 
* * *

The S&M Feminist:

Best of Clarisse Thorn

FREE SAMPLE

Buy the longer version at:

<https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/166178>

**In paperback:** <https://www.createspace.com/3878670>

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Clarisse Thorn

Smashwords Edition

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clarissethorn.com

@ClarisseThorn

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This **free** ebook is copyright 2012 Clarisse Thorn. I certainly have mixed feelings about modern copyright law... but I've put an enormous amount of time and effort into my writing, and I make my living as a writer. So I ask you to please respect my time and effort, and observe copyright laws as they apply to this ebook. **This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form.** In other words, you're welcome to share it with your friends. Also, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation at  [http://eff.org ], a nonprofit that protects free speech on the Internet and does lots of awesome work around copyright issues.

Cover image copyright 2002 Clarisse Thorn.

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### Also check out Clarisse's awesome book

### Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser!

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There's a huge subculture of men who trade tips, tricks, and tactics for seducing women. Clarisse Thorn, a feminist S&M writer and activist, spent years researching these guys. She observed their discussions, watched them in action, and learned their strategies. By the end, she'd given a lecture at a seduction convention. This is her story -- and her theories about feminism and seduction to boot.

<https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/144451>

In paperback: <https://www.createspace.com/3830583>

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If you're afraid of pain, you have to find out what pain is.

~ Marina Abramovic

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I'd like to thank all the brave pioneers of the BDSM community, for exploring the reaches of human sexuality, and coming back with maps.

~ an unsourced quotation offered by one of Clarisse's blog commenters

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I think of Clarisse as the John Stuart Mills of sexuality.

~ one of Clarisse's ex-boyfriends

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People's ability to understand their own emotional and physical experiences and sensations is limited by what is safe to ask or know, what systems of interpretation they have received for screening that raw material, and whether they find it possible to connect with anyone who thinks differently about these matters.

~ Pat Califia

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Abuse of power comes as no surprise.

~ Jenny Holzer

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### Notes, Acknowledgments and Resources

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For this free sample, I chose 14 articles that I most wanted to get out there. But since I started my blog in 2008, I've written dozens of articles, and I'm not afraid to say that a lot of them are really good. You can buy the full _Best Of Clarisse Thorn_ on Smashwords here: <https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/166178>

It's available in paperback here: <https://www.createspace.com/3878670>

I had a privileged upbringing. My education and safety nets are the biggest reasons I'm able to do the work that I do, and I try not to forget that. I have been blessed with parents, friends, and lovers who have supported me both emotionally and intellectually. Since this is a "Best Of" my blog, I want to particularly acknowledge the commenters who have contributed their perspective to my blog, and the other bloggers who have responded to me and cross-posted my work. There are too many to name, but thank you all so much.

I try to keep my writing as accessible as possible. One way I do that is by avoiding jargon and by using terms that I think most people will recognize. I often write "S&M" instead of "BDSM," for example; and when I'm using technical S&M language like "top" or "bottom" or "scene," I try to define the words as I go along. But sometimes I slip into jargon by accident. Also, plenty of S&M terms are super useful, and giving a quick overview of S&M language can go a long way towards describing S&M culture. Hence, I have included a Glossary at the end of this book. Many of the terms in the Glossary aren't terms that I use in this book, but you might find it useful or interesting anyway. (I also included a few terms that come from other subcultures, such as polyamory or queer studies.)

I've received a lot of feedback over the years informing me that I'm the "gateway drug" into feminism for some readers. That's kind of cool, but I want to make it clear that if you're just now getting into feminism, there's lots of other stuff to learn before you draw any conclusions. Feminism is a huge, varied, rich movement with lots of history, schisms, and discontents. Also, in case it needs to be said, I'm not the only feminist who does S&M. There are others, some of whom love my work and some of whom disagree with me frequently.

One advantage of the blog format, as opposed to more traditional formats, is that each post can contain tons of hyperlinks -- and each article has comment space, so there can be fascinating discussions that explore each topic more deeply. (Of course, there can also be silly, boring, or offensive discussions.) As soon as a blog becomes moderately successful, it develops its own community of regular commenters, and mine is no exception. Facilitating and moderating these discussions can be amazingly fun and interesting. It can also be stressful and exhausting. As a commenter community evolves, it shapes how other people read the blog's articles and comment on them; sometimes the community will develop norms or tendencies that make certain people feel more comfortable -- or less comfortable. I've tried to control this with my blog so that it's a welcoming environment for most people, but I have such a diverse range of commenters that it's sometimes quite difficult.

I bring all this up because, if you're intrigued by some of the articles you read in this book, I encourage you to check out the original post. In this book, I've made a lot of hyperlinks into footnotes, but not all of them. More importantly, if you look at the original post, you can read the comments. But my commenter community has changed over time. Sometimes it's more feminist, for example, and sometimes it's less feminist. So just be aware, if you read the comments, that the range of opinions may not reflect any group that would assemble elsewhere on the planet; that a different community might produce really different comments; and that other articles might have really different discussions.

If you've already read my incredibly awesome book _Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser,_ then thank you! (Bonus points if you can pick out all the parts of _Confessions_ that I pulled verbatim from articles included in this book.) If you haven't read _Confessions,_ then please check that out, too. <https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/144451>

Paperback copies of _Confessions:_ <https://www.createspace.com/3830583>

I powered this ebook almost entirely with my own strangely obsessive energy, so you can blame me for any mistakes. If you find coding errors, broken internal links, or whatever, then I invite you to email me and let me know so I can update the file! I'm available at clarisse.thorn@gmail.com.

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BDSM Resources

BDSM is a 6-for-4 deal of an acronym that stands for Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism, and/or Masochism. Some people call it S&M, B&D, leather, fetish, or kink. BDSM can mean very different things to different people, and there are a lot of activities that can fall under the BDSM umbrella; such activities might include spanking, Master/slave role-playing, handcuffs, cages, rape fantasies, razor blades, or all kinds of other things.

I mention a lot of resources in the articles that I've included in this book, but I wanted to include an overview at the beginning, too.

Hands down, I believe that one of the most important resources within the BDSM community is the Kink Aware Professionals list. If you are seeking medical, legal or other professional help for a problem that is influenced by alternative sexuality, there is probably someone on the list who can help you. When I was going through my own complicated and difficult BDSM coming-out process, I tried two therapists from the KAP list. One of them didn't really get me, but the second was wonderfully helpful -- so, if you're looking for a therapist, don't be afraid to shop around until you find the right fit. The list is here:  https://ncsfreedom.org/resources/kink-aware-professionals-directory/kap-directory-homepage.html

Books

My personal favorite beginner BDSM books are _The New Topping Book_ and _The New Bottoming Book,_ by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy. If you look for those books on Amazon.com, you will also see a lot of interesting related books in the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section. I remember liking Jay Wiseman's _SM101,_ although I know some people who have mixed feelings about it; a number of people recommend _Screw The Roses, Send Me The Thorns_ by Philip Miller and Molly Devon, but I've never read it myself.

If you're thinking of coming out to a loved one, I recommend the book _When Someone You Love Is Kinky_ by Dossie Easton and Catherine W. Liszt. I've also heard good things about the "Parents of Alternative Sexuality" pamphlet by Dr. Amy Marsh.

If you, like me, are particularly attracted to the idea of needle piercing, there's a great book called _Play Piercing_ by Deborah Addington.

If you're more interested in getting a feel for common BDSM philosophies and what the BDSM community is like -- an anthropological perspective, one might say -- then there's a book by Mark Thompson called _Leatherfolk,_ and a newer one by Staci Newmahr called _Playing at the Edge._

Online

I usually direct total newbies to this BDSM 101 page by Franklin Veaux: <http://www.xeromag.com/fvbdsm.html>

As it happens, the same writer has a good Polyamory 101, too: <http://www.xeromag.com/fvpoly.html>

There are a lot of websites on BDSM, and they aren't all carefully edited or moderated; so if you can manage it, then I suggest you try to get hold of one of the above how-to books. That said... overall, one of the best online BDSM resources is FetLife.com, the kinky social networking site. Once you have an account, you can join a huge variety of discussion groups about BDSM. FetLife is not a dating site; it's more like a kinky Facebook (seriously). I think that there are important problems with how FetLife is structured. For example, there's no way to search for past topics, which is ridiculous; this means that the research process for finding discussions is incredibly weird. The BDSM activist maymay has written intelligently about many issues with FetLife: <http://maybemaimed.com/2011/03/20/fetlife-considered-harmful/>

But the fact remains that FetLife is a huge gathering place.

Another good online resource is the amazing sex education site Scarleteen.com. Scarleteen offers a ton of advice on a ton of sexual topics, and has its own message boards.

The site KinkAcademy.com has received some good reviews, and features video tutorials by some people who are pretty well-known in the community. You have to buy a membership, though.

The BDSM writer Ranai from Germany has labored long and hard to make an amazingly comprehensive, international, multilingual directory of kink resources. I haven't gone through it extensively, but every time Ranai comments on my blog she's brilliant, so I'm sure her directory is brilliant too. Here's the directory: <http://ranai.wordpress.com/kink-resources/>

There are so many BDSM blogs that I could never count them all. I want to direct special attention to Kink Research Overviews, an abandoned but still excellent blog that profiles the sparse and scattershot research on BDSM:  http://kinkresearch.blogspot.com/2009/10/welcome-to-kink-research.html

In Person

If you've decided that you want to start attending workshops, discussion groups, parties, or other BDSM events in person, please keep in mind that not everyone is going to mesh well with their local BDSM groups. If you don't like your local BDSM group, then don't force yourself to participate! That said, I generally encourage people to get into their local community, because it truly can be an amazing resource -- it's way more than just a place to meet partners.

If you make an account on FetLife, you may be able to join groups for your area (for example, if you live in Chicago, then you should look for Chicago groups), where local issues or events will be discussed and publicized.

For those aged 18-35, many major cities have branches of The Next Generation, a.k.a. the local "kinky youth group."

Otherwise, just Google around. It's much easier these days than it was for our parents.

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Lectures, Workshops and Events

I'm not just a writer -- I also give lectures and workshops, and organize events. Here's a short list of some of the lectures, workshops and events I offer:

* **Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser.** There's a whole subculture out there devoted to teaching men how to seduce women. Over the last few years, these underground "pickup artists" have slowly surfaced into the popular consciousness, with the help of bestselling books like Neil Strauss's _The Game_ and hit reality shows like VH1′s _The Pick-Up Artist._ I spent two years doing on-and-off research into these Casanovas. In this lecture I discuss my experiences talking to pickup artists, learning their techniques, understanding their community frameworks and norms, and eventually giving them tips on how to seduce women... all of which culminated in my book, _Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews With Hideous Men_. This presentation was originally created for a lunchtime talk at the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago, and I can deliver it in 90 minutes or less.

* **Leadership in the Bedroom: A Sexual Communication Workshop.** Down-to-earth tips and ideas on how to communicate clearly about sex. This workshop was originally requested by the University of Illinois at Chicago, but I've given versions of it at other venues as well. It was one of the first workshops I ever designed, and I'm currently working on streamlining it and making it more interactive. I can do it in an hour, but it's really better with two hours.

* **BDSM Overview.** Imagery deriving from bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadomasochism (BDSM) is becoming commonplace -- and we all know (or think we know) what a dominatrix is -- but most people don't have much idea of what BDSM actually involves. Although it is increasingly accepted as an alternative sexual orientation, BDSM remains surrounded by stigma, scandal and occasional legal action. This presentation covers the basics of BDSM (however, it's not a how-to lecture -- you aren't going to learn how to use a whip, though you'll learn where to go to find out!). I prefer to poll the audience to see what they want to cover on top of that -- BDSM history? cultural landmarks? BDSM & feminism? legal issues? I've got it all! I have given this lecture more than any other. It can be squished into an hour, but I prefer two hours.

* **Sex-Positivity for Everyone! Including the Mens!** What is masculinity or male advocacy as a movement, and how is it in dialogue with contemporary feminism? Can it be incorporated into feminism, or can the values of the sex-positive feminist community speak to its concerns? What does positive, productive talk about masculinity sound like? I talk about all this in a short lecturette and then facilitate small discussions on kinky male sexuality, men in the pickup artist community, and men who buy sex. This workshop was originally requested by the University of Chicago, and based on feedback from that experience and others, I have been adapting it. It should take about 90 minutes.

* **The Sex+++ Film Series at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and related film screenings.** I have now overseen many many screenings of sex-positive documentaries, and facilitated followup discussions afterwards. In the past I have done this primarily to accomplish my own activist educational goals or to raise funds for deserving institutions, but I'd be happy to run a screening or two upon request. Please note, however, that I don't own the rights to all the films I've screened, and so if you want me to run a screening for you, you may need to budget extra in order to cover the rights. I started the Sex+++ Film Series at Chicago's Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, and as I write this in 2012, the film series is in its fourth year. You can look at the film series calendar here:  http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/03/17/the-sex-positive-documentary-film-list-2011-2012/

I would certainly be willing to design a new workshop or lecture upon request -- in fact, two of the above events were created at the request of the institutions that invited me.

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### Table of Contents

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Here's a link to go back to The Very Beginning.

Here's a link to the Glossary.

Throughout this book, footnotes will look like links in the text. Click the link to go to the footnote. At the end of each footnote I've included a backlink to the context you came from.

I write both personal narratives, and cultural analysis. Almost all my writing mixes the two, but most of my pieces incline more towards one than the other. Accordingly, I've tagged all the articles in this book as either [storytime] or [theory].

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S&M [storytime]: Love Bites: An S&M Coming-Out Story

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Education [theory]: Liberal, Sex-Positive Sex Education: What's Missing

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Communication [storytime]: Sex Communication Case Studies

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Manliness [theory]: Questions I Want To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men

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Relationships [storytime]: Chemistry

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Feminism [theory]: "Inherent Female Submission": The Wrong Question

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Manliness [theory]: Fifty Shades of Grey, Fight Club, and the Complications of Male Dominance

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Feminism [theory]: Towards My Personal Sex-Positive 101

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Orgasmic "Dysfunction" storytime]: [A Unified Theory of Orgasm

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Boundaries storytime]: [Orgasms Aren't My Favorite Part of Sex, and My Chastity Urge

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S&M theory]: [BDSM As A Sexual Orientation, and Complications of the Orientation Model

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Abuse theory]: [The Alt Sex Anti-Abuse Dream Team

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Abuse theory]: [Thinking More Clearly About BDSM versus Abuse

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S&M storytime]: [The Strange Binary of Dominance and Submission

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About The Author

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Footnotes

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Glossary

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S&M:

### [storytime] Love Bites: An S&M Coming-Out Story

_The events of this story took place between 2005-2008; I wrote it in fits and starts over the span of 2006-2008. I started blogging as Clarisse Thorn in 2008, but my coming-out story wasn't published until early 2010, when_ Time Out Chicago _picked it up. I look over this piece today, in 2012, and I think about what I would have written differently if I'd had the hyper-focused feminist sex educator instincts that I have now. I would have written differently about consent, and I would have written differently about the communication that happened with my partners about my consent. I would have talked about how the S &M subculture isn't always welcoming for everybody, though it feels welcoming for me. Plus, I'm no longer practicing monogamy; I'm polyamorous these days._

But at the time, my goal was to do two things: (1) write out how S&M stigma felt for me, as a young feminist, and to talk about how I was overcoming it. And (2) show that sometimes a partner just isn't good for you, even if he has a quality that you really really want -- and you can always walk away.

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Love Bites: An S&M Coming-Out Story

I was very drunk. My perceptions had a frame-by-frame quality, and the evening didn't seem immediate: pieces of it were foreign, disconnected as a dream. I was being bitten very hard on the arm. It would leave marks the next day.

I was so muddled by assorted things that even now I can't sort out how I felt at that moment. When Richard's nails scored my skin I gasped, but I didn't ask him to stop. I flinched away, but he kept a firm grip on me. "Beg for mercy," he said softly.

Frame. Skip. I discovered that a mutual friend of ours had seen us, stopped, and was sitting on the grass across from Richard. "Hey," he said. "You shouldn't do that."

"It's okay," Richard said, "she likes it," and pulled my hair hard enough to force me to bow my head. _I do?_ I managed to think, before thought vanished back into the blur of alcohol and pain. Our friend's face loomed over me, concern sketched vividly on his features.

I closed my eyes.

"Mercy," I whispered.

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Later, Richard reminded me of something I said that night: "I wish I'd met you years ago." Thinking hard, I could only recall the evening in broad strokes. We'd gotten drunk at an outdoor party; he'd hurt me a bit; I'd said that; and then I'd staggered off to help clean up.

"A lot of crap comes out when you do this stuff," he now said. A few weeks had passed. I was lying on my stomach across the foot of his bed. Sitting perpendicular to me, he leaned back and propped his feet on the small of my back. Thin and pale, he tended to wear black, and had intense dark eyes. It was summer in 2005. I was twenty years old.

He'd asked me why I wanted to be hurt. I couldn't work out an answer -- wasn't certain the question was valid -- so I asked him why he liked to hurt people. He'd half-laughed, with a tone that I couldn't evaluate. Ruefully? "That's a long, dark road," he'd said.

"How do you know?" I asked, irritated by his presumption, nervously curious. I wasn't sure I was what he thought I was -- wasn't sure _what_ had been going on that night, beyond alcohol dulling my reactions and feelings. But I knew I hadn't been abused or violated. I hadn't asked him to stop, and I wanted to figure out why. "How did you know about me?"

"I can tell," he said, and grinned. "With you, it was obvious." He paused, added quietly, "You were begging for it."

A couple of hours later, we remained fully clothed, my face was buried in his pillow, and I was crying. He'd pinned me down so I couldn't move, and was raking his nails across what was exposed of my tank-topped back. When Richard first spotted the tears, he'd asked if I wanted a break. I'd said that it was okay, that he should continue, that I was fine.

I felt myself fragmenting, desperation and terror and pain pouring through me in an unbearable, necessary torrent. I told myself over and over that it didn't hurt that much, but I couldn't stop myself from tensing, crying out. After a while, I found myself saying, "No."

I felt him check himself, shifting his weight from my back. "Can we clarify something?" he asked gently. "Do you really want me to stop when you say no?"

_No,_ I realized, _I don't,_ and something vital in my psyche seemed to snap. The tears overwhelmed me. I couldn't get an answer out through my sobs, but even if I could have, I haven't the faintest idea what I might have said.

"We should take a break," he decided, and moved away. I'll never forget the relief -- and desolation -- I felt as he did.

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It was a long time later that I remembered: I _had_ met someone like Richard, years before. It had been in spring 2003; the guy was thin and pale, dressing mainly in black. I hadn't once thought of him in a romantic light.

I'd counted him a friend, but had only been alone with him once. We were in his living room, seated next to each other on dun-colored carpet. I couldn't recall how it started \-- we'd been sitting playing video games? had he tickled me as I shouted invective at the screen? -- but it ended with him holding my wrists, me lying back on the floor and wondering how to get him off me.

I'd thought he might kiss me, so I turned my head away. Instead, he bit my neck. "No," I said aloud, more in startlement than anything else, and he gave me a searching look -- as if he wasn't sure I was serious. "Please let me up," I said, and he asked, "Why?"

I didn't feel panicked, but strangely at a loss: he didn't seem to take my objection seriously. Yet he wasn't particularly threatening me, and I wasn't afraid. I explained that I was in a committed, monogamous relationship I didn't want to disrupt; I carefully didn't react when he bit me again, although it hurt.

I didn't say I wasn't getting anything out of my powerlessness or his apparent desire to hurt me, that it left me cold. Maybe I wasn't sure it would register: he hadn't appeared to _believe_ me when I first told him to let me up. And maybe something in me agreed that such a response was incorrect.

Eventually, I got away. Stupidly, confused, I mentioned the incident to my boyfriend. Of course he was furious; I had to calm him. For my part, it hadn't occurred to me to be mad. That didn't feel as bizarre as it sounds -- on some level, I felt that the whole incident was reasonable, even if it hadn't turned out to be what I wanted.

Not then. Not with him.

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After I cried my heart out in his bed, Richard was very kind. He brought me a glass of water and listened as I said a lot of bewildered things. When I finally ran down, it was late; he invited me to sleep over, but didn't put the moves on me. The next morning, he told me he had work to do. Straightforwardly, I asked when I could see him again. He smiled, said to email him, that we'd work something out.

The next few days -- weeks -- time, I don't know; however long it was, it felt like being put through a shredder. I couldn't think about anything but that night and how, through my turmoil and tears, I'd found a kind of exultation. I had been sober, prepared and clear-headed. I couldn't find a way around the brutal, uncompromising revelation that apparently, I wanted nothing more than to be subordinated, used, hurt. I actually _wanted_ to be a victim.

I wanted to talk to someone, but wasn't sure how to frame my words. I was positive it would help to talk to Richard, but he was busy, and busy, and busy. I had a number of friends who I suspected were into hardcore BDSM; I could have called any of them. But it was one thing to be fine with other people doing it, and quite another to discover such a desire in myself. In another situation, I would have thoroughly deconstructed my obvious double standard -- but just then, it was a minor irrationality on top of one big chunk of insanity.

I considered asking my loving, liberal parents for advice and tried to imagine how it would go.

Mom. Dad. I love you, and I'm so sorry. I know you've tried to give me an independent, rational, feminist outlook, as well as self-esteem and integrity. Sadly, none of this appears to have taken; I guess I'm a broken mockery of everything you tried to instill. I don't want you to worry, or blame yourselves, but have you any advice on where to go from here?

No.

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My mental images of that summer are hazy with remembered anger. As Richard remained occupied, I felt fury building within my fascination. I'm sure I felt like the classical woman spurned: he was nice enough when he ran into me and told me he was there to talk if I needed it, but the evidence contradicted his words. For weeks after that night, if I tried to see him he didn't have time.

It didn't help that he reacted very badly when I went after him aggressively -- too aggressively, I knew, but couldn't help it -- and told him honestly how vulnerable I was. He backed off fast, leaving me more confused than ever. (Though not too confused to think: _How stereotypical.)_

It went beyond being a woman spurned, though. Especially since I believed, intellectually, that he didn't _owe_ it to me not to be busy. He wasn't required to sort me out. And -- since it seemed to be what I was after -- he wasn't obligated to continue hurting me. We'd just met, after all.

It was more that I was enraged by how desperately I wanted to be hurt -- and infuriated that someone, _anyone,_ could have such power over me. I had always thrown myself into infatuations; like most people, I'd been known to get angry at the object of my affections. But this was different. Not only was I infatuated, I was aching for something I couldn't reconcile. Even if Richard had been the perfect counselor I had no right to expect, I might have hated him. As it was, I felt toyed with, and found as many other reasons to dislike him as I could. As long as I could focus on wrath, I didn't have to think about my other feelings.

It kept me from falling apart.

He was away for most of the summer. I went to a few trusted friends for reassurance and validation; giving few details, I allowed my anger to calcify. But Richard ended up surprising me. On a visit to Chicago, he called me every night for a week. The bruises he left took weeks to fade, some of them bleeding and leaving scars. I raged as I covered the worst of them \-- but felt also a low-burning fulfillment. One close friend, Andrew, caught sight of a bruise on my leg and cast me a worried look. "That looks pretty bad," he observed, and I could only say, "Yes."

By then, I'd well and truly internalized the belief that Richard didn't want to deal with emotional vulnerability, and my furious resentment remained. This feeling was not helped by society in general; men hate emotions, right? Still, the more time I spent with him, the more I had to admit that he made an effort to be sensitive. Most of our failures to understand each other came from how different our relationship paradigms were, not to mention my unevenly-repressed identity crisis. I know I tried to warn Richard that I wasn't doing well at expressing myself and that what I thought, or felt, or believed I was might change on short notice; but I doubt I got even that concept across.

He identified fairly publicly as a BDSMer, and made it clear that he considered me superficial and cowardly because I was unsure about doing so myself. He was also polyamorous, a lifestyle that I had some experience with -- but though I respected others' choices to engage in it, I'd decided against polyamory for myself. It felt strange to draw the parallel, but it _was_ somewhat like dealing with a difficult boyfriend. Still, I didn't trust him, and our relationship didn't particularly involve sex.

Just pain.

Towards the end of one night, wan light filtering through my curtains, Richard inquired unexpectedly, "Are you happy with the way we are now?"

"What do you mean?" I temporized, sighing inwardly. Now I'd have to come up with a rational, coherent answer that would satisfy him. In those days, rationality and coherence felt like improbable dreams.

Richard explained that he hadn't particularly been satisfied with how he'd dealt with me before he left, but hadn't had time for anything better. Now, he thought the situation was "healthier". "What do you want from this?" he asked seriously.

_I want the strength to walk away from you,_ I thought unclearly. _I want you to actually care about me. I never want to see you again._ I hugged my arms to myself, resting my hands gingerly on swelling skin. "Um," I said slowly, "nothing in particular?" I took a breath and gathered the one overriding fact: _I want you to keep hurting me._ "I don't expect anything from you," I told him, "and I don't want you to expect anything from me."

I knew from his smile that my answer was the right one. I could only hope it was accurate.

* * *

The summer passed, Richard away again for the end of it, then returning in September for the beginning of the school year. I, however, was leaving the city soon, and would be gone for some time. Those days were my last chances to see him for a while, and I was acutely aware of his nearness: I felt oriented towards him, as if I were a compass and he was North.

But I still felt the rage, lurking under the surface of my mind like a submerged monster. And though I ached with disturbingly intense thoughts of violence, it seemed that I was staying away from Richard, closing him out when I ran into him. He finally confronted me and asked, blunt as ever, if I was avoiding him. I denied it reflexively. How could I avoid North?

"I'm still figuring out how I feel about you," I told him as we walked late one night on the waterfront. I'd started to come to terms with being a masochist, had begun to assimilate that into my self-image, but that didn't explain why it had taken him to force the knowledge on me. The man I'd known in 2003, for instance, made no impression -- though he'd obviously seen exactly what Richard saw, and had taken almost exactly the same approach. And I'd known heavily, formally BDSM-identifying folks for years. I'd even experimented with light bondage in previous relationships -- being gently tied up, for instance -- though I hadn't found it especially compelling.

Was it that I'd been drunk the first time I encountered Richard, my careful rational mind turned off? Was it that nothing less drastic than the bruises he'd left could have forced my understanding? Was it simply that I'd been romantically unhappy at the time, whereas I'd been content when that other man pinned me to the floor? Even in the midst of my now-constant confusion, I couldn't stop myself from analyzing it all to bits. Now I concluded that I ought to know how I felt about Richard if I wanted to get to the roots of myself.

It had taken me a while to call my openly-BDSM friends for advice, but -- maybe around the same time I really started acclimating -- I had. One of their offhand comments came to mind. "I guess there's no reason you would know this," she'd said, "but it's fairly common for people to have one person who's their lover, and a separate person for inflicting pain."

I thought about that, and about Richard saying, "A lot of crap comes out when you do this stuff." I considered the maxims that tell us that the opposite of love isn't actually hate, and how much time I'd spent encouraging myself to hate him. Finally, I admitted that the only term I had to cover this depth of emotion was "love"... but that couldn't make it _feel_ like the right word. Then again, it wasn't exactly "hate", either.

He was a demon, an idol. He hardly felt like a person to me.

I didn't vocalize any of this. Coming back from the waterfront, we arrived at the intersection where Richard would go to his apartment and I'd return to mine. An awkward pause ensued: I was leaving in a few days, and wouldn't be alone with him again. Watching him, I wondered if he was thinking about asking me over, or was looking for an excuse not to. I looked away.

"Goodnight," I said. Walking home, I wished I felt strong.

* * *

It was after I left Chicago that I really started piecing myself back together. My anger drained away quickly, as if an infected wound had been lanced. Perhaps I found my strength under the scab. I figured that maybe all this did identify something about my personality, but it didn't tell the whole story. Even now, I could be independent, rational, and feminist, with self-esteem and integrity. Right? Right.

It was impossible to deny that the desires were real -- and when I allowed myself to focus on them, I didn't try. Ruminating on my past, I recalled heart-twisting details that put everything in a certain compelling context. It wasn't just the man who'd gone after me in 2003. Wincing, I remembered childhood fantasies: I'd compulsively written and drawn brutal dreams until, at some confused middle-school point, their horror came home to me and I recoiled. In those long-repressed fictions of slavery and pain, I recognized my newly-acknowledged desires.

One conversation I'd had with an early boyfriend rang in my head. "There's a dark current inside me," I'd told him. Self-consciously, I'd averted my eyes at my own melodrama. "I don't know how to be with you, when I feel it." I hadn't exactly been trying to leave him, but I'd needed something _more._

The last dream I remember of Richard didn't involve any pain at all: he just kissed me. Awakening, I felt a melancholy pang. Richard invested a lot of self-conception in being a sadist, and he was so distant -- I couldn't imagine relating to him as a lover. And I knew our relationship (such as it was) would never have started without BDSM as a focus. Previous to that night at the outdoor party, he'd hardly registered on my romantic radar, and we had little in common in terms of how we dealt with relationships.

Still, for a moment I wished -- unreasonably, I knew -- that I could have fallen straightforwardly in love.

* * *

I was gone for six months, and I returned in heartbreak. A relationship more important than words can encompass had become -- after years of attempts -- impossible. I think it was obvious. One friend told me vulnerability was all over me; _like a scent,_ I thought, and wondered if Richard could smell it. In worse shape than ever, I saw Richard and laughed with an edge to my voice. I gave him doe-eyed looks, but deflected his interest with doublespeak and icy tones. I wanted him, and I felt the rage returning. I hated and sheltered behind the unclear verbal games we played. Furious and despairing, I refused to chase him, yet I felt him everywhere. North.

I had to do something. My identity had somewhat solidified: I was into BDSM. I believed it, I even accepted it, but I couldn't go on feeling like I did.

In looking around the Internet, I came upon a directory of Kink Aware Professionals, including therapists who provided their names for people who needed to talk about BDSM but feared judgment. I visited two. One listened to me silently, with a vaguely sorrowful expression; he offered no feedback, and left me wondering why he'd listed his name in the directory. He obviously didn't know what to do with me, and I got the uneasy feeling that I worried him. Naturally, that didn't help at all.

Luckily, the other was everything I could have asked for -- open, patient, clearly knowledgeable about BDSM. He looked straight at me and nodded understandingly when I confessed the whole trail of events; he explained how common my experience was; he gave me ideas about where to look for more information, but didn't try to put his own preferences into our talks. "Most people in your situation feel that they've broken a major taboo," he said. "A lot try to get away from BDSM. But I'm not hearing that from you. You want to adjust, not escape." I nodded, and arranged to see him regularly.

Still, I don't think I could have put myself together again without two other things.

My close friend Andrew went after me at a drunken party. _Shades of Richard,_ I might have thought, but I never did. Andrew pinned me to the floor, laughed as I fought back, hurt me, finally kissed me. When I asked in bewilderment what brought this on, he confessed. "When you were gone, I missed you," he whispered, "and I've never missed anyone like that before." He was as afraid of the darkness of BDSM as I had been, yet he'd thought of me and found himself fantasizing. He wanted to try it with me, but first he wanted to be sure that he and I would remain close -- wouldn't lose what we already had.

In everything Andrew told me -- everything we said to each other, laughing, almost in tears, burying each other in embraces, happily drunk and clear-eyed in the morning -- I found the things that were missing with Richard. Uncertain about BDSM, guarding his and my boundaries, Andrew wanted to commit to me and to a devoted monogamous relationship. Part of me counseled caution and withdrawal, but as my therapist laughingly put it, Andrew was as tempting as an ice-cream factory. It was my chance to fall straightforwardly in love.

Soon after that, I had to explain to my parents why I wanted a psychiatrist who was out-of-network for my health insurance. I closed my eyes as my father asked why I needed this specialist, what his focus was. "S&M," I said shortly.

Why had I worried? I knew my parents had striven to give me an independent, rational, feminist outlook. Self-esteem and integrity. I was so lucky, I understood as my father said nothing but, "All right." It was a blinding realization: my father might have judged me with all the worst things I thought of myself -- but instead, he trusted me to do my best.

When I called my mother (long separated from my dad), too many of my flatmates were around for a private conversation indoors. I banished myself into a warm summer storm, cradling my cell phone away from the rain. There was a pause after I said the fateful words -- then she said, "Have you talked to your father about this?"

"Yes," I said hesitantly. "Why?"

"Well, I think it was an issue in our marriage that I was more into that stuff than he was."

Fat droplets soaked my hair. The tight knot in my chest -- familiar for nearly a year -- loosened as I caught my breath. I turned my face up to the sky and let the tilted world resettle around me; my mother's faraway voice helped me through a hundred things that had torn my heart. "You aren't giving up your liberation," she reminded me, and emphasized my continuing right to a partner who respects me. She even noted mildly that she'd "wondered" about me when I was a child.

I'd feared that I was damaged, that there was something deeply broken in me. I'd wildly guessed that I'd suffered trauma and repressed the memories. But if my mother -- one of the most independent, feminist women I've ever met -- could reconcile BDSM, then I knew I could. And if she was into BDSM herself, then rather than viewing my proclivities as damage, I could see them as something intrinsic we shared.

Over the next hour, my mother told me I could retain rationality, self-esteem and integrity. For the first time, I found myself believing it.

My therapist laughed when I told him. "I swear," he cried, "it's genetic!"

* * *

There was one loose end to an conclusion that felt like a fairy tale. Though we had some unfettered conversations, tension remained between me and Richard -- perhaps it even worsened. At one point, observing us, Andrew said mildly: "Settle down, you two."

Worse, Andrew and I were going in different directions. I finally felt somewhat at peace with BDSM, but he couldn't gain that comfort, and started backing away from it. It was impossible not to think of Richard and shiver, remembering how uncompromisingly vicious he could be. When Andrew and I broke up over a year later, I knew: _I shouldn't see Richard._ My therapist warned me to be careful with BDSM when my heart was in pieces.

Of course I wasn't.

It was the first time I'd explicitly pursued Richard since he'd told me, so long ago, that he was busy. I emailed him straightforwardly, sat down on his bed shortly after Andrew and I broke up. When Richard set his fingernails into my skin, he murmured, "It's been a while," as if he'd always known he'd see me here again. The tears came more quickly than they once had -- I'd fought them then, unwilling to break down in front of him. I'd been successful, too. Richard had only made me cry once, before.

_This is what I want,_ I reminded myself as Richard wound his hand in my hair and pulled my head back. His teeth bruising my shoulder felt familiar and wrong. A kiss on my neck sent me rigid. Sobs nearly choked me. _Why now,_ my heart cried, _why not when you were who I dreamed of, Richard?_

I couldn't fault his empathy -- he pulled away. "No," I said unwillingly, "I'm fine," but he wouldn't continue. Uneasily, he pointed out that I'd never reacted like that. I said he'd never kissed me like that, and he asked, "Really?" as if it were a surprise.

_Yes,_ I thought, forcing my tears away. _I was desperate for it. I know._

To get him to keep hurting me, I had to convince him that I was fine. _This is what I want,_ I coached myself. I was nearly composed when Richard mentioned Andrew, and I felt grief rip me open.

He watched me cry, got me a glass of water. _Shades of two years ago,_ I might have thought, but I never did. I apologized; he said only, "I thought this might happen." On some level, I knew that I had, too -- for all my self-reassurances that I would be fine. _What was I thinking?_ I asked myself, and the answer came instantly. _I had to know._

When Richard asked if I wanted to sleep over, I said I didn't. "Then don't go yet," he said softly, putting his arms around me where I lay. I rested my head on his chest. _I won't tell Andrew about this,_ I decided, wondering if he and I would be together again. _Even if I've learned that I don't want Richard anymore._

* * *

In retrospect, it seems surreal that I reacted so badly to my BDSM orientation. The agonizing memories of my adjustment have lost their emotional flavor. I've learned a lot about how to practice BDSM safely -- physically and emotionally. I've had multiple BDSM partners, and I've had positive experiences in the welcoming BDSM subculture. In recent times, I've even begun to switch: occasionally I'll be the dominant partner, though I feel submissive masochism far closer to my core.

Still, I remember the unease I felt at first \-- and I recognize stronger unease in others. I certainly wouldn't describe this orientation to, say, an employer. I believe BDSM needs a liberation movement, just like homosexuality, but I'm not (yet?) ready to be a public spokeswoman. And I definitely wouldn't consider dragging others out of the closet. I write about BDSM under a pseudonym, and I have changed the names of Richard and Andrew.

I fear that others will read this narrative as describing an assault, a near-rape -- and a woman who tried to rationalize her experience by embracing it. That's not what happened. When Richard first pulled my head back and hurt me at that drunken outdoor party, I could have said no. The word was echoing in my mind, waiting on my lips, and I didn't say it because I didn't want him to stop. I was certainly intoxicated, but I wasn't helpless. I was threatened, but I was not afraid. I may have fought self-actualization like a caged animal, but I could not deny it. I have always been this way.

Conversely, I'm afraid that some conservative will read this and say: "Look how the feminist movement has failed us!" That's not what happened, either. I identify as feminist, and I don't believe that to be at odds with being a submissive masochist. Indeed, I believe that the feminist movement helped my practice of BDSM: it's one of the factors that gave me the strength and self-assurance required to figure out and discuss my sexual needs.

Andrew and I did get back together; then we broke up again. Richard and I have had other nights together. I wish this narrative ended cleanly. I wish I could say that I've found a fairy-tale lover, that I'm now with a man who both hurts me till I cry and gives me the relationship I want. (Why stop there? He could be rich and handsome and a great cook, too!) But this is my story, not a fairy tale. Just as well; that means I still have space to learn. I believe I've gotten better at communicating clearly. I believe I've gotten better at sorting out the harsh emotions inspired by BDSM, working with -- and enjoying! -- those feelings in the context of a loving relationship. And I hope I no longer objectify my sadistic partners to the extent that I objectified Richard. Still, I know I've got a ways to go.

I see BDSM as a continuum -- similar to the theory that homosexuality is a continuum -- and sometimes I think that everyone's on the continuum to some degree. I don't think Andrew is as far into the continuum as I am, and not as far as Richard, either. But there are reasons I was with Andrew for nearly two years, yet never let myself fall completely into Richard.

A certain kind of devoted relationship is important to me. I felt strongly about Richard, and he was a good fit for BDSM, but he couldn't give me the relationship I want. I went back to Andrew, though he was far less into BDSM, because I was able to love him. I wonder, though: if I ever fall for a completely vanilla man, will I be able to compromise that far? It seems unlikely. Maybe if that happens I'll have to remember my friend's words and find a separate person, a non-lover who inflicts pain.

I'd rather not do that, but I can't imagine giving up BDSM. The idea feels equivalent to a vow of celibacy. As my therapist said, I'm not looking to escape -- especially not now that I've finally adjusted. It wasn't easy, but I feel that today I am triumphant. And I believe, I hope, that knowing what I want is the surest path to falling straightforwardly -- happily -- in love.

* * *

This can be found on the Internet at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2010/06/30/love-bites-an-sm-coming-out-story-mirror/

* * *

* * *

* * *

EDUCATION:

### [theory] Liberal, Sex-Positive Sex Education: What's Missing

_I originally wrote this in 2009, then reposted it in 2010 as part of a group drive by sex-positive bloggers to solicit donations to_ Scarleteen.com _. Scarleteen is an amazing sex education site run by the equally amazing sex educator Heather Corinna, and it can always use donations! You should totally go investigate that site. After you're done reading my work, of course._

When I first published this piece, the sex-positive film director Tony Comstock commented on Twitter that, "I think that post of yours might be one of the most important things written about sex-positivity in the last 10 years." I was really honored by that, because he does excellent work.

_My parents occasionally read my blog, and I also got some interesting feedback from my mother. She wrote to me: "_ _Speaking from where I sat when you were growing up: I wish I could have taught you what you eventually learned on your own. But I felt there was this unchallengeable wave moving and I didn't have a place to stand to counter it. I kept thinking I was leaving you to learn the hard way exactly what I learned the hard way, and was still learning, and was despairing of ever learning."_

I wrote back: "For what it's worth, I remember you trying to stem the tide with small comments, and I think that those comments later helped me center myself in a place where I could reach my own conclusions rather than blindly sleeping around." I hope it made her feel better, because it's true. I'm not a parent, although someday I would like to be... but I think one of the hardest things about parenting must be knowing that your kids will learn terrible things from the surrounding world, and the best you can do is try to be there while they process those lessons.

* * *

Liberal, Sex-Positive Sex Education: What's Missing

I am fortunate. I was born in the eighties and I received a great sex-positive upbringing. The public school I attended taught students how to use condoms; middle school health education included a section on sexually transmitted diseases. My parents didn't throw their sexuality in my face -- but they were almost always matter-of-fact, understanding and accepting when they talked about sex. (I'll never forget how, at age 12 or so, Mom sat me down and gave me a long speech about how it would be **totally okay** if I were gay.) I was raised Unitarian Universalist, and the Unitarian Sunday School teen program included a wonderful sex education curriculum called About Your Sexuality. (I understand that the sex-ed curriculum has been changed and updated, and is now called Our Whole Lives. I haven't delved deeply into the Our Whole Lives program -- maybe it addresses some of the issues I'm about to describe.)

So I think I'm in a good position to describe the problematic signals we face in liberal sexual education. Yes, I've experienced the overall sex-negative messages that drench America, and they're terrible -- but so much is already being said about those. I also received lots of sex-positive messages that are incomplete, or problematic, or don't quite go the distance in helping us navigate sexuality -- and I think the sex-positive movement must focus on fixing them.

I'm so grateful for my relatively liberal, relatively sex-positive upbringing. I think it did me a world of good. But here are **my five biggest problems with the way I learned about sexuality:**

1. _I wish that I hadn't gotten this message: "Sex is easy, light-hearted -- and if it's not, you're doing it wrong."_

Do I believe sex can be easy? Sure. Do I think it can be light-hearted? Absolutely! But do I think it's **always** those things? No, and I don't think it "ought to" be.

I think we need to teach that sex can be incredibly difficult. It can be hard to communicate with your partner. It can be hard to learn and come to terms with your own sexual desires. It can be hard to understand or accept all your partner's sexual desires. And just because it's hard, doesn't mean that you're with the wrong partner -- or that you're missing some vital piece of information that everyone else has -- or that you're doing it wrong.

And as for light-hearted, well -- sure, sex can be "happy rainbows joy joy!", but it can also be serious... or dark. And there's nothing wrong with that!

I recently talked to a friend, who also identifies as a BDSMer, about our stories of coming into BDSM. Both of us had sadomasochistic fantasies from a very early age (mine, for instance, started in grade school -- seriously, I actually did tie up my Barbie dolls). I told my friend about how I'd always had these intense, dark, violent feelings -- but when I made it to middle school, I remember a change. I had a series of vivid BDSM-ish dreams, and I freaked out. I closed it all away, I stopped thinking about it, I repressed it all as savagely as I could.

Before that, I had also started thinking about sex. I imagined sex at great length; I read about sex. I had long since filched my parents' copy of _The Joy of Sex_ and examined it, cover to cover -- not to mention many other fine sexuality works, like Nancy Friday's compilation of female sexual fantasies _My Secret Garden._ I was totally fascinated by sex. I talked about it so much that one of my friends specifically searched out a vibrator as a birthday present for me. I actually pressured my first major boyfriend into some sexual acts before **he** was ready, which I suppose is an interesting reversal of stereotype (but to be clear, it's not okay that I did that). As I started having sex, I found that I liked it okay, but knew a lot was missing -- and couldn't figure out what.

It took me years and years to connect sex to BDSM -- to figure out that the biggest thing I was missing, was BDSM. Why? Because BDSM was horrible and wrong, and I'd shut it away; BDSM (I thought) couldn't possibly have anything to do with the bright, shiny, happy horizon of sex! Coming into BDSM was a crisis for me partly because -- although I knew other people practiced it, and had never thought much about that -- my own need for those dark feelings totally shocked me. This wasn't me. This wasn't **healthy sex**. Sex was light-hearted, happy rainbows joy joy!... wasn't it?

In contrast, my friend -- who had an extremely sexually repressed upbringing -- never had any trouble integrating BDSM into his sex life. Sex, for him, was already wrong and bad... so as he got in touch with his sexuality and began having sex, BDSM was involved from the start. After all, there was no reason for it not to be.

As glad as I am that my upbringing was not stereotypically sexually repressed, I have to say that I envy my friend his easy personal integration of BDSM.

2. _I wish this point had been made, over and over: "You might consider being careful with sex."_

I recently read an excellent New Yorker article that reviews the new version of _The Joy of Sex._ It talks about the time when _The Joy of Sex_ came out, as well as a similar contemporary feminist book, _Our Bodies, Ourselves,_ and it points out that "both books espoused the (distinctly seventies) notion that sex could be a value-neutral experience, as natural as eating."

"Value-neutral": that's a great way to describe the overall attitude about sex that I absorbed. As if sex were something I could do as an amusing diversion, with anyone, at any time, and it would always be fun fun fun! As if there was no need to be overly careful or sensitive -- sex was just a game I could play, like a sport -- where the worst that would happen if I screwed up might be a skinned knee.

I wish that there had been an emphasis on how emotions can really **matter** , when it comes to sex. I wish that there had been acknowledgment of the fact that we can really hurt ourselves, and others, when we're cavalier about sex. (Not that we always do -- but we can.) I wish I had understood sooner that sex is not always value-neutral; that everyone has all manner of different sexual needs and hangups, anxieties and strong emotions. I think maybe there are people out there who can have "value-neutral" sex -- where it's totally about physicality and nothing more -- but I am not like that, and I suspect that most people are not.

Which isn't to say that I think there's anything **wrong** with people who can have sex that's "value-neutral." (And maybe "value-neutral" is not a great term for it; I worry that I sound like I'm judging, when I use that term.) I just don't think it's a good model for everyone, and yet I think that it has somewhat been promoted as if everyone "ought to" be that way.

I think that there are lots of people out there who feel as though the sexual liberation movement "failed" or "betrayed them," because they convinced themselves that sex is value-neutral and then got hurt. You see a lot of assertions along these lines in the conservative media -- for instance, here's a quotation from a synopsis of the book _Modern Sex:_

The 1960s sexual revolution made a big promise: if we just let go of our inhibitions, we'll be happy and fulfilled. Yet sexual liberation has made us no happier and, if anything, less fulfilled. Why?... sex today is increasingly mechanical and without commitment -- a department of plumbing, hygiene, or athletics rather than a private sphere for the creation of human meaning. The result: legions of unhappy adults and confused teenagers deprived of their innocence, on their way not to maturity but to disillusionment.... These beautifully written essays -- on subjects ranging from the TV show Sex and the City to teen sex to the eclipse of the manly ideal to the benefits of marriage -- add up to the deepest, most informative appraisal we have of how and why the sexual revolution has failed.

I disagree with most of their attitude. We don't need innocence. We don't need sexual mystery. We don't need to eliminate teen sex. We don't need to re-establish some limiting, patriarchal "manly ideal." But they've got one thing right: we do need to start talking about sex as something that is _not_ mostly mechanical -- as something that, yes, can be "a private sphere for the creation of human meaning."

3. _I wish I'd learned this: "Good sex doesn't just require two (or more) people who like sex. It requires desire -- and desire simply doesn't work the same way for everyone."_

I've said before that I went through a period -- back when I was first becoming sexually active -- where I simply **could not figure out** why sexual acts with people I didn't care about, didn't seem to turn me on. Or rather -- they turned me on a little, but not... much. It took me a while to understand that sex requires more than just two eager people. It requires attraction and desire.

When I was fifteen or so, and at summer camp, I remember making out with a boy. I didn't really want to make out with him, but I wasn't sure how to reject him (more on this under point 5). And I figured: he seems nice enough, so I might as well make out with him. Afterwards, I felt angry at myself, and I felt like I'd wasted my time -- and I felt confused. I'd been bored at best and repulsed at worst, and I wasn't sure why I felt that way, or why I'd done something that made me feel that way.

So why **had** I done it? Because I'd thought: "Sex is value-neutral." Because I'd thought: "Making out is fun, right? -- that means I ought to do it when I get the chance!" Because I'd thought: "My preference not to make out with him is probably just some silly repression that I need to get over." Because I didn't understand that desire is complicated, that you can't just make yourself feel desire when it's convenient, and that you don't need a reason for your attractions -- or lack of attraction. This situation was to reprise itself in various forms over the next years, until I finally learned that sometimes you simply want or don't want things, and that you aren't required to justify your desires.

4. _I wish I'd gotten a list of suggestions: "Here are some places you might go to start figuring out what turns you on."_

I was told that sex was fun. I was even told to explore! But I still spent years with very little actual idea of what I wanted. No one ever told me how or where I might be able to learn more about my needs, or what exploring my needs might look like. And no one ever explained that people are turned on by different things, that some people like some sex acts and don't like others, and that's okay.

I went into sex with a buffet-style attitude, thinking that I must naturally enjoy sex equally in all ways. I was so surprised when I found out that I like some positions better than others! I remember how confused I was when I dated a guy who didn't like fellatio, and how hurt I felt -- like his lack of enjoyment meant that I must be doing it wrong, because **everyone** likes oral sex, right?

And of course, while I had a pretty comprehensive idea of the vanilla sex acts I could experiment with, I had very little idea of what else was out there. In retrospect I find this hilarious, but I remember -- back in my vanilla days -- I had two boyfriends who tied me up. They tied me up and were nice to me, and I suppose it was amusing enough, but didn't drive me crazy with lust or anything. And -- this is the kicker -- **because I did not understand that there's a lot more to BDSM than light bondage, because I did not understand that there are many separate BDSM acts that people can enjoy and many ways to flavor them, I assumed from this experience that I didn't like BDSM.** I went through my old journal entries the other day and uncovered one in which I, confused, am speculating about what's missing from my sex life: I write, "I've tried S&M, so it can't be that."

What a learning curve I had ahead of me, eh?

I wish someone had tried to explain to me the vast cornucopia of human fetishes out there. I wish someone had explained that erotica and pornography are both actually really good ways to learn about your turn-ons, and -- more importantly -- had told me that **not all erotica and pornography are the same,** so the fact that I wasn't into mainstream stuff didn't mean I automatically wasn't interested in all erotica or porn. I've mentioned that I had lots of conversations with friends about sex, but -- until recent years -- those conversations were never framed as "This is what I like," or "I've found something new that turns me on," and I wish I'd realized sooner what a great resource conversations like that might be.

5. And _I wish I'd gotten a list of ideas: "Here are some ways you can try communicating with your partner about sex."_

Lastly, but certainly not least -- I was never taught how to communicate about sex. No one ever gave me even the first idea. In all my sex-positive, liberal sexual upbringing, I was told over and over that "relationships require communication", but no one ever said: "And here's some ways in which you might communicate sexually with your partner."

One big benefit of teaching sexual communication strategies is that it helps people learn to say "no" when they don't want to do something. Teaching people how to set boundaries is massively important, and I think a lot about ways to do it. I saw this adorable video about cuddle parties recently that really struck me -- these people create parties where everyone basically just cuddles, but everyone also specifically has the power to say "no" to any given person or act. The reporter who made the video talks at the end about how she found the whole experience to be empowering -- how she felt like it gave her space to say "no" that she hadn't had before. Perhaps these could be used to teach people to set boundaries?

But you can't really use cuddle parties in a school or workshop setting, more's the pity. When I developed my first sex education workshop, it was all about describing good communication strategies. I listed questions that all sex partners could benefit from asking each other, including "What do you like?" and "What do you fantasize about?" and "Is there anything you really don't want me to do?"

And I talked about ways that you can make communication easier, if the two partners are uncomfortable having this conversation. I took a page from the BDSM community by creating checklists of all kinds of sexual acts and weird fetishes and gender-bending craziness, and I put it all on a 1-5 scale (with 1 being "not at all interested" and 5 being "I'd love to try this"), and I told people that they could try filling out those checklists and giving them to their partners. (The amazing sex education site Scarleteen later implemented the same idea, in a much more comprehensive way than I had!) I suggested that partners write out their fantasies and email them to each other, or write out descriptions of their mutual sexual experiences -- long accounts, describing how they felt about everything and what sticks out in their minds -- and send those to each other, too, so they can get each others' perspectives on what they've done.

(By the way, I still offer a much-improved version of that workshop on my list of events, lectures, and workshops, just in case you're interested in bringing me in....)

God, it's so **hard** to talk about what we want. It's even hard to talk about talking about what we want. I mean, it's hard enough to figure out what we want in the first place -- but communicating it... eeek! And it's worth noting that this is not just a problem of having good sex. As was pointed out recently on the blog for the wonderful sex-positive anthology _Yes Means Yes!:_

[There is a] need to demystify and destigmatize communication about sex. If we can't talk about what we like and what we want, we will always have problems making clear what it is we're consenting to. If we can't be frank about what we do want, we put a lot of weight on the need to communicate what we don't.

Giving everyone great sexual communication skills doesn't just give us all better sex -- it fights rape. There's a noble cause for you!

... So, that's my five-pointed analysis. And that's what I'm pushing for. My goals are not just to get people thinking that sex is awesome and sexual freedom is important. It's going to be hard, and it's going to be an uphill battle, but I'm hoping that I can not only help out with sexual liberation -- I'm hoping to **improve** it.

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This can be found on the Internet at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2010/11/11/classic-repost-liberal-sex-positive-sex-education-whats-missing/

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COMMUNICATION:

### [storytime] Sex Communication Case Studies

_I wrote this post in 2011, years after the events in my coming-out story. By 2011, I'd picked up a lot of different sexual and BDSM experience with a variety of partners. I had just written_ a post _about my most destructive past relationship; the post got a lot of readers and was eventually cross-posted to Jezebel. I wanted to do something positive with all the attention, so I decided to offer some examples of good sexual communication as a counterpoint._

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Sex Communication Case Studies

In the wake of my last post, which was basically a meditation on one relationship with bad sexual communication, I want to offer some positive examples of sexual communication from my life.

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1) **Low pressure and leather belts.** Years ago, when I was pretty inexperienced in the community, I had a single BDSM encounter with a gentleman in his home. We met at a BDSM discussion group, arranged to meet later at a cafe, and went home from there; as we exited the cafe, I took his driver's license and texted his full name and license number to a friend. (I think more people should do this, frankly -- in fact, more non-BDSM people should do this when they go home with strangers from bars.)

We sat together on the public transit and quietly discussed the upcoming scene: he asked me many, many questions about what I was okay with and not okay with. Questions like: "What do you have experience with?" "Could you go into that more?" "What do you like?" "What makes that fun for you?" "Is there anything you really don't want me to do?" He asked a lot of the questions twice, too, which I think is a really great strategy especially with new partners. People don't always have their heads together enough during these conversations to answer an S&M question properly the first time, especially if it's a broad and open-ended question like "What are the things you really don't want to do?"

I made it clear that I just wanted a BDSM encounter, that I wasn't up for oral sex or vaginal sex or anything like that. He'd never had a BDSM encounter that didn't involve orgasm, so it was a new concept for him, but he was cool with trying it.

After our long discussion of boundaries and limits, we made it to his apartment and settled in. He got out some equipment, including a collar, and he said: "While you're wearing this, you will obey everything I say. Do you have any final boundaries to set? Anything you really want me to do? Anything else you don't want me to do?" I said no, and he snapped on the collar. (We did have an agreed-upon safeword, though -- so I had a way of interrupting the proceedings if I really needed to.)

It was an interesting encounter, partly because he was looking more for dominance (giving orders) than sadism (inflicting pain), whereas at the time I was looking more for masochism (receiving pain) than submission (accepting orders). So we started out with him giving me a bunch of orders (primarily to fulfill his kink), and then in the end he hit me a lot with a leather belt (to fulfill mine). At the time I was still figuring out where the boundary was for me: whether I identified as a submissive or only a masochist; how much submission and masochism were intertwined. That night showed me a lot about how one can create submissive energy within a pre-defined space, even with someone you barely know.

Afterwards, when I was done crying, he took off the collar and we went to bed. (By that time of night, I didn't have a way back home from where he lived, so I had to sleep over.) We chatted about random things, neither of us quite tired enough to sleep. Within half an hour or so, he realized that there was no way he was ever going to get to sleep unless he had an orgasm, but he also understood that I didn't want to have sex with him, so he didn't try to push that. Instead, he said: "I really need to have an orgasm before I can get to sleep. I can either take care of that in the bathroom, or I can do it here. If I do it here, then you can help me along, or not. I'd especially appreciate it if you could talk dirty while I jerk off, but it's your decision."

Talk about low pressure! Yeah, I learned a lot from that guy.

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2) **Scripts and Lists.** I had one brief relationship last year with a gentleman who is really, really awesome -- but we have very different approaches to S&M. We had a hard time communicating about it... honestly, if he hadn't been such an awesome guy, I would probably have given up on the relationship after a couple nights together. We were great at having extensive theoretical conversations about sexuality, but when it came down to actually having sex with each other, things got puzzling. We had difficulty predicting, understanding, and initiating with each other.

I'm not sure what made it so hard. I think, mostly, we just brought really different assumptions to the table. I tend to take an "improvisational" approach to my encounters, whereas he tends to take a "scripted" approach. He's into doing stuff like rearranging the furniture, taking on specific roles (e.g. teacher and student), using costumes and props, and knowing exactly what will be said beforehand.

Me, I like going free-form. I talk to my partner about hard limits (things we absolutely don't want to do); I talk to him about things we really like; and we set a safeword. I'm usually okay with diving in from there. If he wants a more structured conversation, I'm glad to have one (and sometimes, especially when I'm dominant, I'll ask for more conversation myself). But generally, I like seeing how things go based on a very loose set of guidelines, and making minor adjustments during the encounter, then evaluating the situation afterwards.

One of the reasons I like doing this is that unexpected things happen. On the flip side, there's also more room for experiences that aren't very exciting. I think I'm more likely to have disjointed or confusing encounters than a lot of other BDSMers I know, although maybe I'm just falling prey to the bias of assuming other people are doing better than I am. And Scripty Guy in particular really doesn't like disjoint and confusion -- he likes knowing what's going to happen.

Late in the relationship, I suggested that we try going through a checklist: that is, a long list of every conceivable BDSM act, each accompanied by a rating scale (for example, there will be an entry for "flogging" where you can rate your excitement about flogging from 1-5). When people use these checklists, a lot of the time they just write their rating for each act, and give them to each other to read. What we did instead was go through the checklist together and discuss what we found hot, what was not, and whatever else came to mind.

This worked amazingly well -- it totally bridged our theoretical gap and it was a turn-on in itself! (Seriously, by the time we were done going through the whole list, I **could not wait** to have sex with that guy.) The conversation also helped me figure out the scripted vs. un-scripted difference between us.

We stopped seeing each other for unrelated reasons soon afterwards, and they were good reasons, but it seemed like a shame; I felt like we'd only just started figuring things out. I'm not sure how well our S&M styles would have ultimately meshed, but I was curious to try. Oh well... win some, lose some.

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3) **Transparent as Glass.** Very rarely, I'll end up with a BDSM partner where our brief in-the-moment communications -- you know, like groans, or physical shifts, or facial expressions, or even jokes -- function very well. We can get into intense, intimate S&M in a way that seems almost instinctive (although it helps future encounters if we talk it over and process what we did afterwards). This is really exciting when it happens, but I recognize it as unusual. A gift.

The person I'm about to write about is totally going to get a swelled head because I write about him so much, but he's such a good example, I have to. The first time I went home with him, I knew he wasn't in the public BDSM community. We'd had one really vague conversation about BDSM previously, and he'd read a small sample of my work. I didn't expect anything much.

He kissed me, and then I think he gave me some kind of mild signal like a bite on my shoulder. It was a gentle bite, by my standards. So I took matters into my own hands and removed my shirt, preparing to give him some feedback. He leaned back and said, "Whoa," and I thought, _Oh damn, I'm totally going too fast for him, he's probably not accustomed to a high degree of sexual directness,_ so I said, "Sorry, is this okay?" and he laughed and kind of threw up his hands and said, "Sure."

That made me a tad nervous -- if me taking off my shirt surprised him, what else would surprise him? -- but I figured I'd see it through, see what happened. So I explained to him what kind of biting I really like, and showed where I like it on my back and my arms. I think I gave him a couple of other tips, too, but I honestly can't remember; it didn't take more than five minutes. I certainly didn't give him an exhaustive rundown of my preferences before I said, "Does that all make sense?" and he said "Yes," and put his hands on me.

Which is why it was so surprising that within a very short time, both of us were breathing hard and confused and maybe slightly dizzy and looking at each other with very wide eyes, and he was saying in an amazed tone: "I just -- I'm a little shocked. That was **really good** ," and I was saying: "Yes. Yes it was."

It went like that for a while. He'd go for it, and then pull back, and I'd drag myself out of my BDSM headspace long enough to explain one or two ideas, or reassure him that I felt fine. And then he'd go for it again. And by the end of it, I was -- blazing.

Sometimes, it just works. You've never met this person before, you've talked for half an hour about something completely irrelevant like science fiction novels, yet it only takes five minutes of discussion about preferences and safewords, and then it just **works**. I don't know why, and I don't know how, but sometimes you find a partner who can just -- **read** you, like an open book -- or who seems as transparent as glass to you; or, if you're really lucky, both.

(But I write about this with some hesitation, and I'm putting it at the end of this post after two other examples for a reason: because I don't think it's the standard, and I don't think it ought to be seen as standard. Especially because, paradoxically, this kind of instinctive connection will sometimes throw me off guard, make me unlikely to communicate when I probably ought to, because if he can read me that well -- it's so tempting to assume that "he just knows" everything. But of course he doesn't. I later had a couple rough moments with that particular guy, where I didn't tell him about boundaries that were actually pretty important, because I thought he could just tell -- and of course he couldn't always "just tell". Sometimes he could, but sometimes he couldn't.)

The overall moral of the story is this. Even with him, even with this guy, who totally blindsided me with his ability to read me despite the fact that he barely knew me: even with him, I had to be able to talk directly about what I wanted. Our connection was established because I was able to say, "Okay, that bite was a tad gentle, here's how I really like it, and here's what not to do with your teeth on me." **All my most extraordinary sexual connections have benefited from everyone involved taking ownership of their desire, and talking about it directly at least a little bit.**

I occasionally come across people who ask me how they can get their partners to do BDSM without talking about it directly. While I appreciate and sympathize with both their need to do BDSM, and their anxiety about talking about it -- I just can't get behind the premise of the question. The fantasy of a sexual relationship that is totally instinctive and perfect without any effort is just that -- a fantasy. And moreover, while you might be able to get some BDSM experiences without actually having a conversation about BDSM, direct sexual communication is not a threat to your sexual experiences -- it can improve them.

Do what you want, really, as long as it's consensual. If you want to have sex that's not communicative, that is your prerogative, as long as it's always consensual. (It's worth asking, though... are you so sure you can tell that it's consensual, if you don't talk about it?) Still. Learning how to talk about sex more directly and exactly might be hard or embarrassing or complicated, **but it is seriously worth it**. Not just BDSM; all sex.

It's so worth it.

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This post originally appeared at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/03/11/storytime-sex-communication-case-studies/

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MANLINESS:

### [theory] Questions I Want To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men

I wrote this piece in 2009. It was the culmination of years I'd spent thinking about masculinity, manliness, and men's gender role. I was relatively new to blogging, and I hadn't yet established myself. I thought that the most controversial things I would ever write would be about S&M. I was wrong.

I published this in three parts, and it got a huge response. The major feminist blog "Alas! A Blog" asked to repost it, for example, but there was a much bigger reaction among non-feminist and anti-feminist men. Some wrote responses with titles like "Answers for an Entitled Feminist." Others actually came over to my blog and engaged me, with varying results. It kicked off a long, dense discussion in my blog Comments section, which lasted for over a year and thousands of comments. I wrote a number of followups, including some that got me labeled "brainwashed by the patriarchy" by other feminist women.

_Some of the guys I was talking to got me interested in the "pickup artist subculture" or "seduction community" -- a group of men who trade tips, tricks, and tactics on how to seduce women. Eventually, I did an in-depth investigation of that subculture and wrote the book_ Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews with Hideous Men, _which contains some of my best work on masculinity, communication, and sexuality. You can buy that on Smashwords at this link:_ <https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/144451>

One thing I've discovered over the last few years, as I learned more about the history of feminism, is that there are excellent reasons why most feminists are unwilling to talk about men's problems. There's a ton of politics involved, and a lot of very justified fears about the political ground we could lose. We still have a long way to go when it comes to gender equality. But I do believe that those fears are often overblown.

And I've also discovered that there's a subgroup of feminists that's much more likely to be open to talking about men's experience: it's the sex-positive feminists, especially the S&M feminists. Most feminist essays I've found about masculinity were written by women who openly admitted that they were into S&M -- Gayle Rubin, author of the pioneering sexuality essay "Thinking Sex," is one good example. Maybe we're the ones most likely to intuitively understand that power is very rarely a one-dimensional picture or a one-way street.

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Questions I Want To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men, Part 1: Who Cares?

Why do I care about masculinity?

I'm rather perverted, but not enormously queer. I present as femme, and -- although I've been known to tease my sensitive (frequently long-haired) lovers for being "unmasculine" -- I fall in love with men. I'm hardly one to go for the "manly man" type, but at heart, I love knowing that I'm fucking a man.

However, because I'm cisgendered and straight, I feel profoundly at a loss when trying to articulate problems of (for lack of a better phrase) "Men's Empowerment." The issues don't feel "native" to me; I've intersected with these questions mainly through the lens of lovers and friends. Watching their struggle is demoralizing, but trying to imagine how I can give them feedback is more demoralizing.

A male friend once wrote to me, "I think you personally find expressions of masculinity **hot** , but you also have no patience with sexism. You've caught on that it's tricky for men to figure out how to deliver both of these things you need, that you don't have a lot of good direction to give to fellas about it, and that neither does anyone else."

So:

How can men be supportive and non-oppressive while remaining overtly masculine?

On top of my limited perspective, there's been an echoing lack of discourse -- that is, very little mainstream acknowledgement of the problems of masculinity. The primary factor in that silence is that normative cis men themselves tend to be flatly unwilling to discuss gender/sex issues. Often, their first objection is that the discussion is neither important nor relevant. This is true even within subcultures centered around sexual analysis, like the BDSM world -- I once met a cis male BDSMer who said, "Why bother talking about male sexuality? It's the norm. Fish don't have a word for water."

But _if masculine sexuality is water and we're fish, why doesn't that motivate us to examine it more -- not less?_

Don't get me wrong: I agree that America's sexual conceptions are centered around stereotypical male sexuality, and I agree that this is damaging and problematic. Believe me, I'm **furious** that it took me many years to reconceive "actual" sex around acts other than good ole penis-in-vagina penetration! But if American stereotypes and ideas of sexuality are male-centered, then surely that makes it **more** useful for us to be thinking about male sexuality -- not less.

And those male-centered ideas of sexuality aren't centered around all men -- just stereotypical men. LGBTQ men are obvious examples whose sexuality falls outside the norm; fortunately for them, they've created some spaces to discuss that. But there are lots of other non-normative guys who aren't gay or queer, yet feel very similar sexual alienation -- and because there's so little discourse about masculinity outside LGBTQ circles, they usually just don't talk about it.

What does it mean to be a cis het man whose sexuality isn't normative? Which straight cis guys don't fit -- and hence, feel alienated from -- our current overarching sexual stereotypes?

Guys who identify as straight BDSM submissives are one fabulous example of non-normative men who are frequently alienated from mainstream masculine sexuality, but who often don't have a forum. Men with small penises are a second. There are lots of others. In the words of sex blogger and essayist Thomas Millar: "The common understanding of male sexuality is a stereotype, an ultra-narrow group of desires and activities oriented around PIV [penis-in-vagina], anal intercourse and blowjobs; oriented around cissexual women partners having certain very narrow groups of physical characteristics."

Still, that doesn't mean that straight, dominant, big-dicked dudes who love boning thin chicks feel totally okay about the current state of affairs. It just means they tend to have less immediate motivation to question it. They also have less of an eye for spotting gender oppression, because -- though they've got their own boxes hemming them in -- they're still more privileged than the rest of us, and the nature of privilege is to blind the privileged class to its existence.

A male submissive once told me, "Lots of heteronormative men know something is wrong with the way we think about sex and gender. I can see them struggling with it when we talk. They can't put their finger on it; they have a hard time engaging it. But I engage it all the time; I have to, because my sexuality opposes it."

When is it to a man's advantage to examine and question masculinity and stereotypes of male sexuality? Which men are motivated to do so?

It's tempting to assert that men whose desires fit neatly (or at least mostly) within the stereotype have it made -- after all, their sexuality works within the norm so many of us struggle to escape. But I've had this assumption corrected several times, usually by smart "stereotypical" men themselves. At one point, while developing a sexuality workshop, I sent the outline to a bunch of friends. The original draft contained this paragraph: "Our sexual scripts favor a certain stereotype of men and male sexual pleasure, which makes it hard for women to figure out what we really want and what we really enjoy, and also makes it harder for non-stereotypical men to figure that out." One friend sent that paragraph back, having quietly appended: "... as well as for stereotypical men to discover or explore new desires beyond the stereotypical script."

When we discuss the limitations around sexuality from a non-normative perspective, how do we exclude normative people who might develop themselves in new directions if they had the chance? What do normative men stand to gain by thinking outside the box about masculinity and sexuality?

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Questions I Want To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men, Part 2: Men's Rights

In the 2006 documentary "Boy I Am", a trans man talks about how one of his mental barriers to transitioning was the fact that after transition, he would be a "white male". And, he laughs, the "last thing in the world" he wanted to be was a white male!

A year or two ago, I attended a lecture by Jackson Katz, a rather overtly masculine, cis male anti-abuse educator who lectures in colleges around the country. Bullet-headed and aggressive in stance, he said a lot of valuable things -- particularly about how men ought to take ownership of problems we traditionally consider "women's issues." It's certainly true that if we want to end male abuse of women, men must participate in the movement. But although Katz discussed some issues of masculinity, I heard little about how we can make things better for men. His proposition of a men's movement was centered around correcting the things some men are doing wrong.

Although they're often watered down, many feminist concepts have gone mainstream. For instance, Americans have some consciousness of traditional feminist critiques about how women's bodies are represented in the media. Indeed, that consciousness has become so endemic that, in a grandly ironic twist, marketers now capitalize on it to sell beauty products: the nationwide Dove Campaign for Real Beauty attempts to **use deconstruction of the media's representation of women** to sell Dove soap. Americans are also quite aware of men as the privileged class -- sometimes regarded outright as the oppressors.

But this shift in awareness about gender issues faced by women has not been accompanied by a widespread understanding of gender issues faced by men. And that creates situations like an activist working towards a masculinity movement that talks mainly about how men are hurting women, or a trans man who has trouble with the idea of transitioning partly because he doesn't want to be a white man -- one of the oppressors.

How can awareness of oppressive dynamics make it difficult for men to own their masculinity? Does male privilege ever make life harder for men? When does male privilege blind us to oppression of masculinity? There's some mainstream awareness of gender issues faced by women; is there any similar awareness of the problems of masculinity?

A good friend of mine first caught my attention by talking about gender. We encountered each other at a BDSM meetup, and when I mentioned that I'd been thinking about the boxes around masculine sexuality, he launched into a rant about oppressive sexual dynamics. He gave me references to complex sexuality blogs and intelligently used words like "heteronormative" and "patriarchy." But a month or so after we started talking, I mentioned his interest in gender issues... and he gave me a puzzled look. "I'm not really into gender studies," he said.

He talks about sex, gender and culture all the time -- but he also specifically identifies as highly masculine, and felt that to be at odds with identifying as someone who questions masculinity. As Thomas Millar writes in his aforementioned article: "There's a huge unstated assumption that to even address the question [of male sexuality], for men, is to mark one's self as 'other.'... cis het men are brought up to fear that their masculinity could ever be called into question. By even opening up a dialog, I think some folks fear that they are conceding that their sexuality is not uncontroversial."

Men currently experience this problem in a way that women do not. In other words, women don't risk being seen as unfeminine as easily as men risk being seen as unmasculine; nor do we have quite the same fears about it. In 2008, a group of researchers published a paper called "Precarious Manhood." Their concluding statement: "Our findings suggest that real men experience their gender as a tenuous status that they may at any time lose and about which they readily experience anxiety and threat." Earlier in the paper, they wrote that -- although "our focus on manhood does not deny the importance of women's gender-related struggles" -- "Women who do not live up to cultural standards of femininity may be punished, rejected, or viewed as 'unladylike,' but rarely will their very status as women be questioned in the same way as men's status often is."

When is it to a man's disadvantage to publicly examine and question masculinity? Surely the mere act of questioning and examining gender does not make a man less masculine; how can we work against the perception that it does?

At the same time, though, this isn't a "with us or against us" situation: men who don't choose to identify as non-normative also don't tend to join the "opposition." By "opposition" I mean folks like "Men's Rights Activists" (on the Internet we call them MRAs). MRAs -- at least according to my stereotype of them -- are conscious of social and legal disadvantages suffered by men, such as the fact that men are at a severe disadvantage in child custody cases; at the same time, they're blind to male privilege. It's a deadly combination. My personal favorite MRA quotation ever is, "White men are the most discriminated-against group in the country." Mercifully, MRAs are a fringe group, but they make a big impression.

My "not into gender studies" friend once told me that although he frequently deconstructs problems of masculinity in the privacy of his own mind, he doesn't like to publicly have those conversations because he doesn't want to sound like an MRA. He said, "A lot of the time, men who want to think seriously about masculinity won't talk about it aloud because we really don't want to be **that**." He later added, "It's very tricky to discuss masculinity yet avoid simply devolving into male entitlement. That's the crux of the problem with the 'Men's Movement' assholes -- none of them are addressing the underlying problems of masculinity. They're just whining about not receiving the privileges their cultural conditioning tells them to expect."

How do the current "men's rights movements" discourage men who might, in a different climate, be very interested in discussing masculinity? Assuming men can reclaim the "pro-masculinity movement" from MRAs, do any men feel motivated to do so? Can men occupy the middle ground between MRAs and LGBTQ, feminist, or other leftist discussions of gender -- that is, can men find space to discuss masculinity without being aligned with "one side or the other"?

All too frequently in radical sex/gender circles, the theme has been blame. Men in particular are excoriated for failing to adequately support feminism -- or criticized for failing to join the fight against oppressive sex and gender norms \-- but few ideas are offered for how men can be supportive and non-oppressive **while remaining overtly masculine** , especially if their sexuality is normative (e.g., straight/dominant/big-dicked).

There are fragments: some insight might be drawn from the ways in which many BDSM communities create non-oppressive frameworks within which we have our deliciously oppressive sex. With practice, one can get shockingly good at preserving a heavy dominant/submissive dynamic that still allows both partners to talk about their other needs. Surely that understanding of sexual roles vs. other needs could be adapted to the service of gender identity. Yet so many BDSMers still fall prey to the same old gendered preconceptions, and talk nonsense about how "all women are naturally submissive" or whatever.

Don't get me wrong: of course anyone would deserve plenty of blame if they refused to let go of their entitlement, or chose not to examine the ways their behavior might support an oppressive system. But I think men exist who are willing to do those things, yet feel blocked from relevant discussions because participating creates anxiety about their sexual or gender identity. It strikes me as unreasonable to attack them for that. Choosing to present one's sexuality and/or gender identity in a normative way is not **in itself** a sin. It's not fair to expect people to fit themselves into a box that doesn't suit them -- not even for The All-Important Cause of better understanding sex and gender.

Where can we find ideas for how men can be both supportive and non-oppressive, and overtly masculine? How can we make it to normative men's advantage to analyze masculine norms? What does it look like to be masculine, but liberated from the strictures of stereotypical masculinity? How can we contribute to a Men's Movement that encompasses all three bases -- being perceived as masculine, acknowledging male privilege, and deconstructing the problems of masculinity?

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Questions I Want To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men, Part 3: Space for Men

I'm about to assert something that makes me nervous, because I worry that people are going to stick me in the "asshole MRA" box. Don't get me wrong: I **certainly** don't think that women have it better, overall, than men do. But I do wonder whether it might be good for feminists to acknowledge that -- **although we don't experience nearly as much privilege as men** \-- there are a lot of advantages women experience that men don't.

Because women aren't seen as threatening, we have an easier time doing confrontational things like approaching strangers on the street. Because women aren't seen as fighters, we stand a lower chance of being mugged than men do. Because women are seen as emotional, we're given a huge amount of social space to consider and discuss our feelings. I can work with and be affectionate with children far more easily than a man could. I can be explicit and overt about my sexuality without being viewed as a creep.

And there are at least a few recurring complaints about how trying to be masculine can suck. First and foremost: that men don't feel they've been taught to process their emotions, or don't feel allowed to display them. Another: that they're perceived as less manly if they don't achieve success through a career, especially if they aren't the main breadwinner for their family. A third: that men are expected to be sexually insatiable, or always to be sexually available.

Of course, it's worth noting that the advantages women experience are almost always the flip side of unfortunate stereotypes. For instance, one might say that women get more social space for emotion because we're stereotyped as irrational and hysterical. But that doesn't change the fact that most of us easily grasp that space, while most men don't. And if we can reject the Oppression Olympics for just one minute and stop thinking about who's got it worse, it becomes clear that the advantages and drawbacks associated with being both male and female are intertwined. The two systems reinforce, and cannot function without, each other. The gender binary may not hurt everyone **equally** , but it hurts everyone. As those beautiful "Every Girl / Every Boy" posters say, the most obvious example is: "For every girl who is tired of acting weak when she is strong, there is a boy tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable."

I do suspect that it may not be psychologically realistic to ask people from our underdog-loving culture to embrace an image of themselves as privileged; my thoughts turn again to the trans man who hated the thought of being a white male. But if we feminists can't work productively from a stance that acknowledges our social advantages, how can we expect straight/dominant/big-dicked men to do it?

Could feminist acknowledgment of the women's gender-based advantages help pave the way for more men to acknowledge male privilege? Could feminist acknowledgment of the advantages on both sides of the gender binary help us better grasp what sucks about being a guy?

Am I citing Thomas MacAulay Millar too much here? Well, at least once, he frustrated me. Amongst the comments on one blog post, I thought he was stating his views about stereotypical guys rather harshly. I suggested that it might be better to seek common ground, or at least to explain things gently; he said he wasn't interested -- "I think we all work with some people where they are and can't soft-sell our views enough to deal with others." He added, "If I'm going to alienate someone for saying what I think too bluntly, I'll pick entitled cis het dudes."

I won't pretend I didn't laugh when I read that -- but I worried about it, too. I've had an enormous number of experiences trying to discuss feminism/sex/gender with men in which the men tensed, bristled, and closed me out. I don't think it was always because those guys couldn't stand the thought of losing their privilege, either. I think a lot of dudes have been led to feel that they have no place in gender discussions -- that those discussions will always be about what men are doing wrong, and that no one's prepared to work with them where they are.

All groups have outsiders. Movements inevitably form themselves around oppositional forces. As someone who's spent her share of time feeling feminist rage, I'd say that being filled with feminist rage is totally understandable. And seriously, don't get me wrong: I'm not giving unfeminist guys a free pass. I'm not happy about the fact that so many men are apparently alienated from feminism because us radicals are too confrontational -- or too uncomfortably correct -- for their fragile masculine egos to handle. (I'm being sarcastic! Mostly.) I'm **really** not happy about the fact that I've got to think about **marketing** anti-oppression -- in a just universe, wouldn't anti-oppression market itself?

But at the same time, I'm a realist. I know this isn't a just universe, and I want to use tactics that'll achieve my goals. Which are: I'd really like to find more men at my side in the sex and gender wars. I'd really like to talk to more guys who don't see ideas stamped with feminism as an attack -- rather, as an opportunity for alliance. Plus, if we're going to think in terms of cold hard tactics, it's worth noting that normative men hold most of the power in America. (That's part of what we're complaining about, right?) So swelling our ranks with The Oppressive Class means we can ruthlessly use their power for good.

Can we do better at making feminist discourses around gender and sexuality open to normative men, without driving ourselves crazy? How can we make our movement open to, and accepting of, normative men? Put another way, how do we convince normative men to support us?

Maybe we don't need a lot of normative men in the camp of sex and gender radicals; maybe we'll be happier without silly Gender Studies 101 questions clotting our discussions. Still, even if we don't try to "recruit" them, I'd love to see more widespread analysis of masculinity and masculine sexuality amongst normative dudes... if only because getting a sense for their societal boxes might simply make them happier. If only because I think they've got their own liberation to strive for.

So at the very least, I'd like to contribute to an America where serious examination of masculinity and male sexuality can flourish.

That's my final question. _How do I do it?_

* * *

The above entries originally appeared at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2009/10/18/questions-i-want-to-ask-entitled-cis-het-men-part-1/

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2009/10/20/questions-i-want-to-ask-entitled-cis-het-men-part-2-mens-rights/

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2009/10/24/questions-i-want-to-ask-entitled-cis-het-men-part-3-space-for-men/

The first followup (plus many many comments) is available at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2009/12/09/manliness-and-feminism-the-followup/

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RELATIONSHIPS:

### [storytime] Chemistry

_I wrote this in late 2011, while I was finishing up the first draft of my awesome book_ Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser. _I was very confused about pickup artist tactics and pickup artist attitudes, and that's reflected in this piece. But there's a lot more to it, from working out some stuff about polyamory to my feelings about marriage. A lot of these thoughts are developed further in_ Confessions.

* * *

Chemistry

It's a long story and a short one, but I guess all of them are.

I'm 27. It's about that age: A lot of my compatriots are getting married lately -- most monogamously, some to a primary polyamorous partner. I myself have a stack of relationships in my past. Some were monogamous, some polyamorous. Some have been on-and-off, some short-term, some long-term (5 or 6 years was the longest). Lately I've been processing some tough questions about polyamory, but I'd like to stick with it.

And I've been thinking a lot about what I want in a primary polyamorous partner. The kind of guy I could marry. I wonder if I'll ever get to that point. I wonder if I'd know him if I saw him.

* * *

I met Mr. Ambition at one of the aforementioned weddings. Several people recommended that I talk to him, and we liked each other right away. Mutual friends used words like "zealot" to describe him; let's just say he's got an intense history of dedicated activism. Charisma, integrity, and pure energy pour off him. His words are almost always articulate and challenging. He can socially dominate a room without thinking. He works a challenging job ten hours per day; exercises two hours; socializes several hours; sleeps and eats when he can. He gives hugs easily, laughs easily, hands out compliments like candy.

Mr. Ambition is most definitely not a neutral personality. Of course, neither am I.

At the time, I was just coming out of the worst stage of my research on pickup artists -- a subculture of men who trade tips on how to seduce women. Also, I'd just had one of those breakups where I was too busy feeling stupid to properly understand how hurt I was. (Don't you hate those?) You can read all about those Dramatic Events in my upcoming book _Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser._ In the meantime, suffice to say that I felt... flattened.

Arguably, I should have had a sign taped to my forehead that read: "Emotionally Unavailable."

I went to dinner with Mr. Ambition later that week. At the end of the meal, he sat back and looked at me. "You're so **authentic** ," he said.

"I haven't felt very authentic lately," I said frankly, but his words felt good. Like a balm. Like I was healing.

* * *

We got along excellently, had a lot in common, etc. Typical this-relationship-starts-well stuff. One evening, after we'd been out to eat in a big philosophical group, Mr. Ambition noted the hotness of my intense theoretical bent. "When you were discussing social justice and ethics tonight," he said, "I wanted to reach across the table and grab you."

He mentioned marriage within weeks. "This has never happened before," he told me. "I've never dated someone I thought I could actually marry." _Whoa, tiger,_ I thought, but I had to admit that he hit a lot of my Ideal Characteristics as well. Intelligence, drive, charisma, **and** morality: it's hard to argue with that.

Our sexual chemistry was okay, but not climb-the-walls stellar. _We'll develop that,_ I told myself. _He's less sexually experienced than I am, and we'll learn each other just fine._ Fortunately he's got some experience with polyamory, but in terms of S&M, he's another of those vanilla-but-questioning guys (I never learn). When we did S&M, I had to monitor the situation extra carefully because it was so new to him.

And for all his intelligence, it was really hard to talk to him about emotions. It wasn't that he was cold or distant; on the contrary, he's one of the most fiery people I've ever met. But he had a lot of difficulty explaining what was going on in his head. Indeed, he told me that he had a lot of difficulty **knowing** what was going on in his head. He did things like laugh when a friend hurt his feelings, then deny that he was hurt, even though I could plainly see the stricken look behind his eyes.

I wasn't surprised that he was more physical than verbal about S&M. Very straightforward: throwing me around, pulling my head back, digging his hands into my skin. He's incredibly strong, and sometimes I called my safeword simply because his strength scared me.

There was one particular S&M encounter... early in the evening, I called my safeword because I wasn't sure he was into it.

"Red," I said, and he stopped. "Is this okay with you?" I asked, and he nodded.

"Yes," he said. "This is good. Let's keep going." His voice was low and slightly rough; a marvel of certainty. He put his hands back on me instantly. My doubts disappeared.

We kept going. I watched my body, felt the lump building in my throat, monitored my breath as it became harsh and fast.

"Red," I said, and he stopped. "You're going to break me," I said, "I'm going to cry. If you don't want to deal with that, then stop."

This, by the way, is a difficult skill that I have learned: this ability to track my S&M reactions so clearly. I would never have been able to do it seven years ago, and I still can't do it during complicated S&M encounters. But now I can do it during simple ones. (Yes, "simple" and "complicated" are in the eye of the beholder.)

I really hate stopping an S&M encounter right when I'm on the verge of tears. It's worse than an interrupted orgasm. But I'd rather do that than break down crying and **then** deal with a horrified partner.

"That's fine," said Mr. Ambition. So we kept going. I cried. He started talking, and I was surprised by how harsh his words could be. _That's more like it,_ I thought.

Some S&M encounters have a rhythm to them, a poetry: a beginning and an end that become clear to the participants as they go along. This one didn't -- at least not to me. So I didn't rely on him to bring it to a close. After a while, I safeworded out, and took a breath to still my tears.

Mr. Ambition was quiet again. I was having trouble reading him. There was some energy caught inside him, coiled like a dragon, but I couldn't tell if it was violence or something else. I put a halt to my own emotional cycle and tried to focus on him. "How are you feeling?" I asked, but he couldn't tell me. I asked a few more questions, and he just couldn't answer. He just didn't know.

I never got another word from him on how he felt about that encounter. I wondered if I was being too careful in how I asked about it; I wondered if he wanted me to push harder; I wondered if I'd already pushed him too far.

I suspected there were some dramatic feelings trapped in Mr. Ambition. But I wasn't sure I currently had the warmth to coax them out.

* * *

In the past, I've fallen in love so hard that I felt like the world was black-and-white when I was away from my lover; I felt like I only saw color when I was with him. I have dated men where the chemistry was so intense, so obvious, that it hung in the air between us like smoke. I've had sex that felt like telepathy. It's pretty awesome when it works. And it's easier to get that with some people than with others: some guys, I meet them and it's like we speak the same language already.

With some guys, it's not instant, but it also doesn't take long to build our mutual vocabulary.

And then I've dated guys where the learning curve -- both sexually and temperamentally -- was much longer. It was less instinctive. But it was not impossible. So I know for a fact that **people can build chemistry**. Sometimes it's just there, but sometimes you can create it.

My relationship with Mr. Ambition was definitely polyamorous, but a few weeks in, I decided I was really into him... and I started managing my incentives. There was another guy I saw occasionally, with whom I had stronger instinctive chemistry. This other guy agreed with me that we didn't want a Big Important Relationship. _This other guy will screw up my incentives if I hang out with him too much,_ I thought, and I limited my time with him. I set rules with myself: I didn't call him, I didn't text him. I knew: _If I let myself get too intensely into this other guy, that could inhibit my ability to bond with Mr. Ambition._

I told the other guy that once my relationship with Mr. Ambition was more stable, we might be able to pursue something more intense. By the time we had the conversation, he said he'd already been thinking similar thoughts. That he didn't want to distract me from something that could be beautiful.

Similarly, there are one or two men in my life that I'm attracted to but don't want a sexual connection with at all. So I try not to see them unless I feel inoculated: I don't hang out with them unless I'm sure I can distract myself with my feelings about another man.

A lot of polyamorists say that "love is infinite," that we can love lots of people, etc. I agree with this in theory -- but there's also a polyamorous saying that "While love may be infinite, time is not." And hormones aren't infinite, either. I've learned my hormonal reactions, I've seen myself get imprinted by people... I've seen myself develop feelings and fantasies for one guy that made me 100% immune to another hot guy's charms.

Do I have perfect self-control? Absolutely not. That's why I'm trying to influence my own choices so carefully. I know that choice plays a huge role when we build relationships. **Choosing to commit is arguably as big a relationship factor as instinctive chemistry.**

... Arguably.

* * *

When I first got to college many moons ago, my roommate came from a family of immigrants with a tradition of arranged marriages. She and I stayed up late one night, perched on our dorm room mattresses, and I listened in fascination while she told me that her father wanted her to marry a man of her father's choice, rather than her own.

"I'm not sure whether I'll do it," she said. I watched her wave a hand airily. I was mesmerized by her casual acceptance of a custom that struck me as barbaric. "I mean," she said, "I'm cool with this guy that my dad's found for me. But I don't know if we're **that** cool. On the other hand, I can't deny the advantages of arranged marriages."

"Advantages!" I cried. I was so young... (Okay, I'm still young.) "What do you mean, **advantages**?!"

"Arranged marriages are more stable," she said. "Much more stable. I'm not sure I'd ever want to marry for love. That shit goes up in smoke."

From what I understand, there have even been studies about this: that people in arranged marriages report being quite happy, quite stable.

I've gotten the it's-not-passion-that-makes-a-successful-marriage message before, of course -- often from super-white, super-American Americans. For example, there's that infamous 2008 article "Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough." The article is sure to send any woman roughly my age into a panic. It's made enough of an impression that I **still** have conversations about it with other women my age -- almost four years after its debut.

I don't like the Settling writer's attitude. She's written with horror and anger about S&M in other venues, for example; and the whole Settling article has a generally conservative bent. But she's articulating some real feelings and important thoughts, and while I don't agree with all of them, I do agree with some. At one point, analyzing television, she notes that:

_While Rachel and her supposed soul mate, Ross, finally get together (for the umpteenth time) in the finale of_ Friends, _do we feel confident that she'll be happier with Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames. It's equally questionable whether_ Sex and the City's _Carrie Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan, only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will be better off in the framework of marriage and family. (Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Bjorn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Bjorn?)_

I've never watched _Friends_ or _Sex and the City,_ but I know the feeling.

Personally, I'm more of a novel girl. The other day, I found myself thinking of my long-ago roommate and her thoughts on arranged marriage while I read Monica Ali's beautiful book _Brick Lane._ Monica Ali is an immigrant to the United Kingdom, and the characters in her novel all come to the UK from Bangladesh. Some of the characters accept traditional arranged marriages, while others make "love marriages" instead -- often defying their parents, their whole set of cultural norms, to do so. Towards the end of the novel, one man reflects on the early days of his marriage:

We thought that the love would never run out. It was like a magic rice sack that you could keep scooping into and never get to the bottom. It was a "love" marriage, you see. What I did not know -- I was a young man -- is that there are two kinds of love. The kind that starts off big and slowly wears away, that seems you can never use it up and then one day is finished. And the kind that you don't notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand.

As you can tell, this character is currently unhappy in his "love marriage." Of course, the grass is always greener on the other side. What's the difference between the big love and the pearl love? Can they even be compared? Is it like apples to oranges?

But couldn't all this be a false dichotomy? Who says it's about arrangement versus randomness -- chemistry versus choice? Can we have both? Can we find the big love, and nurture that so it develops into the pearl love, too?

My ultimate conclusion about the Art and Science of Flirting, from my "studies" of pickup artists and also my entire life, is that flirting is all about strategic ambiguity. Deliberate uncertainty. Manipulating ambiguity and uncertainty can contribute to many intense feelings.

Some people learn this, and decide that the only way to have a relationship with chemistry is to include a constant generous dollop of uncertainty about love, loyalty, or something equally important. These people decide chemistry can only derive from little pieces of confusion: tiny mismatches that lodge underneath the similarities that bring people together, constantly unsettling, like a prickly burr. But I don't think that's what I want.

And after all, S&M creates extraordinary feelings too, but plenty of people do S&M in very controlled circumstances: pre-discussed, with safewords and so on. Arguably, S&M is another form of mismatch, of contrast, of uncertainty -- but it's a form that can be managed. So I know all about creating intense uncertain feelings in controlled circumstances, and using those to contribute to stable and reliable loving relationships. Don't I?

Eventually, my college roommate caused a gigantic blowup in her family by rejecting arranged marriage. Her father didn't speak to her for a long, long time.

* * *

On my birthday, Mr. Ambition took me out to dinner. Then we went to watch fireflies by the lake. As was inevitable for summer in Chicago, we ran into lots of people we knew. One of those groups contained an on-again-off-again partner of mine: Richard, with whom I have... shall we say, a complicated history. I respect Richard a lot, and I like him, and I'm highly attracted to him... but I'm pathologically wary of him for reasons that will become obvious.

We greeted our friends. "How are you doing?" Richard asked.

"Happy birthday to me, asshole," I teased. "How could you forget?"

Richard sighed. "Jeez," he said, "sorry I neglected to wish you a happy birthday within, like, the first 15 seconds I saw you."

I paused, and took a moment to recalibrate: he wasn't reacting in his usual adversarial, teasing-back manner. On the other hand, history has taught me not to fall for it when Richard seems unexpectedly vulnerable.

"I'm sorry," I said. I kept my tone light-hearted, friendly. "You know I love you, right?"

"Do I?" Richard asked.

I tilted my head at him. Without thinking, I kissed my own fingers, then put my hand gently against his face, as if I were about to stroke his cheek. Or slap him. I guess it was a way of distancing myself and kissing him at the same time. I think he understood that I intended it as an uncertain-but-intimate gesture. But I'm never sure, with Richard.

"Call me," I said.

"No," Richard said. " **You** call **me**."

Hours later, Mr. Ambition brought him up. We were having one of those sweet, intimate, disjointed bedtime conversations. Mr. Ambition was lying back, half-covered by a sheet, and I was admiring the play of light on his chest. "Richard really cares about you," he said.

I stiffened, and sat up. "Maybe," I said. "But I can't trust Richard."

"His tone seemed wistful, when he saw you."

"I can't trust Richard," I repeated. "It's always a game with him. Sometimes I think that we have a real emotional connection, but if I try to talk about it or give him emotional feedback, he just ignores me."

"Maybe he isn't really ignoring you," argued Mr. Ambition. "Maybe every time you say something, or give a little, it makes a tiny bit of difference. Maybe you just have to stay open. Keep trying. These things build up."

"You don't understand," I snapped. "You don't know him! Maybe he really cares, but even if he does, it doesn't matter! Things always end up the same. If I mention emotions, or if I act warm to him, he'll ignore me for a while... and then he'll be cold to me again. I'm telling you, I've been here before, with Richard. It's a trap."

Mr. Ambition didn't waver. "If you're strong enough," he said simply, "then you can walk into a trap."

His words made my heart crack, my breath catch. Made me feel like I've forgotten everything I knew about love.

When I was younger, I thought of my emotional strength like water: an embrace that could make someone I loved feel lighter. Water is a slow, eroding force that pulls beauty from the unexpected. Water makes wood into twisted driftwood sculptures; sharp glass into opaque dim jewels; rocks into soft sand. Water will eventually reveal the heart of everything it touches. If you let it.

I hadn't thought of myself that way in a long time. I felt like Mr. Ambition was calling me out, reminding me of who I wanted to be. Maybe I protect myself better, these days. But vulnerability is not always a bad thing.

_I definitely could fall in love with this man,_ I realized.

"You're really amazing," I said, and threw myself on his chest.

He put his arms around me. "So are you," he said.

* * *

As a storyteller, I often look back on my relationships and pick out foreshadowing: the omens. And by now, I recognize the omens even as they're happening... and sometimes I change my behavior, but usually I don't. Perhaps this state is what they call maturity.

One night while we were out, Mr. Ambition sighed in an offhand way. He seemed tired, out of sorts. "I just want someone to take me on an emotional journey," he remarked to me. Then he added, "... No offense."

I mentioned this to a friend, later: "Mr. Ambition says he wants me to take him on an emotional journey," I said.

"An 'emotional journey'? That shit gets old, though," said my friend. I laughed, and agreed with him.

Another night, Mr. Ambition mentioned something about enjoying drama. I was with my best girlfriend at the time; she and I looked at each other. "Careful what you wish for," I said.

My friend said, "Yeah, I'm pretty sure Clarisse knows how to create arbitrary amounts of drama at any time."

"But I'm pretty sure I don't want to," I said.

Later, when Mr. Ambition mentioned that he doesn't usually know how he's feeling, he added: "My friends can often tell more about my own emotions than I can."

"So you basically outsource your emotional processing to your friends?" I asked.

He agreed.

Perhaps the worst omen was when Mr. Ambition told me, "I've never been hurt by love."

"Never?" I asked.

"Never," he said.

His certainty was so great that, in itself, it made me uneasy. Because I have definitely been hurt by love. And my greatest wounds were dealt by men who seemed sure they loved me. A man who seems sure might actually be sure, but he may simply fail to understand himself.... So these days, it's always men who seem certain that make me most uncertain.

There's another great quotation from that Monica Ali novel, _Brick Lane._ Here it is: "The thing about getting older is you don't need everything to be possible anymore, you just need some things to be certain."

* * *

I often felt like I was watching the relationship from a distance. I tried to resist thinking of our relationship using cold, manipulative pickup artist terminology and tactics, but sometimes I couldn't stop myself. I'd rather not talk about that.

I found more and more ways to manage my incentives. I noticed that one of my methods was telling friends and parents that I liked Mr. Ambition a whole lot. I think it was even true.

Most of all, I told myself that the lack of natural chemistry was a good thing, and not a bad thing; the lack of natural chemistry was **why** this relationship could last.

I was quite calculating about it, really, and maybe that was why he broke up with me. On the bright side, I kept my head during the breakup, which was nice, because I didn't keep my head during my last breakup. With Mr. Ambition, I didn't feel like my self-control slipped at all.

"We need to talk," Mr. Ambition said without preamble, when I met him in the foyer of his apartment building. "I'm having some concerns about our relationship." Once we were in his apartment, he said, "To be honest, I don't know how attracted I am to you."

I tried to measure his mien. I got the feeling, again, that energy was coiled tightly inside him. Like a dragon. "Are you breaking up with me?" I asked.

"We're just having a conversation," he said quickly.

We talked about sex for a while. Chemistry. "I don't think I like S&M, to be honest," he said. "I don't feel affected by it."

I thought: _Are you sure?_ and _You definitely looked affected by it,_ but it's both unethical and unwise to question someone else's experience. So I just said, "You know I don't want you to do anything you don't want to do. Have you felt pressured by me?"

"No, of course not," he said.

We talked some more. He ultimately said, "Look, are you totally satisfied with the sex we're having?"

"I mean..." I said. "It's not the most intense sex I've ever had, but it'll keep getting better."

"I think we should just be friends," he said.

"... Okay," I said. "Um. Is there anything else you want to talk about?"

Mr. Ambition seemed agitated. He seemed barely able to hold still. "I've never dated anyone that I respected like I respect you," he said. "Your charisma, your intelligence, your morality. But... I don't know. I don't feel like we're very authentic with each other. I don't feel like there's much warmth between us."

_Maybe you're right,_ I thought. _But either way, it's too late now._ "Okay," I said. I thought for a moment. "I'm sorry," I added. "I really wanted this to work out." For a moment, tears startled my eyes, but I blinked them back.

"Are you all right?" he asked. He leaned forward. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

I looked at him and tried to think. I knew I was going to be very upset in maybe fifteen minutes. He seemed hurt, and I wanted to say something that would comfort him. I wondered if he wanted me to cry, and beg, and create drama; I wouldn't do that... but maybe it would help if I asked for something simple.

But I couldn't come up with anything, and I wanted to leave. So after a pause, I said, "You can let me go home and cry."

I said it as gently as I could. But Mr. Ambition seemed terribly distressed. "Ohhh," he said, and screwed up his face. He leapt to his feet. "I'm sorry," he said.

"It's okay," I said. "Is there anything else?"

"Sometimes I think men just aren't capable of the kind of commitment women are," Mr. Ambition said. He sounded defensive, even though I hadn't made any accusations. "Then again, you're not like most women.... You're kind of a hardass. You probably have this problem with a lot of the men you date, where you come across as kind of a hardass.... And to be honest, I don't think men really want to date women as smart as they are."

_Jesus,_ I thought, _you already broke up with me, can't you just let me go? Why do you have to rip into me like this?_ I wondered how much of what he was saying was about me, and how much was him trying to make sense of his own feelings. But even though I felt sure that he was confused, his words sent an icy spike straight through me. _"I don't think men really want to date women as smart as they are...."_

"I've worked really hard to become less argumentative," I said. "You should have seen me when I was a teenager.... I don't know if I can tone myself down any more than I already do." Even as I said it, I wondered why I was still talking to a guy who'd just said that _men don't want to date women as smart as they are._ I felt like a bad feminist.

"Oh, you shouldn't tone yourself down!" said Mr. Ambition. "It makes you attractive.... Attractive intellectually, I mean."

I sighed. "Yes," I said. "Intellectually."

"I'm sorry," he said again.

"I'm going home," I said.

"We're still friends, right?" he asked.

"Yes, but give me some time to get over this," I said. "Probably about a month."

"What do you mean?" He came after me as I walked to the door. "Like, you don't want to see me at all for a month? You don't want me to call you, or reach out to you, or **anything**?"

I looked at him, again, for a long moment. I regretted his stricken expression. Again, I spoke as gently as I could. "Maybe in a month."

He offered me a ride, which I declined. My fifteen-minute estimate was almost on target: twenty minutes later, I stepped into my bedroom, leaned back against my door and burst into tears.

* * *

I ran into Richard the next evening, and we spent the night together. Richard put a fair amount of effort into convincing me to talk to Mr. Ambition.

"It sounds like he didn't actually mean to break up with you," said Richard. "It sounds like the conversation got away from him. He didn't start that conversation intending to break up with you; maybe he was looking for reassurance, and you approached his questions too logically, and he concluded that you don't care. You really like him. It seems like it's worth trying to make it work."

You may have noticed that both of these men tried hard to convince me that the other man cared about me. I decline to analyze what that means about me and my current approach to relationships.

However, I will say that I tried giving Richard more emotional feedback than I have in a long time; I even told him I missed him the next time he went on vacation. And I did try talking to Mr. Ambition again, and he acknowledged that he hadn't exactly intended to break up with me.

But then Mr. Ambition and I had several of those encounters that I think of as "post-breakup talks". I hate that shit. Every evening ended on a confusing, inconclusive note. He kept saying that he was "confidently ambiguous." We weren't dating, we weren't not dating. It reminded me of a phase I went through with a college ex-boyfriend, back in my monogamous days: my ex and I spent several weeks post-breakup being "exclusive but not together". So preposterous. People are so broken.

Mr. Ambition himself has described uncertainty as an "emotional amplifier"... but sometimes it amplifies in the wrong direction. After a week or so, I got fed up and cut things off. He asked when we would talk again, and I told him I didn't want to talk for a while. A few days later, I broke my neck in a bicycle accident.

It's like a goddamn soap opera, isn't it? Sometimes I can't believe this stuff happens to me.

* * *

Mr. Ambition showed up in my hospital room while no one else was around. I was no longer afraid that I might die, but I was leaden with morphine, and anxious. I awaited the neurosurgeons who would come install a big scary spinal brace, and I felt grateful and glad to see Mr. Ambition. I hadn't been certain he would come, although if he'd had such an accident, I would have moved Heaven and earth to go see him.

"I came as soon as our friends told me," he said. "There are so many people who love you." He said my name, and spoke softly, and the words bruised my heart.

"Thank you," I said inadequately.

"I had to skip out on work to get here," he said, and sat next to my bed. "We're in the middle of important negotiations. A billion-dollar deal."

"I'm sorry," I said. "Maybe you shouldn't have come."

He laughed. "Don't you think you're worth a billion dollars?"

"Probably not," I said.

He took my hand. "Is there anything I can get you?" he asked.

I wasn't allowed to eat or drink before the surgery. "Tell me a story," I requested.

Mr. Ambition retold a story from Dostoevsky's _The Idiot._ It was about a big-hearted man who comes to a small community and befriends an outcast "fallen woman". The big-hearted man gains high status in the community, but when people find out that he's friends with the marginalized sex worker, they become angry. Despite their condemnation, the man stays steadfastly loyal to his friend, and by seeing the way he cares about her, eventually the community accepts her too.

It was exactly the kind of story I expected to hear from him. I thought of the moment, sitting in bed, where he'd said: "If you're strong enough, you can walk into a trap." The moment when I'd realized that I could fall in love with him.

After Mr. Ambition finished the story, the doctors arrived with the brace. This contraption involved using power tools to put four screws directly into my skull, which stabilize seven pounds of metal. For realz. I was awake while they did it, too. Luckily I got local anesthesia, so the screws didn't hurt while they were going in -- but I heard the bone crunching, and I felt the pressure building. Also, my neck hurt a lot. It was reasonably horrible.

Some of my friends said later that they arrived at the hospital and tried to get into my room while the brace was being installed, and they couldn't get in, but they heard me screaming. I don't remember screaming, so I deny everything.

I tried to talk normally while it was happening. I felt like the whole affair was probably more taxing for the doctors than it was for me. I mean, at least I had morphine.

"I'm sorry," I said to one of the doctors. "People must say awful things to you while you're doing this procedure."

"One woman told me how much she hated me," the doctor said tranquilly.

I tried not to cry, but I cried. Like I said: soap opera territory.

Mr. Ambition never let go of my hand.

* * *

Mr. Ambition visited me in the hospital for hours every day. He brought me all kinds of awesome vegan smoothies. He met my parents, and got along well with them.

When she got a moment alone with me, my best girlfriend asked what was up with him. "You guys broke up, didn't you? What's next?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "We haven't talked about it."

When I was able to go home, Mr. Ambition helped move me in. My air conditioner had stopped working, which is not fun for August in Chicago, especially for a person wearing a fur-lined brace. He promised to lend me a fan.

I can't turn my head, so when Mr. Ambition arrived with the fan, I didn't realize it was him until he was standing right next to me. I was alone in my room, lying in bed, wearing only the brace and my underwear while I answered text messages. This was not as sexy as it sounds. Unless you're a medical device fetishist. In which case, I guess it was exactly as sexy as it sounds.

The fan was quickly installed next to my bed. I felt awkward because I was half-naked and wearing a complex brace. I felt awkward because I couldn't help with the fan. I also felt awkward because I was racking up unpayable debt to a man who was, to all appearances, my ex. I tried to cover my discomfort by answering some more texts; then I looked up at Mr. Ambition. I couldn't read his expression.

I felt oddly expressionless, myself. I felt wrung out. I couldn't think of any words I wanted to say.

Maybe that was our moment of truth: the moment had no chemistry at all.

I gave Mr. Ambition my hand. "Thank you so much for everything," I said.

"Of course," he said, squeezed my hand, and left.

* * *

After my accident, Richard sent me a quick email, then didn't contact me for over a month. I remembered what Mr. Ambition had said -- encouraging me to send more emotional signals -- so tried inviting Richard for dinner, and he didn't answer my text messages. When I finally ran into Richard, I asked why he'd been ignoring me, and he laughed. "I knew you'd accuse me of ignoring you," he said. I felt like I'd walked into a trap.

I was hurt, obviously. I was surprised by how hurt I was. The problem with my youthful water metaphor is that water is basically invulnerable, but I am not... and when I was younger and more open, I had much more trouble setting important boundaries.

On the other hand, I had to admit that it was funny, too. I mean, it wasn't like I didn't see this coming. I mean, my coming-out story includes a portrait of Richard at his most difficult. One of the friends I share with Richard made a comment about leopards and spots. Maybe my life is a soap opera, but it could also be a sitcom with the most amazing characterization ever.

I enlisted a cold, brilliant, evil-hearted friend to help draft my final letter to Richard. The letter was very short. Arguably, it was brutal. It read:

Economists recognize that the most robust relationships are formed through a plethora of implicit agreements. Apparently, these agreements are not present, and probably won't be. Cheers.

Economics arguments in the comments are encouraged. More importantly, readers may feel free to steal that letter for use on whoever is trying to pull their chain.

* * *

I received a couple texts from Mr. Ambition, a few days after he gave me the fan. He said there had been a death in his family. "But I don't want to talk about that, actually," he wrote. "I just want to check in and see how you're doing."

I thought about how he laughed when he was hurt. I thought about how he'd once told me that he wanted drama. I thought about his confusing reactions to S&M. I thought about how he outsourced his emotional labor to his friends. I thought about all the emotion I'd felt in him, coiled and caught and turned in on itself like a caged dragon.

I wondered if he wanted me to push him to talk.

"I'm so sorry," I texted back. "But I understand if you don't want to talk about it. I'm doing fine."

He invited me to a social event a week later, but I declined. I didn't reach out to him for a while after that, and he didn't reach out to me. I heard later that Mr. Ambition asked one of my friends whether they thought he owed me anything.

My friend told him, quite accurately: "No, you don't owe her anything."

If anything, **I** owe **him**. I'm not sure what I owe him, but I'm sure I owe him **something**. A billion dollars? Vegan smoothies?

Chemistry?

* * *

This post can be found on the Internet at:

<http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/09/30/storytime-chemistry/>

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FEMINISM:

### [theory] "Inherent Female Submission": The Wrong Question

I wrote this post in mid-2011. Perhaps you can tell that I was in the depths of my obsession with pickup artists at the time... those guys talk about "inherent female submission" ad nauseam. Not all pickup artists are evil and misogynist, but the ones who are love to beat this horse.

* * *

"Inherent Female Submission": The Wrong Question

I get a certain question occasionally, from straight dudes who've had a number of sexual partners. It goes something like this:

_All the women I've slept with liked pain. They asked me to hurt them or to dominate them in bed. I did it, and enjoyed it; I loved how much it turned them on... it turned them on a lot. But I keep thinking about it now. Why are all women into being submissive and/or masochistic in bed? What does that_ _mean_ _?_

They ask me this question in vaguely worried tones. Sometimes they say things like, "It's really creepy." It is obvious that these dudes are rather concerned about this Terrible Truth.

Here's my short answer for those guys: If you know women who are submissive and/or masochistic in bed, that means those particular women like being submissive and/or masochistic in bed. It doesn't mean anything else.

You're still here? Ah, well. I figured that wouldn't satisfy. So here's a longer answer:

Firstly, if you're a straight dude, and you're drawing conclusions about "all women" based on the women you get involved with, then stop. Just stop. Even if you have slept with zillions of women, you don't actually know what all women want, because:

A) **Your experience of women is limited to women who got involved with you.** You are screening for certain qualities, sometimes consciously, and sometimes unconsciously or by accident. If you tend to enjoy the dominant role, for example, or if you use a dominant style of flirtation, then you could be screening for submissive female partners, whether you intend to or not.

B) **Everyone has biases, including you.** I love the old saying: "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." If you have a bias towards seeing women as sexually submissive (and you almost certainly do, because female sexual submission is a hugely prevalent cultural trope), then you're more likely to see female submission in places where it does not exist.

C) **Women, like people of all genders, are demonstrably varied.** You really don't think non-submissive straight women exist? Why then, it must be so inconvenient when I point you to the work of blatantly dominant women, huh? It's shocking, I know... next I'll be telling you that queer and asexual women exist! (Not to mention women who switch among roles -- from submissive to dominant, from sadistic to masochistic. I primarily go for submissive masochism, but still, I myself play for both teams.)

The thing is, though... no matter how many holes I can poke in these dudes' anecdotal "data," I can't bring myself to worry like they do. Even if a brilliant, well-reviewed study came out tomorrow and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that 100% of women are submissive masochists in bed, I wouldn't care. (I bet you my left ear this study will never happen, but I'm just saying, even if it did, I wouldn't care.)

Let me say it really clearly: **Even if most women are submissive masochists in bed (and I'm not convinced most women are), there's nothing wrong with that. I don't care.**

Why don't I care? Because all this anxiety and argument about submission -- and in particular, what it means for women to be submissive; whether all women are submissive; whether women are "inherently" or "biologically" submissive; whether BDSM is an orientation or not... this is all the wrong question.

I'll note that the research seems to indicate that more kinky women are submissive than dominant. Of course, this doesn't necessarily indicate anything about the tastes of women who don't identify as kinky. And it's probably biased by culture, in that everything from fashion photos to romance novels emphasizes female submission and male dominance. Within BDSM culture, female dominance and male submission are often disappeared, much to the justified frustration of actual female dominants and male submissives. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail -- sometimes including our own psyches and sexualities.

Plus, if the only available patterns for kink emphasize something a person doesn't like, then that person will probably avoid kink. Note that in the research I linked to, for example, the percentage of submissive women was higher in samples from within the BDSM subculture than in samples from outside the BDSM subculture... perhaps because many BDSM subcultural gatherings emphasize female submission and thereby alienate women who are primarily dominant. Anyway, regardless... this is **still** the wrong question.

In short, "inherent female submission" is the wrong question.

Certainly, I've fought through a lot of personal fears about what my interest in BDSM meant for me as a feminist... but these days I have trouble understanding what, exactly, got me so upset. I can't believe how long it took me to outthink those fears. Now, it just seems instinctively obvious to me that:

1) **The only reason these conversations happen at all is that BDSM, and especially submission, is seen as broken and problematic and screwed-up and a sign of weakness.** What if we viewed S&M proclivities as a superpower rather than a perversion? What if submission and masochism, in particular, were viewed as signs of strength and endurance and emotional complexity, rather than weakness?

2) **Sexual kinks don't necessarily affect one's performance in non-sexual fields.** A sexually submissive woman won't make a bad CEO (at least, not because she's sexually submissive). I mean, come on, it's not like there aren't sexually submissive men in powerful corporate positions. When I was younger I remember being scared that, in some bizarre way, I was betraying women's liberation by being sexually submissive; this seems ridiculous to me now. That fear can only survive in a culture where people are looking for excuses -- no matter how flimsy -- to control and disempower women. Because it doesn't make any damn sense on its own.

3) **Rape is still rape. Everyone still has a right to consent, including submissives.** A submissive partner (of any gender) must be able to withdraw consent, and a dominant partner (of any gender) must make space for them to withdraw consent. It's always great when both partners can have an honest conversation about desire, trying to avoid pressure and unfair expectations (whether those expectations arise from sexist culture or from whatever else). Safewords are one frequently-recommended communication tactic for those who have rape fantasies, although they aren't the only tactic. What really burns me about many discussions of "inherent female submission" is that they have horrible overtones of blaming the victim and justifying rape... much like "she was wearing a short skirt, so she was asking for it." In reality, "inherent female submission" says absolutely nothing about women's right to choose our partners and protect our bodily integrity. Female submissives have made it perfectly clear that we do, in fact, claim that right.

I think most of the dudes who ask this question come to me, a feminist, and they ask this question in hushed and worried tones, because they are decent guys and they are concerned about The Consequences Of This Terrible Truth. I'd venture a guess that they've met other dudes who talk nonstop about how women are _vain and stupid and hysterical and, snicker snicker, why do we let those dumb bitches even vote and, oh by the way, did you know that lots of girls like to be choked and isn't that sooo significant...?_ And so these decent guys who are talking to me -- they have learned to associate discussions of female sexual submission with anti-feminism, and with attempts to disempower women in other spheres.

Being decent guys, this worries them, because they know that people of all genders deserve equal opportunity. But it is all a red herring! It's a series of illusions thrown up by BDSM stigma; by the idea that sexual kinks always mean something about the rest of a person's life; by people who don't comprehend that everyone has the right to consent; and by blatant, uncomplicated misogyny! Female sexual submission isn't even close to a threat to women's liberation, unless we allow it to be. If we weren't constantly forced to deal with the broken assumptions of a broken misogynist culture, this question would never occur to anyone!

It doesn't matter nearly as much what the cultural patterns are around sexual submission, as it does how we deal with sexual submission. If your partner is submissive, you can respect their desires and also respect them as a person. As I already noted, in BDSM this means communicating carefully, like with safewords and/or other tactics. Some people can have great sexual communication that's totally non-verbal -- but I always encourage explicit verbal communication because for many people, it's easier to make intentions and desires clear that way, and tactics like safewords provide a fallback in case there's a mistake.

So: what does "inherent female submission" mean for women, for feminism, for equal rights, for women who work, for powerful women? For housewives? For disabled women? For female rape survivors? For rape survivors of other genders?

Say it with me now: It's the wrong question. The mere act of asking this question implies a cultural context that is seeking excuses to disempower women. **Female sexual submission means nothing**...

... **except what every woman wants it to mean, for herself.**

* * *

This can be found on the Internet at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/07/01/inherent-female-submission-the-wrong-question/

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MANLINESS:

[theory] Fifty Shades of Grey, Fight Club, and the Complications of Male Dominance

_I wrote this in early 2012, when everyone and their brother was_ talking about _the amazingly successful fanfiction-turned-BDSM-smut_ Fifty Shades of Grey _trilogy, by E.L. James. (The online version of this post contains a bunch of relevant current links at the end.) It's one of my rare attempts at pegging an article to a recent news item; I had been planning to write this article for months, but_ Fifty Shades _gave me an opportunity to actually do it. My main goal as a sex writer has always been to put forth analysis that's responsive to the conversations I hear a lot, yet independent of the latest craze. For one thing, I almost never care to track what Everyone Is Talking About Right This Minute!!, and I'm irritated to think that I ought to do so. But I've come to reluctantly understand that responding to current news is one of the best ways to get more eyeballs on my work, so I'm trying to do more of that. I've also been encouraged in that direction by employers -- most notably the gender-lens website_ RoleReboot.org _, where I took on the role of Sex + Relationships Section Editor in late 2011. A slightly shorter version of this article was originally published there._

* * *

_Fifty Shades of Grey, Fight Club,_ **and the Complications of Male Dominance**

Much is being made of the highly successful S&M erotica novel _Fifty Shades of Grey._ People are blaming feminism for making women into submissives, blaming feminism for preventing women from being submissives, blaming women for having sexual desires at all, and a whole lot of other boring and typical stuff that comes up in any conversation about women and S&M. News flash: it's not the feminist revolution that is "causing" women to have fantasies of submission. S&M fantasies have been around since the beginning of time. (And the 1950s S&M-sensation book, _The Story of O,_ was much better written than _Fifty Shades of Grey.)_

As an S&M writer, I hear a lot of allegations about how "all" (or "almost all") women are sexually submissive and how this must Mean Something. This is echoed in the coverage of _Fifty Shades of Grey,_ in which everyone is demanding to know What It All Means About Women. I've already taken on these questions as they apply to women. But there's another submerged question here -- about men. There's plenty of talk and stereotypes about how men are inherently violent, or more aggressive than women, or "the dominant sex."

As I said in my previous article: I think it's quite questionable whether women are "inherently submissive," but my conclusion is that I don't care. It doesn't actually matter to me whether women in general are "inherently submissive" (though I really don't think women are), or whether submissive women's preferences are philosophically Deep And Meaningful (though I'm not convinced they are). What matters is:

1. How women (or any other people) can explore sexually submissive preferences consensually,

2. How women (or any other people) can compartmentalize submissive preferences so that their whole lives are safe and fulfilling and happy, and

3. How women (or any other people) can be treated well in arenas that aren't even relevant to their sexuality \-- like the workplace.

This is also how I feel about these ideas of "inherent male violence." I don't buy that men are "the dominant sex" or that men are "inherently violent." Based on what I've read, it seems quite clear that individuals with higher testosterone levels -- who are, incidentally, not always men -- often experience more aggressive feelings. Yet that's a far cry from large-scale generalizations, and it's also frequently irrelevant to questions about how people can best deal with those aggressive feelings. Plus, psychological submission can be a very separate thing from physical aggression levels.

Much of the time, when it comes to aggression, anger management is the answer, the same way a naturally shy or submissive person needs to learn to set boundaries. But there are circumstances where catharsis is completely acceptable. Lots of perfectly decent men have urges towards violent dominance; what do they do about it? How much do they agonize, like Christian Grey in _Fifty Shades of Grey,_ and how much do they explore their desires in a consensual and reasonable way?

I always thought that the late-90s movie _Fight Club_ was fascinating primarily because of its lens on masculinity and violence. It's not just about the violence men to do each other, but to themselves. Quotes include "You have to give up; you have to know that someday you're gonna die," and "The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club." I first watched it before I knew much about S&M, but now whenever I think about it, I think about how the idea of a fight club -- where people would get together and fight, for catharsis and community -- is so very reminiscent of how a lot of people experience S&M. _Fight Club_ even has safewords. Someone says stop, you stop. I obviously don't support the endpoint of the _Fight Club_ story (i.e., blowing up buildings), but the idea of establishing a men's community via a fight club seems reasonable to me.

So, what are the practicalities of dealing with aggressive or dominant tendencies in the sexual arena? As an S&M person, I've experimented with dominance as well as submission, but because violence is so associated with masculinity, I turned to some egalitarian male S&Mers for advice. I believe that even for non-S&M people, their perspectives make a really good lens for ideas of gender and violence and power. Of course, the first thing one of my friends told me was: "I'm not sure I really see dominance in general as being particularly masculine. I don't really think it's a gender associated thing."

That gentleman, who comments around the Internet under the name Scootah, went on to add: "I've certainly worried about my kinks in the past. I mean fundamentally, I get really, really turned on by grabbing someone by the hair, throwing them into the wall, backhanding them, etc. That's a pretty disturbing thought for an egalitarian who's worked with abuse victims. I spend a lot of time considering the ethics of my kinks; my partners' enthusiastic consent is a major priority."

Jay Wiseman, author of the famous S&M primer _SM101,_ talks about his own early fears towards the beginning of that book. He writes about how he began having sadistic fantasies, and went to the public library to research them. All he could find was portraits of serial killers, which scared the hell out of him. He writes:

I decided to keep myself under surveillance. I made up my mind that I was not going to hurt anybody. If I thought I was turning into someone that would harm somebody else, then I would either put myself in a mental institution or commit suicide. And thus I lived, waiting and watching to see if I was turning into someone that I needed to shoot.

Fortunately, Wiseman found partners who were open to exploring S&M with him, and went on to write extensively about safety and consent and communication within S&M. Trying to communicate in an egalitarian way is arguably the most complicated part of any S&M encounter; as Scootah told me, "There are certainly elements that could potentially unbalance a relationship in my favor. I'm a big reasonably strong guy. I do usually make more money than my partners. I also have this whole sense of position in the local S&M community. I mostly just try to be aware of those things. I try to be very careful about not taking advantage of that and negotiate clearly and not pressure people."

There are lots of ways to do clear negotiation, including asking open-ended questions before any S&M actually happens: "What are you interested in? Could you go into that more?" There's also a huge emphasis on talking through the S&M encounter afterwards, as part of the post-S&M processing we call aftercare. As another gent who goes by Noir said: "It really helped me to have a few great, feminist S&M partners. Having that echo of 'it's OK, I want this,' as well as the honest feedback when I do wrong really helped shape how I experience S&M, and with who. It's meant I learned how better to read and grasp the people in my, er, grasp."

Noir also noted, "I strive to use dominance and submission as a tool for helping my partners become stronger, in ways that also feed my S&M preferences. For example, I tend to form long-term interests with women who want a 'safe space' to extend and explore their ability to be sluts, with all that can imply. But in the process, we also explore how becoming more confident in one's sexuality also can reflect into everyday life. Also, just coming to spaces in the S&M community can be a goldmine of information. All a dominant man has to do is read, listen, open up and understand. One thing I learned was that my fears about reinforcing our messed-up society were shared by women into kink... but also that my ways of approaching the topic, as 'oh, we're so controlled by society!' were themselves pushing too much agency out of women's choices. There's a balance there that we guys who identify as both feminist and kinky have to respect, and that can come from listening to feminist women struggle with these issues, themselves."

The alternative sexuality advocate Pepper Mint (who has his own blog) told me that in terms of putting gender on his experiences, "I am a bit genderqueer, and I personally experience dominance with either a feminine or masculine vibe from moment to moment. Certain activities -- like punching -- feel masculine, while others -- like whipping -- feminine in the moment. Also, I switch, meaning that I don't always take the dominant role. Strangely, my most clearly masculine S&M activity is masochism. I always feel very manly while taking pain. I don't think I can clearly explain why these things have attached to gender in my head, though presumably I'm being affected by cultural tropes to some extent."

The consensus in general was that dominance, whether masculine or feminine, is something that happens in an encounter... not outside it. As Pepper put it, "New guys often want to play hard or do hardcore things, and will often boast and swagger. Kinky women almost always recognize this as dangerous bullshit. Learn to chill out and not take yourself too seriously, and learn to start with a light careful touch when playing with someone new. Learn to ask for help and guidance, both from others in your S&M community and from your partners."

Scootah agreed: "The first mistake I see newbie doms make is trying too hard to be some kind of bad ass. Admit your inexperience. Be seen learning. Be modest and have a good time. Learn to communicate well, and to really be friends with your prospective partners."

For me, the bottom line of these conversations is that questioning gender roles, and understanding gender complications, is an ongoing process. People have a lot of urges and preferences that are politically inconvenient and which we will never fully understand. Whether we're shaped by biology or culture, those feelings will still exist for now, and we have to deal with them. There are ways to do almost anything such that people respect each other, though -- whatever the implications for gender or power. Violence is complicated ground, but it can be used in balanced and consensual ways that end up bonding people together. _Fifty Shades of Grey_ and _Fight Club_ are both examples, and I haven't even touched competitive sports!

* * *

This can be found on the Internet at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/20/50-shades-of-grey-fight-club-and-the-complications-of-male-dominance/

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FEMINISM:

### [theory] Towards My Personal Sex-Positive Feminist 101

I wrote this in 2011, when I realized that I couldn't find a good Sex-Positive Feminist 101 anywhere on the Internet. The original version contains a lot more links, including an evolving set of relevant links at the end.

* * *

Towards My Personal Sex-Positive Feminist 101

There's an aphorism from the early 1900s literary critic Andre Maurois: "The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one's opinion but to know it." Even though I identify as an activist and genuinely want to make a real impact on the world based on my beliefs... I often think that much of my blogging has been more an attempt to figure out what I believe, than to tell people what I believe. And sometimes, I fall into the trap of wanting to be consistent more than I want to understand what I really believe -- or more than I want to empathize with other people -- or more than I want to be correct. We all gotta watch out for that.

But I'm getting too philosophical here. (Who, me?) The point is, I am hesitant to write something with a title like "Sex-Positive 101," because not only does it seem arrogant (who says Clarisse Thorn gets to define Sex-Positive 101?) \-- it also implies that my thoughts on sex-positivity have come to a coherent, standardized end. Which they haven't! I'm still figuring things out, just like everyone else.

However, lately I've been thinking that I really want to write about some basic ideas that inform my thoughts on sex-positive feminism. I acknowledge that I am incredibly privileged (white, upper-middle-class, heteroflexible, cisgendered etc) and coming mostly from a particular community, the BDSM community; both of these factors inform and limit the principles that underpin my sex-positivity. I welcome ideas for Sex-Positive Feminism 101, links to relevant 101 resources, etc.

This got really long, and I reserve the right to edit for clarity or sensitivity.

* * *

Some Central Sex-Positive Feminist Ideas, according to Clarisse Thorn

1) **Desire is complicated, and people are different.** These ideas both seem basic and obvious to me as I write them, but I wanted to put them out there because I think they're useful anchors for all the rest.

2) **Gender is not a binary, and gender cannot be determined by a person's outer appearance or behavior.** Different people experience and display gender in a galaxy of ways. No woman in the world is perfectly submissive, perfectly hourglass-shaped, perfectly kind, etc, although these are stereotypes commonly associated with women. No man in the world is perfectly dominant, perfectly confident, perfectly muscular, etc. While many people reduce the idea of a person's gender to whether they have a penis or a vagina, the existence of trans people and intersex people proves that this isn't a valid approach. Individual people have all kinds of qualities that are attributed to the "other" gender... and the concept of an "other" (or "opposite") gender is weird in itself, because why does one gender have to be the "other," and what does that imply?

All this having been said, gender is frequently perceived as a binary, and many people fit themselves into the possibly-arbitrary system of gender that currently exists. There are ideas of "men" and "women" that are culturally understood, widely adopted, and socially enforced. Feminism has its roots in women resisting men's violent and social dominance, and in women resisting the cultural emphasis on stereotypical men's desires.

3) **Historically, sex has usually been defined in terms of two things: (a) reproduction, and (b) the sexual pleasure of stereotypical men.** Cultural sexual standards are based on these things. For example, the sexual "base system" (commonly discussed among USA schoolchildren) describes kissing as "first base", groping as "second base", oral sex as "third base" and penis-in-vagina sex as "home base". Why should this hierarchy exist? It only makes sense if we think of sex as being centered around reproduction. If we think of sex as being about pleasure and open exploration in ways that are different for everyone, then having a "home base" -- a standardized goal -- makes zero sense.

Another example: penis-in-vagina sex is often seen as "real" sex or "actual" sex, with all other sex considered "less real". How many arguments have you had over the course of your lifetime about whether oral sex "counts" as sex? (Hint: more than the subject deserves.) For a recent example, there's the Kink.com virgin shoot, wherein a porn model publicly "lost her virginity" notwithstanding the fact that she'd already had plenty of oral and anal sex on camera for years -- she'd just never had vaginal sex.

As for sex being defined by the pleasure of stereotypical men: one example is how people usually think about orgasms. In my experience and that of people I talk to -- and in the vast majority of porn -- it seems commonly accepted that sexual activity ends with a man's orgasm, whereas women are commonly expected to continue engaging in sex after having an orgasm... despite the fact that many women seem just as tired and less-interested in sex post-orgasm as many men are. In part, this goes back to defining sex in terms of reproduction: men have to orgasm in order for reproduction to happen, so men's orgasms must (supposedly) be central to sex. It's all influenced by these other constructions, like how penis-in-vagina sex is "real" sex, or "home base": many people are confused by the idea that you'd shift sexual gears to (for example) manual stimulation if you've already "made it to home base". But it also arises from centering stereotypical men's desires -- from a culture that just generally sees them as more important, more driving, and more necessary than women's. (Note that the majority of women don't achieve orgasm from penis-in-vagina sex in itself.)

When sex is defined in terms of reproduction and stereotypical male pleasure, the following things result:

\+ People who aren't men have a harder time understanding their sexuality, because there are fewer models (for example: it's fairly common for women to figure out how to have orgasms much later in life than the average man -- like 20s or 30s, if ever)

\+ Men who don't fit masculine stereotypes have a harder time understanding their sexuality (for example: there's a great essay by a former men's magazine editor in the anthology _Best Sex Writing 2010_ in which he talks about how hard it was for him to come to terms with his desire for heavy women)

\+ Even men who do fit masculine stereotypes feel limited from other types of exploration, and may derive less pleasure from sex than they would in a less broken world

\+ Sex acts or sexual relationships that aren't reproductive are devalued, are seen as weird, or aren't even defined as sex (for example: stigma against gay sex, lesbian sex, many fetishes, etc)

4) **Women are expected to trade sex to men in exchange for support or romance.** Women who don't get a "good trade" (e.g. women who don't receive a certain level of financial support or romance "in exchange for" sex) are seen as sluts. Men who don't get a "good trade" (e.g. men who don't receive a certain amount of sex "in exchange for" a relationship) are seen as pussies. (Yes, "pussies"... don't you just love that a word for female genitalia is a commonly used insult against so-called "weak" men?)

What this also means is that many people have trouble examining motivations outside this framework: women are always expected to be looking for more emotional or financial investment from a guy, whereas men are always expected to be looking for more (or more so-called "extreme") sex. Women who actively seek sex, or men who actively seek intimacy, are shamed and hurt and confused for it -- often even within their own heads.

5) **Since stereotypical men have historically been much freer to explore their sexuality than people of other genders, the desires of stereotypical men have formed the pattern for "liberated sexuality."** As women have won freedom to act, work and explore outside the home more, we've been following patterns created mostly by men, and those patterns might look extremely different if women had created them.

When we talk about sexuality, I think that leads us to examine what "liberated sexuality" looks like. "Liberated sexuality" is often stereotyped as promiscuous, for example. "Liberated sexuality" is also stereotyped as being unromantic, never involving any of those pesky pesky feelings, etc. I write about this cautiously: I have no intention of telling anyone what "real" men do or feel, or what "real" women do or feel. However, it seems conceivable to me that most men are generally more likely to enjoy promiscuity and emotionless sex than most women are -- if only for hormonal reasons. Here's a quotation from the brilliant trans man sex writer Patrick Califia on the effects of testosterone:

It's harder to track psychological and emotional changes caused by one's taking testosterone than it is to notice the physical differences. But I think the former actually outweigh the latter. It isn't that testosterone has made me a different person. I always had a high sex drive, liked porn and casual sex, couldn't imagine giving up masturbation, was able to express my anger, and showed a pretty high level of autonomy and assertiveness. But all of these things have gotten much more intense since I began hormone treatments. During the first six months on T, every appetite I had was painfully sharp. A friend of mine expressed it this way: "When I had to eat, I had to eat right fucking now. If I was horny, I had to come immediately. If I needed to shit, I couldn't wait. If I was pissed off, the words came right out of my mouth. If I was bored, I had to leave." My body and all the physical sensations that spring from it have acquired a piquancy and an immediacy that is both entertaining and occasionally inconvenient. Moving through the world is even more fun, involves more stimulation than it used to; life is more in the here-and-now, more about bodies and objects, less about thoughts and feelings.

... _Casual sex has changed. When I want to get off, my priority is to find somebody who will do that as efficiently as possible, and while I certainly would rather have a pleasant interaction with that person, I don't think a lot about how they were doing before they got down on their knees, and I don't care very much how they feel after they get up and leave. It's hard to keep their needs in mind; it's easier to just assume that if they wanted anything, it was their responsibility to try to get it. I always preferred to take sexual initiative, and that has become even more ego-congruent._ (pages 397-398, _Speaking Sex To Power)_

A trans woman friend once told me that not only did she get turned on more frequently pre-transition; also, she now has to feel more emotionally connected to her partner in order to enjoy sex. And she noted that she has to "take care of herself more" in order to feel turned on now -- not just in the moment, but in life, and in the relationship.

If we accept that there is, speaking generally, a difference in sexual desires between men and women (although individuals will always be unique), then it leads to new questions. If women were socially and culturally dominant, what would so-called "liberated sexuality" look like? If people of all genders are following patterns set by stereotypical men, then what does that mean for attempts to think around those patterns?

6) **Communicating consent is complicated, but consent is the only thing that makes sex okay, so we have to make every effort to respect it.** All sex is completely fine with me as long as it's consensual. Seriously, I really don't care what you do -- as long as it's consensual. (Try to find a consensual sex act that shocks me. I dare you.)

Communicating consent can, however, be complicated, and there are lots of different ways to do it. Many BDSMers are eminently familiar with this, as you can tell by the fact that some parts of the BDSM community have developed an extensive array of tactics for discussing consent. For example, the most famous BDSM communication tactic is safewords, which gives everyone involved a clear word that they can invoke to stop the action at any time.

Most people don't communicate directly about most things, and the stigma and high emotions around sexuality make it even harder for most people to communicate directly about sex. Hence, most sexual communication is highly indirect. Even among people who are accustomed to direct sexual communication -- like many BDSMers -- a lot of communication ends up being indirect and instinctive anyway; there's just no way to discuss every possible reaction and every single desire ahead of time. Everyone fucks up sometimes. No one in the world has a perfect track record on creating a pressure-free environment for their partners to express what they want... or asking their partners for what they want... or even knowing what they want in the first place.

So, yes, I acknowledge that communicating about sex and getting what you want consensually can be really hard. However, it's most important to not violate people's boundaries. No matter how hard it is, it's necessary to make a serious and genuine effort to measure and respect a partner's consent every time sex happens. Feminist ideas of enthusiastic consent are designed to help this process.

Here's my attempt at a quick definition of enthusiastic consent:

The basic idea is simple: don't initiate sex unless you have your partner's enthusiastic consent. Not a partner who says, "Okay, I guess," in a bored tone, but doesn't actively say "no". Not a partner who is silent and non-reactive, but doesn't actively stop you when you start having sex with them. Not a partner who seems hesitant, or anxious, or confused. Enthusiastic consent means an enthusiastic partner: one who is responding passionately, kissing you back, saying things like "Yes" or "Oh my God, don't stop"... or a partner who talks to you ahead of time about what will happen, as many BDSMers and sex workers do, and knows how to safeword or otherwise get out of the situation if you do something they don't like.

It's worth noting that there are critiques within feminism of the concept of enthusiastic consent. For example, some feminist sex workers point out that when they have sex for money, their consent is not exactly "enthusiastic," but they still feel that their consent is real consent, and that their choices must be respected. The same goes for some asexual people. Asexuality is commonly defined as "not feeling sexual attraction to others," but some asexual people have romantic relationships with other people in which they have sex entirely to satisfy their partner, and some of them have said that they don't feel included by feminist discussions of enthusiastic consent.

Hey, even some of my non-asexual, non-sex worker friends have problems with the idea that they aren't "really" consenting unless they're super-enthusiastic about the sexual act at hand. A married friend once commented wryly that if she and her husband always demanded 100% enthusiastic consent from each other, then the marriage would fall apart. But as we continued to discuss it, she and her husband both agreed that they have zero problem with the situation as it stands.

I don't want to sweep those critiques under the rug. I figure that as long as everyone's communicating about the situation openly, and working to keep things relatively low-pressure, then consent is likely to happen, even if it's not perfectly "enthusiastic." I've had extensive debates on the topic with other feminists, though, and I often seek more, because honing consent theory is one of my favorite things!

All this having been said: the concept of enthusiastic consent has been very helpful for me personally. I know that it's also been helpful for an enormous number of other people who are trying to understand boundaries in their sexual relationships. I absolutely believe that enthusiastic consent is an important and useful standard, and I do my best to observe that standard as much as I can in my own relationships. So, while I think some critiques are reasonable, I also think that the idea of enthusiastic consent is the best baseline assumption to start these conversations... if not to end them.

7) **In practice, as long as everyone involved is having consensual fun, criticism is secondary.** Practically speaking, consent is the most important thing; from a pragmatic standpoint, the question of whether sexuality arises from biology or culture doesn't matter nearly as much. (I find the question of whether BDSM can be categorized as a sexual orientation to be more politically and theoretically interesting than practically important.)

Understanding sexual biology or culture may help us grasp some of the complexities of consent. For example, people often have trouble saying "no" to things directly: when was the last time you explicitly said "no" when you didn't want to do something? Which of the following exchanges is more likely:

Person A: Hey, want to come over tonight?

Person B: You know, I'd love to, but I'm so exhausted from work, I really need to get some sleep.

or

Person A: Hey, want to come over tonight?

Person B: No.

People of all genders really don't like saying "no" to things directly. Grasping this important cultural concept is one step on the path of learning how to communicate effectively about consent. But in my book, it's really not as important to understand why people hate saying "no" directly, as it is to understand that people hate saying "no" directly. It's necessary to understand that because it means that very often, pushing someone until they say "no" can mean pushing them further than they wanted to go.

I believe that the most important role of social criticism -- including sex-positive feminism -- is not to tell people what to do. If you have sex that appears to be in line with ridiculous and oppressive stereotypes, I really do not care as long as everyone involved is consenting and having fun. I reserve the right to occasionally have consensual sex where a gentleman friend beats me up before fucking me, and I reserve the right to enjoy it.

But I want to offer sex-positive feminist analyses in order to help people understand themselves and their desires... and also understand their partners and their desires. I think that many people have sex they don't like, sex that's in line with ridiculous and oppressive stereotypes, because they haven't been exposed to anything they like better. I think many people have sex they don't like because they don't feel like they can look for something different -- they think it's the best they can get. I think many people have sex they don't like because they think it's what their partner wants -- and I think those people are frequently wrong, and I think most partners would genuinely prefer that everyone be having fun.

Which is why I try to deconstruct sexual norms and stereotypes. Which is why I encourage people to look for what they like. Which is why I always emphasize talking about it.

8) **Awesome, respectful, joyful, mutual sex means approaching sex as collaborative rather than adversarial.** Aside from solo sex (i.e. masturbation), sex always involves another person. And at its best, it's about having a good time with other people -- understanding their reality, accepting it, playing with it. The best metaphors I've ever heard for sex were all about collaborative art, like a musical jam performance. Here's a bit from Thomas MacAulay Millar's totally brilliant essay "Towards a Performance Model of Sex" (please do read the whole thing someday):

The negotiation is the creative process of building something from a set of available elements. Musicians have to choose, explicitly or implicitly, what they are going to play: genre, song, key and interpretation. The palette available to them is their entire skill set -- all the instruments they have and know how to play, their entire repertoire, their imagination and their skills -- and the product will depend on the pieces each individual brings to the performance. Two musicians steeped in Delta blues will produce very different music from one musician with a love for soul and funk and another with roots in hip-hop or 1980s hardcore. This process involves communication of likes and dislikes and preferences, not a series of proposals that meet with acceptance or rejection.

... _Under this model, the sexual interaction should be creative, positive, and respectful even in the most casual of circumstances._

("Towards a Performance Model of Sex" was first printed in _Yes Means Yes,_ edited by Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman, the brilliant sex-positive anti-rape anthology that I want everyone in the entire world to read. It was also reprinted in _Best Sex Writing 2010,_ edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel.)

9) **All people deserve equal rights, including sexual minorities.** As long as people are having consensual sex, they do not deserve to be stigmatized, harassed, or otherwise harmed for their sexuality. Period. No one should be fired for their sexual or gender identity. No one should have their kids taken away for their sexual or gender identity. Rape is still rape, even when it's perpetrated against a sex worker. I support decriminalizing sex work for a lot of reasons; for example, I'd love it if the law would quit harassing and jailing sex workers for having consensual sex, and I'd love it if sex workers could organize for better workplace safety. The bottom line is that people -- all people -- have rights. It's time to treat them that way.

* * *

In terms of actual ways to be sex-positive in everyday life, here are the three ways I usually encourage people to spread the sex-positive love:

A) **Avoid re-centering.** Sexuality shouldn't be societally "centered" on any particular norm, idea, or stereotype (except consent). It is frequently tempting to re-center "objective" ideas about sexuality onto ourselves, if we're different from the norm, or onto people we admire. But the truth is that -- on a societal level -- queer sex is just as awesome as straight sex; that BDSM sex is equally admirable as vanilla sex; that cisgendered people are not any more or less amazing than trans people. The decision to have sex is no better than the decision to avoid sex, and asexual people are just as great as hypersexual people who are just as great as anyone with any level of sex drive.

In alternative sexuality subcultures, one often encounters a kind of superior attitude, perhaps because we have to push back so hard against the norm. In polyamory, for example, some of us use the sarcastic term "polyvangelist": a person who insists that polyamory is "better" or "more evolved" or "makes more sense" for everyone, everywhere, than monogamy does. Neither monogamy nor polyamory is better than the other; they're just different. Polyvangelists are trying to re-center onto polyamory. Not cool.

B) **Start conversations.** One of the most damaging problems around sexuality is the overwhelming and constant stigma. It hurts people with certain sexual identities, preferences or pasts. It hurts them spiritually. It can hurt them societally, like when LGBTQ folks have difficulty adopting children, or former sex workers are not allowed to work at other jobs. It can even hurt them physically: 40 years after doctors started noticing the HIV pandemic, too many people are still refusing to talk about sex openly, or give healthcare to sexual minorities directly affected by HIV. To say nothing of people who are attacked or killed for their sexual minority status, like trans people who are murdered in the street, or lesbians who are raped in order to "fix" their sexuality. Sexual stigma kills.

So when someone says something icky about sex and gender, or stereotypes a certain sex or gender identity, it's so great to challenge them -- or at least to question them. ("Really? What makes you think all gay people are abuse survivors?") And some of the most powerful sex activism out there involves starting discussion groups, creating venues for discussion, hosting sexuality speakers or sex-related art, etc.

C) **Be "out" or open, without being invasive.** This can be tricky, because I don't want to encourage people to aggressively talk about sex at totally inappropriate times -- and again, I'm against re-centering. On the other hand, the most powerful tool for destigmatizing sexuality appears to be coming out of the closet -- whether a person is queer, BDSM, or whatever. Openly acknowledging, owning, and discussing your sexual preferences can help others respect those preferences -- and can help others who share those preferences respect themselves. (Can you tell that I cried when I saw the movie _Milk?)_

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This post can be found on the Internet at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/05/08/towards-my-personal-sex-positive-feminist-101/

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ORGASMIC "DYSFUNCTION":

### [storytime] A Unified Theory of Orgasm

_At one point during my blogging career, an editor for the iconic feminist publication "Ms. Magazine" got in touch and asked me to do some promotion for them. I asked if they would accept a submission from me, and when the editor said yes, I poured my soul into this long article about my experiences learning how to have an orgasm. The article was rejected by "Ms.," so I went back to my old friend the Internet and got published on the adorable girl-power site_ OffOurChests.com _. Then it was cross-posted in about a million places. I would love to get published in "Ms.," but in retrospect, I'm actually glad that it went out on the Internet instead of being trapped in a print publication. I've received an enormous amount of positive feedback for this piece, and I'm certain that most of the young people who tell me it helped them would never have seen it if it were in a print magazine._

* * *

A Unified Theory of Orgasm

I CAN'T COME.

_and it's poisoned_ __

_every romance_ __

I've ever had.

masturbating doesn't work. I don't know why. I tried therapy too, but my smart, understanding, sex-positive, open-hearted doctor couldn't help. drugs while fucking? check. I date attentive men who only want to make me happy, but no matter how fantastic they make me feel, I can't get off. and believe me, I like sex. I love sex! how can it feel so good and not end in an orgasm? I tried experimenting, and I sure do love the kink. it feels great. but doesn't get me off. I've tried everything. everything.

now I have the best boyfriend I've ever had. but just like every other one, he can't get me off. big dick? oral sex? tons of foreplay? kink? it's all there. nothing works. I used to lie to my boyfriends and say it was ok that I couldn't get off. then at least they could enjoy sex without feeling guilty. but then they'd stop trying, of course. and this one is still trying... sometimes. I mean, it's clearly never going to work. so I can't blame him for not having the same passion for trying as he used to. and I keep thinking I should back off. after all, why put pressure on him to "perform"? he'll just resent me if I keep asking for more, even if I'm gentle about it and compliment him and all that. since nothing he does works. it will never work.

and I try so hard not to get frustrated, but I can't avoid the knowledge that I am fucked up, I must be broken. I mean, any normal woman would have come by now. so what do I do? I don't know what I need. do I back off and focus on him? that's what I end up doing, because I can't face asking for a little more attention in bed anymore. what's the point? he'll just resent me when it doesn't work again. so I back off. and I can't help resenting him, just a little, for not noticing how much I'm hurting. and not trying, even if I am broken, and I will never ever come.

* * *

I. _Vaginal Pain_

When I wrote the above, I was actually pretty close to figuring out how to have an orgasm. But I didn't know that. I'd dealt with the anxiety of being unable to come for so long -- and I'd also recently begun to understand that my sexuality is oriented towards S&M -- and so anguish just flooded out of me, into those words. I craved S&M, but acknowledging the craving made me feel like a "pervert," a "freak." It contributed to my already-overwhelming fear that I was "broken" because I couldn't figure out how to come.

There's one thing I didn't mention when I poured out all that fear and shame: I experience rare vaginal pain \-- not every time I have sex, not even most times, but occasionally. Medical science has traditionally failed to care about how women experience our sexuality, so very little research has been done on the subject. As a result, it's impossible to say why I get that pain. Is it some kind of physical problem? That seems likely, because my psychological comfort level with a sexual encounter doesn't seem to correlate with whether the pain happens or not. But because female sexuality is often stereotyped as too mysterious and emotional to be worth rigorous medical investigation, I doubt I'll ever know for sure.

For a while I was sure I was allergic to semen, because I read a magazine feature by a woman who said she was. _Aha,_ I thought. I stopped taking hormonal birth control pills. I made my trusted monogamous boyfriends use condoms. The pain became less common. Yet throughout that time -- continuing through today -- I still get the pain occasionally, very occasionally. Sometimes I even feel the pain during encounters that lack vaginal penetration, so it's clearly not about having a penis in me.

I can push through the pain; I can even have an orgasm, a reflex that feels good yet is surrounded by not-good; but I can't get rid of the pain entirely. Whenever I think I'll never feel it again, it sneaks into some sexual encounter.

The semen allergy theory has been ruled out, since I get the pain without semen contact. That doesn't mean that hormonal birth control didn't have an effect, though -- the pain was definitely worse while I was taking it. The Pill intersects with sexuality in ways we still don't understand; one common side effect is that it reduces sex drive. Perhaps the Pill affected my sexuality in some physical-medical way, worsening the pain problem.

The long and the short of it is that I experience some vaginal pain; the pain is confusing and hard to predict, and there aren't any good medical resources on the matter. Maybe the pain points to something unusual about my constitution. Maybe there's a reason it's harder for me to have orgasms than the "average" woman.

But the vaginal pain itself is not overwhelming, on the rare occasions that it crops up. And the vaginal pain is not even close to the most central issue of my sexuality -- or the biggest influence on my orgasmic ability.

* * *

II. _S &M_

I identify my sexuality as BDSM -- a.k.a. kink, leather, fetish, S&M, or B&D. BDSM is a 6-for-4 acronym that encompasses a host of related activities, including bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism and masochism. And yeah, I'm **really** into it: my desires are heavy and overwhelming; I dream of agony, of terrified screams for mercy. I've gone so far as to describe BDSM as my sexual orientation.

Before someone goes leaping to conclusions, there is a definite difference between "good pain" and "bad pain". The occasional pain I feel within my vagina is not good pain; it's not even interesting. It's just annoying. It's not sexy or enjoyable at all.

Some of us in the BDSM community have felt lifelong tendencies towards BDSM. We have conversations ending with thrilled exclamations: "You mean, you tied up your Barbie dolls as a child **too**?!" But BDSM is widely misunderstood and negatively stereotyped, and thus, many of us also went through periods of rejection. We've internalized so much anti-BDSM stigma from society that, at times, we freak out. We deny or erase our BDSM desires.

That's what happened to me when I was in middle school. As my sexuality made itself more and more evident, my anxiety peaked. I'd been producing secret sadomasochistic art and stories without labeling what I was doing, but I stopped. I blockaded my thoughts of violent power-play. I closed it all away as thoroughly as I could.

I still felt sexual desire -- I mean, I was entering my teens, so of course I did. Sometimes I felt so much desire, like in the middle of some inconvenient class, that I'd have to rest my burning forehead on the cold desk. I would close my eyes, and breathe deeply, and wait for the erotic shiver to pass. At home, I'd lie around my twin bed and dream about kisses; imagine men's hair and skin and touch.

Yet it was hard for me to trace my desire, to take control of it. I thought I had no problem with the idea of masturbation, but when I touched my own lady bits, I went cold. Vibrators did nothing but bore me.

I had excellent sex education, thank goodness. I went through a Unitarian Universalist sex education program that talked carefully about different experiences, that made space for gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender and queer folks. I didn't only learn about sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy and condom usage; I was also encouraged to explore my sexuality, to value it. But this marvelous curriculum did not include BDSM and other non-standard sexual identities. Nor did it include much advice on how to negotiate sexual encounters with my partners. So, although I internalized many positive and feminist messages about sex, my own sexuality remained invisible, bewildering and hard to talk about.

When I started having sex around my mid-teens, I liked it -- I liked it a lot -- but it seemed weirdly lacking. I'd never figured out how to masturbate, so I couldn't show my partners how to pleasure me. And although I occasionally suspected that I wanted something like S&M, I didn't understand how far I wanted to go.

A couple of teenage boyfriends tied me up... but then they acted solicitous and went down on me, which didn't send me over the moon (though it was fun). From this, I concluded that S&M was boring, but the truth is, I hadn't come close to the extremes that form my preferences. It was years later that I released my need for agony, tears, bruises and blood.

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III. _Frigid_

As I got older and had more sex, my apparent inability to orgasm became the most toxic secret I had. Most of my closest friends didn't know. For a while I thought I must be "frigid," and ripped myself apart over the idea that I was a "frigid bitch," even though that made no sense. It was ridiculous to conceptualize myself that way -- my sexual desire was undeniable, unavoidable. But I had no other words, no other images or stereotypes, that described a pre-orgasmic woman.

When I did tell my friends, it almost never went well. The best-case scenario was a conversation with anecdotal fragments: "I knew a girl," one friend advised, "who couldn't have orgasms. Then one day she was tripping, and having sex, and she fell asleep, and when she woke up she was having an orgasm."

I also found a book on my father's top shelf, written by a guy who said he could give "any" girl a squirting orgasm. The author claimed that the key was for the woman to be comfortable. He also claimed that the woman had to not know what he was trying to do. In fact, the book explicitly recommended that men prevent their girlfriends from reading it.

Needless to say, it was hard to extrapolate a Unified Orgasm Theory from these tales. The only things that seemed clear were that I somehow needed to both "let go" and to "keep trying." But how?

Every once in a while I made the mistake of telling someone who was convinced they knew the answer -- which was: sleep with **them**. When I got drunk with one sexually experienced male friend and asked for advice, he insisted that if I'd just fuck him I'd be sure to come. "Anytime you want," he slurred, "I'll give you an orgasm. Guaranteed!" The fact that I was not attracted to him was, in his view, unimportant.

Worse was my lesbian female friend who declared that I had "issues." She said that I ought to sleep with a woman. Ultimately, she turned out to be right that the problem was one of sexual identity, but she was wrong that I was a repressed bisexual. Her campaign to get me to sleep with her ended in a threesome with a guy I had a crush on. I liked bits of that evening, but most of it was boring -- if not distasteful. When I tried to talk to my friend honestly about it later, she insisted that I loved the whole experience. She said that I was merely feeling morning-after guilt. "You were totally into it," she informed me. She was clearly smug with victory, but angry that I resisted her version of events. I felt resentful for years.

I didn't even tell my partners about my orgasm difficulties until I'd known them for a while, because my secret felt like such Restricted Information: I couldn't give it to anyone I didn't trust. I couldn't abide the idea of "everyone knowing" how broken I felt. I couldn't stand the combination of pity and fascination that my problem evoked in the few who knew.

When I did get around to telling my partners, that was most complicated of all. I was quite unpopular in high school, and so I was something of a late bloomer -- boyfriend-free until my late teens. It took years before I had any confidence in my boyfriend interactions. And because I had no idea how to come and no idea where to start and little idea of how to communicate about sex, I could not give guidance about what I wanted.

I also felt paranoid that lovers would resent me if they felt I was demanding something too "difficult" during the sexual "exchange," so I downplayed my feelings. I told awful lies like "it's not a big deal that I can't come" -- lies that broke my heart as I spoke them, but felt safer than the truth.

I did manage to have one orgasm in my teens \-- one. I'm still not sure how it happened. It occurred one evening when I was incredibly tired, but went out with friends to get a fudge brownie sundae anyway. When I got back, my boyfriend came over and wanted to have sex, and I let it happen -- despite being tired and uninterested and full of sundae -- because I had not yet internalized the notion that my boyfriends wouldn't hate me if I denied them sex. I was barely present during the act, but I jolted into awareness when I realized I was having an orgasm. Afterwards, exhaustion overwhelmed me and I fell straight into sleep -- so deep that my boyfriend was unable to wake me.

This was puzzling and hard to analyze. What aspects of my singular orgasm should go into my Unified Theory... and which aspects were irrelevant?

The chocolate? Well, chocolate is arguably a mild drug, and drugs help some people come. Also, there were studies that found mild aphrodisiac qualities to chocolate. So maybe.

The position? The position had felt really good but was somewhat awkward, and I felt weird asking my boyfriend to reproduce it, so I didn't let myself think about the position. (I'm much better at communicating with my partners now.)

What about the exhaustion? It made sense that being very tired might help me "let go." But I hadn't been very turned on or enjoyed the rest of the encounter, mostly because I was so exhausted; and I didn't want to deliberately force myself to have sex while tired. So while the exhaustion might have been a factor, I filed it under "less-than-useful" as well.

I didn't worry about the problem too much for a while, because I figured that now that I'd had one orgasm, surely it would become easy. I didn't tell my boyfriend it had happened, either, because I didn't know how to describe exactly how. I thought I'd figure it out as we went along, and then I would tell him exactly what it took.

Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy. Months and years passed without replicating the incident. Anxiety began seeping back. My Unified Orgasm Theory was not doing well.

My fear of being perceived as "demanding" during sex and relationships was at a ridiculous extreme back then. For example, I'd heard over and over that boys don't like girls who are "high-maintenance," so I told my boyfriends that I never wanted them to buy me flowers. I thought that men would feel relieved that they didn't "have to cater to me," but they were just puzzled. (One responded by buying me fake flowers.)

Because of the awful shaming stereotypes around cunnilingus, I sometimes refused that too. I couldn't believe that the boyfriends who were willing to go down on me were actually enthusiastic about it, enjoying it -- and when my anxiety became too painful, I inevitably stopped them. I always stopped them long before I stopped enjoying the act, because I was so scared that they hated it, and hated me for wanting it. I was scared that they resented me more and more, the longer they did it and I didn't come. My fear crept up my spine and twisted around my heart until I **had** to make them stop.

Sometimes I felt trapped between love and disgust, like with the boyfriend who constantly complimented me on how great in bed I was, but who seemed unaware of how much I felt missing. The worst was when he went off on a rhapsodic list of my wonderful qualities ending with: "... and I don't even have to worry about giving you an orgasm!" He didn't see the bind he was putting me in, the awful self-suppression and self-wounding that he encouraged. He seemed unaware that I heard him telling me: "You're great in bed because you are constantly disappearing your own needs, and never asking anything complicated of me!"

In fairness, I wasn't giving him any guidance on how to do better with me. In fairness, I had no idea what kind of guidance to give.

They had their own social programming, and I didn't communicate well. But sometimes I still have trouble forgiving my early boyfriends.

* * *

IV. _The Fight_

Not all my boyfriends were willing to do as little as going down on me. One, in particular, resisted very strongly; never did it at all. This was an especial problem because he was one of the men I've loved most in my life, and our relationship lasted for years. I think well of him when I think of anything other than sex. But when I remember having sex with him, I feel echoes of sick panic and heartbreak.

By the end, every time I slept with him I felt nothing but disgust.

He seemed to prove all my fears: that the men in my life would loathe and resent me if I tried to discuss my confusion and desperation; that they would loathe and resent me if I asked for help with my sexual needs. Towards the beginning of our relationship, I tried asking him (very timidly) to go down on me, and he simply refused. In later conversations he insisted that cunnilingus was "too degrading," an assertion he made with a weird lack of irony, given that I was going down on him regularly.

As the years passed, my frustration deepened and I started thinking about experimenting more sexually, but I was terrified of mentioning it. I didn't know what I wanted to experiment with -- I really believed that I'd "already tried" BDSM, and that I didn't like it -- but his initial rejection of mere cunnilingus didn't make me feel confident.

Finally, I got to the point of directly asking for sexual experimentation, and we had the worst fight ever.

I recall that our relationship was somewhat rocky already. One of my journal entries from that time contains the sentence, "I can't seem to **not** make him angry when I'm trying to discuss our relationship." For this particular fight, we were sitting in his room reading when I scraped together my courage and asked for his help in figuring out my sexuality. "Well, what do you want me to do?" he demanded.

"I don't know," I said, "but I think there must be some way to find out -- I don't know, there have to be books?"

"That's **ridiculous** ," he snapped. "I love you, but I'm not going to **read books** in order to figure out how to have sex with you."

It got worse from there. I was crying within the first few sentences. At one point, he outright shouted at me "I don't care about your satisfaction," at which point I said, "You can't mean that," and he repeated it. Eventually, I simply turned around and walked out of his room. I had nowhere to go; it was a long train ride to visit him, and the trains had stopped running that day. It was mid-winter, and freezing cold. Crying, I put on my coat and shoes and exited the house, onto his suburban street.

I walked completely at random. I was hardly able to see. Fortunately, because it was so cold, no one else was out and about. I muffled my sobs by bowing my head into my collar. After fifteen minutes, I discovered my cell phone in my pocket and tried to call my best friend, but she didn't answer. I was still walking around crying an hour later, when she returned the call.

She calmed me down and got the story out of me. It was the first she'd heard about my inability to orgasm, and she didn't know how to advise me because she didn't have the same problem. Also, it was obvious to both of us that trying to communicate with my boyfriend wasn't working. It was obvious that there might be no way to successfully communicate with him on this topic at all.

Eventually, after she'd managed to quiet me into a trembling jellylike mass, my friend said gently, "Okay, hon, you need to hang up and go back inside." She was right. So I did.

When I stepped back into my boyfriend's room, he was still reading. I could sense from the texture of our silence that he felt bad, though. I was exhausted, I felt like a stiff breeze would blow me apart, but I told myself that I had to set a line. I was sure my voice would waver as I made myself say: "If you're going to tell me that you don't care about my sexual satisfaction, then I can't do this anymore...."

"I never said that," he said softly.

I closed my eyes. He would do this sometimes, insist that he hadn't said words I was **sure** I'd heard, and it always made me feel like I had gone insane. I **knew** he'd said it. I'd even responded with, "You can't mean that," and then he'd **repeated** it. But I felt so tired. It had been hard enough to start the conversation. Hard enough to walk around the streets crying for hours.

Maybe I really did misunderstand him somehow; I've been over those moments in my head a million times, and I don't know anymore. Maybe I misunderstood. Or maybe he was falling into a classic pattern of emotional abusers. Maybe he insisted that I was hallucinating in order to confuse me out of protesting: abusers do these things because they work.

What I do know for sure is that when he halted the conversation with a flat denial, I couldn't bring myself to even try to talk about it again. Couldn't bring myself to resume the conversation. But I also couldn't bring myself to break up with someone I loved so much. We talked about other things instead.

And, of course, nothing about our sex life changed at all.

When my best friend called me the next day to check in, I said, "Well, he says that he didn't say what I thought he did."

Her silence echoed with disbelief.

"Maybe I just... didn't understand what he actually meant," I said, but my words sounded weak even to my own ears.

"Maybe," she said doubtfully, but she didn't press the issue.

Even after that fight, I continued dating that man for a long time. I look back now and I can't imagine how I did it.

* * *

V. _Men's Perspective_

The gendered societal pressures that affect men are worth discussing, and worth analyzing, and I often do just that. There is undeniable pressure on men to "perform" sexually, for example. I try to have sympathy for men who feel this pressure \-- but it is difficult sometimes, because its major effect on **my** life has been to silence me. To make me feel as though I couldn't ask for anything sexually. As though I couldn't express my needs without hurting my boyfriend's feelings or making him angry.

And even now, when I talk about this stuff, I am as vague as I possibly can be about the exact timeline. The last thing I want is for people who know me to read this and know exactly when I started having orgasms. I don't want anyone to know exactly which partners "couldn't perform." Because I know those men might feel it as a social punishment, and as much as I hate the dynamics at work, I can't hate the men who were part of them. They had their own social anxieties and their own blind spots and if I didn't understand what was wrong, how could they?

I recently had dinner with a former partner. At one point we found ourselves having a very explicit conversation, and I mentioned that I've figured out how to come. He looked sad and apologized: "I'm sorry I was never able to get you there." I had no idea what to say.

* * *

VI. _S &M, Redux_

I finally came into my BDSM identity around age 20. At first, when I was faced with the fact that I wanted to be hurt until I cried and begged for mercy, I freaked out. I had no idea what to do about BDSM, no idea how to feel about it. The only thing I knew for sure was that I'd found something I really **needed**. But what did that **mean** for me, when I was also trying hard to be an independent, rational feminist with self-esteem and integrity?

It took me years to parse out my thoughts on feminism and BDSM, to feel comfortable with BDSM, and to talk openly and comfortably about it. During that process, I got better and better at finding partners who were interested in my sexual desires and willing to experiment. I also got to the point of reading sexuality advice books on my own, including books specifically on BDSM. (For recommendations, please check the notes at the beginning of this book.)

And I gritted my teeth, forced down my anxiety, and looked into books about the female orgasm.

One book that came highly recommended from Amazon.com was Lonnie Barbach's _For Yourself._ By the time I was halfway through the first chapter, I was crying because what she wrote felt so true. At the end of the first chapter, I put it down and was never able to pick it up again. Barbach wrote compassionately about experiences very similar to mine -- for instance: _[Are you afraid to talk to your partner about your problem] because you're embarrassed to ask for what you want at a particular time; afraid your partner will refuse, get angry, or feel emasculated?_

But she also ended the first chapter this way: _You have to assume responsibility and be somewhat assertive. Our culture has taught us that a woman should depend on a man to take care of her, which means she can blame him for any mistakes. It's nice to be driven around in a car, but it's also nice to be able to drive yourself so you can go where you want to, when you want to. But to do that, you'd have to assume some responsibility._

It was the same "let go" and "keep trying" advice I'd been coming across for years, except that now it was wrapped up in a nice package of assumptions about me: implications that I wasn't assuming responsibility or being assertive. I felt like she was telling me that I chose to depend on a man to take care of me.

Maybe it would have been okay if the rest of the chapter hadn't been so miserably true, but the combination of reading a bunch of truth about how I was feeling -- then being told that I wasn't trying hard enough, that I was choosing to avoid responsibility.... It was toxic.

I also had the bright idea of asking my gynecologist. The doctor rolled her eyes as I spoke, then told me that the problem was obviously my partners. When I insisted that I needed more guidance, she referred me to a center that gave orgasmic dysfunction "evaluations" at $1,500.00 a pop. I was earning $7.50 per hour at the time. I didn't go.

I got up my nerve and talked to my mother, who had been extremely helpful and caring when I came out to her about BDSM. During the BDSM conversation, I'd been scared -- then I felt immense relief as Mom told me that there was nothing wrong with me, and reassured me that I wasn't "giving up my liberation." When it came to orgasms, though, she seemed unsure of what to say. She did at least tell me that she, too, couldn't come easily, which made me feel a little better.

Most helpful was the therapist I found on the Kink Aware Professionals list -- an online list of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who believe they understand alternative sexualities such as BDSM. I tried one therapist who didn't seem to get it, but the second therapist I saw was wonderful. He helped me through an enormous amount of my BDSM anxiety. The orgasm problem was thornier, but he didn't make any assumptions, and he did listen carefully, which was more than most people did.

My therapist gently encouraged me to get a second opinion about my how my body worked, from a new gynecologist. Irrationally, I didn't. I suppose I still felt crushed by how the first gynecologist had reacted. I also hoped I'd learn to come as I explored BDSM more -- which turned out to be true.

* * *

VII. _Figuring It Out_

In retrospect, I recognize that I went through a brief period where I had orgasms sometimes -- weak ones. But the orgasms were hard to hang on to because they happened during sex with my boyfriend. This would be the same boyfriend I described at the beginning of this piece, when I wrote: _now I have the best boyfriend I've ever had. but just like every other one, he can't get me off. big dick? oral sex? tons of foreplay? kink? it's all there._

Now I see, in retrospect, that **not** everything was there: neither of us had questioned our sexual assumptions, our societally-determined sexual scripts. And one of the biggest sexual scripts is that sex ends with the man's orgasm. That the man's orgasm is the goal.

It's very hard to think around these scripts. It's very hard to even be aware of them. So, since my paramount goal during sex was obviously "satisfying my man," I often pushed my orgasm away due to my focus on him. I knew that if I came then I'd feel tired and less interested in sex (at least for a while). And obviously, if he were to have his all-important manly orgasm, I couldn't go falling asleep on him could I? I couldn't even pause to mentally process my sensations if he seemed to be enjoying himself, now could I? Plus, once he'd come, I certainly couldn't expect him to stimulate me any more than he already had, because he was tired; he'd just had an orgasm!

(These days, one of my #1 judgments of whether a new partner could be good for me is this: if I didn't come before he did, then does he take a moment post-orgasm to catch his breath, and then turn to me and smile and offer to do what it takes?)

In the end, figuring it out was almost anticlimactic.

I saw an online video from sex educator Betty Dodson called "Did I Orgasm?"... and I realized that I'd been occasionally having weak orgasms already. I was also experimenting more and more with BDSM; simultaneously, I put more and more power into the hands of my fantasy men; and once I had compelling private fantasies to feed on, I couldn't help masturbating. Here was the key: initially, I'd felt that masturbating **in itself** involved having too much control over the situation. And that's not how my sexuality worked.

Oh yes, **in practice** I take responsibility for my pleasure; and now I'm pretty good at clearly discussing what kind of role my partners will take ahead of time, describing what they'll do with me. These days, I sometimes take the dominant role, too. But even now, it's hard for me to come if I **feel like** I'm in control.

On some level, even if it's the most tissue-thin fantasy, I usually have to convince my emotional-sexual self that I'm not in charge. It helps if I have an emotional connection with whoever I'm fantasizing about, too. If I don't have an emotionally involved romantic partner, I seem to automatically create BDSM-themed fantasy worlds with hilariously ornate storylines. Years ago, it never occurred to me that I couldn't reach orgasm because my internal characters weren't compelling or my plotlines weren't dramatic enough... but sometimes it's true!

In my case, I believe that BDSM is the key to my sexuality. It is as close to the core of my sexual identity as I can get; close enough that, like some other BDSMers, I occasionally call it my "orientation". But I don't think BDSM is like that for everyone, and I don't even think that's the whole story with me -- because during the whole time, this self-discovery process, I was doing things like eating more regularly, keeping a healthier diet, putting some weight on my previously stick-thin frame, and exercising more. Health plays a big role in any kind of sex, and it's important to think about. Still, even now I can't come without some thread of dominance and submission, even if it's an entirely internal fantasy that I imprint on whatever is happening.

When women ask me for advice on how to have orgasms, I feel helpless because there is no "one true way." I don't want to fall back on the old "let go" and "keep trying" that I received -- it's decent advice, but it's so vague. Perhaps something more useful would be this: first, it really helps to have an idea of what you want. I know this can be hard in a society that soaks us with sexual images designed for stereotypical men, rather than images for women (and especially not for non-normative women like myself). And I feel so aware of how patronizing and useless the "you aren't in touch with your sexuality, that's why you can't come" argument can be. Remember, I had that argument used against me by my lesbian friend. But it was, in fact, kinda true for me -- just in a different way: I need BDSM.

If you're not sure what you want, don't panic. Just keep your eyes and ears open, and try to monitor your reactions. It may surprise you. If it does, don't worry -- just research it! No matter how unusual your sexuality, there is probably information on the Internet about it. (And even if your sexuality is unusual, odds are it's not nearly as unusual as you think it is.)

My personal favorite sex education website in the entire world is Scarleteen.com, a grassroots feminist effort with an amazingly comprehensive perspective. Scarleteen has an incredible impact on many, many lives. Sometimes I read it just for fun!

Secondly: it may help not to prioritize orgasms. I am not saying orgasms aren't important; I just don't want the importance of orgasms to wound you, the way it wounded me. For me, it is helpful to imagine sex as a journey. For me, it helps to focus on having fun throughout, instead of doing what it takes to reach the "goal" of orgasm. If you're not taking pleasure in the journey -- or at least indulging some curiosity -- then why keep going? Why not stop and try something else?

Experimenting sexually in an open-ended way has been, for me, the most productive possible attitude. And in fact, once I knew how to make myself come, I discovered that -- though it's helpful to be able to attain that release if I really want to -- orgasms aren't actually my favorite part of sex! There are lots of other things I like better.

It's also worth noting that our definitions of "orgasm" are fairly narrow. Some research indicates that there may be other ways to conceptualize orgasms than the stereotypical genital-focused approach.

Thirdly, although it's possible for a person to explore sexuality on her own, relationships can make or break the process. We all make some compromises for romance. But when we compromise, we should know **what** we're compromising, and **we should think about whether the compromise is worth it**.

For me, sexual exploration and satisfaction are incredibly important -- but it took ages to develop the courage to put my foot down about them. After my boyfriend shouted at me that he didn't care about my sexual satisfaction, it took me an embarrassingly long time to end things with him; I really was in love, and we'd been together for years. But my sexuality wasn't even close to a priority for him, and breaking up with him was one of the best decisions I ever made.

After ending that relationship, I was able to build my self-confidence and self-esteem with new boyfriends surprisingly fast -- and my boyfriends helped me more than they probably know. I owe countless small debts to men who accepted my inability to orgasm, took my anxieties about it into account, and sometimes gently pushed me to try new things.

One particular guy comes to mind: I told him I couldn't come, but that I wanted to experiment with S&M, so we arranged to buy rope and some painful equipment. During our conversation, he gently drew me out on my history, and then he said, "You know what I think we need to go along with this rope? A vibrator."

I blinked and said hesitantly, "I don't know, I've never really liked vibrators." But I was willing to try it again, and that's when I learned that vibrators are awesome. That's when I learned that what I really need is to convince myself I'm not in charge -- that once the correct fantasy is in place, vibrators make everything easy.

Even today, few things make me happier than a man who grasps the tension I still sometimes feel about "being demanding" or "asking for too much." I communicate with straightforwardness that amazes most partners, but it's crucial for them to understand that I still have hesitations. That even I, sometimes, need a moment to articulate what I want -- or need to be asked whether there's anything he can do.

Lastly, and most importantly: don't let go of your boundaries unless you're sure you're ready. If you really don't want to do something, **you don't have to make yourself do it**. I'm writing this because when I was growing up, all the sex-positive work I read encouraged exploration at the cost of boundaries, and I think that's wrong. There were times when that attitude hurt me -- for example, I did things I didn't like because people claimed I hadn't yet gotten over my sexual "issues," like my lesbian friend in college. And I know that attitude has hurt other women, too.

I don't like seeing sex-positive feminism equated with making oneself freely sexually available. Exploring sexuality does not mean you have to ignore your warning bells.

Sexuality is so complicated. Sex cannot be reduced to bodies, or hormones, or psychological stereotypes. Sex cannot be reduced to certainties, to shoulds and shouldn'ts. If I could destroy every force in our lives that drives home ideas of sexual "normality", I would. Which leads to my final piece of advice: **don't let me tell you what to do**. This is just my experience, just my ideas. As with everything, I want you to do whatever feels right for you -- as long as it's among consenting adults.

* * *

VIII. _Study Questions!_

Here are some things that might be interesting to reflect on:

1) What questions do you have about your orgasm?

1a) Where have you researched the answers to those questions?

1b) Have you ever discussed those questions with your partners?

2) What questions do you have about your partners' orgasms?

2a) Have you ever asked your partners about their orgasms?

3) What's one thing you wish you'd said in bed to a partner?

3a) What would have made it easier to say it?

4) What are your favorite sexual acts? Are there other ways you could perform them?

5) What's the best sexual experience you remember? What made it great?

6) What's the hottest thing you've seen or read? What made it great and are there ways you could participate?

7) Does anything from this article resonate with you? What?

* * *

_Here is a tangential footnote on issues of manliness_ :

When this article was first posted, a guy grabbed the first comment on the version that I posted to the feminist blog _Feministe,_ protesting that I clearly don't get the men's side of this equation. I don't usually get super angry about comments on the Internet, but in that case I did, and I had to take a while to calm down.

There was a mild comment fracas. Eventually, in response to that guy, I wrote:

I worked really hard on this article to try and note both:

A) how men's perspective might make this difficult for them, but simultaneously

B) why men's insecurities aren't actually an excuse for men to treat women badly.

_In my experience women are actually extremely aware of men's insecurities._ _Women frequently silence themselves and put up with a lot of crap because we are afraid of "emasculating" our man, as I specifically noted in the article._

Given that this was an article about:

1) a woman's experience,

2) and what it's like to be a woman,

3) and why this issue is difficult to take on as a woman,

4) and why women shouldn't allow men's insecurities to shut us up...

... can you see why I would avoid putting a lot of text towards describing men's insecurities in loving detail?

Now. With that having been said....

One of the guys in the Clarisse Thorn Manliness Brain Trust (tm) emailed me with some thoughts in the wake of this article. Once again, I want to emphasize that I don't want anyone to feel that they "ought to" give a crappy partner "another chance" if that partner is treating them badly. I spent **years** giving a terrible boyfriend millions of second chances because I kept telling myself that he was just "insecure." **Walking away from that oh-so-"insecure" man was one of the best choices I ever made.** Nonetheless, I think that the following comment from my Manliness Brain Trust (tm) friend might be useful for some people:

When I first saw this post, my first thought was that I have to pass it on to a couple of the people I'm involved with, who have difficulty reaching orgasm because it's an awesome, awesome article. My second thought was that it seemed like Clarisse didn't really grok the guy's side of this exchange.

Somewhere among 5th, 7th and 9th thoughts, was the notion that I'd be a jerk to raise that point in the comments. This article is a great reference for women working through difficult climax issues and there's no need to drag the conversation off to the guy side of the experience... So I sent Clarisse an email about it instead. Because the thing with Unification theories is that they're never all the way done. And things could have been so much easier for Clarisse if her boyfriends didn't suck. Maybe some insight into why they sucked would help with the ongoing development of the model, or at least provide some eased management strategies.

The thing is, I don't feel attacked or diminished or anything else by this article. Despite the fact that I'm a guy, I have insecurities and I can in some places see a stupid, obnoxious mirror of myself in Clarisse's dumb ex boyfriends \-- that isn't at all why I thought I should talk about the topic more with the author. It just seemed to me like Clarisse hadn't quite got her head around what the guys were going through with their side of this interaction. Where their insecurities came into play.

In my head, I see a young woman, working through her own issues with orgasms reading this, and seeing her young boyfriend reflected in Clarisse's past relationships. And the take away from Clarisse's experience at the moment seems to be that if your boyfriend is insecure and stupid, maybe he's not the right person to work through this with you. And I'm not sure that's doing anyone any favors. I mean shit, maybe that is what you should take away from reading this -- that the guy you're with isn't the right person for you right now if you're struggling with difficulty achieving orgasm. But maybe there are other stories going on as well. Maybe he's insecure about his role and his failings (or his body or whatever) and maybe he could be the right guy to work through this with you, if you're the right person to work through his insecurities with him?

And please, please don't take that to mean let things slide because you don't want to emasculate him. I'm not for a moment advocating putting up with nonsense because he's a guy with a precious male ego. But lots of guys, certainly including myself, have personal insecurities, about masculinity and about sexuality, and attached to the perceptions of masculinity in sexual situations. As a guy, we're all taught that real men don't give head -- or at least that it's a private thing that we don't admit too -- which is so fucking stupid, but is still really out there in heteronormative western male culture. We're all taught that getting a woman off is our job, and to be a good man, and a good lover, we have to get our partner off before we get off. I don't know a single sexually active guy who has never felt humiliated because he came too early, and too early is largely defined as before our partner gets off. And we're all taught that real men get their partners off with nothing but the awesomeness of our cocks. Hand jobs/digital penetration are fine for highschool or fore play -- but our image of a good man, and a desirable lover doesn't integrate with those things. We're coached by pop culture and porn to believe that the guy every woman wants is the one who sticks his cock in and makes her explode with joy from the very first thrust. And any time that doesn't happen, the guy is at fault.

And again, to stress my position here, I think all of those things are stupid, illogical nonsense. But those are the pressures that are on guys. And maybe, if the guy that you're with is struggling to work through your orgasm issues, maybe it's because he's so far under the weight of his own insecurities that he doesn't know how to cope with his own issues, and be a supportive partner to work through yours. But the thing about a good relationship, is that together you're stronger than the sum of your individualities. Maybe as a couple, you can work through his insecurities and your orgasm difficulties at the same time. Nobody's problems exist in a vacuum, and sometimes finding the support you need is easier if you just fix the support you already have.

I posted the comment in response to the other dude's _Feministe_ comment, and there was some discussion afterwards -- including some guys saying that they never got any memo about cunnilingus being "not manly."

**Here's my wrap-up** : sympathy is good. Trying to build a better relationship is good. And I understand that some people may have serious, important reasons that they can't or don't want to walk away from their romantic partner. (That's one of the things feminism has always worked towards: giving people many sources of support and safety nets, so people can leave abusive partners if necessary.) But. Seriously, if your partner sucks? Walking away is an option -- it's even an option, sometimes, when you think it's not an option. Just remember that.

* * *

This post can be found on the Internet at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/10/31/a-unified-theory-of-orgasm/

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BOUNDARIES:

### [storytime] Orgasms Aren't My Favorite Part Of Sex, and My Chastity Urge

_These two articles were both written and published at_ OffOurChests.com _after I published "A Unified Theory of Orgasm." The first was a followup to "A Unified Theory of Orgasm," and the second wasn't, but when I reviewed the two articles later, I concluded that they deal with fundamentally the same issues and belong together._

* * *

Orgasms Aren't My Favorite Part Of Sex, and My Chastity Urge

My previous piece "A Unified Theory of Orgasm" was really well-received, and a lot of people have thanked me for writing it. As always, though, there's some mixed feedback too. And I've been worried about one thing in particular: it seems like a lot of people missed the part in my article where I said that, now that I've learned how to have orgasms... **orgasms aren't even my favorite part of sex**. It's a long article, and I can see how people would miss that, but I did say it and I think it's important.

It may be ironic that I spent so much time feeling terrible and broken and depressed because I couldn't figure out how to have orgasms... whereas now I prefer not to focus on them. In fact, **I estimate that** _most_ **of my current sexual encounters don't include my orgasm, and** _very few_ **of my most pleasurable sexual encounters have included my orgasm**.

I'm the first to admit that I don't know everything about sex, and there's a lot that I haven't experienced. Anything might change. But seriously. The best sex I've had in my life has been connective and emotional and, for me personally, has frequently involved intense BDSM. My favorite sex so far? Has also mostly been orgasm-free.

Some people in some sex-related communities have asserted that for maximum amorous power, it's actually best to limit one's orgasms, because then the contained sexual energy ends up channeling into a deeper connection with one's partner. I can see that. For me, another way of thinking about it is that I'm really into being teased -- and I'd rather experience hours of being teased without an orgasm, than have a quick encounter that ends in orgasm.

And.... (Oh no, I can already tell this is going to get complicated... but hey, sex is complicated, so I'll give it a shot.).... Especially when I'm doing BDSM, it can actually be hot sometimes if I don't have an orgasm. For example: if I go to sleep so turned on that I can't dream about anything but my partner, and then I wake up in a damp mess, and then my partner makes my life difficult all morning, it's pretty awesome. (Although it's very nice that I know how to give myself orgasms now, because that means that if I'm really feeling overwhelmed by my own sexual energy, I know how to give myself release if I have to. You know, like... if I need to get some work done.)

Aaaaand... here's the most painful, ridiculous, circular irony of all. Ready? Here goes: now that I'm capable of having orgasms, I've found myself occasionally having orgasms **only to satisfy my partner**. How absurd is that? Plus, I know I'm not alone, because I've talked to other women who do the same thing!

I've written before that in the past I've felt trapped by fake plastic ideas of "what hot girls look like during sex"; I've written about how the pressure to "perform" my sexuality can hurt. What has amazed me, as I've gotten older, is just how pervasive that pressure can feel with some partners... and how little pressure there is with other partners. The question of how to create a low-pressure environment for sexuality to flourish is big and complicated, so let me just say here that although I'm all about people giving each other orgasms... it's no good if my partner's desire to give me an orgasm turns into pressure for me to have an orgasm!

Scarleteen, my favorite sex education site, has a great article about "squirting" orgasms and how some women feel pressured to "squirt" for the sake of the sexual "novelty." On a similar note, I'll close this post with an anecdote about a guy I dated a while back who was very focused on giving me orgasms. To his credit, he figured out how to make me come very quickly. But the problem was that -- I soon realized -- **the biggest reason he wanted to make me come was because he wanted to feel like he could**. Fundamentally, it wasn't about my pleasure; it was about him feeling like "the man."

Let me be clear: he was a great guy, and I was into having sex with him. But it became very obvious to me that if I didn't have an orgasm every time we had sex, then he would be really bothered. So there were definitely a few encounters where, although I wasn't especially interested in having an orgasm, I still closed my eyes and flicked through fantasies with a kind of panic... until I managed to kick-start my body into coming. Isn't that messed up?

One thing I've learned, in years of writing about sex and gender, is that anything -- anything at all -- can be a tool for limiting or stifling sexuality... just as much as it can be a tool for releasing sexuality. Turns out, orgasms are no exception. Even orgasms can become a difficult duty. **I'm so glad that I know how to have an orgasm now; for me, that was an important step for my sexuality and my self-esteem. But now that I've learned how to do that, I find myself questioning why it's such an important and destructive issue in the first place!**

**Sex is a journey.** There are so many directions, so many forks in the road, so many stops along the way. There are so many speedbumps and roadblocks, uphills and downhills, free and easy open stretches. Sometimes people stop to rest. Sometimes people double back. Everything is evolving. A lot of people find it most awesome to simply... enjoy the road.

* * *

When I was in my late teens, I had a couple straight lady friends who did this thing where they took a year of chastity... although they had already had a fair amount of sex. It wasn't that they thought sex was bad. It wasn't that they especially disliked sex. It wasn't that they regretted choosing to have sex previously. But these women felt powerfully drawn towards taking a year away from sex, a year where no sex happened in their lives... and I instinctively understood **because I felt the same urge**. In fact, I came up with the idea of deliberately taking a year of chastity on my own, before I heard that anyone else was doing it.

I'm not telling you this because I want to sound like one of the "cool kids"; I'm not trying to say anything like, "I was into chastity when it was underground!" As it happened, I never actually went through with my chastity urge. But I thought about it a lot, and I thought about the fact that other girls I knew were doing it. We didn't have backgrounds that one would normally consider anti-sex. We had liberal backgrounds, liberal parents, liberal educations. Why were we so attracted to the idea of taking a year without sex?

I thought about it a lot, and I concluded this: **We felt like we didn't own our sexuality**. We felt like our sexuality wasn't for us. Or at least, that's how I felt.

Even though on the surface it looked like I was totally in charge of my sexual decisions, there were social pressures and expectations that made me feel overwhelmed and confused. Not always, and not all the time! But enough that there were plenty of times that I just felt like all I wanted to do was **stop** and be done with it... "take my body back" from a world that seemed intent on constantly telling me how I must look, how I must dress, how I must have sex.

I've written about how much easier it was for me to learn how I ought to look and "perform" while having sex, than it was for me to learn what I actually wanted from sex. That, I think, is where the chastity urge came from for me. That, and the way I kept finding myself making out with guys who I had zero interest in because it was "too awkward to say no". Or the way I didn't feel like I could decide not to have sex with my boyfriends; not because I didn't think my boyfriend would listen if I said no, but because his potentially hurt feelings seemed so much more important than my bodily preferences.

So many things about the way I was having sex seemed to have nothing to do with me. And if sex had nothing to do with me... then why was I doing it? I guess I wanted to reassure myself that I could take control of at least one thing: saying no.

Eventually, I got a better handle on my sexual preferences and began to learn how to talk about them. It was a long process, and my sexual journey is far from over (yay!). There were people who showed me what it meant to have a low-pressure sexual relationship; there were people who made it easy for me to talk about sex; and there were other people who made it easy for me to turn them down, sexually, which was just as important.

But one interesting thing during the beginning of my learning process... especially given that I now really emphasize and encourage talking directly about sex... was that I felt like a couple of my boyfriends really, really didn't want to talk about sex. And while sometimes this was clearly terrible and toxic, sometimes it felt good. It felt safe. I wanted to be sexual, but I also felt so much pressure to be sexual that it sometimes felt like a huge relief to just... "not worry about it."

In retrospect, though, I think that the "safety" I felt when I didn't talk about sex with certain partners was a mirage. It was a false safety, sustained by a carefully crafted mutual fiction of the relationship. When we ended up talking about sex later, "giving up that safety" just made the conversation unnecessarily scary and weird. And the independent illusions we each had about our sexual relationship flourished and grew strong within our silence. Those illusions were so much harder to release after months of self-reinforcement than they would have been if we'd dragged them into the light from the beginning!

Occasionally, I wonder how it would have felt if I'd taken that deliberate year of chastity. I wonder which of my early experiences would have changed; I wonder whether a year of chastity would have made me feel more comfortable with my sexuality sooner. I'm very happy with how I feel sexually now. I sometimes feel confused or overwhelmed, but I think I'm okay at handling that and even talking about it. Yet I do wonder how it would have felt to draw such a strong boundary; to say such a strong "No" to the world and its messed-up sexual expectations.

* * *

This post can be found on the Internet at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/02/02/orgasms-arent-my-favorite-part-of-sex-and-my-chastity-urge/

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S&M:

### [theory] BDSM As A Sexual Orientation, and Complications of the Orientation Model

The first version of this post was written in 2009. I updated it slightly and reposted it in 2012. The original version includes an evolving set of relevant links at the end.

* * *

BDSM As A Sexual Orientation, and Complications of the Orientation Model

There's a hilarious sticker that you can buy online at a website called TopPun.com. It shows a list with "Homosexual Agenda" written at the top. The list items are: "1. Spend time with family, 2. Be treated equally, 3. Buy milk." (You can also buy a keychain version.)

I love that because it so perfectly highlights how preposterous all those right-wing accusations about "the gay agenda" are. Actually, gay people just want to live their lives like everyone else; the to-do list for most gay people looks a lot like most other people's.

In a way, that sticker also highlights some problems with the very concept of sexual orientations -- the way we sort ourselves into groups based on sexuality and its apparent innateness. Why do people have to insist on being so different from each other? A question that sometimes gets raised in BDSM contexts: is BDSM a "sexual orientation"? And I have such mixed feelings about that question. I feel intense BDSM as an incredibly important aspect of my sexuality, perhaps an innate one, but I don't want us to fall into the same traps that beset homosexuality.

I remember the first moment it occurred to me to consider BDSM an orientation -- the first time I used that word. I believe I was writing up my coming-out story at the time; I was discussing the way I freaked out when I came into BDSM, and I wrote: _In retrospect, it seems surreal that I reacted so badly to my BDSM orientation._

I remember that I felt vaguely electrified at what I was saying, a little scared... but also comforted. At the time, I hadn't had much contact with other sex theorists, and I thought I was saying something radical. I was scared that my words might appear too radical to be taken seriously. Also, since our culture mostly discusses the idea of "orientation" in regards to gay/lesbian/bi/transgender/queer, it seemed to me that -- if I dared refer to it as "my BDSM orientation" -- then a comparison with LGBTQ was implied in my statement.

Would the world believe that my BDSM desires could be as "real," as "deep-rooted," as "unavoidable" as the sexual orientation of a gay/lesbian/bi/transgender/queer person? Would I offend GLBTQ people by implying that my sexual needs are as "real," "deep-rooted" and "unavoidable" as theirs?

I later found out that some LGBTQ people do get offended by it, and others don't. Sometime you end up with ridiculous arguments like this one from a comments thread on an incredibly BDSM-phobic blog: one person says, "As a lesbian, I would like to say a sincere fuck you to people comparing BDSM to homosexuality," to which another person replies, "As a queer person myself, I would like to say a sincere fuck you to people who claim that I ought to see my BDSM and my queerness differently." As for me, Clarisse, I'll be frank with you -- I've come to the conclusion that I don't have a dog in that fight, and I'm staying out of it. I'm straight as the day is long, but I've also been invited to speak about BDSM at queer conventions and to write about BDSM on queer blogs. So I'll hang out with the people who are cool with me, and everyone else can kick me out of their LGBTQ circles as much as they want.

But I used to feel a lot more worried about how I'd be perceived for talking about BDSM as an orientation. Still, as weird as the concept of "BDSM as an orientation" felt when I first thought of it, it also felt right. When I looked back at my memories and previous actions, it was quite obvious that I have always had these needs, desires and fantasies. Acknowledging this, and applying the word "orientation" to BDSM, helped me come to terms with my BDSM identity.

The "BDSM orientation" idea cleared a mental path for me to think of BDSM as a inbuilt part of myself, like my bone structure or eye color. BDSM became something that it was desirable to accept, come to terms with... even **embrace.** It was a hugely liberating way of thinking about it: **if I thought of BDSM as an orientation, that meant I didn't have to worry about or fight it anymore.**

Since then, I've been so buried in sexuality theory and I've talked to so many BDSM people that -- well, now the idea of a "BDSM orientation" seems kinda boring. I am reminded that it's a radical concept only when I talk to people who don't think about these things all the time. I think that the idea of BDSM as an orientation occurs naturally to people who think a lot about BDSM sexuality, because **so many kinksters** either know we're BDSM people all along, or instantly recognize BDSM once we find it. Here's a quotation from an article about a BDSM-related legal case that quotes sexologist Charles Moser at the end, as he very eloquently describes how BDSM can be considered a sexual orientation:

When I talk to someone who is identifying as BDSM and ask them have you always felt this way, and they almost always report that 'This has been the way I was all along. I didn't realize it. I thought I was interested in more traditional male/female relationships but now I realize that I really like the power and control aspects of relationship.'

... They are very clear often that, 'my relationships which were vanilla were not fulfilling. I always felt like there was something missing. Now that I'm doing BDSM, I am fulfilled. This feels really right to me. This really gets me to my core. It's who I am.'

... And so in the same way as someone who is homosexual, they couldn't really change -- they somehow felt fulfilled in the same-sex relationship -- similarly in a BDSM relationship or scenario, they similarly feel the same factors, and in my mind, that allows me to classify people who fit that as a sexual orientation. I cannot change someone who's into BDSM to not be BDSM.

That's how I feel. Absolutely.

And yet I disagree with Moser on one key point: not all BDSM people are like this. I know that people exist who do BDSM, who don't feel it the same way I do. They don't feel that it's been with them all along. It's not deep-rooted for them. It's not unavoidable, it's not necessary, it doesn't go to their core. They can change from being into BDSM to not doing BDSM, because it's not built-in; it's just something they do sometimes, for fun. There are also plenty of people who have equally strong feelings about their BDSM sexuality, but who have different BDSM preferences from mine. And that's totally okay with me! I will always say that I've got no problem with whatever people want to do, as long as it's kept among consenting adults.

But what does the existence of people like that mean for BDSM as an orientation? Are they somehow less "entitled" to practice BDSM, because it's not as deep-rooted or important to them as it is for, say, me? No, that can't be true. I'm not going to claim that my feelings are "more real" than theirs, or somehow more important, just because BDSM goes straight to my core but not to theirs. They've got as much right as I do to practice these activities, as long as they do it consensually.

So, where does that leave us? It means that BDSM is an orientation for some people, but not for others. I'm fine with that. Does that mean we're done here? Well, no....

... because if BDSM is an orientation for some people but not others, then we're in a bit of a weird place when it comes to societal recognition. In the case I cited above, Charles Moser is claiming that we BDSMers can't change ourselves and that therefore, we don't deserve to be stigmatized for our sexuality.

On the surface, this might seem reasonable, but actually, **whether or not** people can alter their sexual needs, **there's no reason people shouldn't be able to do what they want with other consenting adults**. If any of us phrase the argument as: "I can't change myself, so please don't hate me!" then we are implicitly saying, "If I could change myself, I would... but I can't, so please have pity on me!" In other words, we are implicitly saying: "BDSMers can't 'fix' our sexual needs -- it's not 'our fault' -- so please don't hate us."

And when we say that, we are accepting and validating the way our culture tries to shame our sexuality. We are fundamentally agreeing with the opposition and begging for an exception, rather than trying to change the rule. We are calling BDSM a "fault," rather than stating that freely exercising sexuality is our "right." **When we make BDSM into an orientation, we are often casting BDSM sexuality as something that we would "fix" if we could. But BDSM is not broken in the first place!**

Also, using the orientation argument leaves the entire segment of the population that doesn't feel BDSM as an orientation standing out in the cold. If we go with the orientation model, and say that it's okay for BDSM-identified people to practice BDSM only because we feel it as a deep-rooted orientation... then we are implying that it's **not** okay for people to practice BDSM if they **don't** feel it as a deep-rooted orientation.

Something like this has happened in some gay/lesbian communities: people who have sex with folks of the same gender, but don't identify as strictly gay or lesbian, have sometimes been stigmatized within gay/lesbian communities or even disallowed from gay/lesbian gatherings. I understand that there are historical reasons that kind of thing happened, and analyzing the phenomenon would take up a whole post. I'm pretty sure books have been written about it. But the point is that when it did happen, it left bisexual people -- as well as others who don't fit neatly within the "gay/lesbian orientation" -- out in the cold. And I don't want to support that with BDSM.

So I've tended to avoid that kind of language. I think it is important to move away from "I can't help having these needs," and towards "It's fundamentally unimportant whether we can change our sexual desires; the only really important thing is whether or not we practice them consensually."

... But...

... there's always a but...

I'll admit that I feel anxiety about abandoning the "orientation model." I still haven't taken the word "orientation" out of my BDSM overview lecture, because it is useful for convincing people that BDSM is okay. Many people, at this point, have accepted the LGBTQ orientation as something that should not be stigmatized. The word "orientation" can really help them understand what BDSM means to us and why it's not okay to stigmatize that, either.

Furthermore, there are obviously people out there (like Charles Moser) who are seeking to protect BDSM legally, as a sexual orientation. They want to make BDSM a protected class, so that we can't get fired or have our kids taken away or suffer other consequences for being into BDSM anymore. If talking about BDSM as a sexual orientation means I can worry less about those potential consequences, then is it worth it? Maybe.

And, of course, I don't want to forget how much the idea of an "orientation" comforted me when I was first coming into BDSM. It made me feel so much better to recognize BDSM as an inbuilt part of myself. I don't want to take that comfort away from anyone else.

So, when I try to campaign for general sexual freedom and acceptance -- "orientation" or no "orientation" \-- I imagine that I'll still end up using the word sometimes. But I'll always try to be conscious of it, and I'll always try to speak in ways that support this statement:

It's fundamentally unimportant whether we can change our sexual desires; the only really important thing is whether or not we practice them consensually.

* * *

This can be found on the Internet at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/09/classic-repost-bdsm-as-a-sexual-orientation-and-complications-of-the-orientation-model/

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ABUSE:

### [theory] The Alt Sex Anti-Abuse Dream Team

_I wrote this post in 2010 for the high-profile feminist blog_ Feministe. _If I were to write it today, then I would write it differently. In particular, if I were writing it today, then I would emphasize that there are actually two primary patterns for abusive S &M perpetrators. There are the ones I emphasized in this post, the ones who prey on inexperienced people outside the community... but then there's another category: perpetrators who achieve high status within the community and then use it to get away with non-consensual things. Other BDSMers have been writing about this more and more, and the discussion is really heating up right now, in 2012. My fellow feminist BDSM writer Thomas MacAulay Millar has a particularly long, dense blog series about patterns of abuse in the BDSM community that gives a lot of great reference links to other articles on the same topic. Thomas blogs at the "Yes Means Yes" blog, and the series is being published post-by-post even as I write this. The first post in the series is available at this link:_  http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/theres-a-war-on-part-1-troubles-been-brewing/

* * *

The Alt Sex Anti-Abuse Dream Team

BDSMers face a lot of stigma around our sexuality, and this can be a major problem when BDSMers are trying to deal with abusive situations. I've written a lot about generally negative conceptions of BDSM -- they can briefly be summarized as:

* S&M is wicked,

* abnormal,

* a sign of mental or emotional instability,

* inherently abusive,

* or even antifeminist.

Given this climate, it's not surprising that two things almost always happen when BDSM and abuse come up:

1) People of all genders who are abused are often unwilling to report. **People of all genders who are abused within BDSM relationships tend to be particularly unwilling to report.** Victim-blaming is already rampant in mainstream society \-- just imagine what happens to, for example, a woman who has admitted that she enjoys being consensually slapped across the face, if she attempts to report being raped. And that's assuming the abuse survivor is willing to report in the first place; ze may prefer not to negotiate the minefield of anti-SM stereotypes ze will be up against, ze may be afraid of being outed, etc.

2) Members of the BDSM community sometimes push back against real or perceived anti-SM stigma by talking about how abuse is rare within the BDSM community. A BDSM blog post and comments over at the awesome blog SM-Feminist claim that **not only is abuse within the community rare, but abusive BDSM relationships seem more likely to happen outside the community.** In fact, if you look then you can find posts from submissive women who found that getting into the BDSM community, being exposed to its ideals and concepts, helped them escape or understand their past abusive relationships.

I tend to think that #2 is a really good point -- particularly the bit about how abusive BDSM relationships are more likely to happen outside the community, due in part to lack of resources and support for survivors. For this reason, I tend to stress the role of the community in positive BDSM experiences, and I encourage newcomers to seek out their local community. But lots of people don't have access to a local community at all, especially if they're not in a big city. Plus, lots of people have trouble enjoying their local community for whatever reason, perhaps because they have nothing in common with local S&Mers aside from sexuality, or because they don't have time to integrate into a whole new subculture.

There's also the unfortunate fact that point #2 sometimes reacts with point #1 in a toxic way -- that is, it can ironically be harder for abuse survivors to talk about abuse within the BDSM community because the community is pushing back so hard against the stereotype of abusive BDSM. **I've spoken to BDSMers who feel that the S &M community pushes back far too hard, and that survivors are being aggressively silenced simply because the rest of us are so invested in fighting mainstream stereotypes.** I have never personally experienced this, but I would not be surprised if I did. And the fact is that I'm sure there are toxic dynamics in some BDSM communities -- we aren't a monolith, folks -- and that even in 100% awesome communities, I'm sure there are at least a few abusive relationships. And **even one abusive relationship in the community is obviously too many.**

As Thomas MacAulay Millar wrote when the most recent abusive BDSM case hit the media, "Our declaration that the abusers are not us has to be substantive." This is something we should be taking action on. But how?

* * *

Dynamics Within the Community

I have personally had excellent experiences within the S&M community. However, I am also pretty thick-skinned (unfortunately, this is partly due to lots of time spent working in a sexist industry); and I have a well-developed sense of my own boundaries. I am saying this not to sound self-congratulatory but because I believe that, due to being thick-skinned, I may be less bothered by actual harassment and pressuring dynamics than others are. Also, I am lucky enough that I've never experienced an assault. Therefore, it's incumbent upon me to listen to how other S&Mers -- especially female or genderqueer S&Mers -- feel about their experiences being pressured within the community.

There are issues that even I have noticed. For example, I think that there is a distasteful tendency to talk about "real BDSM" or "serious BDSM," as if some S&M is more legitimate than other S&M. That's wrong and dangerous because it can make some people feel as though they have to push past their boundaries -- do things they aren't comfortable with -- in order to be accepted, liked, or seen as "real." On the rare occasions that I encounter this, I try to point out the problems right there and then. **There is no such thing as "more real" and "less real" S &M. The only truly important part about any S&M activity is that it happen among enthusiastic, consenting adults.**

Thomas once wrote to me by email that "I tend to think that the dynamics of abuse in the community are a combination of the desire to avoid washing our laundry in public, patriarchy colonizing our own, and the usual thing in small communities where people's willingness to do the right thing in theory bumps up against their personal friends and loyalties." I completely agree. I'd add that similar issues arise in almost all small communities, and it's not fair to blame S&M in itself for these problems. At the same time, though, **it's incumbent upon all BDSMers to contribute to an environment where people who don't want to participate can easily say "no", and can rely on being supported by others when they do**.

* * *

Existing Anti-Abuse Initiatives in the BDSM Community

Finding existing initiatives is a bit of a piecemeal project, but here's what I've run across.

* **A variety of pamphlets and written statements.** One example was released by The Network/La Red, a rather unique anti-abuse organization for lesbians, bi women and trans people. One panel of the pamphlet shows a picture of handcuffs, and the text says:

_The most basic difference between S/M and abuse is_ _Consent_ _._

_It is not consent if..._

_* You did_ _not_ _expressly give consent._

_* You are afraid to say_ _no_ _._

_* You say_ _yes_ _to avoid conflict._

_* You say_ _yes_ _to avoid consequences (i.e. losing a job, losing your home, being outed)._

_S/M is..._

* Always consensual.

* Done with respect for limits.

* Enjoyed by all partners.

* Fun, erotic, and loving.

* Done with an understanding of trust.

* Never done with the intent to harm or damage.

Just because you consent to play does not mean you consent to everything. You have the right to set limits.

(You can look at images of the pamphlet on my Flickr account.)

Some SM organizations have also released statements on SM and abuse, such as the national Leather Leadership Conference and New York's Lesbian Sex Mafia. Note that at the bottom of the LSM page, they mention that they've sensitized a local abuse hotline; if I ever get a grant or something to start a pro-sex anti-abuse center, I'll immediately grill the LSM to see how they got in with that hotline and what they said.

* **Kink Aware counselors.** The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom maintains an online list of Kink Aware Professionals, which is a grassroots effort begun by writer/activist Race Bannon and includes doctors, lawyers, and therapists. The list is pretty much open and opt-in -- professionals go to the KAP site and offer to list themselves there -- and this is one reason it's not a good idea to assume that any given professional will be a great fit for you. Personally, when I was coming into my BDSM identity, I found a Kink Aware therapist to be incredibly helpful -- but while I was finding him, I visited another therapist who was not at all helpful.

When people ask me for kink-friendly survivors' resources, I always tell them to seek a KAP therapist first.

* **The annual Alternative Sexualities conference.** This is a comparatively new effort from the Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities. They describe it as "a conference for clinicians and researchers, addressing issues around BDSM/Kink sexualities and consensual non-monogamies." 2012 will mark the fifth Conference on Alternative Sexualities. I was on a panel at the 2009 conference in Chicago, and I thought it was pretty awesome, but I am obviously biased.

* **Community workshops.** Most BDSM communities in large cities have educational workshops. These teach SM-related ideas or skills such as community etiquette, how to use various types of equipment, etc. Every SM workshop I have ever attended has emphasized careful negotiation and has, at the very least, mentioned safewords. One workshop -- "The Emotional Aspects of BDSM Play", taught by San Francisco's EduKink -- gave a detailed list of ideas for how to tell BDSM from abuse, which I wrote down:

1) Consent. BDSM is consenting; abuse is not.

a) Assuming consent was given -- was it informed consent? Did everyone know what they were consenting to?

b) Was consent coerced or seduced from the partner? Did everyone feel like they could say no if they wanted? Was anyone worried about suffering negative consequences if they said no?

2) Intent. A BDSM partner intends to have a mutually enjoyable encounter; an abusive partner does not.

a) Did everyone leave the scene feeling somewhat satisfied?

3) Damage. A BDSM partner tries to minimize the actual damage inflicted by their actions; an abusive partner does not.

a) Did the two partners learn what they were doing before they did it? Did they learn how to perform their activities safely?

b) Were the partners aware of the potential risks of their activities?

4) Secrecy. Abuse often happens in secret. This is the hardest one on this checklist, because -- due to the fact that BDSM is a very marginalized, misunderstood sexuality -- BDSM often happens in secret, too. But this is one of the benefits of having an entire subculture that deals with BDSM: we try to look out for each other.

a) Were the two partners involved in the local BDSM scene? Did they get advice from knowledgeable, understanding BDSM people during rough patches in their relationship?

I've heard of one or two workshops specifically focused on "BDSM for Survivors." I've also heard of support groups for BDSM-identified survivors of abuse, but I've never run across one in person. I've said this before, but I'll say it again: I believe that the safest place to have a BDSM relationship is within the BDSM community.

* * *

My Fantasy Sex-Positive, Anti-Abuse Program

You can tell from the above list that relevant community efforts have focused on raising internal awareness, consolidating useful information, and educating. If I were to get a grant or something (ha!), I would certainly look for ways to use it on a dedicated pro-sex, anti-abuse initiative, hopefully more expansive than a hotline, and considerably more extensive than a pamphlet. I've never developed this thought too extensively -- I hate to torture myself when I know there's no money for one of my ideas -- but I know I'd want my Dream Anti-Abuse Team to have the following qualities:

* BDSM is obviously my main interest, because that's how I identify the core of my sexuality. But I have a strong interest in destigmatizing all forms of sexual expression practiced by consenting adults. Everyone involved in my initiative would emphasize that **people of all genders and sexualities could come for help -- whether straight, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, asexual, BDSM, sex worker, polyamorous, swing, or whatever amazing fetish could conceivably come up.**

Ideally, I would personally try to shock the hell out of anyone before I agreed to work with them... because anyone whose face twists up or who gasps at the idea of any kind of consensual weird sex is a person who shouldn't be anywhere near altsexual abuse survivors.

* I'd want **destigmatizing alternative sexuality among the mainstream, especially mainstream anti-abuse organizations,** to be a major focus -- so that abuse survivors could feel less anxious about being misunderstood while seeking help. So I'd need people who were willing to go out and charismatically shock the abuse officers at police stations, feminist organizations, college campuses, etc. I'd want us to be running everything from anti-stigma poster campaigns to sex communication workshops.

* I'd want the program to be **well-advertised to the general public, so that people who aren't in the community -- yet who are practicing S &M or poly or whatever on their own -- could still find us**.

* Of course we'd also do the more traditional work of offering walk-in counseling to abuse survivors, including help making a concrete plan, altsexual-friendly legal advice, and so on.

So.

Anyone willing to fund my Dream Team?

* * *

This can be found on the Internet at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/01/16/the-alt-sex-anti-abuse-dream-team/

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* * *

ABUSE:

### [theory] Thinking More Clearly About BDSM versus Abuse

_I wrote this post in 2011, as part of my continuing attempts to move the conversation forward. As I noted in the previous piece, other BDSMers have been writing about this more and more, and the discussion is really heating up right now, in 2012. My fellow feminist BDSM writer Thomas MacAulay Millar has a particularly long, dense blog series about patterns of abuse in the BDSM community that gives a lot of great reference links to other articles on the same topic. Thomas blogs at the "Yes Means Yes" blog, and the series is being published post-by-post even as I write this. The first post in the series is available at this link:_  http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/theres-a-war-on-part-1-troubles-been-brewing/

* * *

Thinking More Clearly About BDSM versus Abuse

Years ago, when I first started thinking about BDSM and abuse, I -- like a lot of feminist BDSMers -- was defensive.

We get scared of the accusation that "BDSM is always abuse"... and we're accustomed to accusations from certain feminists such as "those of you who pretend to like BDSM just have Patriarchy Stockholm Syndrome and don't know what you really want"... and often, we're also fighting our own inner BDSM stigma demons. We get angry that our sexual needs are seen as politically problematic, or unimportant.

And so, for a lot of people, our instinctive angle on abuse in the BDSM community is: "Shut up! That's not what's going on!" And that's a problem.

Obviously, I don't think BDSM is inherently abusive! Exploring my personal BDSM desires has given me some extraordinary, consensual, transcendent experiences and connections. I also genuinely believe that BDSM has the potential to control, subvert, and manage power. **BDSM can be a place where people learn to understand bad power dynamics in past relationships; it can be a place where people learn to manage or destroy bad power dynamics in their current relationships; it can be a place where people find glory, self-knowledge and freedom by manipulating their own reactions and responses to power.** The sex theorist Pepper Mint has a great, complicated essay about this called "Towards a General Theory of BDSM and Power". And here's one of my favorite quotations on the matter, from a submissive and former blogger who went by violetwhite:

It's ironic that the most perverse manipulations of power in my life occurred in a past vanilla relationship, where I tolerated tyranny because the normative structure of our relationship obscured the fact that that is what it was.

Still, I've seen things happen in the BDSM community that turned my stomach. Terrible manipulative behavior exhibited by people who have the greatest reputations. Blaming the victim when they try to speak up. Telling "rumor mongers" to shut up when people are trying to talk openly about problematic community members. The BDSM subculture has its own version of rape culture, where "lying bitch" and "drama queen" and "miscommunication" are used against abuse survivors. Miscommunications do happen... but not everything that could be a miscommunication is actually a miscommunication.

Oh yes, rape culture can happen in BDSM just the same way it happens in the "vanilla" mainstream. And there are certainly people in my local community who I would never get involved with, because I do not trust them.

**Being defensive about BDSM and abuse won't help; yes, BDSM is stigmatized and stereotyped, but the abuse is still a problem.** So after I started blogging, I tried to move past my defensiveness and write more concretely -- to write about what exactly the BDSM community does to work against abuse. One of my first posts on BDSM and abuse was called "Evidence That The BDSM Community Does Not Enable Abuse." It highlighted anti-abuse initiatives within the BDSM community. As I learned more about BDSM and abuse, and my perspective got more nuanced, I wrote a more expansive post called "The Alt Sex Anti-Abuse Dream Team." It covered all the information I'd given in the earlier post, and also talked about how I personally would structure an anti-abuse initiative with alt-sex people in mind.

Looking back now, those posts still strike me as defensive. I was making good points, but I also think that I didn't fully understand where some feminists are coming from when they react negatively to BDSM. This past year, I've learned a lot more about abusive gender-based violence, power, and control. And I've concluded that while BDSM is obviously not equivalent to abuse, we need better theory to describe the difference between BDSM and abuse, and we should try to avoid defensiveness while articulating that theory.

One thing I think people can do is try to "start from a position of strength, and seek strength afterwards." The overall point of that maxim is that any given BDSM activity can eventually make all parties feel more supported, more capable, more powerful in the world. That's my ideal end goal; that is what I personally would aim for with my BDSM practice. **Perhaps I might do an intense BDSM scene that makes me feel terrible in the moment \-- or for a lot of moments... but I want to be sure it will make me more supported, more capable, more powerful later.**

That's an awfully vague maxim, though, and one that can be different for every person. I may have found a more concrete focus in a 1984 anti-abuse concept -- the Power & Control Wheel:

In 1984, staff at the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) began developing curricula for groups for men who batter and victims of domestic violence. We wanted a way to describe battering for victims, offenders, practitioners in the criminal justice system and the general public. Over several months, we convened focus groups of women who had been battered. We listened to heart-wrenching stories of violence, terror and survival. After listening to these stories and asking questions, we documented the most common abusive behaviors or tactics that were used against these women. The tactics chosen for the wheel were those that were most universally experienced by battered women.

In a BDSM context, a lot of the behaviors listed on the Power & Control Wheel could be part of a consensual encounter -- violence, headgames, name-calling, all kinds of things can be BDSM. But this part, this is important:

MINIMIZING, DENYING AND BLAMING:

* Making light of the abuse and not taking her concerns about it seriously.

* Saying the abuse didn't happen.

* Shifting responsibility for abusive behavior.

* Saying she caused it.

(The original wheel uses gendered language, but I'd like to note that although abuse is most often perpetrated by men against women, abuse can happen in any kind of relationship and to people of any gender.)

In the brilliant documentary _Graphic Sexual Horror,_ which profiles a now-defunct BDSM porn site, there's footage of a scene with a porn model named S4. The dominant partner slaps S4 across the face, and S4 reacts angrily. She says something like, "We didn't talk about that in advance!" The dominant doesn't apologize; he doesn't take her seriously, and he doesn't talk to her carefully or work to calm her down. Instead, the dominant partner snaps: "We can't talk about everything in advance," and aggressively demands to know whether she's ready to continue. This is an example of minimizing, denying, and blaming.

I have some sympathy for his awkward position -- I've made small mistakes as a dominant partner, too, and he's correct that it's impossible to talk about everything in advance. But **the way to deal with those mistakes is by apologizing sincerely and making sure the mistake never happens again**. For example, one of my exes really hated being bitten on the lips, and at one point I bit him on the lower lip. And he called me out, and I said, "I'm sorry," and I put my arms around him to offer comfort; I said, "I won't do it again," and I didn't.

My experience of BDSM relationships is that it's best for there to be both communication ahead of time -- and lots of discussion and processing afterwards. Both partners get to set "hard limits": things they absolutely don't want to do. If one partner has concerns, those concerns get airtime. Both partners acknowledge a role in the proceedings, and blame isn't spread around; even if something goes wrong, the discussion focuses on how to prevent that from happening again rather than making accusations.

And if BDSM is happening, it must be possible to acknowledge it, even if it's subtle. For example, I ran into a partner on the street the other day; he gave me a hug and held me in place for a while, even though I tried to move away. This, my friends, is subtle BDSM. Which was fine with me! But it was only okay because I knew I could call him out on it later and be sure it was acknowledged!

And I did mention it later, and he did acknowledge it, and we both laughed and said it was hot. And if I had told him not to do it, that would have been okay too. And **the fact that I knew I could talk about it, that I knew I could tell him not to do it and he'd listen**... **meant that I also could have declined to mention it, and I would have felt fine**.

Something else worth acknowledging here is time boundaries. If a person is indeed calling names, controlling what the other person does, etc, then it's often useful for it to be communicated -- and also time-bounded. For example: "You can only call me pathetic during this sexual encounter. Otherwise, please don't."

There are BDSM couples that get rid of time boundaries, and have ongoing BDSM relationship situations; there are also BDSM couples that don't use safewords. I think those relationships require a lot of understanding and care from all parties involved. I've never gone without safewords, but sometimes I go without time-bounding, and when I do, I make very sure that I can trust my partner and communicate well with him. (Thomas MacAulay Millar calls safeword-free BDSM "the advanced class".)

The same group that made the Power & Control Wheel has another useful wheel -- the Equality Wheel. Here's the text of the wheel:

ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP:

* Making money decisions together.

* Making sure both partners benefit from financial arrangements.

NEGOTIATION AND FAIRNESS:

* Seeking mutually satisfying resolutions to conflict.

* Accepting changes.

* Being willing to compromise.

NON-THREATENING BEHAVIOR:

* Talking and acting so that she feels safe and comfortable expressing herself and doing things.

RESPECT:

* Listening to her non-judgmentally.

* Being emotionally affirming and understanding.

* Valuing her opinions.

SHARED RESPONSIBILITY:

* Mutually agreeing on a fair distribution of work.

* Making family decisions together.

RESPONSIBLE PARENTING:

* Sharing parental responsibilities.

* Being a positive, nonviolent role model for the children.

HONESTY AND ACCOUNTABILITY:

* Accepting responsibility for self.

* Acknowledging past use of violence.

* Admitting being wrong.

* Communicating openly and truthfully.

TRUST AND SUPPORT:

* Supporting her goals in life.

* Respecting her right to her own feelings, friends, activities, and opinions.

All these things ought to be present in a BDSM relationship! Some people do heavy role-play situations where they have specific personas that they don't want to break out of... and they still can make sure that all those elements are included. For example, they can keep simultaneous journals about the relationship, and thereby keep up with each others' feelings and consent without breaking out of their roles.

I also think that the list is especially useful in that **it highlights places where non-consensual control is likely to happen** **...** **and therefore, places where BDSMers should be especially careful**. For example, failing to support a partner's life goals would be okay in the middle of an intense BDSM encounter. But afterwards, it might be good to give extra support, just because that can be such an important genuine danger spot.

Just like vanilla people, BDSMers have a lot of unspoken elements of our relationships. For example -- the partner I mentioned earlier, who held me in place when I gave him a hug on the street. We didn't negotiate that particular act ahead of time. But we have an established relationship, and we've done similar things before; I knew that if I wanted to talk about it -- or ask him not to do it -- then he'd listen. And, even more importantly, the rest of our relationship lines up with the Equality Wheel.

* * *

This can be found on the Internet at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/08/02/thinking-more-clearly-about-bdsm-versus-abuse/

* * *

* * *

* * *

S&M:

### [storytime] The Strange Binary of Dominance and Submission

_I wrote this in early 2012, and it was originally published at_ RoleReboot.org _. If I had to summarize my relationship with this gentleman today, then ironically enough, I'd say that "it got complicated and I'm pretty sure it's over now." I still like this piece, though._

* * *

The Strange Binary of Dominance and Submission

It's been a while since I felt simultaneously very into someone, and very sure about him. It's a strange feeling. I've been playing with theories about how "flirtation is basically an exercise in strategic ambiguity" and "insecurity is an integral part of romantic intoxication" and "uncertainty is an emotional amplifier," and I do think that those ideas are true in many ways. But I got so wrapped up in theory that I forgot how it feels to be way into someone... and only a little bit scared.

* * *

I met Mica at a Saturday night party. When I left the next morning, he said he wanted to see me again as soon as possible. "Monday?" he asked. "Tuesday?"

"Monday," I said. "Tomorrow."

He's a smart, creative thinker. There are layers to him, and he practically shines: so why not name him for the mineral Mica? I would love talking to him for those reasons alone. But there's also a kind of certainty to him; a calm presence; an extraordinary quality of attention. Once he's focused on a partner, there's a rhythm behind everything he does. He's so precise that when I'm kissing him, I feel like an awkward puppy.

I observed this very quickly, and something else: that the quality of his attention -- often **overtook** him. Controlled him. In a sexual interaction, it's difficult to distract him from catering to me. And since he's excellent at reading my desires, I usually don't **want** to distract him.

It made me think of what I was like, years ago, before I understood my submissive tendencies. Mica hadn't done much explicit S&M before, and when he'd done it, he was dominant. I didn't want to project too much, or make any assumptions about him... but I couldn't help noticing.

The second night I was with him, I asked him to inflict light pain on me. Very light. I didn't want to go further with him, yet. But his instincts for delivering pain and watching my reactions were, as I suspected, beautifully calibrated.

The third night I was with him, he touched my face and kissed me. I felt my eyelashes flutter and my body melt, and he smiled. Then he said, "I'm feeling really gentle tonight. I don't know how much I'm up for."

_He doesn't want S &M right now,_ I thought. Sometimes guys date me and get anxious that I'll be disappointed when they don't want to do S&M. This is understandable, given that I'm an S&M writer. But I hate that, because the last thing I want is for one of my partners to feel obligated... and besides, even I don't want all-S&M-all-the-time. I smiled directly into Mica's eyes and told him I was fine with it.

In bed, I watched him. Watched his extraordinary attentiveness. Eventually we got to a point where I was leaning over him, kissing him. I watched him give up his body to the kiss. _He doesn't want S &M right now,_ I thought,... _except that his main experience with S &M, so far, is being in charge._

"Do you trust me?" I asked him.

"Yes," he said. "Absolutely."

I clenched my nails into Mica's side, and his back arched. It was the clearest invitation I'd seen from him and, I suspected, the clearest invitation he knew how to give. If he even knew that he was giving it. It can take a lot of time and experience for a submissive to learn what they want well enough to give good feedback for it. It's one of those submissive skills that people don't think about enough, because for some reason we're always too busy teaching dominant skills.

I kissed Mica again, and tore into his back.

He was ready for it. His breathing fast became irregular; he gasped; he shook in my hands. After a while, I pulled back and simply observed the intensity flooding through him. His body undulated like a wave.

"I knew you were dangerous," he breathed. "In exactly the way that I want."

"Dangerous," I repeated. I hesitated. "What do you mean?" His eyelashes flickered, and I saw that he was too far under to answer me. He probably barely knew what he was saying. (In S&M, we call this state of mind subspace.)

I pushed him a little farther. I only used my nails, but you can do a lot with your nails. I said his name, over and over. He struggled, he fought his own body. I observed the struggle and saw myself in it. "I know," I told him.

Eventually Mica said, quite seriously, that he wanted to stop. I was certain that he could take more. A lot more. I might have been able to convince him to continue, and had him thank me for it later. But he needs to know that I'll respect him when he says to stop. Also, in a somewhat self-interested way, I don't want to set a precedent where his boundaries are entirely nonverbal; where his limits depend on my capacity to see through him. Maybe someday, when we know each other really well. Right now, it would make it too easy to seriously harm him... and for him to hate me afterwards.

So I stopped.

"No one has ever touched me so deeply, so fast before," Mica said, later. And, later later: "This changes **everything**." I lay still, kept my arms around him, listening. "That was total catharsis," he said. "I mean --" a note of doubt crept into his voice. "Do you actually **like** doing that?"

"Yes," I said. I said it fast and hard, because he needs to believe it. I understood why he was asking: I've been there. When I was first getting into S&M, the first time I felt that way, I had a hard time believing that my partner actually liked doing that for me. It felt so incredible. It felt like I couldn't possibly be giving back as much as I received. Sometimes, I still feel that insecurity.

"I'm glad you like it," Mica said. I felt his body relax next to mine. "Because I'm going to want that again."

"I know," I said softly.

I tried not to be afraid. Not only because I like him so much, and it's easy to be afraid. But because someone like Mica, who wants so much to give, can be seriously damaged by a partner who isn't careful to offer him space to be exactly who he is.

And, most of all, because S&M is a complex and fickle mistress. Because I knew that if Mica expected me to be able to do that regularly, he was bound to be disappointed. His tendencies are there, and I can learn them, but this one "total catharsis" depended on a confluence of factors: there had been something close to his surface, something he'd practically begged me to pull out, and it had been his first time.

Plus, S&M also depends on self-maintenance and reasonable expectations and respecting our own failures. An S&M relationship will be much less stable if the people involved can't accept imperfection.

I was scared, scared, **scared** that Mica believed me to be more amazing than I could ever possibly be.

* * *

The next day, Mica was thrilled by his scratches, and showed them off to me. I was pleased by how he eroticized the marks -- I do that, too -- but I also felt a moment of piercing guilt. "I'm sorry," I said. "I should have been more careful, before leaving marks like that. I should have asked."

Mica met my eyes directly, insistently. "No," he said. "Don't be sorry. Last night was amazing. You knew exactly where I needed to go."

I pushed back my fear -- _he expects too much of me_ \-- and answered quietly. I ended by telling him, "S&M can't be that, all the time." He nodded. I hoped he was listening.

Fortunately, he was. The next time we did it, Mica was slightly disappointed that it wasn't mind-blowing -- as I knew he would be. But he dealt with it. He articulated the disappointment to me, and he remembered that I'd warned him, and he said that he was prepared to take things as they came. And then, lying on his side next to me, watching me, he asked: "Do you want pain?"

I felt my eyes widen. I felt a spike of fear. I was already so into him. I knew that if I allowed him to get me to subspace, there'd be no going back.

"Yes," I said.

And again, that attention. In a way, sometimes, Mica's attentiveness can be strangely inconvenient. He's almost over-attuned to my desires. Even when I tell him to close his eyes, he can't lose himself that way; he can't make himself keep them closed. The quality of his attention is, however, quite remarkable when he hurts me.

"This is where you could take me apart," I said afterwards, as I surfaced out of that terrible vulnerability.

Mica looked at me, rested his head on me. "I just want to take care of you," he said.

* * *

When I was younger, it took me a while to get around to taking the dominant role. And there's still something I can reach when I'm being submissive and masochistic that I've never reached when I'm dominant. Still, I think of myself as a confirmed switch now: someone who can take either the submissive or dominant role. Yet it's such a strange binary, isn't it? If he rips me apart and then says, "I just want to take care of you," then which of us is in charge?

Mica told me recently that, "When you're hurting me, my favorite thing you say is 'I know.' Because you **do** know. You know exactly what it's like."

By now I'm barely scared. It hasn't been that long, and I'm trying to allow for New Relationship Energy. I know this could still go up in smoke. But we've talked about expectations, and we've talked through what we're both looking for, and we're both thinking of each other in a long-term way.

If I had to point to events that "proved" Mica has serious potential, two things would top the list. First, in the aftermath of his first incredible S&M experience, when he dealt with the disappointment of realizing that S&M can't always be that -- dealt with it quietly, sensibly, without drama, by talking to me. And second, when he said, in defiance of most aggressive stereotypical dominant roles: "I just want to take care of you."

* * *

This can be found on the Internet at:

 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/02/10/storytime-the-strange-binary-of-dominance-and-submission/

* * *

* * *

* * *

About The Author

* * *

Clarisse Thorn is a feminist, sex-positive educator who has delivered sex-related lectures and workshops to a variety of audiences, including New York's Museum of Sex, San Francisco's Center for Sex & Culture, and universities across the USA. She created and curated the original Sex+++ sex-positive documentary film series at Chicago's historic feminist site, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. She has also volunteered as an archivist, curator and fundraiser for that venerable S&M institution, the Leather Archives & Museum. In 2010, Clarisse returned from working on HIV mitigation in sub-Saharan Africa. Her writing has appeared across the Internet in many many places. She blogs about feminist sexuality with a focus on S&M at clarissethorn.com, and tweets @clarissethorn.

Handy links for connecting with Clarisse:

Blog: <http://clarissethorn.com/blog>

Twitter: <http://twitter.com/ClarisseThorn>

Facebook: <http://www.facebook.com/clarisse.thorn>

Buy the full version of this book: <https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/166178>

Buy it in paperback: <https://www.createspace.com/3878670>

Find other Smashwords books by Clarisse: <https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/clarissethorn>

* * *

### Also check out Clarisse's awesome book

### Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser!

* * *

There's a huge subculture of men who trade tips, tricks, and tactics for seducing women. Clarisse Thorn, a feminist S&M writer and activist, spent years researching these guys. She observed their discussions, watched them in action, and learned their strategies. By the end, she'd given a lecture at a seduction convention. This is her story -- and her theories about feminism and seduction to boot.

<https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/144451>

In paperback: <https://www.createspace.com/3830583>

* * *

* * *

* * *

Footnotes

All these links were last checked in early 2012.

* * *

S&M: **Love Bites: An S &M Coming-Out Story**

1. Kink Aware Professionals:  https://ncsfreedom.org/resources/kink-aware-professionals-directory/kap-directory-homepage.html \-- [back]

* * *

Education: **Liberal, Sex-Positive Sex Education: What's Missing**

1. The Unitarian Universalist Our Whole Lives curriculum: <http://www.uua.org/re/owl/> \-- [back]

2. _New Yorker_ review of the new _Joy of Sex:_  http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/01/05/090105crbo_books_levy \-- [back]

3. Synopsis of conservative book _Modern Sex:_ <http://www.manhattan-institute.org/modern/> \-- [back]

4. Cuddle parties:  http://current.com/shows/max-and-jason-still-up/89557966_first-time-cuddle-party.htm \-- [back]

5. Scarleteen's sexual inventory checklist:  http://www.scarleteen.com/article/advice/yes_no_maybe_so_a_sexual_inventory_stocklist \-- [back]

6. _Yes Means Yes_ blog on how affirmative communication combats rape:  http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/the-words-that-come-after-i-want/ \-- [back]

* * *

Communication: **Sex Communication Case Studies**

1. The previous post about a really problematic relationship:  http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/03/01/storytime-how-my-life-wasnt-always-happy-fun-boundaries-are-perfect-land/ \-- [back]

2. A post deconstructing S&M checklists:  http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2010/06/14/sex-communication-tactic-derived-from-sm-1-checklists/ \-- [back]

* * *

Masculinity: **Questions I Want To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men**

1. Thomas MacAulay Millar on masculinity:  http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/things-cis-het-men-are-afraid-to-talk-about/ \-- [back]

2. "Precarious Manhood" paper: Vandello et al. "Precarious Manhood." _Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,_ Vol. 95, No. 6, 1325 – 1339. 2008. -- [back]

3. Men's Rights Activists: the "most discriminated against" quotation came from Kuster, Elizabeth. _Exorcising Your Ex._ Fireside, 1996. Also, long after the publication of my blog posts, the politics website AlterNet did a profile of the MRA movement:  http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/154617/Leader's_Suicide_Reveals_Frightening,_Violent,_Organized_Misogyny_Movement/?page=entire \-- [back]

4. Sexism in BDSM:  http://maybemaimed.com/2009/10/02/dont-you-fret-sexism-is-alive-and-well-in-bdsm/ \-- [back]

5. Seriously, these posters are awesome:  http://www.reachandteach.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=50 \-- [back]

6. Alienating men with Thomas MacAulay Millar:  http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/who-is-bidding-on-natalie-dylans-virginity \-- [back]

* * *

Relationships: **Chemistry**

1. Infamous article "Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough":  http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-him/6651/ \-- [back]

* * *

S&M: **"Inherent Female Submission": The Wrong Question**

1. The _Topologies_ blog features three dominant female contributors:  http://topologies.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/shifting-the-discourse-on-female-dominance/ \-- [back]

2. Research on proportion of submissive BDSM women: <http://kinkresearch.blogspot.com/2009/10/sex-role-ratio.html> \-- [back]

3. The female dominant blogger Bitchy Jones is pissed:  http://bitchyjones.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/bondage-awards-not-actually-sexist-on-purpose/ \-- [back]

4. The male submissive blogger maymay is pissed:  http://maybemaimed.com/2007/08/04/what-sexuality-might-taste-like-if-you-were-a-submissive-man-in-2007/ \-- [back]

* * *

Manliness: _Fifty Shades of Grey, Fight Club,_ **and the Complications of Male Dominance**

1. The sex writer Violet Blue offers some hilarious _Fifty Shades_ commentary and linkfarming:  http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchives/2012/04/fifty-shades-of-linkbait.html The writer A.V. Flox also did a really great analysis of how badly _Fifty Shades_ deals with S&M: <http://www.blogher.com/troubling-message-fifty-shades-grey> \-- [back]

2. Pepper Mint's blog: <http://freaksexual.wordpress.com/> \-- [back]

* * *

Feminism: **Towards My Personal Sex-Positive Feminist 101**

1. An excellent definition and discussion of the word "cisgendered": <http://carnalnation.com/content/49458/1067/word-day-cis> \-- [back]

2. Analysis of the "virgin" shoot at Kink.com: <http://missmaggiemayhem.com/2011/01/12/virginity/> \-- [back]

3. Asexual writer discusses sex-positive feminism:  http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/02/07/an-asexual-map-for-sex-positive-feminism/ \-- [back]

4. Most women don't achieve orgasm through penis-in-vagina sex alone:  http://www.scarleteen.com/article/advice/i_cant_orgasm_from_intercourse_and_its_ruining_my_relationship \-- [back]

* * *

Orgasmic "Dysfunction": **A Unified Theory of Orgasm**

1. A tactic called "gaslighting" is a common one used by emotional abusers:  http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/11/21/one-abuse-script-with-many-faces/ \-- [back]

2. Kink Aware Professionals:  https://ncsfreedom.org/resources/kink-aware-professionals-directory/kap-directory-homepage.html \-- [back]

3. Betty Dodson's video "Did I Orgasm?": <http://www.youtube.com/v/rkCihT1mkmc> \-- [back]

4. Our definitions of orgasm are fairly narrow:  http://sexuality.about.com/od/anatomyresponse/a/what_is_orgasm.htm \-- [back]

* * *

Boundaries: **Orgasms Aren't My Favorite Part Of Sex, and My Chastity Urge**

1. Deliberately limiting orgasms for a more amorous relationship: <http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/too-many-orgasms/> \-- [back]

2. An article of mine about the pressure to perform my sexuality:  http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/05/27/im-not-your-sex-crazy-nympho-dreamgirl/ \-- [back]

3. An article of mine about creating a low-pressure sexual environment:  http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2010/05/28/sexual-openness-2-ways-to-encourage-it/ \-- [back]

4. Scarleteen discusses women and "squirting" orgasms:  http://www.scarleteen.com/article/advice/squirt_on_female_ejaculation \-- [back]

* * *

S&M: **BDSM As A Sexual Orientation, and Complications of the Orientation Model**

1. BDSM-phobic thread on a radical feminist blog:  http://rageagainstthemanchine.com/2009/02/07/please-somebody-come-and-defend-kinkcom/ \-- [back]

2. BDSM-related discrimination case and orientation notes from Charles Moser:  http://www.xtra.ca/public/Vancouver/BDSM_lifestyler_unfit_to_drive_a_limo_police-6577.aspx \-- [back]

* * *

Abuse: **The Alt Sex Anti-Abuse Dream Team**

1. The post on SM-Feminist about the prevalence of abuse in the community:  http://sm-feminist.blogspot.com/2007/11/wut-about-abuuuuuuuuuuzers.html \-- [back]

2. A post on SM-Feminist about an abuse survivor who learned to set boundaries and protect herself through BDSM:  http://sm-feminist.blogspot.com/2008/01/not-your-usual-bdsm-and-abuse-story.html \-- [back]

3. Thomas MacAulay Millar's article "Not What We Do": <http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/not-what-we-do/> \-- [back]

4. Front image of a pamphlet about abuse in BDSM: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/35620214@N02/3488055736/> \-- Back image of same pamphlet: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/35620214@N02/3487239893/> \-- [back]

5. Statement on BDSM and abuse from the Leather Leadership Conference: <http://www.leatherleadership.org/library/diffsmabuse.htm> \-- Statement on BDSM and abuse from the Lesbian Sex Mafia: <http://lesbiansexmafia.org/lsmnyc/bdsm-is-not-abuse/> \-- [back]

6. Kink Aware Professionals:  https://ncsfreedom.org/resources/kink-aware-professionals-directory/kap-directory-homepage.html \-- [back]

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Abuse: **Thinking More Clearly About BDSM versus Abuse**

1. Pepper Mint's essay "Towards A General Theory of BDSM and Power":  http://freaksexual.wordpress.com/2007/06/11/towards-a-general-theory-of-bdsm-and-power/ \-- [back]

2. The origins of the Power and Control Wheel: <http://www.theduluthmodel.org/training/wheels.html> \-- Image of the Power & Control Wheel: <http://www.theduluthmodel.org/pdf/PowerandControl.pdf> \-- Text of that wheel, and other relevant wheels: <http://www.dhs.state.il.us/page.aspx?item=38490> \-- [back]

3. Image of the Equality Wheel: <http://www.theduluthmodel.org/pdf/Equality.pdf> \-- [back]

4. Simultaneous journals:  http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2010/07/30/sex-communication-tactic-derived-from-sm-3-journal-keeping/ \-- [back]

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S&M: **The Strange Binary of Dominance and Submission**

1. Some advice on how to deal with an S&M encounter gone wrong:  http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/12/09/what-happens-after-an-sm-encounter-gone-wrong/ \-- [back]

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Glossary

As I said in the introduction, I try to keep my writing as accessible as possible. One way I do that is by avoiding jargon and by using terms that I think most people will recognize. I often write "S&M" instead of "BDSM," for example; and when I'm using technical S&M language like "top" or "bottom" or "scene," I try to define the words as I go along. But sometimes I slip into jargon by accident. Also, plenty of S&M terms are super useful, and giving a quick overview of S&M language can go a long way towards describing S&M culture. Hence, this glossary. Many of the terms in the Glossary aren't terms that I used in this book, but you might find it useful or interesting anyway. (I also included a few terms that come from other subcultures, like polyamory or queer studies or feminism, because why not.)

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**aftercare** (BDSM): A cool-down period after an S&M encounter, which often involves reassurance and a discussion of how things went. Clarisse talks about aftercare a lot, and deconstructs it very thoroughly in an essay called "Aftercare or Brainwashing?" which is printed in the full version of this book and will be available after June 16, 2012, on the Internet at:  http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/06/16/sm-aftercare-or-brainwashing

**blaming the victim** (feminism): The faulty assumption that an assault survivor caused or contributed to the assault.

**bottom** (BDSM): A blanket term for a _masochist_ and/or _submissive._ Not everyone who is a masochist is submissive, and vice versa.

**cisgendered** (queer studies): A term that means "not transgendered." For example, Clarisse is a cis woman or a cisgendered woman. Here's an excellent essay by the trans activist Asher Bauer describing why the word "cisgendered" is important: <http://carnalnation.com/content/49458/1067/word-day-cis>

**coming out** (queer studies): Openly acknowledging one's sexual identity to oneself, one's parents, one's friends, and other parts of one's community.

**dominant** (BDSM): A person who enjoys being in charge during an S&M encounter.

**dungeon** (BDSM): Dungeons can often be split into two types: those owned and staffed by professionals, and those owned by people who are drawn to S&M for non-monetary reasons. There is occasionally overlap between the two groups, but often there's less overlap than one might think. Professional BDSM is frequently banned at non-professional dungeons, and non-professional dungeons are frequently non-profit organizations. Indeed, many non-professional dungeons could be described as "community centers" for BDSMers. They're basically centralized nodes for BDSM support, and they may host lectures, workshops, discussion groups, public parties, or other meetups.

**enthusiastic consent** (feminism): A standard for ethical sex whereby one is expected not just to have a consenting partner, but an enthusiastic and excited partner.

**gender policing** (feminism): Gender roles are defined by culture, and when a person steps outside their gender role, that person will often be _policed_ or attacked by other members of the culture. For example, a USA man with long hair risks being mocked or beaten up.

**heteronormative** (queer studies): A term used to describe the cultural expectations of "normal" heterosexual relationships. For example, the expectation that men are the ones to pursue women during romantic interactions is heteronormative.

**kink** (BDSM): A specific preference. For example, if Clarisse enjoys being whipped, then she has a kink for it. She could also say something like, "I kink on whipping."

**kinky** (BDSM and others): A lot of BDSMers use "kinky" to mean "into BDSM." However, there are some people who use the term more broadly and include practices that aren't usually considered BDSM, such as _polyamory_ or _swing._

**landmine** (BDSM): An extremely sensitive psychological spot, sometimes hit accidentally during BDSM play. This is discussed further in Clarisse's post "What Happens After An S&M Encounter 'Gone Wrong,'" which is printed in the full version of this book and is available on the Internet at:  http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/12/09/what-happens-after-an-sm-encounter-gone-wrong/

**masochist** (BDSM): A person who enjoys receiving pain.

**New Relationship Energy** (polyamory): The obsessive, irrational joy one feels after starting a relationship with a new and awesome partner.

**out [of the closet]** (queer studies): An adjective to describe a person who is open with people outside her sexual subculture about her sexual identity.

**play** (BDSM): A verb for having an S&M encounter. For example, if Clarisse was whipped by a gentleman, she might say that she "played with him." Clarisse once saw a display at the Leather Archives & Museum asserting that in Old Guard Leather Culture (i.e, gay men's S&M culture starting around the 1950s), the word was more often "work" than "play" -- apparently, even S&M toys were usually called "tools."

**play party** (BDSM): A party where S&M can happen openly. Some play parties ban sexual intercourse, while others don't.

**polyamory** : A community to support people who want to have multiple lovers and be honest with everyone involved. Polyamory usually focuses more on an emotional relationship than _swing,_ but not always. The writer Franklin Veaux has a good Polyamory 101: <http://www.xeromag.com/fvpoly.html> And the blog _Polyamory In The News_ has a good post on the various distinctions between polyamory and swing:  http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com/2009/12/polys-vs-swingers-as-viewed-from-2010.html

**primary relationship** (polyamory): A relationship with more commitment and expectations than other relationships. For example, a primary relationship might be one where the participants live together and/or are married. Polyamorists sometimes disagree about whether relationship hierarchies are desirable.

**rape culture** (feminism): A culture in which rape is prevalent and is maintained through fundamental attitudes and beliefs about gender, sexuality, and violence, including _rape myths._

**rape myths** (feminism): Cultural ideas that make it harder to recognize, prosecute, and heal from rape. For example, many people believe that rape usually happens to young, "hot" women... but interviews with rapists show that they usually prioritize targets based on how vulnerable they are, rather than how "hot" they are.

**sadist** (BDSM): A person who enjoys inflicting pain.

**safeword** (BDSM): A word that any S&M participant can say at any time to stop the action. Safewords are extensively analyzed in a post Clarisse co-wrote with Thomas MacAulay Millar, "The Annotated Safeword," which is printed in the full version of this book and is available on the Internet at:  http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/the-annotated-safeword/

**scene; The Scene** (BDSM): The word "scene" is often used to indicate an S&M encounter. For example, if Clarisse was whipped by some dude, she "had a scene" with him (or some would say that she "scened" with him). "The Scene" is also sometimes used to indicate the public S&M community -- the _dungeons,_ workshops, lectures, discussion groups, and meetups that create an open network of BDSMers in many areas.

**secondary relationship** (polyamory): A relationship with less commitment and fewer expectations than other relationships. Polyamorists sometimes disagree about whether relationship hierarchies are desirable.

**squick** (BDSM): A feeling of not wanting to participate in an act, without judging others for doing it. For example, if a BDSMer feels sick at the sight of blood yet doesn't want to express disgust towards blood fetishists, then she might describe herself as "squicked" by blood. The BDSM subculture generally places a high value on recognizing that one can be squicked by an act, without judging it.

**submissive** (BDSM): A person who enjoys receiving orders or otherwise accepting an experience defined by a partner.

**swing** : A community to support people who want to have sex with multiple people and be honest with everyone involved. Unlike _polyamorists,_ swingers usually don't emphasize developing emotional connections in _secondary relationships,_ but this isn't always true. Clarisse is less familiar with swing than polyamory, but some swingers emailed her this Swing 101: <http://www.swingersboard.com/forums/faq.php?faq=swinger_faq> And the blog _Polyamory In The News_ has a good post on the various distinctions between polyamory and swing:  http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com/2009/12/polys-vs-swingers-as-viewed-from-2010.html

**switch** (BDSM): A person who feels comfortable in either the _top_ or the _bottom_ role.

**top** (BDSM): A blanket term for a _sadistic_ and/or _dominant_ partner. Not everyone who is sadistic is dominant, and vice versa.

**vanilla** (BDSM): A term to describe people who aren't into BDSM, or sexual acts that aren't perceived as BDSM. Some folks describe so-called "slightly BDSM" people or acts as _french vanilla._ Sometimes, non-BDSM people are offended by being described as vanilla, which Clarisse thinks is silly, but she often avoids the term anyway and says "not into S&M" instead.

**ze** (queer studies): A gender-neutral pronoun, also written as "xie." The possessive version is "zir" or "xir" or, sometimes, "hir."

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end
