founded the Leather Bindings Society, a kinky book club in Toronto, which has been running steadily since then.

In 2009 I stepped into the world of graduate school, because I had settled upon a research project that I really wanted to pursue: the heretofore unwritten history of leatherdyke community development in Canada. If ever there were such thing as an official qualification to be a kink educator, a master’s degree focusing on leatherdyke porn must surely be it, on some level, and now I have that. And I must be a serious masochist because I let my supervisors convince me that I should keep right on keeping on, and dive into the PhD program, so here I am, on my way to being a doctor of perversity.

Now, I’d always been a keen student, but school was always something I did alongside my paid work. But I quickly learned, upon starting grad school, that grad school expects you to be available as though it were a full-time job and then some, and also magically well-funded despite offering funding (partly via employment, partly via grants) that is shockingly inadequate to cover real-life expenses. And that’s talking about York, which actually sits on the high end of the funding spectrum among Canadian universities. But for someone like me who craves high-calibre intellectual stimulation and has a project I’m truly passionate about, grad school is simply the shit. There is nothing better. I’ve done self-directed, ground-level, real-life learning for a long time, so I do not dismiss its value, and I think without that existing learning as a background, I’d be a far poorer-quality grad student today. And frankly, I’m pretty sure that the giant CV full of that learning is what got me into grad school in the first place.

But for me, right now, the structure, support and challenge of grad school are without a doubt exactly what I need at this point in my life. And seriously, people? Grad school eats your life. All of it. Just… everything. It’ll eat your relationships, your health, your money, your sanity if you let it. I don’t think this is a good thing, and I think the system needs to change, but that’s how it is at this time and I can either operate within it or opt out (or devote all my time to being a student activist in the hopes of changing the entire neoliberal education system—which is an extremely worthy pursuit—but not where I actually want to focus my energy).

So all of a sudden in 2009 I found myself in the situation of being deeply in debt, essentially employed full-time at the occupation of being a student which was paying me shit but feeding my soul and blasting my brain full of exciting new ideas. I was trying desperately to hold a balance between my health, my scholarly success and my need to make a living and pay off my credit card. So I had to do some serious triage. I dropped all my freelance clients who were paying me at the low end of my scale, and pushed for more work from the ones who paid better. And… I stopped taking unpaid teaching work.

I didn’t think this would be a revolutionary thing to do. I knew some places could afford to pay me, because some places had been paying me for quite some time. I also knew that I had my volunteer cred totally in the bag, because I co-organized a 100% volunteer-based annual event that didn’t (and doesn’t) pay me or anyone else a dime. And if you’ve ever organized a weekend event with a small team of people, you know what I’m saying when I tell you that it requires endless hours of work, year-round, the end. An Unholy Harvest is my heart and soul. It is where I want to devote my volunteer energy. It is the only place I want to devote that energy (that and the Leather Bindings Society). So even though it is absolutely not fair to require that anyone volunteer for the community in order to prove their dedication or realness, if you are of such a mindset, I still pass muster.

Not everybody is in the position of actually needing—I mean profoundly needing, like in order to afford food—to be paid for their teaching work. But that is the position I am in. If I take unpaid teaching work, I am literally in the position of having to turn down paid work to make room. This makes no sense and so I will not do it. It shouldn’t need to be this dire; I shouldn’t have to justify my desire to be paid a fair wage for the work I have spent more than fifty grand, and ten to twenty years’ of work depending on how you count it, at this point, to be qualified to do.

Some folks reacted to this change in policy with support. To them, I say many thanks.

Others, not so much. I will never forget when the organizer of a giant commercial sex trade show weekend tracked me down, spouted flattery, and asked me to teach at his event. Once we’d checked topic and availability, I brought up the question of rates, and he just about had a fit. “I’m giving you incredible exposure!” he sputtered. “That should be payment enough!” “I don’t need more exposure,” I responded. “I have plenty of that already, which is why you knew who I was and why we are having this discussion in the first place. What I need is to pay my rent. You’re charging six thousand people $30 a head to come to your event, and you pay your staff to be there. So I’m sure you can afford my teaching fee, which is quite reasonable, especially since I can tell you that I know of at least a few dozen people who will show up to your event specifically to come to my workshop, who might not otherwise attend.” He would have none of it. The deal was off.

I have tons of similar stories. The undergrad student organizer who, despite me stating my workshop fees clearly from the get-go, insisted that I should accept a $25 gift certificate rather than my workshop fee because it would give me the chance to hone my skills (because clearly, with 12 years of teaching experience, my skills are in serious need of honing). The community group that paid me for my work but was only able to hire me after a year or more of major, intensive and divisive policy discussions within their board of directors, which eventually authorized them to make some sort of major exception to their rules in order to hire me—for a workshop that promptly doubled their usual attendance. The conference that offered to pay me, then retracted the offer and expected me to fly overseas anyway and then volunteer my services to teach an “informal” workshop during their supposed “unconference,” the topic of which they wanted to nevertheless choose from within my workshop list and publicize on their website ahead of time along with my name and bio. I could go on…

I’m not sure why the idea of paying someone for professional work—and at this point in my career, I am a bona fide professional—is so darned hard for some people to swallow. But it does seem to be. And this needs to change.

And now, back to the question of event models

So earlier in this post, I discussed the “shopping mall” versus the “potluck.” And I discussed the idea of “kink-famous.”

Let me be clear here: I make my living on the shopping malls, but I run an event that is unapologetically a potluck. I make my living, or at least far more of it than I ever expected when I was working on a degree in French translation, on the very kind of “kink-famous” that I so deeply distrust. There is some weird irony in this. I recognize this and I’m not always sure what to do with it. I don’t trust or believe in the system by which I pay my rent and which allows me to pursue my lifelong vocation. The best I can do here is say that I don’t trust the entire capitalistic system and that I think I can sleep at least somewhat better at night doing what I love than working in a cubicle. But that feels a bit weak as far as argumentation goes. Right now I can’t do better. I’m too busy trying to earn a graduate degree, wrestle down that last seven grand, get my taxes in on time (whoops! So much for that!) and follow my calling as best I know how.

I think that, to me, the question of integrity is the key element here. I volunteer to run a potluck event, and in that context, I do not get paid and I do not pay anyone. I work at shopping mall events, and in that context I think everyone should get paid for the work they do. There are problems in both models. With the potluck, Jacqueline and I have come up with some solutions. If you are curious about how we approach that challenge, please feel free to peruse the Unholy Harvest website, especially the About, Accessibility, FAQ, Present and Help Harvest sections. They set out our philosophies about presenters including our support for first-time presenters, volunteers, dress codes, donations, accessibility, fame, Canadian focus, support for newbies, community-building, and a whole bunch else.

With the shopping mall, the specifics of how that should function are a whole other ball of wax—because the fame question impacts the value question which rests on the privilege question which all impacts the payment question, and all of that is no different than, and possibly even more complicated than, the way this all works in mainstream society’s very problematic institutions. I don’t know that I can change this system, or precisely how I’d like to see it change, or what would happen to me and the work I do if I managed to change it.

What I can call for, though, is clarity and integrity within whichever model of event someone chooses to run.

At the same time, I also want to make it clear that I’m not advocating for a two-tiered system, in which shopping malls are where the Real Pros go and potlucks are for the dregs. That’s not a helpful model. I just think that the motivations and rewards for doing certain kinds of work need to be more clearly laid out. You might love your work as an accountant, but you don’t do it for free. And you might have a lot of fun singing karaoke, and have a great voice, but never want to charge anyone for a concert. Pleasure, volunteerism, community-building, fame, vocation, making a living—all these motivations come into play, and all are valid in their own right. Let’s just please stop mixing them all up and then guilt-tripping, excluding, taking advantage of or rewarding people for having them mixed together in a slightly different way than the next person.

What you can do

I want to call for greater transparency and for clarity of purpose here—on the part of both event organizers and presenters.

My suggestions for event organizers: If you want to organize a shopping-mall endeavour that caters to the kink/leather/BDSM community and helps you make a living, go ahead and do it (or run any other kind of kink-friendly business for that matter). If you want to organize a potluck endeavour that doesn’t pay you at all, go ahead and do that. Just state up front what you’re doing, and how and why you’re doing it, and where the money goes that you are charging your event attendees, if you are charging them at all. In my opinion this kind of information should be available up-front on every BDSM/leather/kink event website, period. There is no shame in making a living. Don’t hide it. There is also no shame in creating community space that’s not related to money-making. Don’t hide that either. Neither gives you any special virtue—they are just different. If you are currently working on an event that blends these two models, try to figure out a consistent set of politics and an ethical framework that you would be totally comfortable explaining to anyone who asks, publicly announce that framework, and change how you organize your event if you discover that things aren’t fitting into that ethical framework.

My suggestions for presenters and potential presenters: If you want to build community or have fun by presenting at conferences but you want to make your living elsewhere, that’s awesome—then you might want to focus on seeking out volunteer presenting opportunities at potlucks. If you want to build a paid career out of presenting at conferences, that’s awesome too—then you might want to build experience by volunteering in the potluck range, actively work to acquire teaching skills, and possibly study sexuality in some formal way as appropriate to your field of interest, and then start pitching your work to shopping mall events that pay for professional skills. Hold event organizers to a high standard of integrity. Ask them questions about who they pay, and how, and why, and who they don’t pay, and how, and why. Present at the ones whose ethical framework lines up with yours.

Let’s create a culture of transparency, where money is not a taboo topic and fairness is the order of the day.

(don’t) assume the position

I stumbled across a blog post from a het male dom the other day, about the eight slave positions that he thinks “most dominants” train their submissives to do and have them do regularly. Of course what he really meant was “the het male dominants who think exactly like I do, and their gender-normative female submissives.” So not exactly my thing.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing wrong with these positions, I just bristle at the idea that “most dominants” do anything specific when it comes to physical play styles, movements, positions and so forth. It’s a serious pet peeve of mine, as it makes it seem as though “we” all have access to some sort of mystical repository of knowledge about How This Is Done, and every once in a while we’ll deign to share it with the rest of you who haven’t figured out where that knowledge comes from yet. We do not. There is no repository. Unless you count a couple centuries’ worth of porn. We make this shit up as it pleases us. Sure, we might get our ideas from within a particularly protocol-oriented local or regional community, if we happen to be part of one. Or we might cleave to a particular tradition that has a lot of written documentation we can follow to the letter—but frankly, most of those are also just porn (Gor, anyone?), so born out of someone’s fantasy brain, not from some sort of Grand Official Manual of Dominance. But the vast majority of dominants, if we use “slave positions” at all, simply grab ideas that happen to give us a boner and get our submissives to perform them because they work for us personally. And we must, of course, accommodate the individual needs of a given person—bad knees, bad back, what have you—and the particular flavour of any given relationship.

Anyway, all bitching aside, the post got me thinking about how I do use a fairly specific range of positions and commands—not randomly or for the fun of displaying people, usually, but because some positions are useful. I am realizing more and more how my preferences are often about solid functionalism and pared-down elegance, rather than anything explicitly sexual. I mean, I like looking at sexy people as much as the next person, but I don’t actually need to, for instance, “inspect” someone on a regular basis unless we’ve agreed that this would be hot and fun. And while hot and fun are, well, hot and fun, they don’t get the dishes done or my feet rubbed, and as such are not likely to be required every time someone enters a room. So this “present” position that the poster writes about, for instance, is frankly of very little use to me—though it’s obviously of great interest to him. See what I mean? If you like the idea of using physical positions to reinforce or experience your D/s dynamic, go right ahead, but please, please, please… make it up. Just make the shit up. Find inspiration anyplace you please, but don’t go out looking for the Right Way. Don’t get invested in what this mythical Everyone Else does. They do not exist. And what’s in your own head, fulfils your own fantasies, and fits into your own life and relationships and physical condition is way more important anyway.

So just to present an alternative to this mythical “most,” I took a moment to write up the positions I have been known to ask my submissives to use. They look a whole lot less like “please show me your sexual availability as much as possible in every random situation” and a lot more like “be graceful, be polite, and be useful to me.” I never set out to develop a list of positions—but I realized recently that, having been in one form or another of D/s relationships for the past decade, I do indeed get people to assume certain positions regularly, and it is helpful to be able to tell people about them. Bear in mind that the majority of people who’ve submitted to me are somewhere along the masculine spectrum, so the body language I prefer in these positions tends toward the broad and masculine. Nothing wrong with the femmier side of body language—I’m just stating my own biases up front, so that there’s no mistaking them for anything but personal preference.

Note that some people get very, very excited about positions. They have exacting standards for them. Some dominants can spend hours training a submissive to be able to execute a range of precisely measured postures, much in the way one might train to hold a complicated yoga pose or perfectly perform a synchronized swimming choreography. Some submissives get into the process because it takes them into such a tightly focused, totally blissed-out and intensely turned-on headspace, sort of like meditation but with a giant throbbing boner. These are the people who daydream about doing military drill, or get off at the physical discipline and concentration required in their Tai Chi class. I think that is awesome, and have even been able to get into it on occasion when I’m in the mood for super-high-control kinds of play. But most of the time, I couldn’t be bothered. That level of exactingness is just too much work. For me, outside play situations, that just gets in the way of whatever it is I’d like to accomplish—refer back to my principles of “functional and elegant.”

If this kind of thing appeals to you, in your own D/s arrangement, it can be useful for the submissive to spend a few minutes each day practicing them for a little while. Not because they are difficult, but because it’s nice for someone to be able to do them smoothly and gracefully—so the submissive can think about those two criteria as they work to integrate them into body memory, much the way you might practice basic dance moves in order to not have to think about them so you can just move with the music. I would encourage the submissive to think about economy of motion (a term I borrow from Midori’s “Wild Side Sex: The Book of Kink”), and seamlessness of transition between one and the other. If you want to play with them, or with your own variations, I would encourage the submissive to string them together in one way or another, and also do them separately from standing. If you’re inclined to do so, the dominant can drill the submissive, for fun, but it may not be necessary.

I also realized, as I was writing this up, that I use hand signals for most of these positions. They’re pretty intuitive and frankly I never set out to develop them; they just kinda made sense in the moment enough times over the years that they became second nature to me.

So here they are. Have fun with them, or don’t, as you please. They’re mine. Make them yours, or make your own, or don’t bother.

1. Wait. Submissive: Start from standing. Shoulders are square, legs are slightly spread apart and the hands are clasped behind the back. Kind of like a military “at ease” position. (Pro tip: I got this from working in retail for a long time, where it’s good to look like you’re available to customers but not just lounging about.) Dominant hand signal: looks like a stop sign, palm facing forward, or possibly just the first two fingers, as though you were indicating “hold on just two minutes.”

2. Kneel (also known as “kneel down”). Submissive: Shoulders are square, legs are slightly spread apart, butt rests on your heels, and the hands are either clasped behind the back (when told to wait) or palms up on the thighs (to be ready to be useful). Dominant hand signal: put your hand out at waist height, palm facing the floor, and press down a bit. If they don’t go down far enough, press further down.

3. Kneel up. Shoulders are square, legs are slightly spread apart, thighs are at a 90-degree angle from calves, and the hands are either clasped behind the back (when told to wait) or palms down on the thighs. Dominant hand signal: Same as for kneeling down. If they go too far down, or start from kneeling down, beckon slightly to have them come back partway up. If they mistake that for a signal to rise, use your stop sign. Or just use your voice. Meh. This is not an exact science.

4. Down. Start from kneeling down, then put palms, forehead and as much of upper torso as possible to the floor. Similar to child’s pose in yoga. Good as a lead-in to boot licking, for instance. Dominant hand signal: anytime you’re indicating to someone that they should do something which will directly result in them no longer being able to keep their gaze on your hand, then your hand signals become useless. For this one I find that simply pressing down on the middle of the person’s back or gently on the back of their neck clearly indicates where I want them to go. That can be done with a hand or a foot.

5. All the way down. Flat on your belly, legs slightly spread, palms down, arms in cactus shape (out 90 degrees from the body and bent 90 degrees at the elbows), forehead to the floor or head to one side. Dominant signal: just keep pushing down. Kick a knee out of the way or something if they seem attached to the basic down position. Did I mention this isn’t an exact science?

6. On all fours. Submissive: uh, just do it when told. Dominant hand signal: I haven’t figured one out for this, though I’m sure I could. Seems easier to just say something like “I need a footstool” or whatever.

7. Bend over. Submissive: Palms on the table or other available surface, or on your thighs just above the knees if no surface is near. Legs slightly spread. Dominant hand signal: hand up like a stop sign, then bend your hand forward flat at the wrist, or bend your fingers forward. Helps if you’re holding your stop sign so that the edge of your hand faces you, rather than the flat of your hand, so the person looking at you can clearly see the bend. Either that or just put one hand on the front of a thigh to keep them standing, and push their upper body down using your palm against the middle of their back or gently against the back of their neck.

8. Sit comfortably / be comfortable. Submissive: Transition in some graceful way from kneeling to sitting on your butt with legs to one side or cross-legged, whatever’s most comfortable in terms of sitting on the floor. Don’t grunt and thunk. Think fluid and smooth. The idea here is to get off your knees, if kneeling for long periods is difficult but you need to be on the floor for a while. It’s also lovely as a transition to curling up and putting your head on the dominant’s foot. Dominant hand signal: I dunno, I usually just kinda wave in a general way to indicate they should chill out down there.

Have fun with all that. I will say that, while everyone who does D/s will have their own preferences (including having no preferences at all, or not having developed preferences yet, or not caring one whit about positions), I have observed that D/s-oriented people often notice when someone has basic “training” in these things. It’s as though the spirit of them is apparent even though everyone has different preferences about exactly how things should be done, and about what would appear on this list. There’s a certain flavour about how some people move through space and interact with the world that is related to the body awareness and economy of motion inherent in regularly taking or requiring others to take positions like this—a developed instinct, you might say—and it can be sniffed out. I know that I personally do notice these things when I’m in leather/kink/BDSM spaces and when I do, I end up feeling a little more at home, even when that body awareness is in no way directed at me, but just because it feels like I’m around others who on some level do “what it is that I do.” So if you do this stuff often enough, you may find that others begin to approach you for advice or out of curiosity. All I ask is that you tell them what I am telling you here: that you made shit up that worked for you, and that they can do the same.

trust me

Of course you can trust me. I’m a skilled top. I mean, you saw me swinging a whip around some and it looked good, didn’t it? You can surely tell I’ve been practicing for a long time, and that I was taught by the best. Safety protocols? Yeah, of course I follow those. Sorry, just a sec, I need to use the bathroom, I just had a coupla beer before the party. Oh, you’d like a reference? Sure, lemme just get Bob. He’s been submissive to me for months, he can totally vouch for me. Aftercare? Well, I don’t really believe in aftercare. I mean, of course I’ll hug you and stuff, but actually I have another play date in… um… an hour and a half, so we might need to keep it to a minimum. Thanks, I knew you’d understand. What? Yeah, I’m totally clean. Do I look like the kind of person who’d have a disease? Please!

Oh, come on. Enough with this negotiation stuff. Let’s just let the chemistry flow. I’m awfully sexy, and I’m paying a lot of attention to you. You should be flattered. And we all know that in the SM world, when you’re hot, you’re at the top of the food chain. And y’know, who wouldn’t want to get with a top who’s at the top of the food chain? It might bring you a few steps further up that chain, yourself. Well, as far up the chain as a lowly submissive is ever gonna go, yuk yuk. It’s okay, honey, maybe you can learn to top one day. If you do, then you’re not really a true submissive, but I’m sure that’s no big deal to you. What? Oh, no, no offense. I’m pretty brainy, a touch arrogant, sure, but only cuz I know you like it. Also, I have a high-powered job, and some money to throw around—I had to get this leather outfit custom-tailored last time I was in London, so as to appropriately showcase my perfection, don’tcha know! We both know I have that mysterious edge of dominance that turns your knees a bit weak, that yummy sense of entitlement that means I’m really truly the Real Thing, and I’m just gonna read your gasps and flushes and writhings such that you basically don’t have to say a word and I know exactly what you need. That’s what I’m good at, after all. Reading your transparent little submissive mind. I’ve honed my craft. Baby, you think you can hide something from me? I don’t need safewords. I’ve been doing this for years. They line up around the block for me. You think you’re something special? Well, if you’re not interested, I’ll just move along to the next hungry… what? Oh, well, in that case, you’ve managed to retain my interest. For now.

Did I mention I’ve been doing this for years? I’m super experienced. Yeah, I learned from the Old Guard, and boy, those guys knew how to do things right. They used the eight classic slave positions and all the real protocols. It’s a lost art, I’m telling you, it just kills me how the kids these days are such lightweights. They don’t take anything seriously. In my day, a submissive didn’t question orders—they just obeyed! And they used honorifics at all times. And sat on the floor, not the bloody furniture, of all things! Yes, even in public restaurants. They were truly proud of what they were. None of this make-the-vanillas-comfortable shit. Munches with no fetish wear—what a joke! And we never shined our own boots—there was always a willing tongue available. And they’d speak when spoken to, and anticipate our every need, and take whatever we felt like dishing out. And anytime we brought our slaves to another master’s house, they knew full well they were there to be used by whoever wanted them. Duh. That’s what a real submissive does, y’know? It was a time of courage. A time of honour. A time of truth. They just don’t make them like they used to. But you, little one… you might have some potential. I have a feeling about you. All you need to do is obey me, and I’ll show you how this is really done. What? Chicago? Uh… you mean San Francisco, don’t you? Well, I lived in San Francisco back in the day. The old days I mean. No, we didn’t write this stuff down. Are you kidding? It was, y’know, tribal—we passed on knowledge to each other through mentorship, it was all oral tradition.

If you want to know that I’m the real deal, just check out my list of friends. I trained under Midori. Yeah, for serious. She taught me everything about bondage. I learned so well I even showed her a trick or two. Me and Fakir go way back, too. See this scar? Yeah, that’s where he put a hook in me once at a Sunbeam ritual. And I pal around with Jay Wiseguy. I mean, uh, Wiseman. You know, the author? I proofread his last book, actually, the Better Built Bondage Book. He forgot to put me in the credits, but that’s cool with me, we don’t need to thank each other for these things. Yeah, totally, you can ask them. I mean, Midori’s on the road a lot, and her e-mail was bouncing last week. And Fakir, well, he’s getting up there, so he’s a bit forgetful these days, but you could give him a shot. And Jay—my man! He’s a bit hard to track down, but yeah, go ahead, tell them I said hi. But anyway, there’s a cross free over there. Let’s grab it before someone else takes it over. I can’t wait to get my hands on you.

Anyway, I’m a community leader. I’ve got cred. I’ve been running this event for seven years! I can put you on the guest list for next time, if you want. Just tell them you’re with me and they’ll let you in. Come find me, I’ll be in the VIP lounge. It’s so much easier to socialize when you’re among the elite, y’know? I swear, the plebes are such a pain to deal with sometimes. Oh, also, I’m on the board for the big conference next month, and we need helpers. I know you’d be super good at that. No worries, I’ll just slip a little note to the committee at the next meeting and make sure you’re in. The discount is really great. Oh, you’re very welcome. I don’t do this sort of thing for everybody, but you… you’re different. There’s something special about you.

Now, I’m going to tie you up. Um, actually, that top you’re wearing is going to ruin the line of the rope. Time for it to come off…

on ecstasy

Not too long ago, I wrote an instalment of my “Ask the Sex Geek” column for In Toronto magazine in response to a reader question about trying to find resources on spiritual approaches to sexuality, such as Tantra, that don’t rely on a classic gender binary. Such resources are remarkably hard to find, and as such a lot of them have been a real turn-off for me. For that reason, I thoroughly enjoyed Barbara Carrellas’s book Urban Tantra: Sex for the 21^st Century when it first came out a few years back, precisely because Barbara takes such a refreshingly non-gendered approach to the topic. So I called her up for an interview for the column.

While we were chatting, she told me about her newest book, Ecstasy Is Necessary: A Practical Guide, and asked if I’d be interested in taking part in her virtual book tour, in which she’s “visiting” a number of blogs over the course of a couple of weeks. Of course I jumped on the opportunity since the last one was such a treat! So today I’m posting my review of her book, and I’m weaving it together with her answers to some questions I threw at her. And Barbara’s hanging out here in the comments section, so if you have any questions for her, she’ll jump on in and answer. (Hi Barbara! *waving*)

The short summary: Ecstasy Is Necessary is a book about how to recognize ecstasy and how to cultivate it in your sexual life and relationships, but also in your everyday, mundane experiences of moving through the world. By “ecstasy” Barbara’s not talking about pleasure, per se, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s more like that blissful “something more” feeling you get when all the energies of the Universe are aligned and you are in a state of bliss and connectedness. What’s great about Barbara’s approach to this is that she’s not advocating the rabid pursuit of a particular sort of New Agey high, nor of a specific path to achieving ecstasy, Tantric or otherwise. It’s more like she’s trying to get people to understand how ecstasy is both mundane—in that we can find it anywhere, everywhere—and sacred, if we allow ourselves to take the risk of letting go in order to fully experience it.

***

Andrea: How would you relate this book to your other work, which is more explicitly on Tantra?

Barbara: It’s funny, I never considered Ecstasy is Necessary to be a Tantra book when I was writing it. But when Tantrika friends of mine read it they marvelled that I’d written a book about Tantra without ever having used the word. I didn’t really understand what they meant until just the other day when I was talking to my partner Kate Bornstein about binaries. I realized that one of the most powerful binaries in our culture—right up there with good/evil, black/white, male/female— is sex/god. Tantra is a word that breaks that sex/god binary because it contains elements of both sexuality and spirituality. Ecstasy is another word that breaks that binary. The word ecstasy implies a sexual orgasmic state but also make us think of nuns, saints, shamans and spiritual seekers in religious trance.

I also think Ecstasy is Necessary is Tantric in its approach because of its emphasis on conscious practices and mindfulness. Having written extensively about how those relate to energy and the body, I wanted to apply those same principles to thought and emotion. It’s my hope that Ecstasy is Necessary will be considered both a prequel and a sequel to Urban Tantra.

***

One of the first things that struck me about the book was how Barbara’s just so damn grounded about all this stuff. You could read this book as a goddess-worshiping crystal-wearing eye-gazer and still find something new and challenging in it, because the focus isn’t on the mechanics of any particular system—it’s about focusing deeply inward, to the essentials of how to build deep connection with oneself and with a sexual partner. You could read it as an atheist and still understand that our brains can produce ecstatic experience and that we can deliberately create the mental conditions for that to happen. Barbara, for instance, recounts her own experience of thinking herself to orgasm while in an fMRI machine that measured her brain waves and confirmed that yup, indeed, she was coming!

***

Andrea: On page 18 you make the rather bold statement, echoed in the book’s title, that “ecstasy is medically necessary to the health and well-being of the human body.” Now I know you weren’t writing a science book, so I wasn’t expecting a ton of peer-reviewed research to be cited here, but this statement has me awfully curious, especially since you clearly believe this on enough of a fundamental level to title your book with the idea. So – tell me more! I want some nerdy! In what ways is science beginning to acknowledge ecstasy as a medical necessity?

Barbara: Here’s the gist: this is based on Wilhelm Reich, who said that orgasm (the full, whole body kind, not the hiccups some people call orgasm) was physically necessary for health and well-being. Nothing short of full out orgasm could fully release tension. Long held, deep seated tension was the cause of much of the illnesses we suffer from. Orgasm is, so to speak, the human reset button. I take it a step further. Ecstasy, with its spiritual component, is, in my view as or more necessary. Not only does it release aforementioned tension, it never fails to create an Ah-Hah moment, in which we see possibilities we hadn’t seen before. It keeps us growing and striving. It’s the spiritual reset button.

***

I like this book because I think Barbara’s asking all the right questions. For instance, she has a whole section on figuring out what your values are. It sounds like a boring thing – y’know, like how are, say, “honesty” or “punctuality” really related to ecstasy? But what she’s getting at is that knowing who you are and what’s important to you is a first step in figuring out how to be able to most deeply connect—with yourself, with your partners, with the broader woo-woo energies out there in the world. I ask this same question in my 10 Rules for Happy Non-Monogamy, but Barbara takes things several steps further, in that she provides practical homework-style exercises for figuring out the answers.

***

Andrea: You have a really great section on defining your core values. And you provide step-by-step instruction for figuring them out, which I’ve never seen before. How did you go about developing these steps?

Barbara: How nice to speak to someone who understands the importance of values in relationships!

The steps in the book are based on an exercise that Hayley Caspers uses in her corporate training workshops. Hayley is one of my oldest and dearest friends and has produced my work worldwide. We have been obsessed with the importance of values in relationships for years. I had a very personal reason for choosing to write about this now. Just before I began to outline Ecstasy is Necessary I went through a horribly painful breakup of a relationship I really treasured. I asked myself, “How did a relationship that was so ecstatic go so wrong?” I realized that my lover and I had radically different values regarding an issue that was deeply important to her. No amount of behavioral compromise will heal an issue when what are really being compromised are your deepest core values. When you aren’t consciously aware of your core values it’s easy to find yourself compromising them. I wanted to come up with a simple, accurate and effective way of arrive at one’s values. When we know what our values are, we know when they’re being violated. When we can talk about that, we can find ways to settle conflicts that are in alignment with our core values.

***

Now, for all that Barbara doesn’t spend time in this book teaching any formal system for getting at greater self-understanding and ecstatic experience, she nevertheless makes a ton of room for the vast range of systems that are out there—including Tantra, but also including, for instance, the highly varied collection of practices that is BDSM. Her earlier book, Urban Tantra, similarly made space for BDSM as a path to ecstatic experience, which is remarkably rare and which, for me, was incredibly validating.

I often find that people tend to grab onto the system that works for them and then preach it, and the loudest ones doing that also tend to pooh-pooh the other systems. So a lot of the Tantric and West-Coast-y spiritual sexual healing culture I’ve been exposed to tends to get very invested in all the technical details of their practice and look askance at sadomasochism. A speaker at a conference I attended many years ago went so far as to say that SMers were clearly not having deep and meaningful sex because it was all just so violent. And along that same continuum, I certainly feel like an outsider when I go to a yoga studio sporting a black leather mat bag, eleven piercings above the neck and a motorcycle jacket, not because I don’t know the yoga lingo or can’t do a downward dog, but because I don’t fit into the culture that has built up around the practice—I don’t have “yoga friends.” I show up, do my thing, and nobody asks me out for spirulina shots with the girls afterward, y’know?

On the flip side, SMers have a set of cultural norms too—certainly there’s a lot of room for spirituality within SM practice, but the average leather bar wouldn’t exactly know what to do with someone who showed up in purple robes and wanted to cast a circle. We may understand how you can achieve transcendence through a solid flogging or piercing scene, but eye-gazing and bottom breathing (no, not that kind of bottom! or that one either!) aren’t exactly taught at your standard SM 101 workshop.

And yet, these are all practices that focus on deep connection with self and others, and that use breath, pleasure and the body as routes to connect with ecstasy or wholeness. It’s about bloody time someone started articulating the connections in a way that’s accessible to people from several sides of the cultural divides, rather than simply trying to explain one of them to the other, or touting one system as The Way. Barbara explicitly makes room for both SM and Tantra without requiring that you buy into the trappings and cultures of either, or any other trappings or cultures for that matter, in order to find your own path to ecstatic experience. She speaks simply but without condescension; she recognizes her position of privilege as a professional sexual explorer without making the reader feel like they’re sitting on the bleachers while the cool kids get to play. It’s such a fucking relief.

***

Andrea: How do you see the relationship between energy-based, spiritually-inclined sexual practice and BDSM?

Barbara: Hah, speaking of binaries! Tantra and BDSM were once thought of as polar opposites—never the twain shall meet. Well, today they meet up in some variation in every play space I step into. Many people practice BDSM as an extremely spiritually-inclined, energy-based sexual practice. Personally, I find it thrilling and profound to consciously apply everything I learned in my study of Tantra to BDSM. And the most frequent request I get from the Tantrikas who sign for my Urban Tantra® Professional Training Program is for help in learning the “Dark Arts.”

Andrea: What do you think your readers will make of your frequent references to BDSM and various forms of non-monogamy? Would you say you’re doing political work by weaving those references into the fabric of your approach, or is it more of just your own particular worldview, such that it would be strange for you to suppress it? Who are you trying to challenge or make productively uncomfortable? Who are you trying to include or make comfortable?

Barbara: It really is hard for me to suppress any side of my life and my teachings—I feel so passionately about it all. I also feel an urgency to bring everyone to the erotic table, which in my world, is a smorgasbord. Take what you like, leave what you don’t, but be sure to try at least one new thing. Then let’s sit down and enjoy it all together. As for politics, I think of myself as very apolitical in comparison to so many of my friends and colleagues. But if the personal is political, then I do have a political agenda set on coalition building. I want to increase the breadth, depth and substance of sex positivity. It’s not my intention to make anyone uncomfortable, because I don’t find that works very well. Quite the opposite, it is my intent to make everyone as comfortable as possible, not just in their own sexual/erotic skin, but also when in the company of people of very different sexual persuasions, identities or preferences. We don’t all have to fuck each other, but we do need to do more than simply respect each other’s sexuality and identities. We need to embrace each other’s sexualities and identities—even celebrate them.

***

The book also has an excellent section on boundaries. For all that they’re fundamental to good relationships with both self and others, boundaries are a really challenging topic to tackle. Some of us need our boundaries to become less rigid; some of us need them to become firmer. Some of us need to test and stretch; some of us need to ground, root, take shelter. Sometimes our boundaries serve us and protect us; sometimes they limit us and sap our ability to connect. Again, Barbara navigates this territory with grace, and better yet, with a ton of practical tips on how to figure out your own boundaries, communicate them to others, and make sure you in turn understand theirs. On this count alone I’m likely to recommend Ecstasy Is Necessary when I teach both SM workshops and non-monogamy workshops, simply because these exercises are so useful for any kind of relational practice… well… anywhere.

***

Andrea: One of the things I liked best in the book is your idea of the “magic room” instead of the idea of a “safe space.” I’ve always had an instinctive mistrust for the idea of “safe space,” because who can really promise that anything will be safe, let alone for a whole group of people? And if someone’s promising something they can’t possibly know for a fact they can provide, then how can you trust them at all? Anyway, can you say more about this “magic room” idea? How do you create it? What are its key components?

Barbara: The term Magic Room was coined by my colleague, Swedish sex educator Carl Johan Rehbinder, during a discussion of so-called safe spaces at one of my Urban Tantra® Professional Training Programs. The minute the words fell out of his mouth we all realized that he’d nailed it. Not only could we never guarantee that any space would be 100% safe for everyone, but we didn’t even want things to be that safe. I love Jack Morin’s theory (from The Erotic Mind) that peak erotic experiences (and peak spiritual experiences as well, I think) are the result of just the right combination of safety and risk. Think about it—isn’t that what makes something feel magic? When you’re dancing on the edge of safety and risk? In Ecstasy is Necessary I wanted to give people an opportunity to find out precisely what they needed to feel safe, but not to encourage them to stay so safe that they never explored their edges. I also gave them guidelines on how to take an erotic risk that would save them from feeling so frightened or overwhelmed that they would retreat to their “safe normal.”

***

And then there’s Barbara’s grounding in a certain history, with her work hearkening back to a sense of infinite sexual possibility that first emerged, for her, in the heady 1970s, but that has since been filtered through the realities of AIDS and STIs, among others. When I read her book I can feel her sense of grief and loss and rage, as someone who lived through the waves of death that came with the early AIDS pandemic. And yet she hasn’t lost her capacity for joy or vulnerability, and that too comes through in her approach to sex and ecstasy. Hers is not a happy-go-lucky call to ecstasy and joy; it is not a privilege-soaked, product-driven form of trite sex-positivity designed to “spice up your sex life.” It is a fierce determination to reach for joy in sex through devastation, marginalization and pain, and an invitation for readers to join her in that purpose-driven journey not by painting over the challenges and pains that get in the way, but by embracing them and hauling them along for the whole wild and messy ride. The result is a flavour of sex radicalism that is more in-your-soul than in-your-face, but with plenty of grit behind the gentle approach. Her book reads a bit like the way it feels when your trusted best friend hauls you out of bed after you’ve been moping around for too long after something bad happens. A sort of “I love you, honey, now get your shit together. I’m taking you out for lunch.” Except lunch is sex. Or something. My metaphor might be falling apart here, but my point is that Barbara manages to strike just the right balance of firmth and kindness.

***

Andrea: As a historian (historian-in-training?), I want to ask you some more about the idea you talk about that the 70s were a historical blip in which sex was cool and okay, post-1950s repression but pre-AIDS. Do you think that was broadly accurate? Or was it specifically accurate for a subset of the population, of which you were a part? If it’s the latter, can you describe that population? Certainly we know there was all kinds of yummy stuff going on in gay men’s bathhouses, but you’re speaking about a group that obviously includes people outside gay male culture. Who was having all this crazy fun sex?

Barbara: The 70s were an historical blip in which sex was cool, and this went way beyond gay male subculture. Sexual freedom was everywhere. The youth revolution of the 1960s had become the adult sexual revolution of the 1970s. This was the decade that gave birth to porn chic. Films like The Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat were no longer playing only in seedy red light district grindhouses—they were at the local mall cinemas. In New York City, Plato’s Retreat, the legendary swingers club, was, in its heyday, regularly frequented by celebrities. And it wasn’t all porn and sex clubs. There was a ton of excellent material on sexuality published in the 70s. Much of it was published by collectives or by small publishers and are long out of print. Every once in a while I’ll find some incredibly astute and/or esoteric book on sexuality published in the 70s in a garage sale or used bookstore. But some of the books from that era are still on the shelves in new editions. For example, the first edition of the legendary book Our Bodies, Ourselves was published in 1970 and it’s still in print—3 million copies later! Betty Dodson started her women’s BodySex groups in the 70s. It was a wild, experimental time as sex became the most popular and powerful way to celebrate and support women’s liberation and gay liberation.

***

Ah, history! There are about a dozen PhD thesis topics in just that one paragraph. I will restrain myself from trying to tackle them all personally.

All in all, Ecstasy Is Necessary is gonna be a classic, and one I suspect I’ll be recommending to a lot of people and for a lot of reasons.

I’ll conclude this inter/re/view with a couple of sentences that really struck me on page 169 of the book, and which I think may become one of my own guiding thoughts for this year: “Surrender. You’ve worked hard to get here. Don’t miss a moment of the bliss.”

why rape jokes aren’t funny, even if you’re kinky

You’d think that given that kinky people are universally more enlightened about sexuality than the general population, nobody would have to explain this one. But from recent discussions I’ve seen go by online, it appears that we can throw that little “superior enlightenment” theory out the window (no big surprise there), and that a post laying out the basics of this is in order.

I will, for the curious, attempt to shoot down a few of the most common responses I’ve seen to women who’ve posted on similar topics, by means of a footnote at the end of this post. So if you are about to say “You’re just a humourless feminist,” “You’re missing the point,” “You’re just a man-hating lesbian,” or “You’re just bitter/triggered/biased because someone raped you,” or simply curious about how I’d respond to any of those dismissals, scroll down.

All righty. Moving along.

Point 1. Kinky people can be, and are, sexist. Rape jokes are one form that sexism is expressed.

Despite what the research says about how kinky guys are generally pro-feminist (see part 1 of the footnote for that), the research (at least, what little research there is) still indicates that in the public pansexual BDSM scene:

• women are more likely to identify as submissives and men are more likely to identify as dominants;
• women are generally presumed submissive and men dominant (and whether this is a cause or an effect of the first element is a question well worth debating, and one which I seldom see discussed);
• women and submissives are treated with less respect than men and dominants; and
• this disrespect generally takes forms along classically sexist, essentialist lines.

Thomas Macaulay Millar deftly links “domism,” role essentialism and sexism and sums up the key related points from two major (kink-positive) scholarly studies of the pansexual BDSM scene in this brilliant post. Please go read it, it’s really quite impressive.

In short, despite any claims to enlightenment or feminism, standard-issue sexism is still clearly present in the pansexual BDSM scene.

One of the many ways sexism plays out in the BDSM scene is rape jokes, and other kinds of all-too-common comments intended to humiliate or reduce women or submissives (because of the significant overlap, both work here) within the pansexual community but outside the context of negotiated scenes or relationships. Millar’s post quotes a few specific examples from the two studies he refers to, but you can find many more if you read either one in full. They are remarkably familiar for anyone who’s spent time in pansexual scene space.

Point 2. Rape jokes aren’t funny.

I don’t mean in that in a finger-wagging way. I just mean they aren’t actually funny. They fail to get a laugh most of the time (with some notable exceptions I detail in the next point).

You know what always kills a joke? When you have to explain it, or explain why it’s funny. I often see people trying to explain why rape jokes are funny, so that tells me right away that they pretty much aren’t. There are a few classics, like “Can’t you take a joke?” or “You have no sense of humour,” both surefire lines of defence for people who don’t know how to make good ones. And then we also have a few more righteously principled defences. One I often hear goes something like, “Well, if I can joke about murder, why not rape? Are you saying it’s okay to laugh about murder but not about rape? Do you think murder’s okay, but rape isn’t?”

I don’t know why it comes up so often, but it really does. And it’s particularly relevant because answering those questions tells us a lot about precisely why rape jokes aren’t funny.

If we look at some yummy Stats Can data, it tells us that “Police reported 605 homicides in 2006 … a rate of 1.85 homicides per 100,000 population.”

Meanwhile, also according to Stats Can, “Quantifying sexual assault continues to be a challenge, since the large majority (91%) of these crimes are not reported to police. According to self-reported victim data from the 2004 GSS on Victimization, approximately 512,200 Canadians aged 15 and older were the victims of a sexual assault in the 12 months preceding the survey. Expressed as a rate, there were 1,977 incidents of sexual assault per 100,000 population aged 15 and older reported on the 2004 GSS.”

Do we see a difference here? Fewer than two murders per 100,000; just under 2,000 sexual assaults per 100,000 and that’s only counting the 12-month period right before the survey. Let’s keep in mind that a person can be sexually assaulted numerous times in a lifetime and most of us rarely answer Stats Can surveys, whereas murders by definition happen only once and, with some notable exceptions, are pretty reliably reported, what with, y’know, dead bodies to deal with and such. I’d say the scale difference here is rather evident.

What am I getting at? Well, we—many of us, at least in non-war-torn North America—can joke about murder because we’ve never met someone who got murdered, or murdered someone, or met a murderer, or been murdered. Most of us will never encounter that reality in our entire lives, so it’s distant, and that makes it easy to be callous about, to treat as banal. I’d be willing to bet that if 2,000 out of 100,000 people had witnessed a murder in the last 12 months, we likely wouldn’t be laughing much about that either, not to mention there would be 2,000 fewer people around per year to make the jokes. Rape is a concrete reality for many of us, and it’s much harder to find anything funny about it as a result. So the comparison to murder doesn’t hold up. It’s not about one being more right than the other, or more PC. It’s just about how difficult it is to find humour in serious trauma that directly affects many of us all the time.

When people are challenged about making rape jokes, I also hear a lot of them cry “censorship,” start talking about the PC police, or beat the tired old argument that we should be allowed to discuss anything we want within the realm of kink because it’s supposed to be this safe place where anything goes as long as it’s consensual. And y’know, far be it from me to tell you what you can and can’t talk about, unless of course I’m moderating the group, in which case I’d be well within my rights to shut down inappropriate topics as outlined in the rules.

But will I tell you what I think you should and shouldn’t talk about or say? Hell yeah. For instance I think you shouldn’t use racist terminology, make fun of fat people, joke about people with disabilities, or sling around homophobic slurs. Challenging people—kindly, without personal attack, and with the benefit of the doubt, until such benefit is clearly no longer warranted—when they’re being douchebags is itself dialogue, not censorship; it is a really valuable form of activism. It contributes to creating a group climate where dissent is an option, where people have the opportunity to learn about what hurts and marginalizes people who aren’t like them, where people outside a narrow range are more likely to feel welcome and included (and then everyone gets laid more). Who said it’s okay to make some people feel rotten (by making rape jokes) but not to make others feel rotten (by calling out bullshit)? I’d say it’s pretty even as far as deals go, though if I had to pick whose feelings I’m more concerned about, I’d definitely be more likely to worry about those of a possible rape survivor than those of a guy who wants to make a tasteless joke. I know, that privilege is a hard thing to look at, but really, guy, you need to get over it. I’m not much one for playing the Oppression Olympics, but for what it’s worth, on the scale of oppression, you lose.

Does that mean we shouldn’t talk about rape fantasies in the context of kink? Nope. I think we should talk about them as much as we like. It’s a helluva charged-up topic for all kinds of good reasons and that makes it well worth discussing. But talking about our individual kinks is not the same as joking about what person we’d really like to rape, how much so-and-so really needs to get raped, how rape is probably the only sex so-and-so gets, or any other similarly stupid, boring tripe. These things are not thoughtful discussion, exploration of a taboo kink, genuine engagement with an edgy form of fantasy or play. There is a world of difference between saying “I fantasize about doing a rape scene” or “my partner wants to do a rape scene and I’m not sure how” and “Jill really needs to get raped in a back alley, haha!” If you’re not enough of a grown-up to be able to tell the difference, you probably shouldn’t be playing this game at all.

We could get into a big debate here about how things are different if a woman, and not a man, makes the joke, or laughs at it, or if the joke is about a female rapist, or a male victim, and so on, and so forth. I’m not really interested in debating it much though. Sure, it might be different on some level, as many things are depending on who’s saying them. Okay. Fair enough. It’s still not particularly funny to make a rape joke. It might be less directly reflective of the reality of rape out there in the world, but really, does that make it therefore hilarious and/or justifiable? Seems to me it simply creates an environment that makes it acceptable for people who are not in these “more justifiable” categories to also make rape jokes. And really? Meh. I can think of better things to stand up for than my right to make unfunny jokes about my own possible sexual assault perpetration or victimization. They’re a bit clunky, and they still play into the fact that…

Point 3. Rape jokes directly support and encourage rapists.

For this one, I’ll refer you to yet another brilliant post, this one by Organon.

Here’s a quote that sums up the post:

“6% of college-aged men, slightly over 1 in 20, will admit to raping someone in anonymous surveys, as long as the word “rape” isn’t used in the description of the act—and that’s the conservative estimate. Other sources double that number.

“A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. That’s not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists?

“Rapists do.

“They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.

“Virtually all rapists genuinely believe that all men rape, and other men just keep it hushed up better. And more, these people who really are rapists are constantly reaffirmed in their belief about the rest of mankind being rapists like them by things like rape jokes, that dismiss and normalize the idea of rape.”

So basically, if you make a rape joke, casually banter about doing non-consensual things to that hot woman or submissive over there, or treat rape as though it were something banal and normal and nothing to get terribly upset about, well then sure, you might be triggering the one in four women sitting nearby who’s been raped. And sure, you’re making yourself look like a complete douchebag (no, sadly, you don’t come off as a super-sexy “edgy” kind of kinkster, despite how desperately you might like to—if you are that edgy, surely you can come up with a more creative strategy). But mostly, what you’re doing is inviting the one guy of the proverbial twenty, who is also sitting nearby, to rape someone, quite possibly someone in that same room. Because he doesn’t think you’re joking. He thinks you’re completely serious, and that it’s completely okay to do that.

And you know what? Even if you’re not sitting near that one-in-twenty guy? The women sitting nearby? They might think you, yourself, are that one guy in twenty who might actually rape them, given the chance, considering how completely blasé you’re being about the topic.

And even worse? Maybe you actually are that guy. You sure do exhibit all the signs. Really you’re kinda advertising it, wouldn’t you say? This, right here, is about the only reason I can think of why you might want to continue making rape jokes, or laughing at them—at least now your targets can see you. So if you are that one in twenty, please, make all the rape jokes you want. Because if all the non-rapists in the room stop making them, and stop laughing at them, but you keep right on keeping on, then we’ll know exactly who to avoid. In the meantime, there’s a degree of mistrust that sorta has to be extended to everyone, because it’s sometimes hard to tell which one of every twenty is the one-in-twenty who’s truly dangerous.

And with that in mind…

Point 4. The BDSM community does not keep anyone safe from rape.

The research doesn’t talk specifically about the BDSM community on this point, but the statement applies there as much as anywhere else. In fact, no community, network, or set of trusted friends and acquaintances keeps anyone safe from rape. Why? Because 70% of rapes are committed by someone who knows the victim.

That figure, or higher, is repeated all over the place—the Toronto Police Service, the Rape Victims Support Network, Victims of Violence (with research funded by the Department of Justice Canada), and even good ol’ Stats Canada.

Some of those perpetrators are relatives, colleagues or neighbours. And some of them are friends and acquaintances. In other words, even if we drop all the husbands, boyfriends, dads, work colleagues and so forth from the list and focus exclusively on the “other acquaintances” category, the simple fact of knowing people—like, say, from attending the same munch a few times or seeing each other at the occasional play party—is no guarantee of protection. Quite the reverse. The people habitually found in a given social setting are the ones most likely to rape the other people in that same social setting.

So please, let’s stop with the idea that we police the SM world and magically make it safe for everyone because of our focus on consent. If 19 out of 20 guys (and yes, I am focusing on guys here, because the studies above also note that around 97% of sexual assault perpetrators are male) believe in consent-only activity and practice it 100% of the time, that still leaves the one guy out of twenty who doesn’t and who is still happily ensconced within the community. And let’s recall that many of those 19, along with a few gals, may be making that one guy feel perfectly justified about what he does, because while not being rapists, they may still be helping to create an environment in which rapists can flourish, or at least get by relatively unnoticed. So if you’re one of those folks who thinks that if you say “consent” often enough, you’ve paid your dues and can now also make or laugh at a rape joke, think again. These things do not cancel each other out.

Point 5. People vastly under-report incidences of rape and sexual assault, mainly because of fear of repercussion or ostracization.

If you were an oppressed sexual minority—say, a kinkster—all your life, and you finally found a community where you could meet like-minded people, and explore this very deep and compelling part of yourself with people you find attractive, wouldn’t you want to make sure your membership in that community wasn’t jeopardized? And if that community distrusted the cops because the cops had been known to arrest them for their enjoyable consensual activity, and possibly even take away their kids or get them fired from their workplace, wouldn’t you be unlikely to bring the cops’ attention their (your) way? And if you knew that because you were a pervert, the cops might think you were really asking for it anyway (much like if you were a sex worker, or a gal with a short skirt, and so forth), wouldn’t you be less likely, in the midst of your own trauma, to risk adding the further trauma of being disbelieved and your charges dismissed? Yeah, well, layer all that on top of the existing reasons why 91% of your average not-kinky people who get sexually assaulted don’t report it to the police, and you have the perfect storm.

I don’t think we will ever know how many people get raped or sexually assaulted within the pansexual BDSM scene because those people have a whole fuckload of reasons why not to ever tell—way more so than their non-kinky counterparts.

Conclusion: Reality bites.

We can talk about consent, safewords, negotiation and safe calls, and we can trot out the existence of female dominants and male submissives all we want. None of this makes reality go away:

• The pansexual scene both displays the idea that men are in charge (dominant) and women are not (submissive) and reinforces that as a norm.
• Discourse about the proper roles of dominants (men) and submissives (women) within the pansexual scene commonly steps way outside the bounds of negotiated relationships or scenes, which is not okay.
• Rape jokes (which are not okay even outside the scene) are made within the pansexual BDSM scene directly or indirectly as part of that discourse.
• Rape jokes in any context reassure rapists that what they do is normal, okay and approved-of; in BDSM spaces, they reassure rapists that even here, regardless of a parallel “consent” discourse, rape is still okay.
• So-called community self-policing does not erase the occurrence of rape and sexual assault.
• The pansexual scene’s internal community codes as well as the pansexual community’s relationship to the dominant society may directly act as deterrents to the reporting of sexual assault, whether to the police or within the community itself.

Consider this: a rapist walks into a pansexual BDSM event. He looks around and sees that mostly, the men are dominant and the women are submissive, and there’s a whole complex language around consent. But then he also notices that people aren’t really practicing what they preach, or at least they seem to do so inconsistently, because clearly sexist dynamics are playing out outside scenes or ongoing D/s connections. And the people joke about rape in a way that makes it seem like that’s just as cool here as it is anywhere else—and not only that, but they’ve got fancy things like collars and cuffs and rope to make it all even easier! All he needs to do is learn the “in-crowd” language to avoid being easily detected. Cuz really, once he’s got that down, he’s not very likely to encounter much resistance, and even if he did, she’d never take it to the cops. And she wouldn’t risk saying anything in the community either, cuz she’d get snubbed. Sweet deal.

It’s a bit sobering, isn’t it?

And that’s why rape jokes aren’t funny, even if you’re kinky. They are only one part of a larger system in which many other things happen that are not funny, but they are also one of the easiest to simply stop. So let’s stop making them. We’re a creative, intelligent bunch, or at least we sure like to think of ourselves that way. I’m sure we can find plenty else to laugh about.

***

And here is that promised footnote on my response to classic dismissals.

1. “You’re just a humourless feminist.” Feminist? Yes, and honestly, unless you are a frothing idiot, you are too, or at the very least, you believe a lot of the same things feminists classically believe whether you label it as such or not. In fact, most kinky guys do, according to this article by Patricia A. Cross and Kim Matheson. In their research, they found no appreciable difference between sadomasochists and non-sadomasochists in terms of their attitudes and beliefs regarding feminism. (Though it sure is interesting that their findings also indicate that, while still well within the range of pro-feminist, men in SM communities generally have a higher belief in traditional gender roles than women do, regardless of kink role.) Humourless? Well, I make no claim to stand-up comic prowess, but I think I’m pretty funny, and by all accounts most of the people I know would agree, but I guess that’s up for argument. While we’re at it, shall we debate the equally subjective notions of “attractive” or “smart”? I’ll pencil you in for that discussion sometime in 2080, ‘kay? Call me.
2. “You’re missing the point. This discussion isn’t about rape, it’s about (insert stated topic here).” If you made a rape joke, guess what? Now the discussion is about rape. Oopsie for you. Next time, stick to the topic at hand and you will not have a much-deserved shitstorm on your hands.
3. “You’re just a man-hating lesbian.” If by the word “lesbian” you mean “woman who likes to fuck women,” you’re bang-on. Mmmmwomen. But I’m not a lesbian, properly speaking, because I also have a long history of dating, playing with and fucking men, as well as trans folks who identify all along the gender spectrum, the latter of which includes my partner of five years. I suppose it is possible I could have done all that and still hated the men and other non-female-identified people I’ve been with, but that would be an awfully significant waste of time. And also? I have three brothers who are the awesomest guys in the world, so anytime I’ve been even remotely tempted to say “I hate men,” I have always caught myself, because seriously? These guys would give hope to the most man-hating of man-hating dykes. (On a side note, most dykes who don’t sleep with men don’t actually hate them. It’s more that most men are just kinda irrelevant to them, which I suspect gets some guys’ knickers in a knot way more than any actual hating would.) More important than my sexual history, though, is that I don’t really think hating anyone is the most productive of places to put my activist energy. I’d much rather invest in coalition-building and avoid grossly stereotyping groups on the basis of a single shared characteristic given that, y’know, that’s kinda what gets done to me, and I don’t like it. Also, I was born at least a decade too late to get caught up in the Sex Wars. Hello from the third wave.
4. “You’re just bitter/triggered/biased because someone raped you.” Actually, no. I’ve never been raped or sexually assaulted. I am one of those fortunate women—and how awful that one should have to be fortunate in living to their mid-thirties without being raped. Hey, I’m not saying nobody’s ever tried. If you have a spare day or two, I could list you the many, many times I’ve had guys (always guys) attempt to get me drunk, try to corner me in a room alone, or flash me in a subway station. There’ve been so many I’ve lost count—and I’m hardly exceptional in that regard, and my stories are hardly the most dramatic. Certainly I’ve had plenty of non-consensual touch inflicted upon me, including in kink spaces. But nobody’s ever managed to get it any further than a single unwelcome move. Whether because my big bad scary dominance has given them pause, or my strategic escapes have left them in the dust, or my physical self-defense has been enough to show them there be dragons there (or just really sharp fingernails), or I’ve just been plain lucky, I don’t know, but suffice it to say I have no directly personal triggers in relation to the topic of rape. That all being said, if you’re going to disqualify someone from speaking about rape precisely because she or he has been raped, I’m seriously not impressed. If you follow that logic for a step or two, what topics of significance to you are you no longer qualified to speak about? I bet the list would get long awfully quickly, so let’s quit while we’re ahead, hmm?