Kink Fest; The Quotes Post

I'll write a big 'ol missive on the event later, I'm sure, but for now, here are some favorite quotes from the last day and half. Heard in classes, around the festival, and in the dungeon (no names posted, because I don't have anyone's permission, or even what some of their names are). From hilarious to quippy to profound, perverts say it all.

[from a presenter, on people arriving to his class on time] "I appreciate your radical acceptance of the schedule." 

"We cannot have power exchange unless everybody has power to begin with." 

[on suffocating someone with your hands, and using different smells (wasabi, fish sauce, scat) to make breathing unpleasant] "Some people, when they smell certain smells - they stop breathing. They're like 'fuck you, fine' and just stop." 

"You, darling, might be an asshole" 

"I had a partner who identified as a human ferret." 

[on being asked to bottom in a double penetration rape scene by five new-ish tops, in a lecture given by the bottom on how to play with new tops] "I was laying there, after they'd tied me down on my back, while they were trying to figure out how to put it in. And I was just sort of waiting. And then I suggested, gently "Hey, maybe the problem is the position of the bottom..." They flipped me over and got right back in. It was awesome." 

"But I said 'Sir' at the end, so it was all okay." 

[from a very shy person, in a lecture on negotiation for shy people] "I wore a name tag that said 'My name is ___, wanna fuck?' It opened up a lot of doors."

More details later! Now: on to further adventures!

Getting to Kink Fest: A Fable

I was pretty excited for KinkFest this year. Although I was going to be working four shows over the weekend (as per usual), I was probably going to do what I did last year: buy a ticket for Friday, go to the lectures during the day, shop around at the vendors, maybe check out the party post-show.

And then I lost my job. Which is another blog entirely, so we'll leave it at that for now.

I was (among many other things) both excited to have the entire weekend free, but also a bit hesitant, because my financial situation had changed with the loss of that job. So I looked up kinkfest, and what it would cost for the weekend.

And holy fucking floggers, batman. 185$?! Plus an extra 40$ if you wanted to attend the leather dinner on Friday evening, with the keynote speaker and the fancy schmancy attire?

185$ is almost exactly what I make in a week now. I can't spend that much money on anything other than rent, much less a luxury like a kink conference. I understand that these events cost money, and I believe that, could I afford to buy a ticket, I would definitely regard my money more than well-spent. But right then, it just wasn't an option.

Wait! Excitement! There are work study volunteer opportunities! I apply! I am excited! I'm a great volunteer, and have experience, and I sent them this blog, and although I'm not super active in the Portland community, I am enthusiastic and express such enthusiasm with grammar and punctuation! But not emoticons! Because I have standards!

A few weeks later, I get an email informing me that, unfortunately, I have not been awarded a workstudy. That there were limited spots. That they are sorry, but that they hope to see me at the event. I am saddened, but spend the afternoon moving money around, to see if I could maybe pay for a day ticket. Alas, no dice.

Another email the next day, from the Education Committee, telling me that if I still want to volunteer, I can volunteer to set up the lectures and classes (which are my favorite parts anyway). I extrapolate (and learn later: wrongly) that this means I can show up and attend just the parts I volunteer for without having to pay. I am excited again! There is hope! I write an e-mail back to Eddy (we'll call him Eddy), the Education Committee Coordinator, with my schedule preferences for working the lectures and my grammatically evidenced gratitude!

Eddy is very kind in his reply, but has bad news for me. Everyone must register for the event, and if I wanted to volunteer, I would have to buy a ticket for the weekend. I tell him "oh." I tell him "bummer." I tell him "thank you for letting me know," and still, I am enthusiastic, because Eddy really is very kind, and he offers to maybe help me get involved in other kink activities around Portland, which especially right now, with Jamie and my boyfriend out of town, would be a nice refreshing burst of fellow kinksters in my life.

We ping back and forth a few times.

And then, and then... and then he tells me, don't hold your breath, but oh, there might be a few more workstudies available! And oh, he has asked that maybe I get one, to help the Education Committee! And oh, the next day, an e-mail from Vicky (we'll call her Vicky), the Volunteer Coordinator of Kinkfest, saying yes, she is pleased, saying yes, I have been awarded a workstudy! Full workstudy!

Hurray!

So, there's a meeting on Saturday, of the volunteers. I'm really excited to go, and I'm really excited to volunteer (and there will, I'm sure, be much writing on this blog about kinkfest over the weekend).

But it was interesting, this whole financial process. Because there have been times in my life where yeah, a workstudy would have been nice, but not necessary. There are times when I would have applied, and been rejected, and somehow scrounged up the money to go anyway.

This just isn't one of those times. And it was interesting to see, in many of the emails (not Eddy's, but some other ones) how it seemed... optional? Somehow. How in the underlying message, there was a "we know you applied for this thing because you can't really pay for this, but just in case you can still: here are some options."

I'm not trying to criticize Kinkfest. I understand that continuing to offer opportunities to those who might be able to afford them is awesome, and they asked, in between emails about workstudy and further offers, if I still wanted to volunteer - it was overtly consensual, and finance-conscious. Rather, I'm reflecting on my own personal difficulties in having things offered to me, and not being able to take them for financial reasons. I am, for the first time in a little while, farther on the other side of the line; I am definitively more poor than I was a month ago.

It's not something I'm unfamiliar with, but in a way, I'm learning to be poor again. The timing of all this is remarkable, because not only has my financial situation shifted, but there's the kinkfest scholarship thing, as well as the graduate school scholarship thing. I'm getting acceptance letters (yup! two!), and in the same breath, they offer me spot in their program, and a letter saying how much money I'm (not) getting to go there. One of the schools I've been accepted to (ranked 24th in the country, wow) is already out because I can't pay for it.

But I'm learning to sit with it. I'm learning to trust that, along the way, the right school or the right festival will come along ("right" including the money aspect of what it is to be right for me). I'm not especially bitter about it. Money is just another factor, and this is just where I am right now.

Anyway, that was a serious digression into non-feminist non-kinky territory. Or maybe: thoughts about economic barriers in the kink world deserves it's own dedicated post.

To end on a more relevant note: I just read a Lee Harrington blogpost on "asking," which links to Amanda Palmer's recent Ted Talk on the same topic. Asking is good, asking is important, and like Palmer says, when you connect with people, everybody feels good about giving.

The Conflation Game

it's a pie chart! kink is the red. just 'cause.

I get pretty excited when kinky articles or posts pop up in non-kinky settings. Feminist blogs, or blogs of my friends, will occasionally feature kinky subject matter, and it puts my worlds together in a really great way. It's both that my sexuality feels less relegated to a dark corner of the internet, but also that it's somehow less pigeonholed, less quarantined (because even when kink isn't judged worse than... other aspects of being human, it's often very insular: people talk about kink in kink spaces, with kink people, and that's the only place it happens). Coming across it this way, it feels like part of a whole, an integrated whole, as opposed to a separate space.

I had a moment like this with a post by sex geek on feministing; the post is long, really long, but it does a good job of breaking down how the mainstream media talks about kink, and tackles a couple of recent and particularly egregious examples. One of my favorite of sex geek's points, and a thread throughout the post, is the conflation of kink and violence; or rather, the mainstream's choice to ignore how pivotal, and how essential, and what a cornerstone, and what-other-language-can-I-look-for-to-reinforce-this-point, consent is to the kink community (I've also written about this conflation before, from a more personal context, so I'm excited to see it getting discussed other places).

It's like the flour in bread, dudes; if you leave it out, you don't have "sorta kinda something like bread." You have water and yeast and sugar. Which is both gross, and very, very far from bread.

Priceless

Feminist textbooks, feminist theory essays, other reading material: a hundred-ish dollars.

Kinky hankies: ten dollars.

"this is what a feminist looks like" jacket: twenty dollars.

Finding out your father is a bigot and a shitlord, really and truly: fucking not worth it.

Frivolous or Pathological: The Options of Kink

Although I've written before about some things that irk me about Dan Savage, I keep listening to his podcast. Partly because he's says great things much of the time, and partly because, as a sex nerd, I like to listen to other sex nerds.

On his most recent podcast, a caller asked about whether power exchange was at the core of all fetishes, and remarked that he saw, under the wide umbrella of what we call deviance or kink or BDSM, common themes of power exchange, control, etc. I'm inclined to agree with him (and even to take it a step further: to say that sex, even the most obviously non-kinky sex, has elements of power exchange somewhere in there), although that's not exactly what I wanted to write about here.

Savage invites an author and researcher on the program to talk about the caller's question, one Jesse Bering. And the conversation didn't go the way I expected. Here's some of it, transcribed:

Bering: He's referring to sadomasochism essentially. I wouldn't say that sadomasochism is a common feature of all the fetishes or all the paraphilias. I think it's a... it's a subtype in itself. 

Savage: Don't you think that so many fetishes are, at bottom, about power and control and dominance? I mean, even a foot fetishist -   

B: Not really. 

S: No? 

B: I mean, I think the argument would have to made. I think there are foot fetishists that are also sadomasochistic, but I don't think they necessarily have to go together. 

[conversation veers into fetish as a term, etc., and how defining between "fetish" as a term is important]

B: But something that happens to sort of turn you on or makes your arousal more exacerbated is very distinct, very different from having sort of a clinically diagnosable paraphilia or fetish. Umm, so the terminology is slippery, but I think it's important as well. 

S: Okay, so if not all paraphilias and fetishes involve power, why is it that so many people's fetishes and kinks do involve power? 

B: Well I do think that the sadomasochistic component is a very strong one, and it does underly a lot of human sexuality, um, you know, typically, you wouldn't consider someone to be a sadist unless they're really sort of genuinely causing harm and distress to somebody who's not giving consent. I mean, they really take the pleasure in the fact that they're causing somebody else pain and suffering. But most people who are sadomasochistic, the sort of S&M, BDSM community, you know, they're sort of what John Money, a psychologist, called "velvet dragons." They're sort of playing with simulated pain. Very few people are sort of genuinely committed to the role of being a Sadist. Or, you know, they have limits to the extent to which they're agreeable to being the masochist in the interaction. Um, you know, a woman who's sort of biting into her husbands rear end and calling him a sissy little bitch or something like that, that's not really a sadist, that's sort of playful -  

S: But that's sort of an arousing power game, and so many people's kinks and paraphilias sort of tap into that, those arousing power games. Does that have something to do with the fact that we're just monkeys in shoes, or that ...[something I couldn't decipher]... we're deeply hierarchical primates,and playing with hierarchies, and flipping roles and inverting power dynamics is inherently arousing, gets the blood going? 

B: I do think that, I mean clearly what these types of interactions suggest is the eroticization of power differential, and you can change roles in the bedroom where it's... not as easy to do that, in your everyday life. So, I do think it's striking at some core feature of human sexuality, and getting into some animalistic aspects of our underlying psychology. And you know, you do find all sorts of variants of power differentials like this all across different societies and human cultures.

So first, I need to point out that Bering is using the term "sadomasochistic" in both a confusing and vaguely old-school fashion. As in the first printing of The Bottoming Book (of which I'm a proud owner) and many early books about kink, the term "S&M" or "sadomasochism" is used to refer to all things kinky; power exchange, playing with pain, sissy play, puppy play, whatever you want to put in that category. Now a days, with the coining of terms like "kink" and "BDSM," "sadomasochism" has, from what I can tell, returned to it's original meaning: namely, referring to sadism and masochism. Referring to pain. And while I think the history is probably where Bering got the use of his term, it's confusing when he conflates sadomasochism with power exchange, or general kink, over and over. He's not exactly wrong, so much as vague, and from someone who goes on to point out how important it is to define our terms, I find that sort of funny. Especially if when that someone is a sex researcher speaking as a guest on a show about sex.

Second, there's a polarization that happens in Bering's language, and it's pretty disappointing to hear it, especially from someone who's writing books about perverts. It's when Bering starts to talk about who's really a sadist, and characterizes the S&M that happens in the BDSM communities as "playing with simulated pain."

What he's trying to do, I think, isn't really so bad. Differentiating kinksters from scary sociopaths is great, and I understand that, in our current society, it's still a necessary distinction to make (to say nothing of the fact that it's true, we're not). But what happens, when Bering tries to say this, is that kink (the kink that's risk-aware, that's consensual) gets characterized as sort of meaningless. Bering uses words and phrases like "simulated," "[not] genuinely committed," "not a real sadist," (and I'll leave a rant about what makes a sadist "real" to the side, for now, although I think it's mostly that Bering's using a different definition of "sadist" than most sadists I know. Again, define your terms). I think there's a phrase pretty early on in the conversation that sums up an often unnoticed, prevalent attitude in so, so much of the mainstream view of kink.

"But something that happens to sort of turn you on or makes your arousal more exacerbated is very distinct, very different from having sort of a clinically diagnosable paraphilia or fetish."

Throughout the conversation, these are the two options that Bering offers: you can have a silly little fetish that "exacerbates" (as if sexuality some kind of rash) your arousal, or you can be clinically ill. If you choose the first, your interest in kink/a fetish item/power exchange can't really be taken seriously, or isn't really important, or is just playing and look at the goofy little kinkster. Choose the second, and you're ill, and there's something wrong with you, and you need help.

And this is the option given, if you've got kinky proclivities, by much of the world. I don't think Bering really meant anything by it, and it was great that Savage pushed him to explain why, then, power exchange is such a big part of human sexuality (or, in his own way, challenging Bering on his de-legitimizing language and attitudes). But I don't think that excuses pointing out the lack of a third option here, the option that I and many lovely perverts I know tend to choose.

That this way of expressing ourselves can, all at once, be deeply felt, serious, playful, emotional, honest, vulnerable, and healthy. That the presence of consent doesn't make the pain any less real (I mean, has Bering ever seen someone take a long, hard, consensual beating? There's nothing simulated about it), and that the "deviant" nature of this kind of sex doesn't make it any less than other kinds of sex.

Basically, that I can say: masochism and submission are essential parts of my sexuality, and that doesn't make me sick. Yes, I need this to really get off (chosen intentionally: need); yes, this is the most true way I can express myself sexually; and no, that isn't a problem.

As in a recent post (where I go more in-depth about silly vs. serious sex and kink) I'm not trying to say that any sex (much less all kinky sex) needs to be super duper serious all the time. I'm just saying that people who pontificate about how it can't be serious, or if it is, it must be a diagnosable pathology, need to shut up already. Because, as the abbreviations used above denote (and to go with the ever-present acronym tendency of the kinky world), that's a bunch of BS.

The Only Kind of Porn That's (almost) Impossible To Find

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