on ecstasy March 12, 2012

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.”

privilege, guilt and the global politics of the sexually different September 11, 2010

The following is a comment that was just left following my post “‘It’s Not About Sex’ and Other Lies.” It’s incredibly thought-provoking and so I wrote a long response to it, and then I realized that really this should be a post in and of itself.

So, for starters, here’s Marissa’s comment.

***

Thanks for sharing this speech; I was sent the link by a friend.

It expressed a lot of what I didn’t even know I’d been ruminating about!

I guess all I would like to add would be this, which of course goes without saying in some sense, but by the end of reading your post I felt it’s what I needed to comment.

I agree that we who are concerned about these things are doing beautiful and valuable work. Where I struggle, at times, is to see this work as _essential_, in the face of other shit going on in the world that is eroding people’s perhaps more basic (?) rights to food, shelter etc.

Now to hierarchy the needs of humans isn’t that useful. And we need serenity to accept the things we cannot change. I guess the least I can do is acknowledge my incredible blessings/fate/grace/luck that in my world, one of the most difficult things right now is coming out as poly to my family and friends. Not, what to eat or how the fuck to access drinking water.

How do queer, kink, poly etc communities place themselves into the global community which includes: pogroms, malnutrition, all kinds of real exploitation?

I spoke recently to a woman who has been working for over a decade at the local women’s refuge. She takes a zero-tolerance approach to violence. She sees where people allow other people to be violent to them as the beginning of the end; opening themselves up to the risk of non-consensual violence. I know this to be true, but I choose to take the risk. Am I willing to jeopardise her work and message by making my point?

One of the things I struggle with is how to prioritise my own commitment to breaking this shit down, for myself and in the way I live my life, over other kinds of “goods” (e.g. being quiet when it’s not the right time to bring this shit up). How tolerance to the mulitvarious expressions of self that we predominantly see in the relatively affluent part of the world connects with those communities of people who simply don’t have the energy to care about this shit right now.

I don’t think that the kink etc some of us experience is a “more advanced” form of civilisation. I don’t believe, for example, that once societies have a guaranteed basic income, they will as a matter of course, in the fullness of time, have and want the kinks that other societies now have and want.

Meaning to say, I do not expect that societies of people that do not obviously include people who express kinkiness, queerness, poly-ness, whatever either (a) actually do have people who are “like me” / “like us” about these things already in secret, or (b) include any people who will ever want to embrace my understandings of these things.

And despite that non-expectation, the “beautiful and valuable” work of which you speak here I think can resonate and connect with those who don’t even care or want to be queer or poly. Because what we’re really talking about, as you say, is having the room to explore the possibilities of whatever the fuck we want in a base-line consensual level (i.e. at the level that it counts, for us).

In that sense, we commune across kink, across cultures. We find this other community which includes straight / non-kinky people, people who don’t particularly want marriage for love let along sex for kicks, people who are too tired or thirsty for any kind of non-necessary physical activity, but who are nonetheless open to being tolerant… even if not actually tolerant at the time.

I’m not sure what my point is. Just teasing some of my thoughts out, I guess. More or less a variant of a t-shirt slogan I would love to paint up one day: “My family emigrated to a western county and all I got was this lousy white liberal guilt.”

***

And here’s my response…

***

Hi Marissa,

Thanks for your thought-provoking comment.

I totally hear you on the questions you’re raising. Sometimes as a sexuality activist and thinker, I find myself wondering if everything I do is all just a form of Western indulgence brought about by my comparatively huge amount of privilege.

And yet… it’s also not that simple.

You asked, “How do queer, kink, poly etc communities place themselves into the global community which includes: pogroms, malnutrition, all kinds of real exploitation?”

I don’t necessarily think there’s one simple answer to this. Except that I know so many queer people, as well as (and overlapping with) kinky and poly people, who are super attuned to social justice here and internationally and who actively work toward making the world a better place way beyond the bounds of sexuality-based communities. Queers are often at the forefront of anti-oppression and international solidarity work, among many other areas. Is it because of their sexuality? Probably not in any direct way, but I can’t help but think that for people who have a really embodied, personal sense of justice and injustice—as sexual minorities often do—it is not a stretch to forge links between that and wider understandings of justice and injustice. I’m not saying all queers are heroes by any stretch, nor all poly or kinky people, but it’s worth thinking about these links nonetheless.

Beyond that, it’s also worth noting that while the terminology, history and social context may be quite different in different countries, same-sex desire and practice, multiple partnerships and non-normative sexual behaviours are not “white things” or things that only happen in North America. I do understand that when someone’s in the middle of a war or a famine, they probably are more interested in escaping violence and getting food than in debating the merits of polyamory or practicing their bondage knots. But from there to thinking that the rich tapestry of human sexual possibility only ever unfolds in peaceful, well-fed and privileged contexts is far from accurate, and to think otherwise denies an essential component of humanity to people from non-Western countries. (It’s not that I think you’re doing this, Marissa, I’m just on a roll here…)

Same-sex-loving and gender-transgressing people (who are sometimes one and the same, and sometimes not) face severe persecution all over the world. Non-monogamous partnerships are common in some cultures, sometimes in ways that are oppressive and sometimes in ways that are not, and (more often than not I suspect) sometimes in complex layers of the two within a given situation; also, a wide range of different types of non-monogamy are often present within a single geographical or social context. (We see that here in North America too, with hip urban swingers’ culture existing a short flight away from hyper-strict Mormon polygamist sects, for example.) For that matter, resistance to both enforced non-monogamy and enforced monogamous marriage is also present in all sorts of places and cultures—the essential piece here being about the right to choose the kinds of relationships that suit us each best regardless of what a given society prescribes.

And while the imagery and language of kink (as it is more or less formally understood) has evolved in a very specific context here in North America, and thus has taken on specific and recognizable forms here, I can’t imagine that we’re the only ones enjoying a wide range of intense bodily sensations, engaging in emotional experiences of vulnerability and control, or eroticizing objects and body parts outside the narrow range of what’s socially approved in any given culture, time and place. It’s entirely possible that in many places across the world, such practices take on extremely different forms, and may be subject to more, less or different types of social opprobrium.

I like how you put it when you wrote, “I don’t think that the kink etc some of us experience is a “more advanced” form of civilisation. I don’t believe, for example, that once societies have a guaranteed basic income, they will as a matter of course, in the fullness of time, have and want the kinks that other societies now have and want.” And I definitely like how you expressed, “I do not expect that societies of people that do not obviously include people who express kinkiness, queerness, poly-ness, whatever either (a) actually do have people who are “like me” / “like us” about these things already in secret, or (b) include any people who will ever want to embrace my understandings of these things.”

But I’d take it a step further even. I’d say that societies all over the world already do include people who transgress the social norms for sexuality and relationships—and those transgressions may not look, in the sense of surface-level visual or linguistic cues, much like the ones we engage in here (though certainly some do). So maybe in those cases we just don’t know what to look for, or can’t see them. Or maybe those transgressions have not led to the development of subcultures dedicated to their practice (though certainly some have). So it’s not so much that people from “other” societies will ever want to embrace “our” understandings—I bet (and in some cases I know) that they’ve already got their own.

I’d venture to say that regardless of geographical location and specific cultural context, a few common themes come up all over the world. The powers that be—and in this day and age, after centuries of colonialism all over the planet, what part of the world is truly free of Western influence in this regard?—generally value certain kinds of genders, certain kinds of sexualities and certain kinds of relationships more than others, and punish those who fail to live up. Violence, coercion, repression, censorship and the like are still tools of oppression used to enforce those norms. People all over the world are told how they’re allowed to love, desire and partner, and what is okay to do with their own bodies vs what is not. These aren’t the experiences of the privileged; they’re overwhelmingly common, and they often come hand in hand with the cultural responses to war, famine and other forms of adversity. Times of war are often times of greatest fear, control and repression at home.

Here in North America, I’m articulating how I think about these things using references and language common to a specific set of subcultural communities, but the message I intend is simpler and, I hope, much more broadly applicable than that. So yes, I do think that doing the work to untangle people’s fucked-up understandings about love, pleasure, pain, fear, vulnerability, power and so forth is essential work, and I think that work has far broader implications and uses than simply to shore up the existing privileges held by (some elements of some) Western sexual minorities.

As for the woman with the zero-tolerance approach to violence, I don’t think you are in any way jeopardizing her work by making your point (or living your kinks, as the case may be). The equation of kink with violence is a deeply flawed and laughably simplistic paradigm that shows a serious misunderstanding of the subject at hand and a refusal to engage in the most basic of critical thinking. Kink isn’t violence, and it isn’t a slippery slope toward violence either. It’s a way of experiencing pleasure, sometimes (though not always) via bodily stimulation. Her equation of kink with violence only stands if she’s also going to consider “violence” to include all team sports (football, hockey, rugby) and all other forms of physical exercise and recreation (hiking, surfing, running, swimming, bodybuilding, yoga, spending time in the sun or the cold), all body modification (tattoos, piercing), many kinds of physical therapy (physio, electro-stim, deep-tissue massage), all direct and most indirect medical intervention (dentistry, surgery, bone-setting and casts, stitches, all drugs), most (if not all) forms of employment (emergency response services, mining, road work, food service, anything that involves lifting, moving or typing), most forms of transportation (walking, cycling, driving, flying), many forms of food and drink (alcohol, dairy, wheat, sugar, hot spice), various types of spiritual practice (fasting, pilgrimage, kneeling), pregnancy and childbirth, and all types of penetrative sex. In short, anything that carries some risk of discomfort or damage to the human body but in which we engage for a wide range of perfectly good reasons nonetheless.

If anyone engages in these activities—any of them!—due to coercion or force, then by all means, condemn the coercion wholesale. Same standard applies to any kinky activity. But if that’s not the case, (your acquaintance should) get over it already, and focus on preventing coercion and force where it’s actually happening rather than inventing it where it’s not. Creating false connections between happy, healthy, mutually pleasurable activity and real-life coercive violence only serves to diminish the very real experiences of violence that some people have, and to dilute the focus that should be placed on ending violence in the world.

Marissa, you say you “know this to be true,” as in, that by engaging in kink practice you are opening yourself up to the risk of non-consensual violence. But this is not “true.” You aren’t putting yourself at risk of non-consensual violence by being kinky, any more than you would be by dating or partnering with someone in a completely vanilla way, or for that matter, making friends with someone at a cocktail party. People don’t need kink to become violent. They just do it. Vanilla people beat up their partners all the time. Date rapists don’t need to dress up in leather and batterers don’t generally carry floggers. Sure, you’ll find those same elements in the kink world like anywhere else, but no more so, and possibly less. You can’t protect yourself by staying away from the kinky people, and you won’t put yourself at risk by spending time with them. You certainly won’t keep yourself safer by denying your sexual inclinations. If you never engage in them, you’ll never get to pick apart or experience how your desires truly work, or to talk about them clearly or express them, or to develop a bodily knowledge of what pleases you and what does not. (I’m not suggesting you’re doing that – as you have said you make the choice to do so – but as a general point this bears saying nonetheless.)

You can mitigate your risk by developing strong instincts about who to trust; by setting good boundaries; by acquiring strong communication skills; by working on the ability to say a powerful “no,” a meaningful “yes” and a detailed “maybe” depending on what you actually want; by learning how to avoid, and confidently defend yourself in, situations of physical assault (get comfortable with leaving a risky situation without apologizing or worrying that you’re not being “nice,” and get comfortable with screaming and hitting if you can’t leave!); and by participating in efforts to change the world’s consciousness about how it’s not acceptable to rape or sexually assault people. None of this will protect you from being attacked (anywhere!), but it sure will give you some valuable tools in interpersonal relationships and help you get out of sticky situations.

I totally get the temptation to get swallowed up in liberal white guilt. And yet, I think there are richer, more productive ways of engaging with the questions you so clearly articulate. The common theme underlying all your questions, I think, is agency. And I think that, if we bear in mind the broad range of realities, cultures and experiences that exist in the world, and act with as much consideration for that as we can at all times, we can both recognize agency, and the struggles for agency, in “other” societies and claim agency for ourselves in our own society without worrying that somehow our sexual and relational proclivities are somehow inherently oppressive to others. They’re not. There is room for all of us here.

“it’s not about sex” and other lies August 23, 2010

The following is the talk I gave this afternoon at the closing banquet for The Floating World, a supercool (and absolutely massive) sex-positive annual weekend conference in New Jersey. The teaser for the talk read as follows: “This is a talk about the lies we tell ourselves and the rest of the world. It’s a talk in which bullshit will be called, hierarchies challenged and strong statements made. It’s a talk about polyamory, and BDSM, and queerness, but above all, it is most definitely a talk about sex.”

***

Hello everyone. I’m very happy to be here, and I’d like to thank the organizers of Floating World for inviting me to come and present both tonight and throughout the weekend. You are an incredible group of people and I’m honoured to be among you. And I want to extend my congratulations to the people who make events like this happen. They are one helluva lot of work.

One of the things that makes this event unique is that it caters to such a wide variety of people on the sexual fringe. Of course that also makes it a little complicated to come up with a speech that will resonate, or potentially resonate, with everyone. But I like a challenge. So today I’m going to speak to you from my various perspectives all at once. Let me lay those out for you so that you know where I’m coming from.

I’ll do this in the order they showed up for me. So, for starters, I’m a kinky fuck. I’m sure that’s also true for many of you in the room. Me, I’ve known this since I was about two years old. I don’t necessarily buy into the “born with it” story, but at the same time, the first thing I ever knew about my sexuality was that my turn-ons were inextricably bound up with questions of power and pain. I’m not saying this to create a hierarchy in which I must be kinkier than you if I was masturbating to thoughts of torture when I was a toddler and you only figured out your kinks when you were fifteen or thirty or sixty. I’m just saying it because it means that to me, kinky came first, and I don’t know how to have sex any other way.

Next up? I’m queer. But I’m the kind of queer that sometimes upsets other queers. A lot of people use the term “queer” as a sort of 2010 version of “gay and lesbian,” maybe with a bit of genderfucking thrown in to mess with the binary (thank you Judith Butler). For me, queer is a question of mindset. I’m not particularly picky about the genitals of the people I’m drawn to—that’s just plumbing. It means that I tend to not find people attractive when they’re invested in the institution of heterosexuality (as separate from the practice, which can be lots of fun), or in a system that only includes two genders. I find the institution oppressive and the binary reductive and that shit gives me a limp dick.

Concretely, that means that both my gender and sexual practice are all over the map. And that map, in addition to all sorts of gorgeous people who identify as female or as somewhere on the vast and beautiful trans spectrum, also includes male-bodied individuals who still identify as male. For some people, the boundary of queer still stops at homosexuality. As in, you no longer really count as queer if you have sex with someone who’s of the “opposite” sex. But believe you me, when I’m in bed with one of those, what we’re doing is still deeply, deeply queer. And not only if I’ve got my cock down his throat or I’m dressing him up in my lingerie, although that’s fun. Even if we’re in the missionary position.

I’m also a trans ally. For me that does not mean automatically seeing trans people as a subset of the queer population. Why? Because some trans people are straight. In Ontario, the Canadian province where I live, a survey was recently carried out that collected 87 pages of data each from nearly 450 self-identified trans people, which is the largest and most comprehensive survey of its kind. You wanna hear a fun figure? It showed that 35% of trans people identified as straight or heterosexual. That tells us two things. First, it tells us that one-third of trans people, at least in Ontario, aren’t queer. They’re your average straight person who happens to have been born in a body that didn’t match their sense of themselves. But it also tells us that 65% of trans people do identify as something other than heterosexual or straight—gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer, questioning and more. This becomes relevant when we look at the kind of transphobia that still comes up in the queer world. You know, the one that likes to call itself GLB…T. I wrote an article on the initial results of the survey for Xtra, the national queer newspaper. And the reader comments that came up after the article—I just read them this morning—and they made me incredibly sad. One woman wrote, “Perhaps the trans community could come up with their own media so there can be some refocusing on our issue of sexual orientation.” I guess she missed the fact that 65% of trans people are, broadly speaking, some sort of queer. That makes “them”—or at least two thirds of them—into “us.”

I’m polyamorous. I am a member of a queer triad. For me, poly is a worldview and even a spiritual perspective, not just a way of doing romantic relationships. It informs the way I approach my friendships, my work, my community. But in addition to being polyamorous in the sense of having multiple loving relationships at once, I also engage in a broader kind of non-monogamy, meaning that I happily (very happily) play with and fuck people I do not love.

Now that last one brings me to the title of this talk, which is “‘It’s Not About Sex’ and Other Lies.” So the first thing I want to do here is unpack the idea of lies, because as a person who values honesty and trust above all else, I do not use that word lightly.

I think that when people lie, it’s generally for a specific reason. Omitting the compulsive liars out there, who simply do it because they always do, I think we lie because we think it will get us something more quickly or more easily than telling the truth. So when we say “that dress looks great on you” when it doesn’t, we’re doing it for a few benefits. First, it keeps a relationship smooth when a different answer to that little question might have made it rocky, in the moment; it allows us to avoid unpleasant conflict. Second, it allows us to make someone feel good. Third, it allows us to look good ourselves—“look, I’m such a nice guy, I’m giving a compliment.”

Now, I still don’t advocate lying about a partner’s dress, but even so, I can admit that it’s a relatively small matter to by lying about. But it still has consequences. It might keep a relationship smooth in the moment, but if the person who’s being lied to realizes there’s a lie going on, it erodes trust. If I look in the mirror after receiving a compliment of that sort, and I realize that there’s actually a chocolate stain on my dress, or the seam is straining because I gained some weight, I will start to wonder why my partner didn’t just say so—I asked because I wanted their opinion, not because I wanted to have my ego coddled. What else might they be lying about, if something so small and simple is approached that way? And how will we ever learn to deal with our conflict points if we avoid them? Beyond that, while that lie may have made me feel good in the moment, it’s a very hollow kind of way to feel good; and if it made the liar look good in the moment, well, that only lasts as long as the lie isn’t exposed.

If we take that model for the benefits of lying, we can start to see why some of our lies are a tempting strategy, but we can also see why that strategy starts to fail.

So what are the lies I’m talking about?

Well, let’s start with a simple one, and one we’ve probably heard a lot: “Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, queer people are just like everyone else.”

Okay, on some level this is true. We’re just like everyone else in that we’re human, we eat food and breathe air and drink water and shit poo, we work and play and rest, we have dreams and ambitions and challenges like anyone else. Fair enough. But when people say this, they’re usually trying to make it seem as though you could just take the average nuclear family photograph, remove the male half of the couple, insert a female replacement, and proceed, with all other assumptions intact.

And I argue that we absolutely can’t do that. Doing that, or trying to, erases all the realities we live in. For starters, we live in a culture that’s heavily weighed down by misogyny—by the hatred of the feminine and the female. This doesn’t mean we have seen no progress, because we certainly have. But just listen to the way we talk. You throw like a girl. What are you, a sissy? That’s so girly. You’re such a pussy. This language is available to us because no matter how individually progressive we may be, our culture still devalues the feminine.

Our culture devalues the feminine and sees it as the necessary counterpart to the masculine; the feminine is the background against which masculinity defines itself. A man is only a real man when he’s nothing like a woman. The people who hate queers hate us because our very existence challenges that little set-up. If a woman can be substituted for a man in the picture, or a man substituted for a woman, then the whole precarious structure starts to fall over. Which should have us asking: if the structure is that fragile, why are we buying into it in the first place?

Any strategy that tries to pretend we’re all alike is a strategy that only works in a vacuum, and ignores all the many issues that we face, as queers, which make our lives and our experience extremely different from the rest of the world. I come from Canada, where same-sex marriage has been a fact of life for several years now, and you know what? It didn’t solve all our problems. It just made certain privileges easier to access for people who generally had a lot of privilege in the first place.

Kids still show up at the queer street youth drop-in that my boy runs because they’ve been kicked out of their homes for being queer or trans or both. Doctors are still under-educated about some of our most basic sexual practices and the risks they may or may not include, like, say, cunnilingus. Queers, alongside many other groups with legitimate political agendas, are still brutally assaulted by cops and jailed for peacefully protesting, as we saw in the recent G20 mess in Toronto which featured the country’s largest mass arrest in decades. Our health is still affected by the strain of living in a homophobic world, with queer people facing much higher rates of smoking, depression and other issues. Written words and images that depict our sexualities are still censored, underfunded and suppressed. We’re still harassed at work and bashed on the streets.

And that’s just the bad stuff. As a grad student working in the realm of history, I can attest to the incredibly rich and textured past of queer people and queer cultures. It’s a mistake to look into the past, see evidence of same-sex experience and simply equate it with the stuff we get up to today. But at the same time, that history represents the precedents of a culture that many, if not all, queer people still participate in today. The current renaissance of butch-femme identities among dykes, for example, is exactly that—a renaissance. It’s not new. People have been doing it for decades, if not centuries. And we take what we know of our pasts and we blend that with the cultures and technologies and ideas we have today in creative ways every day; that past merges with the present and informs how we understand ourselves and how we create new ways of being. Today’s butch and femme are not the butch and femme of 1942, much like today’s drag queen is not New York’s fairy from 1890. But our identities in 2010 could not exist without the ones that came before us. We have a complex history that informs a complex and evolving culture. And while that history and that culture may not resonate with every person out there who’s interested in having same-sex sex, we can’t dismiss it as the realm of just a few isolated people, either.

When we say that “queers are just like everyone else,” we erase that history. And you know, if you’re not into history, that’s your prerogative. But in saying such things, we also erase the present. We erase the fact that our health, our families, our work situations, our communities really do have distinct characteristics and distinct challenges. And in erasing those challenges, making like they’re not important or notable or worthy of mention, we’re doing the homophobes’ job for them. We’re buying into their system—a system into which we can only truly fit if we erase enough of ourselves that we don’t even really exist anymore.

I’m going to move on to some other lies now. I’m going to talk a bit about the lies we tell in the BDSM and leather communities.

One of the lies I hear a lot, particularly in intro-level BDSM books and classes, is that “BDSM is not about pain.” That one comes hand-in-hand with a couple of others, so I’ll try to tackle them as a package. That package includes the lie, “It’s not really real, we’re just role-playing.” And there’s also my perennial favourite, “Everything we do is consensual.”

Now let me say up front that I definitely know people for whom BDSM really isn’t about pain. They don’t like pain, and not even in that I-like-what-I-don’t-like sort of way. And I also definitely know people for whom BDSM is all about the role-play. They want to be puppies and ponies and dirty uncles and little girls and nasty mobsters and pirates and wenches and Catholic schoolgirls and nuns, and all kinds of other crazy shit. They’re awesome and beautiful and sometimes they’re absolutely the life of the party.

But I would argue that even if these things are true for some of us, the fact that they’re not true for all of us means that using those statements is a problematic way of explaining ourselves to the outside world. It sets up a situation where we take the most palatable forms of kink—the kind that doesn’t really hurt, that isn’t really risky, and that’s all just a big game of let’s-pretend—and we put that forth as an explanation of how really, in the end, we’re not actually perverts, we’re just, y’know, creative types. Who like to dress up in shiny things sometimes, and play, like theatre, and isn’t that fun?

That means we’re setting up a hierarchy in which the people who are the furthest out on the fringe—the full-time master/slave couples, the people who get off when they’re being tortured or humiliated, the people who do heavy body modification or highly risky play, are the bad guys. The weird ones over in the corner there, who make the rest of us look bad.

I know that when I see a 101 manual that tells the rest of the world, and even the freshly hatched kinksters coming into my communities, that we don’t really enjoy pain, I feel erased. I feel as though I’m being told that my kinks are things I should be ashamed of. They’re not fit for public consumption. They’re weird and dangerous and they’re most certainly not good PR.

I call bullshit. I want it to be up-front and centre that while some of us are not interested in pain at all, some of us definitely are. That we’re working to dismantle the emotional, cultural and even medical and legal understandings of pain and hurt and harm, that we’re exploring and disentangling and recoding the meanings we place on the experience of pain, that we’re doing that work with our minds and our bodies and our spirits and our sexualities, and that this is beautiful and valuable work.

Same goes for this question of role play. For some people, getting to be someone they’re not, for a little while, is a great relief. Or hell, it’s just fun. Plus, the costumes are fabulous. For some of us, though, our kink is not about escapism, or about taking on a persona that’s an exaggerated or narrowed version of ourselves; it’s about intensification, deepening of who we are. It’s about broadening that into our daily lives. It’s about everyday power management inherent in ongoing D/s and M/s relationships, and the challenges of doing that ethically, humbly, in relationships with people with whom we take our power dynamics well outside the container of a focused scene space.

Those of us who do full-time M/s relationships are often both admired and reviled in the kink scene. Some people see full-time M/s as the be-all and end-all of what it is that we do; the pinnacle, the thing we all dream of and fantasize about. Others see it as inherently unhealthy, codependent, abusive, dangerous and probably a little bit crazy. Or maybe a lot crazy. Now, I am the last person who’ll try to convince you that there’s no abuse in the kink scene. There is, absolutely. There’s also a lot of simple ineptness, and human error—which of course has increasingly serious consequences depending on how intense the risks are. But that’s not the same thing as saying that M/s is bad.

At the same time, I’m not interested in creating a reverse hierarchy, where the cool kids are the pain sluts, and the more you can take the hotter you are. I’m not interested in making fun of the non-pain people as lightweights or as not really kinky. Not in the least. And I’m also not interested in saying that the M/s people are better than the D/s people who are better than the role-players. This isn’t a question of worth. It’s a question of each of us having our own perfectly valid kinks, that bring their own perfectly valid challenges with them, and their own perfectly valid pleasures.

What I am saying is that as we intersect with a world full of people who don’t yet understand what we do and who we are, we aren’t doing ourselves any favours by putting on a good face and only trotting out the kinks and the people who are easiest to digest. No real understanding can come of it. Much like if I went out in a dress with a chocolate stain on it, someone will eventually notice that something’s not quite right. People will notice that they’re not getting the whole story. It makes us look duplicitous and insincere. It alienates people from each other within our communities as much as it misrepresents us to others. It doesn’t build trust.

I think we also fail to build trust, both within our communities and outside them, when we insist that everything we do is consensual, and stop the discussion there. I’ve often said that for me, consent is the baseline, the sine qua non of anything I do—and I’m not talking about kink. I’m talking about life. I’m not going to drive someone’s car without permission and negotiation any more than I would have sex with them or spank them without permission and negotiation. I bet most of you feel the same way. So now that we’ve all established that we’re human beings with generally good intentions, let’s talk about reality.

In reality, consent is messy and complicated. We communicate to the best of our ability and there is still misunderstanding, unexpected circumstances, emotions we couldn’t have predicted, sensations that feel different than they did last time. Relationships shift, words don’t mean the same thing to everyone, risks come up that we hadn’t accounted for. I am not bringing any of this up to justify non-consensual behaviour. My point is that we hide behind this idea that what we do is consensual when it’s actually a really poor shield. So rather than talking about consent, I’d rather talk about communication skills, listening skills, awareness, education, informed choice about risk. These are human concerns common to any kind of relationship, and in that sense, BDSM is not different.

Beyond that, I take issue with the idea that we insist so strongly on the concept of consent BDSM because I think it puts us on the defensive and lets the vanilla world get away with appearing to be problem-free. The reason we have grasped onto consent so strongly is because we’ve been told that our practices are hyper-risky and freaky and frightening. It’s almost like we’re seen as monstrous, so we must need to build extremely strong cages to contain ourselves. And you know, in some cases, that’s accurate. Some of us do engage in pretty risky play, and I absolutely support the idea that as your risk level goes up, so should the care you take toward safety and the intensity of your negotiation and the depth of your awareness and the weight of your consent.

But you know what? The real monster is way, way bigger than the blood players and the erotic asphyxiation fetishists. The truth is that plain old body-to-body sex is risky. If I flog someone, I do not run the risk of getting them pregnant. If I tie them up, I am not going to transmit hepatitis C. Face-slapping and verbal humiliation are highly unlikely to infect anyone with HIV. But having standard-issue penis-to-vagina sex—now that shit can kill you! And it’s often some of the most poorly negotiated, least talked about and questionably consensual sexual behaviour out there on the market. So why, exactly, is the onus on BDSMers to be more consensual than everyone else?

So I’m interested in having realistic conversations about what we get up to, both within our communities and when we’re doing our PR. I’m interested in turning the tables when people think what I do is terrifyingly risky and that it requires special skills to navigate well. I’d rather challenge the whole world develop the kind of skills we spend so much time working on in the BDSM world, because what the rest of the world does can itself be terrifyingly risky, it’s just not acknowledged as such. I’d rather tell everyone having any kind of sex or play or relationship to engage in the kind of risk assessment and safety approaches we think are important, rather than holding that feature of our communities up to justify why we’re not actually really scary perverts after all.

I’m interested in putting out the kind of message that embraces the diversity of what we do and finds ways to communicate about it without being defensive. It’s about acknowledging that the BDSM, leather and kink communities encompass a full spectrum of people’s relationships to power and pain, and that we’re each on our own journey, and that we come together as a community—a loosely affiliated web of many sub-groups and sub-sub-groups—to help each other along on those journeys. I’m not interested in being admired for the extremity of my kinks on the one hand while being sanitized out of existence on the other. I am a whole person. I am a human being, like every one of you out there, who’s just trying to get it right, to live in a way that’s true to myself, to understand concepts and practices and people who aren’t like me, and to learn what I can from them and offer what I can in return. And I would challenge us, as a bunch of perverts who often do fetishize good communication, to find ways to communicate that to the outside world as such, rather than picking the easy things to explain and sweeping the rest of it under the rug.

Here’s another lie that’s been coming up a lot lately: Polyamory is not about sex.

Now, I can understand that on some level, there is a distinction between having sex outside the context of an ongoing romantic relationship, and having sex within that context. And of course, I would generally agree that it’s probably unhealthy to pathologically pursue empty, meaningless or compulsive sex with strangers that leaves you feeling used or worthless.

But once again, this kind of thinking is all about a weak defence tactic. People often seem to think that the only way to deal with clueless non-poly folks’ assumptions—i.e. that poly is ALL about sex, that sex must be the only reason to do polyamory—is to go too far in the other direction and say “it’s not about sex at all.”

In truth, poly relationships are as much about sex as any non-poly romantic relationship is—which is to say, a lot! This is not to diss the asexuals out there. But most of us are hardly making a claim to asexuality.

Beyond that, we’re certainly not having problems with anti-polygamy laws, multiple-partner immigration cases, child custody and society’s general prejudice for all those multiple *non-sexual* relationships we get into. The whole reason polyamory bothers people is that we’re having sex. Otherwise we’d just be a bunch of friends hanging out, and everyone does that.

Further, what bothers people about polyamory is that we’re having sex with multiple people and telling the truth about it. Because don’t you know, we’re supposed to be ashamed of it? We’re supposed to do it behind closed doors, when we’re working late or when our partner is out of town. The very concept that sex with multiple partners could be a shameless, accepted, encouraged part of our lives is terrifying to anyone who wants to keep it hidden.

Of course sex may or may not be the first or even the most important thing we seek out in a romantic relationship. Real life does happen, and partnerships don’t last if they’re built on sex alone; we are, of course, whole human beings. We want to spend our lives with people who get us, with whom we can share a home harmoniously, and with whom we can enjoy dinner and a movie and a good conversation and maybe a vacation once in a while. But from there to saying we’re not here for sex is simply not true. And it’s a very shaky tactic to be employing when we are trying to explain ourselves to the world.

Another related tactic I’ve seen is when poly people (and non-poly people, for that matter) dress up sex in spirituality as though somehow that makes it less dirty. This is not to say that spirituality is bad. I truly believe that sex can be sacred, that sexual energy moves through our bodies in ways that can open us to the divine, that the body can be a path into the spirit. At the same time, I am often uncomfortable with the messages that I hear in sacred sexuality circles. I hear language that’s about honouring and embracing and celebrating, when in fact it sometimes feels more like it’s about excluding and judging and refusing to see the diverse ways that people engage with spirituality in their sex. Janet Kira Lessin is a leader within the World Polyamory Association, and a tantric sex coach. I’ll quote an essay she wrote about three years ago, just to give you an idea of what I mean:

“Even though we respect & embrace our sensuality, we are not swingers or polysexuals, so we don’t focus on the sexual or disrespect the very essence of sexuality & all its glory. We aren’t swingers, so we don’t use swinger terms & for the most part, most polyamorous people would never use the words… slut, whore, queer, fag etc. These are derogatory & demeaning to a person’s character plus in no way to these words have a positive meaning behind them. We use the words “love”, “long term relationships” & commitment when we talk. We aren’t crude, rude & talk about sex 24/7.”

To me, that sounds incredibly holier than thou. That tells me that she and many people who think like she does really want to draw a line in the sand in which the sluts, whores, queers and fags are on the outside, and the spiritual and loving polyamorous people are on the inside. It’s okay to talk about love and relationships, but it’s not okay to talk about sex. It’s okay to use words like “share” or “sacred” or “spirit” but not to use words like “fuck” and “beat” and “suck.” It’s spiritual to commit to someone, and profane to cruise. I’ve heard that kind of hierarchy in other places and I don’t trust it for a second. My relationships are sacred and my sex is spiritual, but my polyamory does not happen on the other side of a fence with the freaks and sex radicals safely at a distance. I am a queer. My community is made up of sluts and whores and fags. Those people are not “them,” they are “us.” And whatever our sexuality looks like, it’s just as legitimate as that of the people who choose to follow traditional Tantra or any other sex-positive spiritual path.

Beyond the question of spirituality, it seems like there’s a subset of poly folks who are so intent upon the “purity” of poly that they forget—or would like to forget—the natural human instinct to fuck, committed relationships or no. Sometimes sex is deep and meaningful, sometimes it’s superficial and fun. Sometimes it happens in the context of a 20-year-long marriage, sometimes it happens with a person you’ve known for 2 hours and will never see again. Sometimes it’s rough and fast, sometimes it’s sweet and sensual. Attributing validity to only one kind of it, and only then behind closed doors and closed mouths, only serves to alienate the people who are proudly poly and do their sex in other ways (often in addition to, not instead of, the long-term committed kind), and to dismiss the incredible richness and power of other kinds of experiences.

Speaking for myself, I can say that some of the most amazing, affirming and life-changing sexual experiences I’ve ever had have been with people who were not my committed partners. The first woman I ever kissed, I spent one night with and never kissed again. (Of course we’re dykes, so we’re still in touch on Facebook ten years later.) I learned to ejaculate because a guy I had a one-night stand with told me he could feel that my body was ready to do it, and explained how he could tell. I found out just how much I love the attention of foot and shoe fetishists because of an exquisite one-time-only scene with a male submissive—the first person to ever treat my body from the knees down as though it were the most beautiful part of me rather than focusing on my tits and ass. I had my first taste of D/s service in a scene I did with someone I’d just met while I was on vacation in a different country, and that set me on a path of D/s and M/s relationships that has continued ever since; today I have a wonderful leather family made up in some part of my former submissives and their constellations, and I’m the owner of an amazing boy in an M/s dynamic that, ten years ago, I never even dreamed was possible.

I can think of much more productive conversations to be having. Rather than talking about how non-sexual and committed and really non-threatening we are as poly people, I’d rather talk about the kinds of ethics we try to bring to our relationships. From there, I’d like to talk about how to extend those ethics to every kind of relationship we have—how to treat a casual sex partner with as much respect and care as we would a long-term lover, how to take all those amazing communication skills we try to develop and put them to use in navigating temporary connections with as much grace as we do multiple-partner living situations.

I realize that I come to my poly from a place of queerness, where because of a long history of oppression, of being told our sex is bad, many of us hold onto and defend the beauty of our sexuality with great ferocity. I come to it from a place of kink, where we spend tons of time talking about how to play and have sex in ways that feel good to us. But whether you’re kinky or queer or poly, all of the above or none of the above, I invite you to join me in refusing to buy into any variety of “sex is bad” or “sex is less than,” no matter whose mouth it comes out of. Whether it’s conservative lawmakers, or our intimate partners; the American Psychological Association or our community leaders; the Religious Right or the sacred sexuality proponents.

When we sanitize who we are and try to present the “best” face, we’re actually creating a hierarchy that doesn’t reflect who we are and that pits us against each other instead of against the people who try to tell us that how we live is shameful. When we do this as a community, it’s the same thing as when we do it individually—de-gaying your house when your aunt visits, or pretending your second partner is just your roommate when the neighbour’s around—and it hurts us individually just as much.

I think if there’s anything I want you to take away from this talk, it’s to question the easy defensive statements we sometimes make, to avoid slipping into those lies, and to convey a richer and more complicated truth instead.

night owls unite! November 17, 2009

A friend of mine just posted this little gem on Facebook:

Dawn, n. The time when men of good reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer to rise at about that time, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach, and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it.

– From The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

Okay, so it’s all about men, but the sentiment applies nonetheless. Lemme give a bit of my history here…

As a child, I had a helluva time falling asleep – when I was nine, my parents actually took me to the doctor for it. Not because I slept poorly or had any health problems, just because I was wide awake at bedtime and would stay up reading well past lights-out, only to feel zonked the next morning. I remember my doctor, a very kind old man, poking and prodding and asking questions. His eventual prescription? “Relax. You think too much.” Thinking back, I’m glad it wasn’t worse. I didn’t know how to turn off my brain, and didn’t feel particularly anxious or anything, so I just got creative about hiding my wakefulness – angling the reading lamp, feigning sleep as soon as I heard footsteps approach, and so forth.

As a teenager, I found the early start of high school classes to be unbearable; nighttime was my wake time and rousing myself at 6 a.m. to get to class on time just about killed me. I remember doing early-morning exams some years where I literally fell asleep on the exam papers, the abrupt downward streak of pencil on the page proof positive that my body just did not want to be awake. I found creative ways to appear to be paying attention in class while actually napping. (Did you know that if you hold a book open with the bottom edge on your lap and the top edge against the desk, and slouch down, the angle of your downcast eyelids makes it look like you’re reading, but the position of your head allows you to nod off? Just don’t snore.) And yet, I aced my classes because I did my homework at night.

As a young adult I chose jobs in the retail and service industry and opted for the late shifts and evening jobs that nobody else wanted, working at movie theatres and closing up shop at stores and at the gym.  At CEGEP and I noticed that if I started a class before 10:30 or 11 a.m., I could just about guarantee that my mark would be at least 10% lower than any others; but because I got to pick my own schedule it was easy to make that problem go away. University was a similar boon to my body clock. Learning, apparently, can take place at any hour. What a relief!

Then I hit the corporate world. And while I loved my job, my boss had a really strong conviction that in order to be a good worker, I needed to show up at the crack of 8:30 a.m.  When that proved to be a major challenge for me – not helped by a long rush-hour trip from one side of town to the other – the resulting guilt-trips, employee review notes and general disapproval of my ways really took a toll on me; I felt unfairly attacked and judged, and as a result I ended up being really defensive and angry. It just didn’t make sense to me that the hour of the morning should have any bearing on whether or not I was seen as a good employee, when my numbers were demonstrably higher than average. Either way, if I showed up “on time,” I would stare slackly at my computer screen until 11 or so – not exactly prime production time. More strategies ensued. I brought in sweet orange oil to sniff. I’d take short walks to get my circulation up and force my body into wakefulness. I’d eat chocolate. (I spent a lot of time wishing I didn’t hate coffee so much, because it seemed to work for everyone else…) In the end, the time question was a major contributing factor in my eventual choice to leave; the strain of being misjudged really wore on me.

From there, I became a freelancer. Freelance writing clients don’t care if you do their work at 8 in the morning or 8 at night, as long as they get what they’re paying for. Yay! Plus, most people don’t want to take radical sex workshops at 8 a.m.

And once again, more recently, I have found a haven in university studies. At the beginning of the semester, I went to an early-morning class at which the professor was a no-show (argh), and so I took advantage of the trip to campus to drop in at several offices to get paperwork done – you know, signing up for insurance, figuring out payroll, paying tuition, getting a student card. At every office, there were barriers set up to channel people in long, winding line-ups, but at every office, I was the only one there. By the third office, I made a comment to the woman at the desk about how weird it was to see no line-ups. She peered over her glasses at me and announced acidly, “Graduate students do not get up in the mornings.”

These are my people!

And then… and then, another friend of mine posted a link to, of all things, a Wikipedia article about Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. And it seriously just about made me cry.

Apparently, there are lots of people like me, and the cluster of “symptoms” we all show are typically taken by those around us to mean that we’re lazy, no-good layabouts, or excessive partiers, or what have you. Read this excerpt:

Delayed sleep-phase syndrome (DSPS), also known as delayed sleep-phase disorder (DSPD) or delayed sleep-phase type (DSPT), is a circadian rhythm sleep disorder, a chronic disorder of the timing of sleep, peak period of alertness, core body temperature, hormonal and other daily rhythms relative to societal norms. People with DSPS tend to fall asleep some hours after midnight and have difficulty waking up in the morning.

Often, people with the disorder report that they cannot sleep until early morning, but fall asleep at about the same time every “night”. Unless they have another sleep disorder such as sleep apnea in addition to DSPS, patients can sleep well and have a normal need for sleep. Therefore, they find it very difficult to wake up in time for a typical school or work day. If, however, they are allowed to follow their own schedules, e.g. sleeping from 4 a.m. to noon, they sleep soundly, awaken spontaneously, and do not experience excessive daytime sleepiness.

The syndrome usually develops in early childhood or adolescence, and sometimes disappears in adolescence or early adulthood. Depending on the severity, it can be to a greater or lesser degree treatable. Prevalence among adults, equally distributed among women and men, is approximately 0.15% or three in 2000.

DSPS was first formally described in 1981 by Dr. Elliot D. Weitzman and others at Montefiore Medical Center. It is responsible for 7–10% of patient complaints of chronic insomnia. However, as few doctors are aware of its existence, it often goes untreated or is treated inappropriately. DSPS is frequently misdiagnosed as primary insomnia or as a psychiatric condition.

Now look at a few key concepts here. This is a “disorder” in which sleep timing is off kilter “relative to social norms.” Everything functions just fine if we are “allowed to follow” what works best for our bodies. It’s often “treated inappropriately” and is often “misdiagnosed (…) as a psychiatric condition.”

Further in the article…

It is conceivable that DSPS often has a major role in causing depression, because it can be such a stressful and misunderstood disorder. A recent study from the University of California, San Diego found no association of bipolar disorder (history of mania) with DSPD, and it states that there may be “behaviorally-mediated mechanisms for comorbidity between DSPD and depression. For example, the lateness of DSPD cases and their unusual hours may lead to social opprobrium and rejection, which might be depressing…” (…)

The fact that half of DSPS patients are not depressed indicates that DSPS is not merely a symptom of depression. Even in depressed patients, treatment methods such as chronotherapy can be effective without directly treating the depression.

And a bit earlier…

Working the evening or night shift, or working at home, makes DSPS less of an obstacle for some. Many of these people do not describe their pattern as a “disorder.” Some DSPS individuals nap, even taking 4–5 hours of sleep in the morning and 4–5 in the evening. DSPS-friendly careers can include security work, work in theater, the entertainment industry, hospitality work in restaurants, hotels or bars, call center work, nursing, taxi or truck driving, the media, and freelance writing, translation, IT work, or medical transcription.

Some people with the disorder are unable to adapt to earlier sleeping times, even after many years of treatment. Sleep researchers have proposed that the existence of untreatable cases of DSPS be formally recognized as a “sleep-wake schedule disorder disability”.

In other words, DSPSers do just fine when nobody’s getting on their case about their difference, but people tend to reject them socially or think they’re crazy, which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy in that exactly these issues can lead to depression. And not only that, but medical researchers want it to be seen as a disability. But certain professions are friendly to people like us – ones that allow a person to work alone or with fellow creatures who only come out during the shadowy times of the day.

Does any of this sound familiar, o sexual and gender transgressors?

Okay, I’m certainly not trying to say that the social disapproval and related stress of sleeping at odd hours is in any way equivalent to the experience of being queer or trans. But the parallels are astounding. I’m also a bit leery of grabbing onto the “disabled” label, but I admit it certainly might have come in handy when I was working with daylight creatures who could enforce very real consequences for my difference in this department. And I’m definitely leery about the medical approach to the whole thing. But y’know, maybe for some people, who are willing to invest in a lifelong course of treatment in the aim of becoming “normal,” it would have its advantages. As for me – I’m simply not interested in drugging myself for the rest of my life so that my hours look like those of your average rat-race office worker. Really, I’m just fine with being outside the norm.

The parallels are even further enhanced by Bierce’s quote above. His act of satiric redefinition echoes some of the strategies that queers so typically employ to defend our existence – camp, sarcasm, and the implication (accurate or otherwise) that something about our difference in fact might just make us superior, that we might, by virtue of our supposed ill virtue, have in fact found the secret to happiness. I hear tones of Oscar Wilde and RuPaul in here. And I’m reminded, on a somewhat more serious note, of the scene in the film Kinsey in which a young gay man – brutally assaulted by his brothers when they found him out – says to Kinsey, in a Southern drawl, “I don’t so much mind bein’ queer. I just wish everyone else wadn’t so put out bah it.”

Now, can you picture what a DSPS resistance movement would look like? We’d have candlelit protest marches. We’d come up with a glow-in-the-dark DSPS pride flag, and 24-hour diners would post it in their windows to attract the DSPS dollar. We’d lobby for flextime at our day jobs, and for the inclusion of our condition in the list of federally protected special-needs groups. We’d educate our kids about how Heather’s mommy might get up at noon and go to bed at three in the morning, but that we don’t call people like her “lazy,” we call them “differently slept.” Evolutionary psychologists would produce research to show that DSPS cave-people were highly valued and given special status because they kept watch over the fires at night and kept their tribes safe from nocturnal predators. And eventually, the movement would experience internal strife among the “moderate” and “severe” DSPSers, because meeting times would never be scheduled at the perfect time for everyone.

Okay, so I’m being deliberately silly here. My intention is not to mock all the amazing activism that queers and other groups do, not at all. But this isn’t an attempt to rally people to the cause of defending night owls from oppression either, per se – though I certainly have experienced it, and many others have likely had a far worse time than I.

I guess I’m trying to point out that societal response to individual difference, and the reactions of groups on the butt end of that societal response, are amazingly predictable. And while single-interest activism can be effective when you get enough people together, this kind of thing makes me wonder if perhaps, rather than opting for the currently favoured strategy of gathering as groups to push for equality, we should just try to expand our understandings of what “difference” can look like, and endeavour to be  bit more flexible, a bit more understanding, and a bit more welcoming of difference as a whole.

And on that note, now it’s 1:30 in the morning and I have an editing job to work on…

a disturbing equation, or, musings on masculinity November 9, 2009

Tonight, during his workshop at Venus Envy Ottawa entitled “FTM Sexuality,” Patrick Califia said something that gave me a new insight:

“Masculinity is constructed as this thing you can never have. It’s all about striving, competition. If you can lift 50 pounds, you’re supposed to keep working until you can lift 500 pounds. (…) That takes its toll even on cisgendered men, and on women, who have to put up with it.”

Fascinating. Masculinity as something that by its very nature you can’t ever actually attain. That would likely explain a whole lot of the anxiety some people feel around their masculinity – that it’s not enough to be strong, they need to systematically eliminating all traces of vulnerability; it’s not enough to be financially secure, they need to be constantly scrambling for more money; it’s not enough to be successful, they have to be at the top of their field; and it’s certainly not enough to be straight, they have to utterly abhor any sign of gayness, spurn any affection between men, ridicule any possibility of erotic or even aesthetic appreciation of other guys.

The idea certainly brings with it some troubling thoughts about the fear of femininity. And we all know that fear is a very close cousin to hatred, i.e., in this case, misogyny. If this constant striving for masculinity is pursued in some cases with such intensity, it implies a pretty huge fear of what might happen if one were to stop striving. What is so terrifying about femininity? Julia Serano certainly covers a lot of this ground with great eloquence in her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, and I don’t have it handy so I can’t quote her here, but I strongly recommend giving that book a read if you have a chance.

Leo Bersani takes a somewhat different angle on the same question in his essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in Douglas Crimp’s 1988 anthology AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, in which he makes the simple but eloquent statement that, at least in terms of how society tends to view it, “to be penetrated is to abdicate power” (italics his). He places that statement in a much more complex context than I have room to describe here – do read the article if you’re interested, it’s very thought-provoking. And while I do have some pretty pointed critique about his essay, I also recognize that his points ring true – essentially, he’s saying that because penetration is constructed as being a loss of power, men who are invested in their own heterosexuality (and, I would add here, masculinity) are terrified of the idea of being penetrated, and this terror turns to hatred, and that hatred is homophobia.

This terror about the possible instability of masculine or male power would also explain the homophobia of the Religious Right, whose entire concept is built on a top-down structure in which God is at the head of things, men are the next best thing, and women and kids are at the bottom of the heap. If the inherent power of masculinity – expressed most eloquently in the exclusive power to penetrate and the impossibility of being penetrated (i.e. classic heterosexuality) – is shown, in the act of homosexual penetration, to be very easily shattered, then it would make sense that they’d be very invested in suppressing and decrying that act as unnatural and sinful. And they’d also be very invested in promoting and supporting heterosexuality through all sorts of weighty institutions and cultural propaganda. In a big-picture, Freudian sort of way, the existence of homosexuality blatantly challenges the most fundamental tenets of the entire power structure, and shows it to be exactly as flawed as it very much is.

I would argue that in somewhat different form the same concept rears its head in the kink community, particularly in the actions of dominants and tops (of all genders) with fragile egos and in the way the community does not always treat its bottoms and submissives with respect. If dominance = power = penetration = masculinity, and one element of that equation is challenged, then the whole thing falls apart. And the complementary equation is that submission = powerlessness = being penetrated = femininity, then the whole situation does bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the problems with everyday masculinity, the politics of homophobia, society’s tenacity when it comes to the institution of heterosexuality, and the structure of the Religious Right. Yup. Uncomfortable indeed.

I know I’m extending the concept to a rather extreme degree – from individual emotional experience of a trans man to the oppressive politics of a major worldwide institution – but this extension certainly does line up with what Patrick said tonight. If masculinity is something ever-elusive, never quite solidly gained, always up for question, always needing to be re-secured and re-proven both by what one does and what one would never do, and yet that masculinity intensely valuable, even essential, to the most basic forms of social functioning and to retaining power for oneself, then the stretch is not a big one except in terms of numbers. Of course Patrick was making his statement in service of a talk about FTM identity and sexuality, where the elusive character of masculinity as we construct it can be quite poignantly discouraging in a personal sense, and can leave trans guys feeling like they’re never going to quite measure up. But they’re just the latest people to find themselves trapped in a structure – emotional, psychic, societal, religious, and more – that has trapped all of us for millennia.