Happy New Year

I've been very silent the past quarter, and I thought New Year's Eve would be a good time to post a little update to friends, family and members of the Academy.

It's been quite a year.

In the mid 2000's I set a seven year life plan.

From 1998-2011 I ran Community Interactive Theatre project that took the greatest part of my time and energy. From schlock to high art, it was a priority. I had coaxed the project to a financial breakeven point over six years, but it began to founder and slowly sink by the bow after striking the iceberg of the endless series of disappointments that is now generally referred to as "The Great Recession" of 2005-2010.

As I fought off foreclosure on my house largely due to game-generated debts, I realized that while I had learned a great deal from running the project, I also realized that it tied my hands in many ways that were unfair to the other people in my life, and limited my ability to look at other, wider-ranging work.

I planned to salvage the project from collapse, prune it to financial viability, turn a stable organization over to the members to run by 2010, and spend 2011 writing and preparing a "Masterpiece" end to this phase of my career in Interactive theatre to be run in April 2012.

I've never respected temperamental artists who walk out on a loyal community because of a few downturns, or because they've ceased to have a personal need for the community. The arts group achieved full independence in fall of 2011...a little behind schedule...but who knew in 2006 that the Recession would last five years. Other groups have foundered in squabbling when the members took over responsibility for operations, but our turnover was worked out over two years, and resulted in a management system I believe has the capacity to endure for many years.

When I began working in interactive theatre in the early 90s, the first significant project I really drove was a drama based on the sinking of the RMS Titanic in April 1912. The story captivated me long before it included Kate Winslet's tits, and our groundbreaking work was the first of its kind to focus on realistic period drama rather than a sort of "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" fantasia. Groundbreaking in its day the work had many flaws, and I hoped to create a completely new work for the 100th anniversary.

After that I'd planned to step away from Interactive Drama, spending the remainder of the year writing and assessing where I wanted to go from there.

To understand why I'm writing about a project that didn't happen, it's worth knowing that I am an extraordinarily proud and arrogant person, with a reputation for doing things...bar the losses...because I said I would. In the mid-90s my mortgage was in trouble because of losses sustained supporting major projects, and I went to the wall again to sustain operations in the onset of the recession, spending not only everything I had, but everything I could reasonably borrow as well.

Now...it may not escape you that this style of behavior, while colorful, flamboyant, and artistic is not exactly disciplined. It can be forgiven once or twice, when there is a need to drive, passion and the commitment take risks to make big things happen. But as a pattern it's not the sort of thing that makes you say "this guy certainly knows how to lead." By the beginning of 2011 I'd already cancelled the Titanic project, recognizing that even outstanding success would be a Pyrrhic victory at best. If you're a friend or acquaintance, I hope you might join us on the weekend of April 14, when the household produces our annual Edwardian Tea followed by an adult afterparty...this year's theme will be "going down on the Titanic."

That has made 2011 a year of thought, learning and decision. The fact is that transition periods are hard. Retooling and changing directions can seem...directionless, and there is the desire for immediate short term payoffs. But from 1998-2010 I was driven on a bi-monthly cycle of short term payoff, and I realized that if 2011 was to be a watershed year for change it would require focus on the long term.

I completed a degree in Clinical Hypnotherapy in 2011 (though I won't finish paying for it until 2012...not a cheap undertaking)  I'd presented a few classes on erotic hypnosis in 2010, and for me one of the best ways to learn is by teaching. I realized that I knew a good bit about the general psychology of D/s which doesn't seem to be "common knowledge" in any of the communities I'm involved in...though most bits and pieces of it are. There is an absence of a "unified field" approach to D/s.  I resolved to do a full workshop on the psychological aspects of D/s/

I figured that two weeks was adequate time to prepare for the workshop, but as I got into the second week of four am nights, I realized there was a big problem...I had a lot more information than I could present in eight hours. Not just more but a lot more. I'd known that the issue would be culling down but the scope was...stunning.

I ended up with a handout that ran 120 pages. As handouts go it's not badly written, but it was no more than that. But as I held it in my hand, I realized I had a core of something and a great deal of my future direction slewed into focus.

When I first came to D/s, I wanted something like a handbook to tell me how to do it. There are books on Traditions, Protocols, even technique. I found tons of online advice, most of it empirical. Some was obvious, some counterintuitive but useful, but sadly, a huge quantity of the "standard advice" particularly on M/s and particularly online was filled with bad and wrongheaded ideas or general asshattery. I realized I was lucky to live in a region where good influences and a high level of education have produced a comparatively enlightened culture.

I wanted to know the answer to the question "Why do humans Dominate and submit, what is the point of it, and how do I make it work as something other than a roleplay game."

There are plenty of two sentence aphorisms...but I wanted a deep exploration of the mental processes that lead to masochism, sadism, dominance, submission, and a breakdown of every element of psychology that bore on these issues, written specifically from the perspective of D/s relationships.

It didn't exist.

It does now.

I've written fiction novels before and submitted them for publication. I know roughly how long it takes to complete a fiction draft, and then a revision. So I predicted I'd be done by November 1...then December 1...then...

Nonfiction is a little different. A particular problem for me is that I detest pop writers who claim contrversial things like "matriarchal societies are more sexually permissive," and then don't tell you how they know that. Are they an anthroplogist? Did they hear that in some class in 1980...read it on the interwebz...is it still current thinking? Can I trust them? Let's just say I believe in end notes...if an idea is controversial, a reader should be able to look it up and decide for themselves whether or not it rests on good authority.

I have high hopes to at least have a polished draft by mid February but it goes as fast as it goes.

The Manuscript exists. 200,000 words of meticulous detail describing every major facet of human psychology that touches on D/s, along with a pragmatic framework for implementing D/s in a fashion that is actually consistent with what we know about how people think and act.

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

I finished my second draft and realized that I had a document which has all the information I want. It also has all the warmth, charm, and readibility of:  The World Bank: Agriculture and Development in Rural Subsaharan Africa - a financial overview.

I'm not stupid and I could not tell myself that this tedious pile of nearly a quarter million words was exciting to anyone. And if it's not readable people aren't going to read it no matter how valuable it is. A year or so ago, J. introduced me to Chip and Dan Heath's work on making ideas stick...I'd heard of it peripherally before. I have a lot of time driving on my two hour commutes so I've been catching up on sciences reading by buying audible books on MP3...so I picked up their book and "read" it all the way through.

It was eye opening...gripping. I'd been doing a lot of things right...telling stories, anecdotes, little mysteries...I just needed to annihilate pretty much all the other words that weren't those things and I'd be fine. The manuscript is full of little stories that were streamlined or paved over in favor of getting across "important ideas" and not using too many words. But those elements are what people love...moreover it's how humans learn and remember.

It's slow going, but I've loved the pages I've revised since mid December, and I can honestly say that there was not a page till that point that I really "loved" though I had a few clever jokes and felt some pages didn't suck. It will be done when it's done, but I won't have to cringe as people read it and hope that the gravity of what I have to say will make up for the fact that reading it is only slightly less painful than a close perusal of the Manhattan White Pages. If they still have white pages.

So that's what I did with my Thanksgiving, Christmas, and MLK holidays.

The coming year will be interesting. I'd hoped to hit the ground running in January with a book...its' going to be late February or April. In time for the summer at least. A blockbuster hit. I wonder if I can get Martin Scorsese to direct...he makes the best fucking films....

The coming year should be interesting in more ways than one. People who know me know that I'm not one for wildly flamboyant predictions. But here are a few to start the New Year:

2012

2012 will be the most explosive year in domestic events since 1968. Whichever side wins the election we will see more serious conflict than we have since Mayor Daley's cops punched Dan Rather in the stomach inside the Democratic Convention Hall while the rest of his henchmen nightsticked kids outside the Chicago Hilton as they chanted "The whole world is watching."

The whole world wasn't watching then...it was gazing through a peephole at grainy black and white.

But it's watching now...

From Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, to Daraa in Syria, from Zuccotti Park to Oakland, in real time, moreso every day. There is loss of privacy for individuals...but also for states and corporations that once operated behind impentrable veils.

The world is changing. The Hacker Group Anonymous may piss off the Government. But they also faced down the Los Zetas drug cartel through a YouTube ultimatum and forced the return of one of their members. This is a strange new era.

Seemingly invincible Russian leader Vladimir Putin was booed at an MMA fight between Fyodor Emelianenko and American Jeff Monson...and despite spin control attempts Putin was lacerated on Facebook. The very idea that Putin might be damaged by Facebook is senseless in the context of Stalin-era politics. The World is changing.

The invention of the printing press around 1440 took about a century to spread through Europe. Few scholars seriously doubt it was a major driving factor behind the the Age of religious wars (c.1560-98) which essentially marks the end of the Medieval world and the birth of the Modern Era. The 95 Theses might have languished in obscurity if it were not for moveable type.

What took 150 years from 1450-1600 may happen in a fraction of that time now. The Web is about sixteen years old to most people. We knew it would change the world in ways beyond our imagining and that change is coming. Watch for it. 2012, by nature of the sharpening Eurozone Crisis, and the US Presidential election will be a watershed year...

A Happy Thanksgiving to all…

There’s a few personal notes at the end of this post, but first my annual digression on holidays…

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is among our most traditional holidays, having no real grounding in any specific religious holidays but being grounded in the European Tradition of a Harvest Feast which probably goes back well into the Neolithic. 

Several groups of Spanish Explorers celebrated Thanksgiving feasts in spring in Texas, notably Coronado in 1541, and Juan de Onate in 1598, after nearly dying of thirst in the Chihuahuan desert.  Martin Frobisher celebrated a Thanksgiving in Baffin Bay in 1578. 

But the celebration moved into the realm of something fun that we might recognize with settlers in New France who established annual Thanksgiving Feasts at the end of the harvest season.  Samuel de Champlain formed the "Order of Good Cheer," the first order of chivalry under the sponsorship of Jean de Biencourt, Baron de Poutrincourt, not only to organize feasts and toasts but entertainment, including theatre.

It's possible the settlers at Roanoake Island North Carolina also celebrated a Thanksgiving during the three years that they were abandoned in the late 1580s, but the main course may have been "each other," since the colonists were likely starving and nobody knows what happened to them, though there's some hope they were enslaved by the Indians and forced into a life of comparative plenty and shameless fornication.

In the British United States, Thanksgiving originated, like most important firsts such as Distilling, Tobbacco, and probably murder, from my home state of Virginia where Jamestown celebrated Thanksgiving from around 1607.  The celebration was incorporated in the charter of Berkeley Hundred, around 1619. 

The Separatist Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth in 1621 also celebrated a Thanksgiving Feast, celebrating their deliverance from safe urban prosperity in Leiden among the libertine Dutch to the wilderness of North America where they could endure hardship and privation in order to impose a strict religious rule.  The somewhat more laid back Puritans who came to Boston a decade or so later may have continued the tradition.

In any case...Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanks to All…

It's been a tough fall for the household with many challenges presented by health and the chances of finance....but we've done very well largely due to the character, determination, and goodwill of every one of us.  I could not ask for a better household or finer people, and I’m thankful.

Several of my friends have also enjoyed good years.  Some have found happiness in new relationships, others have endured depression or hardship and found stability and calm, or found new horizons.  For that I’m especially thankful.

I've been largely absent here and on Fet for about the past two months...going on three...long enough to be remarked on.  There's nothing wrong.  Following our successful late summer Workshop, I began working on a writing project to present what I've learned about the psychology of Power Exchange over the past ten years, loosely based on the framework of the booklet.  The project rapidly expanded to about 150k words.  It's been "done" in terms of principal writing for weeks, but the revising is far harder than writing and beating the mass of words into a concise, orderly, draft is taking some time.

I have a hard deadline to have the Ms. published and available through print on demand and Amazon Kindle by February 1, but I hope to have it out by early January. 

I don't like talking publicly about writing projects till they're mostly done, but this one is sliding towards completion.  That said, I'm looking for people with an interest in the topic who might be willing to read the revised draft. Please feel free to contact me at the address in the sidebar if you're interested.  I'll have some people for grammar and proofreading, so I'm looking for folks who care about the subject and can provide feedback about logical topic order, framing and presentation. 

And if you're a close friend and I haven't leaned on you in private... please don't feel neglected..I'm sure I will, but feel free to make me feel less guilty about imposing by dropping me a line!

It's been a good year, and despite some hardships a lot of good things have happened and moved forward.  Peace, prosperity and happiness to all of you!

Everything you ever wanted to know about the care and feeding of leeches

...No, really, I'm serious...

Some of you may remember our leech special issue. Well a few months have gone by and the leeches needed to eat again. I googled around online and found virtually nothing really authoritative about feeding leeches...one suggestion said to put them on a blood soaked towel...that didn't go well. Another suggestion was to feed them with purpose made blood sausages. This worked and since there's no other source online, I present my guide to the care and feeding of leeches. Perhaps not as humorous as we'd like but...it's late...



First buy beef blood. This is easier than it sounds. If you go to any butcher, they'll freak out and look at you like you have six heads. This has probably been the case since Carrie came out. People only want blood for Halloween pranks and your local butcher doesn't want a visit from the Sheriff. Fortunately Beef blood is important in various cuisines and can be easily purchased online.
http://filipino-store.com/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=275



Buy sausage casng. Your butcher will sell you that. Or you can order it online too. That's intenstine...



Knot the sausage casing at one end...or it's not going to work very effectively to hold blood. Natch...



Now...stretch the sausage casting with the tip of your finger.



Pour your blood into a test tube, or other long cylindrical container.



Work the sausage casing over the tube.



Work a finger or a hollow object like a straw in to release the suction...and pull the tube back out.



Mmmm...blood filled sausage ball...it's going to leak a little.



Tie it off...

Now you microwave it...this is the only part where you need to be really careful. You need to microwave it for about 5-10 seconds. Check it. If you go over, you'll get a nice brown blood pudding the consistency of liver. It's actually kind of tasty, but...it's not useful to the leeches. Start over...it happens very quickly so...check very often...



Hungry leech...



Dinner time..

And we're done. Eat your heart out Iron Chef...

Hafiz - Tired of Speaking Sweetly

Apparently the west is fascinated by Sufi poets.  I have to admit that if I hear one more speaker quote or reference Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, (always referenced in English as "Rumi" because that's the word for "The Roman" which described where he lived) I may actually have to charge to the bathroom and vomit.  I mean Jesus fricking Christ people...he is a good poet, sure, but the most quoted poet in the English Language.  I'm convinced it's because he sounds mystical and foreign.  Overuse can kill anything.

Anyway I was at the Master/slave Conference over the Holiday Weekend, and somebody quoted Hafiz instead.  This alone excited me enough I felt like I ought to go into the LVR and toss off.

Anyway, the context isn't particularly important, but I liked the translation enough to reproduce it here:

Tired of Speaking Sweetly

 

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

 

If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

 

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth

 

That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,

 

Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.

 

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.

 

The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:

 

Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.

 

But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.

 

 - Hafiz 

 

Letters to Dave Navarro

I got this from JayLynn.  I don't ordinarily promote causes here, but this is something so bizarre and enormous that I felt I should pass it along.  I honestly did not believe the first site...talking about the internet harassment of Dave Navarro for seeking a divorce, until I actually went to the second site.  Part of me wanted to believe it was a publicity stunt, but reading through the attack site it seems shockingly real.

http://ittybiz.com/sometimes-the-bad-guys-win/

The short explanation is that this guy's crazy relative seems to have put up a site aimed at coercing him into not getting a divorce, and generally harassing him.  It has generated a good bit of invective and hatefulness.  It's really kind of surreal.  If it were one person's rant-site it wouldn't matter, but the surprising thing seems to be that a fair number of people have bought into it.

The person who put this together comes across as someone with deep passions and hatred who has dressed them up as self righteousness - operating a public website aimed at spamming and humiliating a man about his divorce, and claims that one of the reasons is so his kids won't be hurt.

It's almost unthinkable to me today, living here in the business world on the East Coast that normal people would get involved in another couple's marriage issues.  I can understand a distraught in-law, but business associates?  Dear God, is this 1874?  What the Fuck people...

http://letterstodavenavarro.com/send-david-a-letter

I'm not sure what to do about it.  I sent a very nice supportive letter through the website mentioning how cruel I thought it was that it was being operated at all.


I am sorry that this hateful website has been operated to shame and attack you.  Obviously all reasonable adults in this day and time are entitled to make life choices that mean deciding to step away from a partnership that is not providing them what they need.  It's a hard choice and I am sure you've thought it through.  I am very sorry that you and yours have been put through this horrible torment by cold, heartless people seeking to enforce their own narrow morality on you...people who do not care about your family or happiness, but are seething with repressed hatred and looking for a "righteous" cause to make other people as miserable as they are.


I know that you will rise above all this, and be safe, and have a happy life long after the people who spread hate, misery and intolerance in the name of "righteousness," who inflict untold mental suffering on your children while preaching about "not hurting them," are forgotten.  


Until then know that all decent, right thinking people who are not filled with hate are with you, and oppose the heartless, dogmatic, cruel abuse of your life through letterstodavenavvaro.com


Warmest regards and sympathy,


I doubt the letters get through unfiltered, but I figured it would at least annoy the person running the site, and maybe if a few hundred thousand people hit the site with sympathetic letters it the site will fold up and go away.  Who knows.  It at least defeats the purpose of the site.

MacMcClelland, Rape, and PTSD

In the past few weeks there has been a lot of traffic in the online world about a piece by Mother Jones journalist Mac McClelland for Good.


That's not surprising in itself. If you've never heard of Mac McClelland, she's one of those rare people in the world who is out to do some good...and cut a swathe.  She's a human rights reporter, and from Ohio Warehouses to the depths of Africa she's gone around the world shining a flashlight into the face of people who are the problem.  The coercers, the abusers, the people that make life suck. 

She's lived with Burmese Karen, members of a US-designated terrorist organization, and written a book about it For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma's Never-Ending War (it’s available in hardcopy, but I’m only buying electronic editions these days).

She's got a sharp wit and a sense of humor.  Sometimes she's a little earnest for me, but I'm a Washington cynic.  The worst thing her detractors have come up to say about her is that she may have been a little unrestrained about things like reporting ongoing rapes.  Because you know, not overreacting while people are being raped or murdered around you is the most important thing.

Anyway, in a world where a lot of people are part of the problem she's one of the few that's struggling to be part of the solution. 

Back in the days when Edward R. Murrow was reporting from a rooftop as London was bombed, and Hemingway was fucking Martha Gellhorn while trying to get himself killed by stray fire, a large part of being a foreign correspondent was to be above the fray.  An indomitable machine, reporting to a sober and healthy America on the antics of foreigners.

I'm being a little unfair to Papa, given  To Have and Have Not but you get my point.  America was the land of Walter Winchell, of healthy smiles and rippling middle class muscles, of June Cleaver and martini lunches.  The essence of journalism suggested that we were fine and learning about fucked up things that happened over there...and even the attempt to make us feel involved came with the understanding that the Journalist was merely a camera, an unemotional onlooker.

McClelland broke the fourth wall and dared to talk about the emotional content of reporting from some of the worst places in the world, and in doing so implicitly touched on the PTSD and trauma that lies buried in our own population, hidden behind the facade of a happy, prosperous, middle class America that is rapidly falling apart at the scenes.

She's reported from the original Heart of Darkness, the Congo where Joseph Conrad's well intentioned imperialist Kurtz scribbled, "Exterminate all the brutes!" and died whispering "The Horror!"  You may recognize the story if not the setting from Francis Ford Coppola's modern adaptation, Apocalypse Now. 
Possibly one of the braver things McClelland has done is talk about not only her own PTSD, but talk about how experimentation with consensual violent sex helped her get over it. 

By the time he pinned me by my neck with one forearm so I was forced to use both hands to free up space between his elbow and my windpipe, I'd largely exhausted myself.


The idea that voluntarily experiencing an emotionally provocative event can give us a feeling of greater control over our own lives isn't exactly new.  Aristotle was pushing at that territory when he referenced catharsis in Poetics.  But McClelland puts it in a sharp new focus.

I can't begin to recap the article “Im Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD.”  If you don't read anything else this year, read it.

There's nothing inherently profound about it.  In the kink scene, we all know a dozen people who have dealt with tensions as prosaic as job stress and as exotic as rape trauma through violent interaction either as a top or bottom.  Who have experienced a relief of tension and a greater feeling of control as a result of consensual SM. 

But nobody else in the large world is coming out and saying it.  Even in the BDSM community it can be a brave stand to take.

Mac McClelland said what most of us have thought.

The response has been mixed.  Fortunately the largest part of it has been acceptance and support.  A lot of people intrinsically get this message and realize she's fucking courageous for coming out with it.
Ms. Magazine conducted a good interview and gave McClelland a chance to speak for herself. 
Some of her responses were very interesting, and almost as valuable as her initial article, in giving people permission to seek the things they need.

That conversation [with my therapist] happened exactly the way I described it. I was like, “All I want to do is have incredibly violent sex,” and she didn’t even blink. It’s like I had said, “You know, I would really like a piece of toast.” [This desire] is incredibly common. Trauma affects all aspects of your life, [including] your sex life. The two are super linked. Everybody’s different, but in my case, [I moved] toward the thing that was traumatizing [me]. You sort of have to embrace the thing of your nightmares to process and move past it.


[And] is it even weird anymore to have rough sex? It was a little bit of an extreme version, and the need for it was kind of extreme. But the fact that people are like, “This is nuts!” is actually a little surprising to me. They’re acting like there were … circus animals involved.


Some of the responses were bizarre.  Responding to a piece on Slate one correspondent asked:

"Does anyone else think the article might be, let's say, embellished....I may be naive, but I find it hard to imagine, for example, an ex-boyfriend who would be willing, for therapy's sake, to slam his elbow into his ex-girlfriend's face several times, but only after thoughtfully (and "suddenly") placing a pillow over her head. It's kind of difficult to picture, not only psychologically but physically."


The reader may be surprised to know that the scene, down to the chokehold...wasn't precisely difficult for me to picture.

Other response has been darker.  While it has focused on political issues, there is an undercurrent of agenda to it.  A group of female journalists used an open letter to Jezebel as a platform to shame McClelland for making Haiti part of the backdrop for her personal story.

Marjorie Valbrun was particularly aggressive, taking the matter up in the XX Column - Mac McClelland: What's Happening in Haiti Is Not About You in Slate.


Valbrun claims her issue is journalistic integrity, but her real emotional agenda jars through when she says:
Really? You need to get punched in the face by a man during sex in order to get over Haiti? So I guess mimicking a violent sexual assault is acceptable as long as it is wrapped in compelling prose and sold as self-healing.


Atlantic Monthly has chimed in on the criticism, making an issue of the fine details of precisely what permission McClelland had to write about a Haitian rape victim.  Nobody disputes what McClelland saw and heard, just what hoops she jumped through to bring it to report on it.

So let me get this straight...

The American mainstream media is dominated by a conservative mogul who is under investigation by the FBI, and whose shuttered British subsidiary News of the World committed egregious crimes that have topped a Minister and may yet bring down the Government.  In that environment the microscopic scrutiny of McClelland feels a bit contrived. Like dressing down the Ensign for badly polished dress shoes while the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor.  The offense may be real, but it's a trivial one, often repeated, doubtless by many of the people who are deploring it. 

Why?  Why does an arguably specious procedural error in an admittedly true story warrant coverage in Atlantic Monthly at a time when the FBI is investigating the owner of the Wall Street Journal?

Let's get one thing clear.  While I actually consider myself a “feminist,” I wouldn't be welcomed at most of the club meetings.  I'm a white male who has spoken and written about gender differences in ways that go well beyond political correctness.  I've dared to question definitions of rape that seem inconsistent with common human sexual behavior.  I'm not the bleeding heart kind of guy and I eat red meat.

That said...if this isn't because Mac McClelland is a woman and her writing about this shit rocks people's comfortable world, I've got a bonobo for a nephew.


Seriously Atlantic?    Seriously....


Mac McClelland hit a big honking nerve. 

The Jezebel signatories can’t really argue that Haiti is not a dismal hellhole where the population lives in fear, but they say it’s not as bad as she thinks out of one side of their mouth, while pointing out that the locals can’t escape and so have it worse than she does out of the other.  In the end they say they are upset that she made it about her...because talking about her suffering in some way reduces the dignity of the suffering off the people who have to live there and can’t leave.  The sufferings of Haiti have nothing to do with middle class American women, and McClelland was wrong to connect the dots between the two. 

But it is hard for me to feel that’s the primary unconscious  motivator for the expression of outrage.  It shines through in Valbrun's need to slash viciously at McClelland’s sexual experience in a column that purports to be about journalistic integrity.

One wonders if the fear isn't really a degree of projection.  It isn't that McClelland inserting herself into the situation lessens our appreciation for suffering in Haiti. 

It's that her bringing it home to us uncovers the specter of suffering and PTSD in our own culture...and while we can deplore the sufferings of those foreigners, our own sufferings are to be swept under the carpet, hidden behind a brave face.  If McClelland can have PTSD...or fantasize rape...how about the smiling middle class girl down the block.  She turns our notions of the world on their head, and our notions of sexual comfort and normalcy on their ass.

And it's a good turn. 

I'm sure that Mac McClelland is well tired of hearing about this article, but...I thought it was worth putting one more vote of thanks out there...

Thank you Mac McClelland for a very brave act which has benefitted a lot of people who never knew there was anyone like them.

Thanks for the First Full-Day Workshop

The first thing I want to say is "thanks" to everyone who came out to the full weekend workshop.  I was just awed by the response to this.  I'd felt for a while that basic Psychological issues were under-presented in the Community. 

I just cannot thank the attendees enough.  Some of you were people I knew, and some people I'd never had the honor to meet. I think the thing that says the most about the caliber of people who came is that every single person/couple who I did not know has commented to me on how friendly the group was and how welcome they felt.  I think that just says a lot about everyone.  Thank you all so much for being the first audience for the full run of this material.  

I also want to profoundly thank the rest of the household.  Stephanie, JayLynn, and Miranda did a huge amount of work to get the house ready and prepare yummy food.  Thanks also to Gregg and Alba for Apertifs.

Conception

When I conceived the Course back in November last year, it was just a standalone module linking the things I had learned together.  By mid-spring I'd realized that in doing this I was forming the whole of an underlying practice of consensual power-exchange.  I never changed the course title, because I think the original description was apt.  But I'd promised tying things together, and that became the first presentation of the "Comprehensive Mastery" concept.

I defined "Comprehensive Mastery" as "A results-oriented system of skills and learning which is designed to be applied to the self and partners to form the core of a rounded and pragmatic practice of consensual power exchange."  I then proceeded to put forward a lot of "it isn'ts" the most important of which included "a cult of personality" and "a replacement for any traditions you have."  I knew I had a toolset, but I realized I also have a toolbox, and that to present the toolbox coherently I should give it a name.

The concept differs a little from a lot of traditional Power Exchange when we come tot he world "results-oriented."  I see so many Power Exchange relationships where the practice of this or that tradition is getting only so-so results, or where it's clear that the results are coming from the New Relationship Energy, not the actual Dynamics, and neither partner understands when things fall apart.   The focus for Comprehensive Mastery is on a good long term outcome.

I think several things are clear coming out of the workshop. I think it was a huge success and I've received some very warming praise.  But...enough patting on the back, my personality type doesn't run to that. 

Changes

First, we have more than one day of material.  I'd considered that, but I wanted to give "everything I have."  The result is that I'm splitting the Workshop into two days.  There's enough demand that we'll re-run it in January. 

In terms of interaction, the first two thirds were great.  We have some writing exercises, and some fun games and roleplay to get people up and moving.  I heard a lot of laughter and that's good.  But we need more of that in what will be the second day, and fortunately it lends itself to that very well...creating that will be fun, and I look forward to it.

The manse needs better theatre style seating.  The Manse can hold eighty people comfortably for a party, but that's with both floors open, and people circulating. A presentation means everyone has to have comfortable space to sit in one room.

Sixteen participants and eighteen people was a lot.  We'd officially planned to top things off at fourteen.  Despite being a "big house" we often don't get to make the best use of the Manse because the "big room" is also the dining room, and the Foyer and Parlour are split, which is pretty but not space efficient.  We figured out how to reverse engineer everything so that the Dining Room can be the major seating which should take us up to about 25.  I'd say 'we won't get 25 people for a two day workshop' but I also thought we wouldn't get 16 for a single day workshop. 

The Materials

Right now I'm not going to post the booklet online.  I will make it available individually to all the people who attended, and if someone has great need of it, I'm willing to send it to them, but the current plan is to expand it with the material for January and publish it.  There will be an e-book format, priced for accessibility, not profit, but I think we want to get the material out formally.  I promise it will be out *soon.*

The Expansion

Most of the expansion will be fleshing out more details about the various submissive skills and techniques, and drawing clear parallels to the Mastery skills, making it clear that both partners need some measure of both skillsets.  I also want to at least begin to give examples of exercises or play to teach each of the skills, and I want to expand the Mind Control/Behavior Modification segment with examples both of what to do and what not to do. 

Again...thanks to everyone.  And for the people who couldn't make the workshop, it will be offered bigger and better several times next year...and of course as I mentioned with special provisions for folks who were at the first workshop and are primarily interested in the Second-day materials.