Elf Sternberg

One of the symptoms of my ADHD/interictal syndrome/whatever the fuck this is has reared its head in my learning how to tie people up.

When I was a small child, one of the tests they did to determine my ADHD was a orientation test, and it went something like this:

“You are facing north. Turn left, turn right. What direction are you facing?”

“North.”

“You are facing South. Turn left. Left again. What direction are you facing?”

“North.”.

“Okay. You are facing north. Turn left. What direction are you facing?”

“East.”

You are facing north. Turn right. Turn right. Turn left. What direction are you facing?"

“East.”

Essentially, my north and south were always correct. My east and west were always random. And they couldn’t figure out why. But I knew why: I didn’t know what direction “left” or “right” was.

But I knew that if I was consistent, then “left” always meant turn their same way. “Right” meant, for that particular session, turn the opposite way.

Every time I started, when they said turn left or turn right, I could easily have gone clockwise or counterclockwise. At random. Because I had ADHD, I couldn’t pay attention to directions like that.

I remember when I was learning to tie my shoes, my mother had such a trial teaching me which direction to wrap the string around my thumb to make the loop for the bow. I could never know if I was going up over the the thumb or below the thumb. Of course, every kid was taught to go up and around the thumb, not down and around the thumb, and with enough effort I eventually memorized “tie up, tie up.”

I have rediscovered this problem while practicing my Shibari knots because I can’t remember which direction to make the loop for the final tie to make the cuff for a single column. I do it clockwise or counterclockwise at random. That information doesn’t stick in my brain.

I’m going to have to repeat it a lot until it does stick.

The special irony of the shoelace anecdote is that it has long been known that going under the thumb while making your loop actually creates a stronger and more balanced knot that is less likely to come undone during the course of the day.

Here's a TED Talk (eyerolls are acceptable, but it's only three minutes long) documenting how the "going under" version of the knot is better:

I've just had the mixed pleasure of listening to Consent To Harm on CBC Radio's Ideas With Paul Kennedy. I say "mixed" because, while the overall content of the show was both well-thought and well-produced to an extent that ought to make American broadcasters faint with envy, editorial choices made by the producers have left me puzzled.

The abstract of the show reads: Giving consent seems straightforward. But what a person is allowed to consent to is actually deeply fraught territory. And it gets especially fraught when the question of sex enters the equation. The show contains two different reports: one is about Consent in BDSM, and the other is about Consent and Sex Work.

In the BDSM segment there are several interviews with BDSM practitioners. All of them are women. Even when there are couples involved, both participants are women. They were certainly the best representatives I could have hoped for. They gave well-spoken, lucid explanations about safewords and negotiation, and the negotiation examples are beautiful and explicit (in both senses of the word). They made repeated calls for explicit, enthusiastic, and ongoing consent, with the "ongoing" part being repeated several times, and the dominant partners emphasizing that ongoing consent was necessary for tops as well as bottoms.

In the sex work segment the only mention of men is in the context of sex work clients, not sex workers themselves. The show concentrated on the risks women take when they enter into sex work, and the academic and legal scholars interviewed for the show discussed in detail the essential power dynamics that existed that made sex work dangerous for women, and why the state might want to regulate it. The conversants made classic, straightforward pronouncements about several generations of feminist thought and how it has evolved in the context of sex work.

Excluding men from the BDSM segment may have eliminated the need to discuss the issues of consent in the context of gender dynamics, but by doing so the CBC reinforces the impression that consent is something men already understand and control but women are still trying to figure out. To the extent that the show deals with "people," in only deals with half of them, and to the extent that it deals with relationships and consent, the issue remains woefully uncovered.