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A few weeks ago I was reading an academic journal on the psychology and sociology of consumer behavior (as one does) and I stumbled upon a paper titled Selling Pain to the Saturated Self, which I believe has a lot of interesting insights that would be valuable to the BDSM community.

People who've read my work before know that I'm fascinated by a debate ongoing in unrelated academic discipline, leisure studies, and yes, there is such a thing. Such academics divide leisure into one of three catergories: casual, serious, or deviant. Serious leisure requires (1) perseverance, (2) stages of achievement and advancement, (3) significant personal effort to acquire skills and knowledge, (4) broad and durable benefits, and (5) a special social world with a unique ethos that is deemed valuable both by the participants and by observers. It is the last two that are in contention. If it has them, BDSM is a serious leisure activity; if it does not then BDSM is a deviant leisure activity.

Although they only once mention BDSM or sadomasochism within the paper (addressing Baumeister's earlier works), I believe Selling Pain to the Saturated Self makes a very strong argument in favor of BDSM as a serious leisure activity with broad, durable benefits and a unique ethos that the authors, Rebecca Scott who participated in the painful event, and the other two, Julien Cayla and Bernard Cova, who observed, deem valuable.

The authors of this particular paper, focus their attention on "obstacle course adventures," specifically those that deliberately market their outings as inflicting pain and suffering to test the will and endurance of the participants, and rightly ask, Who buys this stuff? And why? Through Scott's experiences, and interviews with other participants, the authors set out to try and find a set of satisfying explanations in the context of the adventure outing that most clearly markets itself as being about pain and suffering: Tough Mudder.

Tough Mudder is a half-day obstacle course with sections that involve running through blazing mazes of kerosene-soaked bales, swimming through freezing water with obstacles that require one go completely under, climing mountains of stone and ice, crawling through cold mud pits, and finally confronting chambers of swinging, electrified chains that deliver the full force of a cattle prod. It is designed to hurt, to dismay. There has even been a death on the course due to heart failure.

The course is changed every year, but every course starts with the same obstacle: a swim or slog through a long pit of thick mud.

Lessons


Ritual matters


The authors of the paper assert Tough Mudder isn't a sporting event. It's a ritual.

There are two kinds of people in the world: outcome-oriented, those for whom the last event sets the tone for one's memories of an experience, and decision-oriented, those for whom just doing it sets the tone. The directors of TM know this, so they open with a decision-oriented event. There's a "carnival" like atmosphere-- loud music, colorful banners, lots of cheering, and then the participant goes from this world of color and, like her fellow sufferers, jumps into the mud.

The ritual starts here, with a transition from the "real" world to the ritual one. You have to go under the mud to be let out; you have to emerge the same color as your peers, any markers of social status covered and obscured, making you into a troupe. Mud is thick and viscous, hindering you, triggering fears of weakness and insufficiency. Mud is dirty. One of the interviewees described in as feeling as if "you're up to your neck in shit," and the authors go the full Freud by saying that this implication transitions awareness down from one's head to the lower half of the body. Tough Mudder has only two internal, recurring symbols: mud and pain.

Tough Mudder ends with a huge party, and everyone gets a t-shirt saying they finished, and everyone taking photos of their own and each other's bruises.

The authors repeat a point that every single interview revealed: the ritual is acceptable because the participant knows that it is of limited duration. They will be able to return to the "real" world, and they'll be able to bring this experience with them.

Pain matters


The authors talk a lot about pain. After all, consumer culture is about selling people what they really want, and who the fuck really wants pain?


While experiential marketing guidelines emphasize the need “to entertain, stimulate and emotionally affect consumers through the consumption experience”, the literature on the design of experiences almost never mentions the issue of pain in creating experiences that consumers will find appealing


God, I hope I never do kink to "emotionally affect consumers through the consumption process." I want to emotionally affect friends and loved ones through a ritual that includes the both of us.

The title of the paper includes the phrase "The Saturated Self." The people who go through Tough Mudder are mostly office workers, middle class, white collar. Their lives are completely scheduled from the moment they wake up until the moment they lie down. Even their weekend calendars are full. Life is busy but monotonous, filled almost completely with head-oriented work rather than body-oriented, and the few surprises are mostly nasty and mentally taxing, such as unexpected illness, accident, or crime. Those full schedules seem even more impossible when one has to also call the insurance company, or the police, to report that someone has broken into your car.

We've become so optimized that social obligations become emotional burdens. The job we have may well be a bullshit job, and the uselessness and insincerity one gets from one's superiors, and has to perform for customers, takes its toll.

The authors go through a lot of trouble to analyze the reasons people seek out pain. Tough Mudder is an "extraordinary experience;" it's not something normal people go through. It's also held in an outdoor setting, and therapists now prescribe "nature walks" for depressed people, as being outdoors among trees and dirt seems to actually be good for us. It's an escape from the civilized world of stressed concrete, cold steel, overly revealing glass, and Google's surveillance.

Pain has different roles to play: pain brings our attention back to our bodies and helps those of us who "live in our heads" to rediscover our bodies and a spiritual nature that only exists when we appreciate the embodied cognition that goes on beyond our heads; (3) pain creates a harrowing of the self that is crucial to participation in and deriving value from ritual; (4) pain participates in the dialogue between our selves and the world around us.

The Body as Focus discusses how pain makes us pay attention to our bodies in ways we don't, usually. We ignore it, scheduling dealing with it as efficiently as we do any business meeting. We are alienated from it. (And alcohol alienates us further. Maybe this is why so many techies drink.) Painful experiences bring it back to us, highlight it, and show us its shape, heft, and strength.

The other way we experience the body is The Body as Alien. Some TM experiences, especially the ones that involve cold, often invoke spinal reactions in the arms and legs that are independent of what the conscious will of the participant is demanding. The mind is alert an conscious, but the body is rebelling.

Seeking out pain itself is a rebellious act. Pain is an important part of many rites of passage, forcefully pulling the initiate out of his or her head and into the here and now, the reality of the moment. Pain is often the catalyst of spiritual transformation.

The organizers know that one can't endure three hours of solid, unending pain, so the course has moments of hidden pleasure. Leaving the icewater swim marked as "The Frozen Enema" on the course map, the mudders find themselves wading through mud again, but mud that has been warmed, to make their bodies relax. The next obstacle will be even more cruel, but in a different way. This alternation of ordeal, recovery, and then a progressively harsher ordeal, leads to the kind of personal or spiritual transformation most people only see in movies but never experience.

One thing that stood out to me in discussion about the ends of the course is in a section entitled Spectacle. One thing that sufferers in Tough Mudder want, surprisingly, is to be seen. They want to know that someone else sees them, that someone else will also be there to carry away a memory of what the participant experienced. It is a ritualized experiences where showing one's pain and screaming it, or even laughing about it, is valid because, hey, what's a brain to do under those circumstances anyway?

Lessons for Kinky People


For BDSM scenesters, most of these aren't monumental discoveries, but they're ones I've rarely scene consciously engaged. So much of BDSM conversation is about technique and safety, and always the conversation about managing or alleviating the thirst, but I have a service top nature and am looking for ways to get better.

Unlike Tough Mudder, BDSM is already tied up in sex. We're already primed to link our kinky, pain-based scenes with our sex drive, and lots of our toys and games focus on the buttocks and genitals. Part of the rituals we use are designed that way.

Knowing it will end gives bottoms strength. Human endurance is a limited but renewable resource. Our instincts are to hoard it, and never give more than 50% of our effort, because our evolutionary biology "knows" we might need that reserve if a tiger stops by. When a submissive knows (a) that the ordeal they've asked for will end and (b) that the people and place of the ordeal are trustworthy enough to give all, then a submissive will gleefully go much farther than they might have believed possible.

Entrance and exit rituals are critical. Whether someone is a decider or an outcomer, entrance and exit rituals help them move into the space where they submit or dominate, and then move back out into the space of the real world.

Bruises are pretty. It's a common enough refrain in our community, but this paper makes it explicit that carrying the bruises "out of the circle" is a form of emotional rebellion against the conformist office-space world. Under our clothes, we wear marks that set us aside from others.

This is an exploratory practice. TM participants are dredging deep within themselves to find reserves they hoped they had, perhaps always felt they had, and using those reserves to endure. The same thing has been true of BDSM and the ethnography of BDSM ever since Geoff Mains penned Urban Aboriginals in 1984. Part of the training we get as tops is to be prepared for anything when the bottom freaks out; combining this kind of reserve-tapping pain with the intimacy of a one-on-one physical activity that's also highly sexually charged can dredge up all sorts of wild, heartbreaking emotional purging, and knowing what to do when that happens is critical.

For long scenes, "breaks" aren't enough; they have to be pleasurable. Since BDSM scenes are generally highly bespoke, it's important to know what the bottom enjoys as pleasurable stimuli, and to give it to him or her in the middle. Warmth, sweetness, and affection restore a bottom's reserves much more readily than asking them to just find it within themselves.

Making recordings of the scene should not be dismissed. This was a huge insight to me and, in the age of the Internet where a recording leaked to the net can devastate a career, one fraught with danger. But bottoms want to relive the scene, much more than tops do. They want to be able re-experience the sensations from the outside. They want to know they were seen, and they want to be one of the watchers as well as a participant. Kink is revelatory; they want a record of what was revealed.

Recordings allow us to create a timeline and a biography that talks about our bodies. We don't do much about bodies in our real world, and it's becoming a bit more gauche to do so. BSDM and recordings of scenes allow us to experience important trangressions and remind ourselves of why we go through them.

Know if you're seeking escape or disassembly. Pain enhances extraordinary experiences. It's the ritual plus pain plus intimacy and sexuality that makes kink so powerful. Kink allows us to get beyond our urban, stratified, stultifying culture, and into a dreamtime where everyday worries can be put aside. Some seek to escape that "saturated" self, others seek to "break" it. The authors says that escapists remain aware of that saturated self and know that they'll have to return to it; folks seeking disassembly want to break that self down and blow it away, going so deep into painful experiences that time, space, and one's sense of self dissolve completely, at least for a little while. We're tough beasts, and evolution has taught us how to put ourselves back together, most of the time.

Performative urbanity and the emotional labor of it is exhausting because it's so repetitive and stressful. Kink taps different reserves, and that's important; it exercises emotional and physical muscles we don't normally use. The painful experiences of kink create quiet emotional spaces where we get visit parts of ourselves that we otherwise don't normally see.

Thesis


Scott, et. al. present Tough Mudder as an activity that's dangerous, even deadly, and extraordinarily painful, and those are its selling points. In the end, they praise Tough Mudder as "a particular kind of escape that betrays the desire to flee the burdens of identity," one that leaves us with "hidden signs of subversion" inflicted on our bodies as an "effective route to escape the servitude of office work."

If Tough Mudder's painful rituals have broad and durable benefits, and most of the people interviewed claim it does, and if it creates a special social world with a unique ethos, then it's a serious lesiure activity, rather than a deviant one.

BDSM makes the same claims, and as I have documented before, not only does BDSM have a unique and valuable ethos, it has one so valuable that the normal world has benefited from it, even if we rarely get credit for that. BDSM is clearly a valuable, serious leisure activity.
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So, a few years ago when Omaha was doing a lot of political things, one of the more prominent members of the Democratic Party asked her if she ever intended to run for public office. Omaha said no, she hadn't, because she feared she had too much historical baggage, starting with putting herself through university as a stripper (AKA sex worker), and followed through by ending up as Washington State Ms. Leather in 1997. In the current atmosphere, a background like that could be a serious detriment. Around that time, someone asked me if I thought Omaha's history, since she's completely unapologetic about it all, would be a problem. At the time, I hemmed and hawed because I wasn't sure. I've finally figured out what to say:

Have you been to a professional or political conference in the past few years? Did it have a Code of Conduct? Did you read it?

Every conference code of conduct you've ever read started with one written by a kinky person. In the late 1990s and very early 2000s the internet started to give women an outlet to complain about all the creepy, awful crap they put up with whenever they go to professional events. Men getting drunk and handsy, groping and even assaulting women who came to teach and learn, not be leered at or mistreated.

At some meeting where event organizers discuss these things, someone said, "This is awful. Women will stop coming if we don't get this under control. Our reputation is at stake." And someone else said, "I have some experience with this. Let me gather some documents and we can discuss this at the next meeting."

That person went home and found the Code of Conduct for their local BDSM dungeon, typed it in, cleaned it up so that it didn't mention all the sexy stuff, and presented it as the starting point of the conversation. Every Code of Conduct you've read since descended from that document.

Kinky people have been dealing with this issue for thirty five years. Ever since Pat Califia published the S&M Safety Manual in 1982, we have discussed and experimented and studied how to manage when creepy guys invade a public space where deeply intimate and possibly dangerous things are happening. If we can do it, then so can professional events where not so intimate or physically risky things are going on.

The whole MeToo thing, the conversations about consent and negotiation and using your words and learning to be unafraid to talk about what you want and need in an intimate setting— that vocabulary came from kink, and it belongs to kink, and we give it to you as a gift, because you vanilla folk need it. How to deal with creeps, and event codes of conduct, and explicit rules about keeping your hands to yourself, is also ours, and we need you to have it, because it's the only way to move forward in a world where health care and birth control mean women aren't shackled to their beds for the first 20 years of their adult lives trying to have babies.

Do I think Omaha's past is a problem? Hell no. I think it's a benefit. Aside from all her other passions about the environment, about quality of life issues in urban spaces, alleviating impoverishment, invisibile disabilities, or transportation issues, when it comes to talking about issues like workplace harassment or teaching students consent, Omaha has more experience with the debate, and more familiarity with the solutions, than any other candidate you could name.

It's totally l'esprit de l'escalier and theoretical at this point, but it's useful to have this idea in my head.
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Postkink


Last week I read an article on "postanarchism" (a highly academic anarchism that uses the tools of postmodern analysis to ferret out the structural features of our existing power structures, mostly as a way of trying to find their weak points and tear them down) and how it relates to BDSM. In the essay, the writer asserts that "Anarchists should be very interested in the BDSM phenomenon that sometimes power can flow in accordance with an ethics of freedom as a symbolic challenge to the forms of social, economic, and political power against which they struggle."

I think this is a pointless exercise. Anarchists are now trying to cast human beings in the same mold as Libertarians and Soviet Communists: limiting the human animal's capabilities to ones they prefer, and discarding everything else about that human being as irrelevant, immoral, even inhuman. People who enjoy consensual power exchanges are as rare as those who deeply enjoy the fundamentals of cooking, or those who actually enjoy reading books deeply even in a world full of Twitter and Netflix.

I have long maintained that, while there are a significant number of people who feel driven into having sex, the number of people who enjoy making sex is much, much smaller. I also strongly suspect that the numbers are badly skewed by sex, and that the number of women who would enjoy sex is much, much higher than that of men.

In the musical South Pacific, the song "Nothing Like a Dame," contains the following lyrics:

We feel ev'ry kind of feelin',
But the feeling of relief
We feel hungry as the wolf felt
When he met Red Hiding-hood


While the metaphor to a destructive hunger for a victim is front and foremost there, I'm fascinated that the writer chose to use the word "relief" to describe what the men are really after. Relief rather than pleasure. It's a drive, almost a curse, and it takes an entire song, one that ends with a reminder that one can find that relief even with a woman who "ain't right" and has "all kinds of flaws."

Dan Savage recently echoed my thesis when he said,

When you’re told about sex before puberty you’re just appalled: Why would anyone do such a thing? And along comes puberty and the thing that you swore when you were 7 years old you would never do, ’cause that’s so gross, and before long, you’re drafted into this army that you never wanted to serve in. And I think that there’s always a bit of discomfort and alienation from your own body that goes on because in a way you experience it as a betrayal. We’re told this lie when we’re children that one day we’re gonna grow up and have sex, when in reality one day we grow up and sex has us.

He goes on to talk about how we have kinks and fetishes and orientations and preferences over which we have very little control— a Buddhist idea, that we don't have thoughts, thoughts have us— and that our inability to consciously choose these, for the most part, alienates our sense of "self" from this critical component of ourselves, our sexuality.

It's precisely because sex happens at puberty, long after all the other basic body things like sleeping and eating and excreting have been mastered, that makes it so alien. It happens at the same time adult consciousness is happening and our brains are rewiring themselves for moral ambiguity and moral decision-making.

I don't think the Anarchist program is immoral; I just think it's tilting at an invisible— and invincible— windmill. Trying to take the unequal power relationship out of sex isn't going to work; we already experience our experience with sex itself as an unequal power relationship when it's imposed on us by puberty. Most people are going to struggle with that unequal power relationship between themselves and their sexual desires most of their lives. (I consider myself doubly lucky; on the one hand, I've always treated sex as a hobby, something I should study and get good at, something I should make as one makes a great dinner, and not something I should take, as one does a microwave burrito; and on the other I seem to have dodged an entire host of unfortunate fetishes, the ones that intrinsically lead to harm to myself or others.)
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I've been reading a lot recently about the Inklings, four writers at Oxford university in the early 20th Century. You may be familiar with two of them: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. One of the things that's really grabbed my attention was Tolkien and Lewis' use of Faërie. Lewis did it with Narnia, and Tolkien does it, not with the entirety of Middle Earth, but only within the realms of the Elves and the Orcs. Tolkien wrote
In a fairy-story the one thing that must not be made fun of [is] the magic itself. That must in the story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.
Tolkien writes that to bring the reader into Faërie, the writer must begin with description, must bring to the reader new and powerful ways of seeing the world. Tolkien believed that done well, Faërie stories transcended mere tales of the weird, that Faërie, when allowed to be "... uncorrupted, it does not seek delusion nor bewitchment and domination; it seeks shared enrichment, partners in making and delight, not slaves."

There is no more powerful expression of Faërie in the real world than kink. The BDSM I've practiced and the BDSM I've seen others practice can be corrupted into a form of domination, but most of the time I've seen it where both parners, men and women, entered in a creative circle of energy and delight, a shared enrichment. It is one born in a crucible of challenge and trust, trial and honor, passion and dignity, and yes, pain. The entirety of negotiation, the expectation that both partners bring everything to the table, lay it out, and honor the commitments made, is the heart and soul of kink.

As Tolkien says, Faërie must be taken seriously. But it is the world of Faërie that demands respect, not the moments within it. Just as there are some very silly moments in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, kink can have its own comedy, and laughter isn't unheard of. (People new to the RACK— Risk Aware Consensual Kink— scene are often bothered by this, because they have mistaken a moment in time for the very world they have entered.)

Tolkien continues:
Before we reach such states as boredom and tedium we need recovery. We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make.
There's a gorgeous word, "respair," which means "the return of hope after a period of hopelessness," that goes beautifully here.

BDSM is a kind of respair: once you've gone through it, the world is rendered brighter, the colors seem to be stronger, and yes, having met the dragon your cat does seem more interesting.

More to the point, Tolkien believed that Faërie stories always had sudden turns, moments of utter chaos where the world seemed to waver and even fall apart, only to be restored in even greater beauty and clarity afterward. Tolkien wrote that these stories are never absolute: the world of Faërie goes on, that the joy of those moments is fleeting, and that the battle to hold the world together starts anew the next day.

If that's not an accurate description of "the place" you go at the end of an intense kink scene, I don't know what is.

Of course, I take my kink seriously. Which is why giggling is good.
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Omaha and I volunteered to run the photo booth at SEAF, where we were to man the computers. Apparently, we were the most computer-savvy people they could rope into the deal.

It was actually a lot of fun. We had the day-shift, which wasn't terribly busy, but was fine throughout the day. We had a lot of very beautiful people come through, in all ages from their anxious mid-20s to their self-assured late 60s. The rules didn't allow for nudity, sadly, but I saw several handsome young men with their shirts off. Apparently the big events happened at night-- performance art and fashion shows, and some demonstrations of the darker leather arts.

I picked up both volumes of The Virgin Project, an incredibly sweet and yet sometimes disturbing collection of interviews with how individuals lost their virginities, all rendered in exquisitely sensitive comic form. I suspect Scott McCloud would approve. They are a perfect representative of the comics as a way of communicating memoir stories clearly.

I can understand why some of my friends who submitted didn't get in. The art reached for the status of art and often reached pretention. If it didn't aspire to communicate something other than "sex is fun," it wasn't on display. Sam Cobb's collection of oil paintings embraced being kinky even into old age and decreptitude; Brian M's photographs of an armless woman with large artifical breast implants were a defiant stab at the idea that the handicapped are nonsexual. Some artworks were accepted simply due to scale: Nancy Peach had big, bold canvasses, but her work was casually heterosexist in theme, so much so that its inclusion was almost ironic. Michael Alm's "Furries Get Together," a tableau of statuettes in fursuits, tried to imply that furries were ordinary people under their clothing, but somehow also managed to say that ordinary people under their clothing can be unpleasant to look at-- the opposite from the values mouthed by SEAF's parent organization, the Center for Sex-Positive Culture.

I did like several pieces there. Christopher Carver's piece "Stephanie" was basically a giant wall-covering poster of a close-up of a rather ordinary vulva, but if you got close to the image you could see it was done in four-color with the "pixels" being silhouettes of bunnies and kittens. Jonathan Wakuda Fischer's "Midnight's Request" appealed to my crotch well, a woodcut rope bondage scene with an animesque feel to it done in woodcuts and paint. And Emily Steadman's oil paintings were sweet and wonderful outdoor love scenes without a touch of irony of desperation.

The best pieces there were the beds, constructions of wrought iron, one made of Gieger-like spines; another of beautiful stainless steel, technological but not gridded, not rigid, a nice place to have sex; and a third in dark steel, gorgeous machine-cut silhouettes of oak trees.

The theme of this SEAF was evocative of other emotions using the erotic as a vehicle, and not necessarily erotic works by themselves. It was certainly not the kind of bondage reportage photography that has been prevalent in the past. Some of it was good, and there was a lot of very skilled talent on display, especially in the constructions and installations.

One thing still blows my mind though: Norwescon was a sponsor (although their name was spelled wrong on one of the flyers, it's correct on the website). Okay, there's a lot of crossover between the pagan, kink, and SF communities in Seattle, but that much seems confessional and a bit over the top.
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A couple of months ago, I blogged about the Hardwood Cabin, a local swingers club nearly in my back yard that the city chose to shut down, claiming that it was a "business" rather than the very large and frequent "private parties" affair that the hosts claimed it was.

In the time since then, I've been thinking on and off about the Hardwood Cabin, and what it means. Most of my "thinking" has been informed, sadly, by the negative reaction to the club that I've seen, mostly coming off the right-wing websites like Drudge and Free Republic. If you want to see reactionary, "freedom for me but not for thee, because you're fat and/or kinky," go read a couple of the entries on those links. Phrases like, "They're not normal, they're sick individuals, like dogs in heat," and "These people are narcissists who insist on the freedom to do as they choose without having to take responsibility for their choices or even make responsible choices," and finally, " They tend to be overweight, middle ages unattractive types."

Oh, I dunno. I thought they were kinda cute. (Last night I met a beautiful and very big redheaded girl at the party, and Omaha asked me if I was "getting into fat women." Uh, dear, it's been clear for years that my tastes run to extremes.)

A friend of mine thought that my interest might be annoyance that I wasn't invited. There may be some truth there. Then again, I had no idea it was going on and obviously didn't have any interest in hunting down new spaces; there are plenty out there already. Goddess knows I'm booked to the hilt already.

When I was 25 years old and pretty much a blithering idiot, I went to a few swingers' club events, usually as an AIDS educator, gave my safer sex presentation and then watched it be blissfully ignored by people who thought that STDs didn't happen to them. I looked down upon those people as desperate, aging, out to prove they can still "do it," and not thinking much beyond my own peer group.

I'm 42 now. I'm the same age as most of the people who went to Hardwood, the age of a lot of the people I once dismissed. While I'm not quite into the random exchange of bodily fluids that is a swinger's event, I enjoy having a life full of wonderful people who are willing to get naked and do dirty things with me. I'm grateful for all the opportunities, from the kinkiest to the most sweet and innocenct. As I've documented before, the passage of time has made me painfully aware of the slow wearing on the equipment, from the knees to the eyes, just like most people my age, and with it two illuminating realizations: my age cohort did not get to sling mud, drop acid, and fuck like crazy at Woodstock, and we have only so many more years to get in all the pleasures of life we can before we have to start thinking seriously about hip replacements and Metamucil.

I have compassion now for the older people I saw seventeen years ago. I understand why the Elf of 25 thought that way. And part of me can't wait until all those snot-nose Freepers reach this age and wonder why they spent so many damn nights in front of the keyboard, whining about libruls.
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Last night, Omaha and I managed to get a babysitter and go out. We had a lovely dinner and then headed over to an S&M party we knew about, where I practiced tying her down and then, well, you can imagine what happened next. Well, you can try.

The remainder of the evening, however, was not so delightful.

Parties are meant to be public, by definition. There aren't that many private spaces, and even the semi-private ones usually allow others to watch, sometimes with limits or restrictions. S&M parties are going to be filled with noise: a giggle, a slap of a hand, the creak of a wooden frame, the clink of a suspension harness, a moan. You go to the party expecting that kind of thing. Sometimes, for a moment, a couple goes way hard and loud with screaming and sobbing. Eventually, it fades.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s it was fashionable to write articles for 'mainstream magazines' about the kinky wildlife going on "somewhere else," and one of the universal phrases found in these articles was that while there were "S-and-M parties" going on somewhere you were not, "nobody ever really inflicts pain on one another during these games. A little slapping, a little tickling, that's about it." That's simply not true, and reading Geoff Mains, who chronicled the S&M scene in the mid-1970s in San Francisco, it was never true.

And when a very heavy pain scene breaks out at a party, there's a rhythm and flow to it that assures onlookers that everything is okay, that both people know what they're doing (or at least getting into).

Last night, though, there was this one couple, man top, woman bottom, and she shrieked at every thing he did. And not in a good way. I mean, full on "I'm being eviscerated please dear god someone stop him help me I'm going to die I'm being murdered!" shrieking. It was horrible. It was the kind of screaming that went on, that reached deep into the ancient lizard part of your brain and shook the alarming ganglia that insisted a member of the tribe was being hurt and you should do something now. It was agonizing being in the same room with them. Every time you'd think they'd reached an end point, that it couldn't possibly get any worse, they'd start right up again.

It was terribly unfair to the rest of the people there. Those two involved the rest of the party in their scene without attendees consent. They ruined other people's scenes. They made mere attendance unpleasant. I spoke with several other people at the party whom I've known a long time ago, and almost universally they agreed.

I complained to one of the party organizers. He shrugged and said, "What can we do? It's an open night. Maybe they come here because she's so loud like that her neighbors hate her."

I mean, it's gotten to the point now where, next time I go to a kinky party around here, I'll have to ask if I can come in for a look-see first and if that couple is attending, I'll leave.
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A sensationalist, yellow-rag article in the NY Post about an accident at an S&M Club in NY City has me fuming.

I'm steamed at the "journamalism." There's an obviously taken-by-surprise photograph of the top and the artice implies she was a pro. There's a "did you know this was happening in your neighborhood?" kind of breathlessness to the writing. There's an excessive amount of prurient detail to the description of the victim: the nipple clamps, the hood, the high-heeled shoes.

More than that, I'm horrified by several of the details. The top at the club (called "The Nutcracker Suite") left the victim alone in a choke position for more than 20 minutes? What kind of idiocy is that? There was no panic snap on the chain (chain? My gods, you use rope for this kind of thing and you carry nursing shears and a panic snap at all times!). If he was incommunicado you put something in his hand that he can drop when he needs to signal your attention. And I have to repeat myself: she left him alone

And what completes my horror is the details of his rescue: The club allowed him in without proper ID. The only thing he had on his person was a freakin' bus pass!

Good gods, the damn place charged $100/hr.

Okay. I'm going to take a deep breath. I'm going to say it out loud: "I am spoiled."

I have been spoiled since 1991 when, tracking down an obscure message on an obscure local BBS, I first attended C-Space, where I met Celeste (did you know Celeste has a blog? Rock on!) and the first thing she taught me (all of us, actually) was how not to get hurt. How to leave your information with a trusted friend, how to negotiate for what you wanted (and didn't want). How to use safewords. I have spent the last 15 years of my life repeating those lessons (not always successfully, but often enough to have made it this far alive, healthy, and suffering only the indignities of passing time) and trying to teach them to others.

Within a year I had met many more people. Some of you still read this blog. At least two of you, one of whom I had known long before Celeste, and one of whom I met shortly after that fateful night, are beautiful people with whom I'm still getting messy and kinky on a regular basis. The club I go to charges between $15 and $30 a night, depending on the event, although you do kinda have to bring your own partner. The clubs I have attended have always been classy, above-board, concerned for your safety first, and insistent that somewhere your real name and ID are kept, just in case of emergencies such as these.

There is no excuse for what happened that night. The incompetence and arrogance of the Nutcracker Suite are simply mind-boggling. The Post is sensationalizing the poor victim; it ought to be going after the damn club for its mendacious and dangerous stupidity.

Grief, I'm glad I live in Seattle. We used to joke, back when Kinky Couples was around, that the rest of the world didn't believe just how nice kinky people had it here. When KC shut down, we broadcast to the world that Seattle had fallen back to being "ordinary." But that's not true: we're still better. The lessons learned from Kinky Couples make us better. I could care less about the NY Post (and it's gleeful followers-on), but I hope that the attention dropped on the Nutcracker Suite makes it either shut down, or learn its lessons well.

[Edit: I can't help but giggle at The Gothamist version of the story, which features a photo of a pair of handcuffs and this sweet addition: Image of Kookie Cuffs, which can be purchased at Toys in Babeland. Yay for Toys In Babeland!]
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So my friend [livejournal.com profile] j5nn5r has recently been absorbed into some kind of avant-garde art collective downtown called The Little Red Studio, which bills itself as a place for "Beauty, Art, and the Erotic," and his wife, Desirae, invited me to come down and check the place out for last night's show. Omaha wanted to go as well but couldn't: Kouryou-chan was sick and someone needed to stay and watch over her.

And Jenner said to me, "Here, Elf, tie her up." )

The only question remains: how much of that can I use in stories?

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Elf Sternberg

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