Gordon's Dry Sin

Happy New Year

2011-12-30T10:03:00.000-08:00

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…

2011-11-24T08:21:00.001-08:00

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

2011-10-11T22:37:00.000-07:00

...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

2011-09-06T11:52:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-31T14:12:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-03T13:47:00.001-07:00

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

2011-07-18T11:36:00.001-07:00

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.

A Warm Fuzzy Tale–PART TWO!

2011-06-29T22:27:00.001-07:00

So...probably most of you in School, or Church, or some other Institution of Cultural Assimilation, read Claude Steiner's "A Warm Fuzzy Tale" in grade school. And if you're like me, you sort of shrugged and said "well that makes sense but whatever."

So...most people get "A Warm Fuzzy Tale" without any explanation that it's a core teaching element of Transactional Analysis, and explains the theory of strokes “the recognition, attention or responsiveness that one person gives another.”

It's actually less simplistic than I remember it from childhood...but it still leaves a little bit out, so I'm going to offer up "A Warm Fuzzy Tale II - The Legacy"

For folks who are too lazy to click, I'll provide a short summary of Steiner's allegory.

A Warm Fuzzy Tale – Synopsis

There's a town and everyone is happy. People are happy because everyone has a bag of warm fuzzies. You pull out warm fuzzies and put them on another person's shoulder, and they dissolve and make them feel good. Going away when you use them, and not being granivores distinguishes "warm fuzzies" from “tribbles.” If you're too young to get that joke, congratulations, you might be in my dating range. If you're fucked up enough that I'm also in yours let's have coffee.

Digressions aside, when you give somebody a warm fuzzy it makes them happy. And since you have a limitless supply of warm fuzzies, people give them out all the time, and everyone lives in a state of primal happiness like in that one colossally annoying R.E.M. song.

Then a bad witch gets annoyed, because it's her business to make potions to make people feel better, and nobody is every sick or unhappy. We know she's a bad witch because the author says so, and because her morals come straight out of "Mad Men," but we don't know what formative experiences she went through, so I'm for reserving value judgments, yo!

There's a nuclear family who serve as the victims in all this…the kids are named Lucy and John (which leads us to suspect this story was first drafted while listening to Sgt. Pepper’s, stoned).

The witch goes around and puts it out to Dad that if you keep giving out fuzzies you'll run out. It's unclear why anybody believes this, but presumably they're all so happy singing Kumbaya that they'll believe anything ...which may be a point in the Witch's favor, but the author doesn't go there.

So Dad notices the spousal unit giving out warm fuzzies to their daughter Lucy and son John, and gives her a talking to, because he's afraid the wife will run out of warm fuzzies for him, and it's pretty clear that bedtime nookie is not going to happen without warm fuzzies. So the spouse backs off on warm fuzzies to the kids, and John and Lucy start watching their parents real carefully and being reserved about their behavior too.

Pretty soon people observe them and word slips around and everybody gets suspicious about who is giving fuzzies to who, so fuzzies get in short supply.

Says Steiner: "After the coming of the witch, people began to pair off to reserve all their Warm Fuzzies for each other exclusively. People who forgot themselves and gave a Fuzzy to someone else would feel guilty because they knew that their partner would probably resent the loss. People who could not find a generous partner had to buy their Fuzzies and they worked long hours to earn the money."

The potion and salve business began to boom, because people would try anything. But...did I mention, you need warm fuzzies to live. No idea why, my guess is that these people lived in the far north and warm fuzzies had a lot of Vitamin D3, but I think it's really supposed to be an emotional thing. But if you can't have a warm fuzzy a potion or a salve is worth experimenting with. The problem is that even the "bad" witch wasn't an insane genocidal witch so having her customers die off seemed like a bad business plan.

So the witch comes out with a new line...bags of cold pricklies. They keep you alive but feel shitty. Instantly these are more popular than Marlboros and Absolut. People won't give you a warm fuzzy, but they'll happily give you a cold prickly.

That's as much of the story as most people remember but there is one other bit that's genuinely interesting.

"Another thing which happened was that some people would take Cold Pricklies.....which were limitless and freely available..... coat them white and fluffy, and pass them on as Warm Fuzzies.

These counterfeit Warm Fuzzies were really Plastic Fuzzies, and they caused additional difficulties. For instance, two people would get together and freely exchange Plastic Fuzzies, which presumably should have made them feel good, but they came away feeling bad instead. Since they thought they had been exchanging Warm Fuzzies, people grew very confused about this, never realizing that their cold, prickly feelings were really the result of the fact that they had been given a lot of Plastic Fuzzies."

I'm not making that bit about the plastic fuzzies up. It's worth noting that Steiner lived back in a time when we actually still owned objects that weren't made of plastic, and used the word as a synonym for “fake.”

So...

At the end a nice woman comes around handing out warm fuzzies and doesn't seem to care about the witch. Presumably she came from Berkeley, or someplace they didn't have parents. We don't know.

Kids love her because she gives out warm fuzzies all the time. It's important she's a chick because if not the story would take a decidedly dark turn at this point but...she hangs out with the kids and it's all good. They call her the "Hip Woman." Remember what I said about when this story was written. So kids start wildly giving out warm fuzzies.

The adults get worried about the kids running out of warm fuzzies in their adulthood, so pass laws against this sort of reckless behavior. And this is a big struggle at the end of the story because many of the children don't want to obey the laws and want to give out warm fuzzies.

And this little bit of revolutionism is designed to be read to kids to encourage them to blow off their parents and give out a lot of warm fuzzies, and honestly it's probably a good cultural influence, even if the bit about the children rebelling...to borrow a phrase "...marks the first place...at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."

See...I'm making sure you get a good ration of cold pricklies in order to be able to digest this warm fuzzy story. Because honestly as adults we're not equipped to digest this sort of thing without a healthy sidecar of "cold prickly." But I got you through the story, and hopefully you're smiling.

Fast Forward

So...let's revisit the magical village a half-century later and see what happened, why don't we?

So...sadly...nobody is passing warm fuzzies or any other objects of measurable worth around for free. There are magazine articles that say you should, but when you do, everybody looks at you like you're crazy, and you have a strange tendency to compose really irritating music, so...people take it easy on the whole warm fuzzy thing.

The problem with the story is that it's a great myth for kids, but it doesn't realistically discuss the realities of living in the world of the Witch. Steiner wrote the story in 1969, and...he was already trying to recapture something that wasn't. Just as the "Summer of Love" of 1967 gave out into the riots, the assassination of RFK, and the defeat of George McGovern by Richard Nixon, we know that the children fail and the witch wins.

Steiner was trying to incorporate some of the idealism of his time into an inspirational story, the ending of which Hunter S. Thompson sums up in his "wave speech"

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ....

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark —that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I think we understand that living in the witch's world is the status quo. It is where most people are. If you subscribe to Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright's theory of tribes (summarized here by David Logan on TED) the society of the witch is a Stage III tribe, and the inability to exchange warm fuzzies freely means it cannot become a Stage IV Tribe where the people use language that describes their place in the world as meaningful because they are positively contributing to achieving outcomes valued by the tribe by cooperating with other members of the tribe."

Within our M/s Households we strive to create Stage IV and even Stage V Tribes, where "Tribal members exist in a state of flow. They use language that describes their place in the world as intrinsically meaningful and focused on the good of the universe. In short, "Life is Great!"”

And we run into the legacy of the Witch. So let's explore some outcomes.

In the witch's world, there aren't a lot of cold pricklies. Because cold pricklies frankly suck, and everybody knows it. Instead there is a thriving mock economy in plastic fuzzies. Nobody gives a cold prickly away without dressing it up to look like something it’s not, unless they’re doing it to someone very much their social inferior…or offering it ineffectively to someone who is their social superior.

John

John left the rebellion against the witch early. He'd always been scared and jealous about fuzzies, and even when he was with the rebellion, he'd kept a lot of plastic fuzzies on hand, and kept the warm fuzzies to a minimum. He liked to get warm fuzzies, but he didn't like to give them. Because he quit the Rebellion early, he got a head start on business, and was richer than most other children his age.

Over time, John got very good at getting warm fuzzies without giving them out. He worked a lot and was very successful, and came up with a plan. In order to get ahead in business, you needed to give John a warm fuzzy. But John only gave back warm fuzzies to the top business people.

John held big barbecues, where he served microbrew beer and gave out a few warm fuzzies and a lot of plastic fuzzies. In time he got to the point of giving even his top people plastic fuzzies. But because those people didn't want to lose face they didn't dare admit they'd been given a plastic fuzzy. They all assumed the other top people had gotten a warm fuzzy and they'd gotten a plastic fuzzy because they'd done badly or angered John. So they would smile as their plastic fuzzy melted and talk about how genuine it felt and how good it was and even say it was better than anyone else's warm fuzzies. Then they did the same thing with their assistants. Most of them also hit on the trick of giving out all plastic fuzzies and hardly ever giving out warm fuzzies.

John worked a lot to have plastic fuzzies that were very realistic looking and they really did look better than most others. He even had luncheons with other powerful businessmen where they gave each other plastic fuzzies on purpose and judged each other on how realistic they looked.

John married and had son and daughter. He had a family ritual where he would call his children in and expect them to give him warm fuzzies. Then he would give them plastic fuzzies, or even occasional cold pricklies. But each child grew up believing that only they were getting the plastic fuzzies. They actually knew very little about warm fuzzies, having hardly ever gotten any, and didn't have much idea of what a real one felt like, so half the time they thought maybe they actually had gotten a warm fuzzy and that there was something wrong with them because it didn't feel the way stories said it should.

John's wife was attracted to him because he had a limitless supply of warm fuzzies (since he clearly didn’t give many out) and was very successful. But he made it clear early on that she would only get warm fuzzies if she worked very hard. He gave her a few from time to time and made a big deal of them, but mostly he gave her plastic fuzzies too. Each time he gave her a plastic fuzzy he made her act as if she'd gotten a warm fuzzy.

This lasted for some years and she grew more and more cold and distant. But she had children, and didn't want them to see that she wasn't getting warm fuzzies, so she just covered it up and went along.

With each child when they first came along, John's wife gave them a lot of warm fuzzies. She also saw small children as sources of unlimited fuzzies, because at first she could more or less just take fuzzies from their bag without asking. What she really wanted was a miniature human being to give her warm fuzzies all the time without question, to replace John. This made John hate his children and be jealous of them.

At first the children gave her warm fuzzies back, but John would ridicule the children when they gave out warm fuzzies, and their mother was constantly demanding fuzzies and not always giving them out. He taught the children to give out plastic fuzzies. His wife would lose interest in one child and dote on the next, but in each case, it didn't last very long once the child got old enough to ask questions about fuzzies and make decisions about what kind to give. The children then felt rejected, and confused and conflicted about fuzzies…they vaguely remembered what they had felt like and assumed they’d done something wrong.

John often got given high quality plastic fuzzies even by his own children. Sometimes this made him angry, but as time went by he was actually alarmed to get warm fuzzies and also on some level felt guilty. He came to feel more comfortable getting high-quality plastic fuzzies and valued fuzzies by how they looked to others, not now they felt to him.

On his 50th birthday everyone in the Community held a huge party for John and not one single person gave him a real warm fuzzy, but he had a very good day and felt successful, because the party was big and well attended, and the plastic fuzzies were incredibly beautiful and elaborate. People did not want to give him real warm fuzzies, but the fact they put such time into making plastic ones to give him showed they feared him, and he took pride in every cold prickly he smiled through.

John was so wealthy that with a few warm fuzzies he could have had almost any woman in the town, but he only had a few tentative affairs. He felt bad about giving another woman warm fuzzies when he never gave any to his own family, so he started by giving women high quality plastic fuzzies. They were so good that they looked realistic, but shortly they'd figure out what he was giving them and move away from him. John found that he could get occasional sexual pleasure for money and some plastic fuzzies to go with it, and he felt a lot more comfortable with that. He kept that part of his life private and secret and told himself it didn't matter to his family since he didn't give away any real warm fuzzies. He was careful not to invest any warm fuzzies in his occasional sexual release, and out of his shame he communicated that value to his son through his words and actions.

When John's son was a teenager the boy learned about warm fuzzies. He didn't even realize that his father knew about them, but he came home and tried to give his father some. Every time he tried, his father grew uncomfortable, and gave him a plastic fuzzy back, or even a cold prickly, so he quickly learned not to do that.

When John grew old some of his younger family members came to see him. He found himself yearning for some warm fuzzies and asked them for some, and they gave him fuzzies but he realized that he honestly could not determine if they were warm fuzzies or plastic fuzzies, because he didn't really remember the difference anymore. He gave them some plastic fuzzies and they left.

John's Son

Grew up confused about fuzzies. He got some from his mother. In theory he wanted warm fuzzies, but he spent most of his time setting up elaborate games to get them, and it was unclear he really wanted to succeed. Like his dad he rewarded people more for giving him good looking plastic fuzzies than actual warm fuzzies.

John's son lived to emulate his father.

He knew that when his father felt very powerful towards someone he made that person take a cold prickly not even a plastic fuzzy. John's son wanted to be powerful like his dad...so he could get more warm fuzzies...so he began giving out a lot of cold pricklies because that's what you do when you're powerful.

He dated girls and liked giving them cold pricklies which they'd accept because he had a lot of money and social status. It turned him on when a girl gave him sex for a cold prickly, because that proved he was powerful. John gave a lot more cold pricklies than his dad because he saw that as making him powerful.

The few times he found girls who liked getting his cold pricklies and would actually ask him for more, he toyed with them then pushed them away, because he was afraid they weren't normal, and it didn’t prove he was powerful to give them what they wanted.

Or he'd go looking for girls who said they wanted cold pricklies, and just pile them on in heaps and leave the girl to crawl away, wondering why he hadn't given her even one warm fuzzy. Then he'd complain she wasn't as advertised.

He might have been happier if he'd been able to maintain a relationship with a girl who liked cold pricklies, and might have even begun to sort out his own issues with fuzzies, but his father taught him that rich and powerful men stayed within the law and only did things that were conservative, and girls like that scared him.

He married girls who wanted protection more than anything else and would accept his cold pricklies for it, or who had been raised to feel that cold pricklies were the price of being successful in life. But he was so intense about giving them out that after a while they would leave him.

So he never had a satisfying relationship, and went through a series of divorces. He had children and was fortunately little enough influence in their life that a few of them actually broke away and found ways to be happy.

John's Daughter

Grew up desperate for fuzzies, but her household was tightly controlled. When she went on dates, her father would check to see if the boy had given her any warm fuzzies and if John thought he had, he'd pour cold pricklies on the boy until he went away.

Eventually she went to college and got out on her own.

What she found was that early on in a relationship she got very excited when she was given a warm fuzzy. But very soon it became uncomfortable to her. She always expected the boy to begin giving her plastic fuzzies, and she hated plastic fuzzies, having gotten them most of her life.

But she found that after a short time, getting real warm fuzzies made her intensely anxious. She didn't feel like she deserved warm fuzzies and they really didn't even feel that good to her after the first few times. She tended to date men only for a short period.

Cold pricklies were interesting to her. They seemed to work as well as plastic fuzzies but they were more genuine. They were familiar to her (because she'd been getting them all her life as plastic fuzzies) but exciting because they'd been a big deal in her father's house where plastic fuzzies were the rule. They made her feel ashamed, and diminished, but when she felt that way she didn’t feel guilty.

Men who handed out a lot of cold pricklies also reminded her of her Dad, and made her feel safe.

She went through a lot of men who just gave her cold pricklies, but she realized that many of them were like her brother and just weren't good people.

Eventually she found the kink scene. In the kink scene she would agree to accept a lot of cold pricklies and then one warm fuzzy. It was hard and a lot of work but at the end she found that she wasn't afraid of the warm fuzzy and felt she deserved it and could actually enjoy it.

She found a boy who liked to give out warm fuzzies but had learned at home that it was bad to give out too many, and that you should mostly give out cold pricklies. She let him give her cold pricklies to get a warm fuzzy. Their relationship was not ideal but it was the most stable she had to that point, and as she got better at taking warm fuzzies, he got a little better at giving them.

Lucy

Participated for a while in the rebellion against the witch. She left her repressive parents and lived in a group house with a boy who gave her a lot of free warm fuzzies. He was involved with another girl but he gave them both warm fuzzies and they talked about how good it was. Then one morning Lucy realized that he was giving the other girl warm fuzzies and giving her plastic fuzzies. She left and tried to hang with the rebellion for a while, but in the end, she had a lot of plastic fuzzies, and began to seriously worry about her supply of warm fuzzies running out. She was pregnant by then and needed the warm fuzzies for her daughter, who wasn't going to have a father.

She brought her daughter up and despite the intention of saving all the warm fuzzies for her, in fact gave her very few and made a big deal of them. She gave her daughter a lot of plastic fuzzies, because she needed to "learn to get used to them" and "they're what she had to give.” It is possible that on some level she enjoyed denying her daughter warm fuzzies, like they’d been denied her, and that she felt satisfied giving her plastic fuzzies, because she’d been treated that way in the past and it felt good to pass it along.

She went through a pattern of finding a man, and giving him the warm fuzzies that she was supposed to be saving for her daughter, because it felt so good when he gave them back. Each time though it fell apart. It was kind of hard to tell why. She'd feel guilty about not giving her daughter enough, and either start not giving the man warm fuzzies, or demanding that he give her daughter warm fuzzies. The man would almost always give her daughter plastic fuzzies, and often start to give her plastic fuzzies as well. Or she'd start to give the man plastic fuzzies because she felt guilty about giving away the warm fuzzies that were for her daughter. But she never seemed to actually give her daughter any more warm fuzzies.

Lucy's Daughter

Eventually one of Lucy's boyfriends started giving her daughter warm fuzzies. A lot of them. People had warned the daughter about strange men, but she'd never gotten a lot of warm fuzzies before so she was just overwhelmed. She gave the man a lot of warm fuzzies back. She would let him do anything he wanted with her because she was so grateful for his warm fuzzies. Eventually he wanted sex for warm fuzzies, and while she didn't really know if she wanted that, she didn't stop him either. She felt overwhelmed and out of control.

Lucy knew the things she was doing were against the law, because the man had to tell her that, so that he could make her promise to keep them a secret. This made her uncomfortable and anxious. So much so that she almost didn't care about the warm fuzzies. But she couldn't exactly stop. After a while though she began to develop a funny feeling. When he gave her a warm fuzzy, she became so anxious and upset that it felt like a cold prickly. It wasn't...it was a genuine warm fuzzy. But getting it scared and upset her.

Eventually the man went away and Lucy was left with the fear and guilt. She felt guilty every time she took a warm fuzzy because she was reminded what she'd done to get them. And sometimes warm fuzzies made her so nervous they seemed like cold pricklies to her, so that she began to feel he'd ruined warm fuzzies for her.

She told a few other people about what he’d done with her, and they immediately told her that she was sick in the head if the warm fuzzies he gave her had ever felt good at all. And since some of them had, she agreed she must have been sick in the head, but she never admitted that, and instead swore they’d always felt like cold pricklies, from the first day.

It also bothered her that sometimes she thought about the warm fuzzies he'd given her, and didn't feel angry but...now that the anxiety was mostly gone...actually kind of missed them. When that happened she felt she needed a lot of cold pricklies because that was what she deserved, and she'd even go find men who gave out cold pricklies...not just plastic fuzzies but actual honest to god cold pricklies...and take as many as they could give her. She would push them to give her more cold pricklies just to prove that they would.

In the end she would end up hating the men who gave her cold pricklies. She couldn't get close to them, but she was always able to find a new one. When they tried to give her warm fuzzies she lost respect for them, and walked away because he had given her warm fuzzies, and she knew what that was about. She had a few friends she accepted warm fuzzies from, but refused to have any sort of intimate relationship with them because that would make their warm fuzzies feel like cold pricklies to her.

The Moral of Our Stories

I could have written...forty of these...but I picked a couple that outlined situations I know to be very typical, and could describe well. There are hundreds of variants on these themes, they're just...suggestions. No two lives are the same.

The point illustrate how the theory of strokes applies to people's adult behavior. If you haven't already mapped this one out, a "stroke" in T/A terms is a human social interaction that has emotional value. A positive stroke is a "warm fuzzy" and a negative stroke is a "cold prickly." The fact that we often give left handed or false social cues is the source of a "plastic fuzzy"...something that on the surface seems to be gratifying, but really isn't.

People need strokes of some sort...that's why people tend to go crazy in solitary confinement. We can get by on mostly negative social interaction, but we need and desire social interaction of some sort.

Through most of the 1990s, a very biochemical model of BDSM prevailed in the world. In the late 90s, I remember reading that BDSM was basically about endogenous opiods. We didn't really experience pain at all...it was just stimulation, and the whole phenomenon was like a runner's high. We were all just healthy athletes.

This explained surprisingly little of the scene to me. The more I began to understand strokes, and life scripts, the more I began to see how our experiences with strokes shaped the type of strokes we needed to receive as adults.

My purpose here was to show how our childhood experiences with receiving strokes inform our future choices, and to explore some of the ways that sadistic and masochistic personality types might form. A great deal more could be said, but this is...a brief and basic look.

Full Day Workshop–Getting Serious!

2011-06-15T12:49:00.001-07:00

I’m not big on self promotion, but I am going to take just a moment of your time (or feed) for a reminder that our deadlines for getting people registered for my first Full Day Workshop are coming up. We have some smart folks registered and I hope we can get a few more.

http://www.gordonsdrysin.com/workshops/index.html

We presented a core taste of this class at Camp Crucible and got very good responses. I know a number of you folks have talked about doing this, or reached out about it, and I really want to work with you to make it possible.

I have to be honest and say I’m not looking for any big return on this. We’re charging enough to cover food (which should be delicious) and supplies to clean up the space and present, but…that’s not really the motive.

I’m really excited about the chance to present this material without being in a rush, in an interactive environment. I think there is a huge amount here that can help people who are into power exchange on any level, and I really want to get people out to it.

We do have some limited crash space available, so please talk to me if that’s an issue, or ping JayLynn or Miranda. I really want to make this possible for everyone and I’m really looking forward to it.

I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner...

2011-06-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

The Sexting scandal with Representative Weiner is a source for plenty of tittering and twittering, not least because most of us still have enough Junior High mentality to think "Weiner's weener" is funny.

For me it opens up a larger question. Has the dichotomy between conventional conservative American morality and the new media led to a situation where we are in danger of being forced to narrow our selection of political leaders along lines that encourage us to pick older, more conservative, and less socially functional men?

I say men advisedly, because the issue isn't with women. It may be some day, but so far it hasn't been, likely because women choose new sexual partners differently than men and for different reasons.

The Biology

Let's start with a biological fact. Successful men want to have sex with new partners. Part of the reason for this is that to be successful requires being a risk taker. The same internal qualities that lead to throwing one's hat in the ring, the vision to fly to the moon, or to speak out strongly about social injustice when others are silent lead to...the willingness to pursue and win new sexual partners.

This may seem like common sense, but there's been surprisingly little research on it. Probably because wealthy, successful, powerful men are not queuing up to have their infidelity studied. It's not very practical to put a sign up on the College Campus "powerful politicians needed for potentially damaging sex study."

Still, the facts support it. Dr. Edward Laumann, the principal investigator of the National Sex Survey in 1992 talked about the issue to Discovery analyst James Williams. Noting the problem with good research, he commented "People who are successful, tend to have higher levels of testosterone. There's a book called 'Social Structure and Testosterone' which looks at studies -- these are usually little mickey mouse surveys -- of small numbers of people in special circumstances"

Laumann continued, "In games or competitions -- and this has been observed in the animal kingdom as well -- winners (males) have a t-surge and those that are defeated have a dampening down of testosterone. Now that would make sense because [the losers are] less likely to challenge or fight with somebody who’s already beaten them. So they withdraw from the fight and the other gets priority for sex, for food, for whatever’s out there that they want to have. So you have a situation where you’re selecting on exactly those variables."

This seems common sense, even in light of research that the DRD4 gene may predispose one to infidelity. The male reproductive strategy is about having sex as much as possible in order to pass your genes along. At the low end of the ladder, some primates "cheat," hiding behind trees or distracting other primates with food for a chance to mate. Men who make less than their female partners are more likely to cheat than men who make about the same or slightly more.

But...At the high end, successful male primates may take additional partners because they have the resources to feed them. More partners means more children which means more soldiers and defenders for the homestead. Humans are only conditionally monogamous. Women also may select multiple partners, but the patterns don't predispose them as much to getting powerful and then into trouble.

Three Problems

The Fiction of Monogamy

The first problem is that our culture is based on a fiction of monogamy. Throughout history we've pretended to be monogamous, while understanding that the rich and powerful would make their own rules. I can't begin to go into the literature that describes this...there is extensive writing about the intricacies of the Victorian "Country Weekend" where the knowledgeable hostess needed to balance rooms between spouses and acknowledged mistresses. King Edward VII forced the Archbishop of Canterbury to sit next to his mistress Alice Keppel at table, and Queen Alexandra was on good terms with his former mistress Jennie Jerome, Lady Churchill.

But by and large we've been able to maintain the veneer that we're all monogamous on some level, even while there is a huge amount of literature documenting that we aren't.

For the first million years or so of human evolution the myth of monogamy probably played an important role. Just as one primate eating all the food is dangerous to the tribe, one primate having all the children is dangerous to the tribe. A general presumption of monogamy is tied to taking responsibility for the children you get. In many, probably most, primitive societies there were clear rules where successful males (and sometimes females) were allowed to have a larger number of sexual partners. That norm only vanished in the West in the last two millenia...and did not vanish at all in the Islamic, Chinese, and Hindu worlds. In the West, the wide acceptance of Christianity required several systematic areas of willful blindness in regards to making war and making love. The prevailing solution was some sort of "double standard" where powerful leaders were conditionally and quietly exempted from the normal rules of behavior.

Middle-Class ethics and the Double Standard

The second problem is that we've changed the double standard. In a lot of ways this is a very good thing. It is unfair that powerful men can cheat, while their wives are considered trollops if they do the same. There is nothing healthy about the media presentation that a man with many casual partners is sexually powerful, (James Bond is the classic model), while a woman with many casual parters is either emotionally damaged, or evil.

The real change came in the 1820s-50s when a vast pool of formerly lower class people pushed into the newly burgeoning "middle class." Up until that time "midddle class" meant a median class below the gentry, but was not the statistical norm. From 1820-1920, the middle class in the West became the majority of the population.

Unfortunately the ethics and morals of poor people are often more rigid than those of the wealthy. The reasons for this are entirely sensible. An Oil executive who throws away a hundred thousand on a lover doesn't cut into his wife's greens fees at the country club. A middle class couple can afford a custody battle and the sale of a house. But a laborer who trifles with another woman may be cutting close to the bone of subsistence for his family...his attempts to beget a new child endangering the one he has. Jealousy is the human tendency to want our partner to give us the benefit of their resources and not make us feel at risk those resources will go to someone else. Laborers cheat anyway, but it's important that the mechanisms of society discourage it, because it's dangerous. Puritanical ethics aren't borne of virtue, they're a rationalization of fear.

So...with the middle classes...came their morality. And the closer people are to the wire, the more their morality reflects fear. Look at a map of Red States and you'll see the rough distribution of non-urbanized poverty, and lower-income, in the United States. Blue States have an average income of $41,183, Red States of $34.202, a discrepancy of $6,981.

The New Media

The third problem, and the one that provokes crisis is that the new media has uncovered the double standard. In the well known film version of Choderlos de Laclos 18th century quasi-comedic novel Dangerous Liaisons the Vicomte de Valmont must go through a number of logistical and mechanical steps to steal and read the letters of a prospective partner in order to blackmail her. Now it's as simple as glancing at her phone when she's in the bathroom. Communication leaves records and cameras record everything, easily, whether we want them to or not.

In general this is a good thing. In the Middle East, it is breaking down longstanding repressive regimes, and crumbling an archconservative culture. But in the U.S. it may be facilitating the process whereby the Government of the entire nation is heavily influenced by "Red" America. And sadly the Democrats are contributing as much to this as the GOP.

To most of us in the socially liberal mainstream, sexting is at worst a fairly silly thing of no real regard and at most an issue you should take up with your wife. For that matter, choosing to be married, to have multiple partners, or not is one's own business. It may be juicy gossip, but it doesn't have much impact on our perceptions of management or political ability.

But because that's not how it's seen in the Red Heartland, we must invoke a second judgment. So while I don't personally have any issue with Weiner's weener...I have to also invoke that he had poor self control and showed poor political judgment.

And therein lies the issue

I feel free to have a wife, and three other partners in various relationships, as well as occasional partners, becuase I'm not a politician. And the double-standard has come full circuit. I expect Anthony Weiner to be more discreet than I am because he's an elected official.

There's nothing wrong with me being polyamorous but it's a death sentence for a politician in the way that being homosexual would have been in 1955. Eventually that dam is going to break and you're going to have a political couple that simply comes out and says "we know about this, we have dinners together, and it's none of your business." But that may be years down the road, because the common wisdom right now says it's an unrecoverable issue.

So, I'm judging Weiner not on what I think intelligent people, or even his own electorate would think but on what Red America would think of his behavior. Reputable Democrats who have better things to do than worry about sexting must now pretend they give a shit, and investigate whether or not he has broken any rules, in order to show that they are not in fact a party of radical sex maniacs.

And the Democrats have in some ways made things worse...

There is no question that the sexual hatchet job on Bill Clinton was an inexcusable. Forty Million dollars was spent on what was supposed to be an investigation into serious fiscal impropriety, but became a drive to "find some dirt at any cost," when a politically motivated lawsuit forced Clinton into either lying, or telling a tremendously destructive truth. His judgment in lying may have been poor but it was based on the old presumption of the double standard and status quo. The President is expected not to wave his affairs under the noses of the Press (as Kennedy was faulted for doing), and the public is expected not to spend millions of dollars in creating entrapments to find that Clinton got sucked off by his Secretary.

And that's the real problem.

Bill Clinton was a powerful and desirable man. He'd had sex with Miss America of 1982, Elizabeth Gracen. Since leaving office, he's reasonably believed to have had a longstanding affair with Belinda Stronach (one of the 100 most powerful women in the world according to Time Magazine) and appealing actress Gina Gershon.

So the most theoretically powerful man in the country was reduced to fellatio from a Secretary in a private kitchen, because the lack of privacy in his life made normal sexual conduct impossible.

That's not good. I get cranky if I have to go a couple weeks without normal sexual expression. Four years? Eight Years? A career?

The traditional Conservative assessment of Clinton is that he was not necessarily bad for the affair (at least that was the assessment after Henry Hyde and several of his other persecutors were shown to have their own sexual indiscretions) but for lying about it under oath.

Because presumably we think that a President who is willing to tell a lie to avoid a complete political diasaster is a bad thing. I wonder how far that assessment of the President's character is supposed to go. Should the President also begin the State of the Union Address "The United States is in an economic slump, there is no recovery in sight, and there is little I can do about it." Advise rogue nations that "We disapprove of your actions, but you can clearly see we're militarily overcommitted and unlikely to actually carry out punitive actions."

Obviously we don't want a President who is honest, we want a President who is a good politician. That doesn't mean being recklessly or maliciously dishonest. It means having a good appraisal of when telling the truth is a worse move than lying and acting accordingly. Clinton was forced into a gamble, and frankly with the existence of DNA evidence in the hands of someone other than Lewinsky, Starr got what we in poker would call a "bad beat" which is when a perfectly good playing hand is beaten by an unlikely last minute bluff. In political terms, it's as if Clinton decided to stand on A-A-J-J-J while Starr stood on J-10-8-7 and got a "9" in the River.

We don't want compulsive liars, but we want good gamblers whose ability to take reasonable risks isn't bound by rote or tradition. We don't want the modern equivalent of the Roman General who lost the battle by refusing to fight on the offensive because of a bad cock's innards. Julius Ceasar was known for winning fights by ignoring the auspices and doing what made strategic sense.

The Shift

Honestly things are already changing. One major reason for this is, oddly, Larry Flynt. Apalled by the politically motivated judicial attacks on Clinton, Hustler publisher Flynt offered a $1 million reward to anybody who could produce dirt on his opponents. In the process he brought down Robert Livingston (R-LA) the presumptive next Speaker of the House. Barr and Burton also both lost seats in the "free for all" sexual scandal.

And that probably represents the last time either major party will go on a publicly funded witch hunt along sexual lines. Statistically about 40% of the people seated in Congress are hiding an affair, and it is unlikely that the possible payoffs will lead to a gamble that has such potential for fallout.

The Press has also retained some dignity, the major news outlets generally refusing to give much traction to the alleged Obama / Vera Baker affair.

But there is still a willingness to embrace sex scandals. The process is cyclic. The Democrats viciously attack any Republican who is exposed in a sex scandal on the grounds of hypocrisy, and this has grown more frenzied and intense in the "payback" era after the Clinton Scandals.

And there isn't an "honesty" option. It's fine to say that Clinton "should have told the truth," but that's preposterous. For a person with multiple sex partners...with or without their spouse's consent (and that's always been up in the air with the Clintons)...admitting it is not allowable. The option is "be honest" or "have a political career." To suggest otherwise is to suggest that a gay man who served in high office in 1948 was "dishonest," because he was closeted, or lied about homosexuality. There is not a societal option for truth. And there needs to be.

The GOP feels stung and is more than happy to gangpile on the Democrats because they've been harsh about it, and so on.

In the end what needs to happen is that a few more men need to stand through these scandals and win re-election, like Clinton.

The Harm

The potential harm is that both parties will tend to see older, more conservative men as more desirable candidates, particularly for higher office. Moral and social conservatism creates the appearance of propriety and suggests that the candidate doesn't have damaging sexual baggage.

This may tend to have the advantage of making more profound hypocrites more viable as candidates. Clinton's problem is not that he was too hypocritical but that he wasn't hypocritical enough. He hadn't been especially careful to hide his early affairs.

Another tendency may be for both parties to favor older men. While Livingston resigned, Henry Hyde, the Legislator most responsible for steering the attack on Clinton was revealed to have had an affair as well. Hyde blithely dismissed the affair (at age 41) as a "youthful indiscretion" and at age 70 there was insufficient outrage to really pressure him.

In the end as long as sex scandals in the U.S. can gain significant traction, we'll be forced to limit our choices to men who have never been discovered, never erred, or never simply been honest. As modern society makes it harder and harder to conceal secrets, that may prove a dangerous restriction on who we can consider electable. And to that extent, the conservative Red States are doing a lot to dictate who can move to the forefront of the political spectrum.

This has led me to the interesting hope that Newt Gingrich shows reasonably well in the primaries or becomes a nominee. While I don't like Gingrich personally or politically, and don't want him as President, he is married to Callista Bisek with whom he had a six year affair that contributed to his political fall. If Gingrich can show nationally it creates the strong suggestion that even fairly blatant sexual indiscretion is not relevant to the political arena.

The Solution

I don't tend to write political or even social commentary very often, because in the wide sense, it doesn't make much difference. Social trends will happen and often the only point in documenting them is to say "see, I was smart, I noticed this."

That said, I'd put the ghost of a meme out to bloggers both liberal and conservative. Sex scandals serve neither party. And...Democrats...they serve you particularly badly so consider just giving it a miss the next time a noted Conservative is caught in the boy's room.

My voice won't change very much but other people in other places are doubtless having this idea and if I can circulate it into a dozen other minds and so forth...in time it will be one very small contribution to a sea change in how we think about sex and politics.

W.C. Fields was right...

2011-06-07T11:37:00.000-07:00

I've always looked a little askance at Field's wisdom. Through most of his life he took little digs at the boredom of Philadelphia...the most famous being his proposed epitaph from a 1925 Vanity Fair. "Here lies W. C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia." Philly has been a fairly consistently charming city for me (you know who you are), so I questioned his judgment.

He also said "Never work with Children or Animals" and after this week at camp, I think he may be right.

I suppose Children aren't so bad. Camp Crucible is one of the few kink sites in the U.S. that welcomes ageplayers and has a strong, fun ageplay community. To a lot of more "straight laced" kinksters ageplay looks like pedophilia, and they're against it without examination. To anyone with a touch of compassion, you see a huge range of play...from people just trying to recapture a period when they had no responsibilities and were cared for, to those attempting to redefine their early sexualization, to those grappling very directly with thier own issues with incest or childhood abuse. Traditionally the kink Community is supportive of people getting into dark areas to grapple with thier own issues, but in this area we sometimes fall a little short.

Be that as it may, Camp Crucible has a vibrant community of "littles." And ribbing aside on the whole they're fun. Don't trust them with money, or sharp objects.

That leaves Animals, and therein lies a story.

For a long time, I've expressed that I'm really not a strong scene player. I do a lot of M/s a lot of D/s but when it comes to actual scenes, I'm sort of stymied. There are a lot of reasons for that. I see a lot of players who do the same scene over and over again. They bring the girl in, handcuff her to a cross, beat her with a flogger, finish with a Hitachi. That's not really thrilling to me. I want to fuck with her head, and do something *interesting*. The idea of sameness runs against my theatrical background.

In my own way I do some standard scenes. I like rough body play...punching, kicking, choking more than I like flogging.

But I envy those folks who can pull brilliant scenes out of their ass...or barring that...plan them months in advance. And it seems with a background in impromptu theatre and roleplay, I ought to be able to do that. And I have on a bedroom scale, but not on a Dungeon Scale.

For Camp Crucible this year, I decided it was going to be *different.* I thought about strengths in terms of what I enjoy...what is fun to me...what is visually appealing...and what would be shocking and a little off the beaten track.

I decided to do a period scene with roleplay. Everyone has their specialties, and there are plenty of people who can make a scene of turning a girl's back into a needle corset. I always believed in "stick to what you know" and a fun period roleplay scene would work well.

I have two partners and I had something totally...other...in mind for J. That may or may not ever get written about here...it was educational and personally intense. This scene was sculpted around M., and designed to play off her best qualities. She's okay with laughing a bit during a scene, likes roleplay, and has a pretty good tolerance for pain.

So...what would make a Victorian Medical Scene "pop." It wasn't as if nobody had ever used a violet wand, or a speculum in a scene. My immediate thought was "leeches!"

The first trick was to obtain leeches. We contacted the reputable Carolina Biological Supply Company which made us jump through a number of hoops. They wanted us to be a business, they wanted a TIN and paperwork. The funny thing is that all this precaution was worthless. Our Household is a business, and has all the necessary paperwork.

I understand that Carolina is probably worried about kids ordering leeches for pranks. Otherwise, it seems...debatably ethical to keep clean medical leeches out of the hands of the public on the grounds that they're medical, when the alternative is to go to any pond or bog and wait a few minutes with your foot in the mud. The only thing they're doing is supplying a clean version of something that can be found in any stagnant body of water.

Some friends who've worked with Leeches before recommended Niagra. We found them much more reasonable, presumably working from the sane point of view that very few people set out to buy leeches without having some knowledge of what to do with them.

The one issue with leechplay is that I was violating the "go with what you know" precept.

It's not that I'm unfamiliar with leeches. People asked me that. "Are you familiar with leeches?" My response was that I was very familiar with leeches, but not with clean medical leeches whose welfare and health I had a positive interest in. At one point it was my job to every few months rig a pump housing which pumped water to a filter. The water was pumped from near the surface of a pond which was fed by mountain springs, then filtered and chlorinated for drinking water. But rigging the housing required standing in foot-deep muck which would often produce a few...."hangers on."

I was familiar with detaching leeches from me.

So...we were going to do a leech scene. Another goal of the scene was to practice safe blood handling. There's this weird disjunction between the Kink world and the Normal world. In the normal world, when Miranda gets a cut, I slap a bandaid on it and go on my way. I don't really worry if I get a little of her blood on me, or vice-versa. But in the kink world there is a perfectly reasonably concern about handling any fluid as potentially contaminated with all the darkest diseases from hell, starting with Hep-C, and I understand and support this. I've been working on playing more with strangers and new people, and adapting my playstyle to people I'm not sort of "quasi-fluid-bonded" with is important. I'd been to a fluid handling class by Del presented by BR Education a few weeks back, and I wanted to be very aggressive about doing all the safe fluid handling things we'd learned in the class.

In the weeks beforehand, I learned a lot about leeches, mostly thanks to Pyrategrrl. She'd also referred me to Lady Greene who I spoke to onsite. This was useful, because the online sources for handling leeches in a Fetish context are...thin. I'm sure somebody will respond to this by linking me to the ultimate leechplay site, but I didn't find much and what I did was mostly some "rah rah" stuff put out by medical companies. Niagra's site had some good basic sense. I ran into a lot of sites that seemed to come through Google Translate or be cribbed from Niagra, with phrases such as "With 8 leeches the blutverlust for the patient is including to the Nachbluten with approx. 200 to 350 ml blood." While it's charming to know that the Germans actually have a word for "Blood loss" (and who is surprised) overall the page was less than clear.

I heard an amusing story about someone who had bought leeches, but didn't realize they needed treated water. They rushed out to the store to get water treatment, and told their partner "check on them to make sure they're alive." She refused, on the basis that "I'm not going to give it mouth to mouth or perform CPR if it's not." The leeches in question were fine...they're hardy and tolerate quite a bit.

The Leeches

I named the leeches Lenny (Leonard), Larry (Lawrence), Lenore, and Lorena. I printed out a little tag for their travel bottle. I'd thought I'd be clever and have them travel in a carafe that had a screw on lid. I didn't want to take a chance on transporting them in the glass display bowl and having it broken. I could leave plenty of air in the neck, and screw the lid on only when in transit. This worked swimmingly (no pun intended) at first. Then came time to transfer them to their bowl. Now leeches don't actually spend most of their time free-swimming. They mostly hang onto the side of the container with thier little suckers. I got the first one free swimming and knocked the other two loose. It had been suggested you could just slide them up the side of the container, but the carafe was too narrow for that. I was easily ten minutes getting the last one (Lorena) out and into the nice glass display bowl I'd brought.

Being myself, I provided personalities and commentary from the leeches from time to time. I suggested that because they lacked true brains, they were, as might be expected, birthers, and also that 9 out of 10 leeches supported Sarah Palin in the last election. On exit polls, 80% gave their reason as "warm blooded" and the other 20% responded "moose" which analysts are still trying to figure out. Periodically through the week I would voice ads for the leeches, typically starting with "Have you ever been in a car accident! Are you the victim of medical malpractice!"

I found that personalizing them and talking to them made them a bit less scary to Miranda, while also generally creeping out most other people I met, and causing them to doubt my sanity, which is always good.

A Man, A Plan

I started the scene with a little roleplay then got my "patient" strapped down on the table. I'd already decided that leeches would be the first element because they took a long time to feed.

I had a plan and it was a good one. I'd get them started feeding, then do the rest of the scene while waiting for them to drop off. I'd heard there could be a little pain and discomfort when they attach, but Miranda has done a hook pull, so I wasn't worried about a little pain from a leech. I knew they didn't hurt for long becuase I'd certainly never felt any of the leeches that attached to me. Leech saliva has an interesting analgesic property that has been described as morphine-like, and as of writing in the *Journal of European Medicine* and *Journal of Biochemistry* ten years ago wasn't fully understood.

But...it works, and I figured I'd do the rest of the scene with the leeches on, and that would make it theatrical and awesome.

No plan survives contact with the annelids...

The Set

I'd build a beautiful set. We'd gotten permission from the Dungeon crew to do bloodplay outside the designated medical area, as long as we brought our own tarps and floor coverings, and cleaned up well. I hung up a nicely printed victorian sign that said "Hysteria Clinic." I had three theatre scrims that I used to hang gold curtains to give a backdrop and a brass stand for the leechbowl, along with my usual collection of ancient and dubious looking medical instruments. There were some photos taken, but I don't have hands on them yet.

The Blood

The first problem came with my presumption that Miranda was a warm blooded mammal. This had seemed a pretty good bet, but once strapped to the table she behaved almost precisely like a five day old corpse...except for the part where she talked to me, which would have been more alarming were she in fact dead.

I'd just found my lancet gun, and not really planning this as a pain scene, I'd decided to use the gun to raise a few drops of blood. I'd used it before and it always raised a nice little globule...not too messy just enough to let the leeches know "here be dinner."

Four lancets later I had yet to raise so much as a tiny pinprick drop of blood. This was followed by skin staples, and a brief moment of comedy while I figured out how to use the remover. I'd been told how to use the remover, but there hadn't actually been one present the first time I used skin staples. It really only took a moment, and would have taken less time in brighter light.

Did I mention the light? So, all in all Camp Crucible was a great deal of fun, and the lack of restrictions on what you can do and how you can behave at outdoor/cabin festival events really outweighs a lot of the downsides. But...there is nature. And around the middle of the week the termites swarmed.

Termites aren't harmuful if you aren't made of wood. They don't bite, or even particularly care about you, and they're less trouble than mosquitoes. But they are attracted to bright light. And Camp was well lit. This means that anywhere there was really bright light there were swarms of termites...and they are kind of clumsy.

In the main dungeon it really wasn't too bad. There was a cloud...it's hard to describe how thick it was...swarming in front of the big halogens out front. Only a small swarm made it inside, and they were attracted to a series of lights strung across the dungeon, and as long as you didn't play under those you were fairly termite-free. But this meant we were conducting our scene in...subdued light.

In any case, I removed the staples...and...nothing.

I then tried with a standard sharp. This hurt a lot because I wasn't trying to be nice. I was trying to induce bleeding...and...

Nothing. Miranda was an onion.

I finally got a few tiny specks and hoped that the leeches would find them. This was followed by a few minutes of leech-wrangling. Again this really wasn't so bad, but it was less than expert. I tried with the glove, and the small forceps and decided I liked the rubber tipped forceps best. I got two on my first try, and tried getting them both on, but neither wanted to attach and they both kept struggling away, leaving me in one case to pull them off the floor. Miranda kept putting her arms down just as they fell off her chest, leaving me to fear they'd attach to her arm or armpit which would just be awkward and certainly not theatrical.

I had a brief moment of joy when the first leech attached...this was followed by...consternation.

The Pain

Now...let's remember, I'm a sadist. I don't mind putting people in pain. But I like that pain to be controlled and managable, and I like to be controlling it. This was leeches, and their miraculous analgesic effects didn't seem to be working.

I'd anticipated that they might sting. But...this is something that I'd had done to me without it hurting at all. Miranda was in shreiking, intense pain which she described as "like someone was poking me with a needle over and over again, in the same place."

The screams and wrenching against the straps were very pretty. I got her calmed a little and got the other leeches on. I felt bad about putting all four on her, but I knew I couldn't mix them once they'd fed, so they all needed to feed or it would be inconvenient for me to store them. And I am a sadist. And I also believed they'd stop hurting any moment now. I will say something about putting leeches on someone screaming in pain does bring out a bit of my inner monster.

But they continued to hurt. I managed to distract her a bit with the violet wand (she hates and fears electricity) and a cane, but really the leeches were stealing the show. They hurt and would break through whatever else I was doing, including hypnotic pain management.

Eventually she got up to go to the bathroom and after that they hurt less. I walked her to the bathroom and back to make sure any detached leeches were cleaned up, though there were none. I realized she had blood toys on her, but figured that they qualified as capped needles, being attached and close ended.

The Scene

The scene was basically "Miranda suffers with some leeches on her while I do a little other play." The leeches stole the show and submerged everything else. We did get some good pictures and it was certainly a taxing scene.

I had to deal with massive infrastructure cleanup. Also our order of Tegaderm hadn't come yet, so I was using some low end bandaids that weren't quite up to the leech wounds. Miranda did a good job of cleaning and bandaging herself. I went back for a few minutes to give her hugs and aftercare, then went back to break the scene down.

After Action Analysis

I have a whole rant on playing in a cold dungeon. I see tiny slips of girls that can play in 40 degree weather and still be fine, still cum, and fly around like Kylie Minogue in Moulin Rouge.

I do not know these people. I find that when I play with girls, if the temperature is low room temperature or below, they get cold, and when they get cold their pain tolerance goes out the window, and they have trouble cumming. This makes any scene involving actual bondage particularly problematic since that runs counter to the whole idea of keeping warm by keeping active.

Camp was hot the first four days then settled into lovely cool days that led into slightly chilly nights. It was getting chilly as I set the scene up (we had to run after the auction so about ten thirty to eleven to start) and while that calmed the termites down, it also made Miranda chilled.

Miranda was also a little scared. I know from my biology classes for hypnotherapy when you're anxious your body draws blood in from the surface of the skin and holds it around the organs in order to minimize bleeding if you get in a fight. It's an old instinct, older than primates.

And that leads to the other guess. My other surmise is that in order to work well, the analgesic found in leech saliva needs good circulation. Miranda was shut down like a bloodless corpse. The leeches couldn't find much blood and kept gnawing to get deeper or increase the flow. This made the pain worse which shut down circulation more. As circulation shut down, the analgesic was dispersed poorly or not at all.

And when we got her up to go to the bathroom, she moved a lot of blood and put things right. The leeches didn't hurt much after that.

Summary of "What I learned on my Summer Vacation"

Leeches need dechlorinated water, like fish. They're okay in stagnant water so they don't need an air pump. Basically treat them like a betta. If you're keeping them, do a partial water change weekly or so, though they don't seem to manufacture as much filth as goldfish.

Their bowl needs a breathable cloth cover secured with a rubber band (in the old days I imagine this was a double leather lace pulled tight). They can creep out of most anything else, but they don't gnaw through fabric. I used an unbleached cotton muslin that looked very 19th century, but also used a rubber band.

Leeches are described as being shipped in a thermos, but mine came in a tupperware with some gobs of gel that I suspect had originally been a coolant of some kind. No water though there was moisture. Honestly I think they're pretty fucking hardy buggers.

Don't mix hungry and fed leeches. Hirudo leeches are cannibalistic annelids, and unfed leeches will eat fed leeches.

A full leech is a blood contaminated toy. Don't forget that. Even well after eating, leeches are going to have whatever was in the bloodstream of the person they fed on.

They aren't reusable. Obviously they're fluid-bonded to the partner they sucked blood from. But you shouldn't re-use them on the same person either. Their environments aren't particularly sterile and as someone put it "you can't brush thier tiny little teeth." I've chosen to keep mine as pets, largely for the amusement factor. The Victorian Library at the manse seemed to need a leechbowl.

Unlike the Audrey II, you don't have to feed them human. They'll eat bovine intestine with some blood wrapped in it, and one report says they can be fed by placing them on a blood soaked cloth. I'll experiment with that in 50-70 days.

The suggestion for handling them was two layers of gloves. The idea is to keep them from smelling you and trying to attach. It isn't clear if anyone has determined whether or not they can bite through a layer of nitrile, but it's not unreasonable to assume they might. I used a heavy electrical glove I have.

The recommendation was using plastic forceps. I got a pair of these, but also got metal rubber tipped forceps, and these were the best for handling them. http://www.regulation-london.com/attachments/images/product_large/rubber_tipped_forceps_v1.JPG . Apparently they are pretty tough.

Generally it's recommended not to detach them before they finish feeding. Teeth or mouthparts can break off and contaminate the wound, etc. However it's also mentioned you can remove them with a thin object like the edge of a tablespoon, and in one case we did that. You really have to slide under them.

It was suggested you can interest them more in certain areas by raising a little prick of blood. The theory seems sound, but the person has to bleed.

They take between 20 minutes and two hours to feed. The usual time given is 20-40 minutes. We found they tended towards the high side of that under our conditions

Warm the skin by rubbing it. Get the person warm and active with some basic exercise. Then apply leeches.

Conclusions

All in all, I'd probably use leeches again. I know a lot more about them now, and I'd bee much smoother and quicker at handling them. I believe I know how to limit their capacity to steal the show. It was a learning experience and all in all a pretty good scene but definitely reminded me that W.C. Fields was right....

Presentations at Camp Crucible

2011-05-24T07:24:00.001-07:00

Our household is presenting two classes at Camp Crucible in the coming week, so this is mostly for the benefit of folks attending Camp Crucible. Apologies to anyone else, though if you find these interesting, please take a look at the Upcoming Workshop, or if you have an event where you might be interested in seeing these or related presentations, let me know!

The Psychological Basics of Mastery

4pm - 5:30pm Saturday 6/4

An educated car-owner knows something about the systems, engine, and maintenance of his car. As Masters we own the mind, choices, and will of our slaves. Shouldn't we know the basics of what makes them tick. This is a basic overview of how people work, with a focus on the issues most common to BDSM, including some theories and models to help understand why people seek Mastery or Slavery and how some common issues of trauma contribute to masochism and sadism. The aim of the Class is to give the new master a basic toolbox for understanding "contradictory" or "subversive" behavior in a slave, and construct a personal system of Mastery that is consistent, rewarding, and growth oriented. This class will not teach you how to take care of your slaves mental and emotional needs, but it will give you the tools to discover that for yourself.

Position Training and Drill for the Slave/Servant

10:30 - 11:30am Monday 5/30

Master James, miranda and jenn present a drill of nearly 50 submissive, glamor, modeling, service and punishment positions for submissives culled from dozens of different sources. The workshop explores position training and drill in relation to leather history, and the benefit of position training as part of overall slave and servant training protocol. We also address the issue of customizing the positions for servants with limited flexibility due to injury, body composition, etc.

Includes participatory demo, and a discussion of the use of posture and positions in the training of slaves/servants, and a demo of gait training, all working on the theory that servants should not only be intelligent and sexy, but look sharp and present well in order to reflect well on their Master and Household.

While the specific position drill for the class was designed to show off the female-presenting submissive to best advantage, some of the positions were originally designed for male submission or military discipline, so we hope there is something for everyone to share and learn.

About the Household

The Household of Master James, and servants JayLynn, and Miranda pairs power-exchange with a focus on communications that goes beyond the Master-servant relationship to work towards harmony and good feelings in all the relationships within the household. Based in the Washington DC Metro area, the Household works to study, understand and present on, the psychology, structure, and dynamics of power exchange. This working household focuses as much or more strongly on good interpersonal dynamics, a shared vision, and forwarding our work within the Community as on "meeting Master's needs." Master James is a Certified Hypnotherapist, and his focus has been on the human mind, including the urges to dominate, submit, and experience pain, as well as the potential for BDSM to provide a cathartic outlet to enrich our lives. Master James has presented on Hypnosis, and the Psychological aspects of M/s for BR and Camp Crucible 2010.

An account of the development of this M/s Household is chronicled in an essay that appears in Power Circuits: Polyamory in a Power Dynamic, edited by Raven Kaldera, (2011, Alfred Press). Master James provides resources, as well as his own "wit and wisdom" on M/s and other fetish topics at GordonsDrySin.com, and the Household is active with MAsT and the DC M/s Community both through events and through writing. The Household's current project is a full day seminar on Psychology within an M/s dynamic, planned for late summer of this year.

The 7th Circle - Inception - Roleplay Event

2011-05-17T13:58:00.000-07:00

Friday, October 21-23, 2011

Event starts at 9pm Friday, runs through 3pm Sunday

Hagerstown, MD

http://www.seventhcircleevents.com

Sophisticated Adult Roleplay... Sophisticated Kink

Do you enjoy mixing Roleplay with your Kink. Have you ever wished that you could take it just a little farther? Do you enjoy dressing up at Fetish Events, but wish you could talk the talk as well as walk the walk? Have you ever done Roleplay and wished that...the scene could progress beyond the point where public decency caused you to stop? Do you already Roleplay at home, but wish you could do a really good scene where people took things just a little more seriously? Have you tried Kink Roleplay events before but found them...awkward, or unengaging?

Welcome to the Seventh Circle!

The "Seventh Circle" series of Roleplay events focuses on strong kink content, and is targeted at adults comfortable in a kink environment. Scenarios have involved fearplay, bondage, and impact, but also involve scripted and freeform characters with plot and roleplay.

There is no "forced" interaction and signups allow you to pick and choose what you are interested in doing.

The event is produced by a community of writers, so sign up early for a chance to contribute your fantasies in deciding what types of scenes will be produced.

Our Food is excellent and includes a full fetish formal dinner at no additional charge.

Meals included

Friday Snack
Saturday Lunch
Formal Dinner
Snacks
Sunday Brunch

Registration

For Specific Information about Pricing Options please go directly to:

http://info.seventhcircleevents.com/index.php?title=Registration_Rates

BEST VALUE - Cast $65

Write Your Own Role - $85

We'll Cast You - $75

Write your own "base" character - Cast in some vignettes - $75

Tech - $25

Workshop - Dominance, Submission & the Mind

2011-05-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

July 16, 2011 - Hagerstown MD.

Full Day, includes lunch, dinner, snacks

A Workshop on the Psychological Aspects of D/s of interest to anyone with a strong D/s or M/s dynamic.

There are dozens of books and movies, from The Story of O to The Secretary that show us idealized D/s relationships, but those of us who fall into these relationships often find that the realities of dealing with a living, thinking, human being do not match the printed page or silver screen.

Ever wondered why your submissive doesn't want to submit tonight. How "thank you, Sir!" became "fuck you, Sir!" Ever wondered why your Dominant seems less than domly at times? Human beings are not storybook characters, and our behaviors are complex and not always intuitive. This workshop will supplement and build the application of common sense in understanding why people behave the way they do.

The Human Mind is a scary subject and the Holy Grail of D/s. If the Brain is the largest sexual organ, then learning why it works and how to change it is the most powerful fetish. In this full-day workshop, you'll learn how the mind works, and how to use hypnosis and other techniques to take control of it as part of a responsible power exchange. Advertisers, Religions, and others use these techniques on us every day, even though we are often not aware of it. Our community is about consensuality and only by learning about how to control the mind can we make informed decisions about taking and giving control in power exchange.

This workshop includes instruction in practical hypnosis, but provides a structured approach to learning "the basics" of human behavior in one day.

Masters/Dominants - they say slaves don't come with a manual, but there is one. Put away prejudices and fictional novels to learn why people act the way they do, and how to change their behaviors constructively.

Submissives/Servants/Slaves - Surrender can be one of the most rewarding feelings, and being trapped one of the worst. Masters, good and bad, will use these techniques to take control. Learn how to recognize and defend yourself against the bad, and embrace and give yourself over to the good.

The Evening track will be followed by a small invite only play party, and we welcome the guests of registrants. We are not able to provide lodging onsite, but can recommend several local hotels within a 5 minute drive.

Tentative Schedule for the Workshop

Morning Track
Basic Human Drives
Depression Fight and Flight
Happiness, Fulfillment and Self-Actualization
Trauma great and small

Lunch (Provided)

Early Afternoon Track
How the Mind Works
How Love Works
Advanced Models for Understanding Human Behavior

Snack (Provided)

Late Afternoon Track
Models for Household/Social Behavior
Introduction to Behavior Modification
Social Capital, TERM Theory
Reinforcement Positive and Negative

Dinner (Provided)

Evening Track
Models for behavioral modification
What works, what doesn't and how to use it in an M/s Contact
Bonus: Hands on Hypnosis Demonstration
Play Party/Social Time

Comments? Please e-mail me

Advocacy for M/s and other Fetish Issues...

2011-04-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

In a group I follow on FetLife, the question came up of displays of M/s in public and whether or not that was appropriate. I wanted to share my personal feelings, and expand that into the larger sphere of public advocacy.

The first thing I want to say is that I think that effective advocacy has to be balanced. It requires careful, intelligent, reasoned discussion and promotion which normal people can feel comfortable with. It is also the case that effective advocacy requires a certain degree of provocative behavior. It requires challenging norms. The Civil Rights movement required both Martin Luther King and Malcom X, two very different individuals. You cannot have societal change without a combination of rationalism and radicalism. Knowing and having the sense when to be radical and when to be rational is a difficult balancing act, and even the greatest advocates have had their failures. In short I believe in a balance of careful reasoning and occasional radical activism.

I don't often engage in public displays regarding M/s. I have a number of reasons for this. I am a private person, and I have the quality of life of my wife (who is not in a D/s relationship with me) and my servants to consider. However I do engage in some public displays and I often approve of and encourage those who do the same, whether it is someone who speaks in public on the topic under their full name, or just a girl who walks her girlfriend across her college campus on a leash. I don't question their motivations or seriousness. I accept that they are doing what they feel is right and believe in.

I do think that there is an abhorrence of radical action within the M/s Community that is not always in the best interests of the individual or the Community. I think there are a few core reasons for this.

a) We are ashamed

On many levels, many of us are ashamed, or made to feel ashamed of our M/s relationships. We wonder if it's really okay if we have someone as our servant or slave. We wonder if it's healthy. We feel on some level that what we are doing is "wrong" in a way that is different from our neighbor's marriage, and we feel that we should not expose it to decent people.

I have a few theories on this. I think that M/s often (not always) draws people who have a background that involves shame for sexual feelings or abuse (Masters as well as slaves). I think often the draw to being controlled and serving is deeply bound up in a past that may anger them or cause anxiety, and that makes them feel that what they do as a Master or slave is contaminated by that shame, because they feel "weak" rather than "strong" for choosing it. I contrast that to the many many people who have similar issues and never rise above them to find a fulfilling way to lead their personal lives and that saddens me. I wish everyone who chose to seek an answer rather than hide from their issues could bring themselves to be proud of what they are.

b) We are trapped into the presumption of sexuality

Because our relationships involve sex, we are trapped in the fallacy that to express our dynamic in public is to expose our sexuality to others. There is some basis for that. To say "with this ring I thee wed" in front of an audience is to say "I now have the right to ejaculate into your vagina, and keep the fruit of that coupling." We gloss the fact now, but there are still parts of the world where the bloody sheets are displayed the morning after to show that the bride is a virgin.

The expression of our personal relationships is not any more (or less) inherently sexual than a wedding ring. It may be far less socially acceptable, but it is a statement of lifestyle choice and commitment, not sexuality.

There is the additional question of whether or not sexual expression should be allowed in society and that's a different, but related issue.

c) We are afraid

We fear repercussions. Against the community, against us individually. We fear that Aunt Agnes will find out. We fear that a coworker will suddenly realize what that symbol means. We fear the judgment of friends, relatives, and of the law. These are real fears, and cannot be easily dismissed.

d) We are polite

Possibly the most powerful and pervasive. We are by and large a polite group of people who value manners. We don't want to upset people, don't want to "squick" them, don't want to have them bent out of shape. We feel that no amount of secrecy on our part, and no inconvenience is too great to avoid making someone else feel unpleasant.

e) We are socially conservative

Around the edge of the M/s movement there is a strong edge of social conservatism. There is an edge of "what we do is okay, because it involves me treating my wife as a slave, but we don't necessarily much like those poly-liberal-genderqueer strange folks. I'll merely comment that once you have stepped into placing a collar on another human being, or having them call you Master or Mistress, you have crossed a line of sorts, and "if we do not all hang together, we shall most certainly...& etc."

The Need

If M/s is to be taken seriously and thrive as a lifestyle, it must be public and acceptable.

I realize that there will be a hundred people on this list who are anxious to tell me that they themselves do not have this need.

So, I have a friend who does have this need. She's young she lives in the North Central United States. She identifies strongly as a slave (not my slave). She has not yet found a Master or Mistress in real life, but she has an online Mistress who I respect and take seriously.

She is torn about entering the M/s Lifestyle, even though she has no serious thought that she can live any other way and be happy. She is torn because it is completely unacceptable to her family...in a way that her being homosexual would not be. And there is nothing she can point at in culture that makes it okay. She cannot say "well, Ellen DeGeneres is a slave." She cannot say "George Takei is a Master."

She told me that she thought about killing herself, but has chosen not to. She lives with the feeling that she will never be able to be what she wants to be, and there is no television campaign to tell her "It Gets Better." Neither Hillary Clinton nor President Obama have a kind word for her to let her know that her choice of lifestyle is okay.

She has that need. You don't need to.

I know another couple who crave the company of other M/s Couples...who crave being involved in the local M/s Poly community. But flat out, they fear the law until their children are at least sixteen. They fear Child Services, and they suffer and sneak out while they can because they care for their children and that constrains them against the lifestyle that is their choice.

They have that need. You don't need to.

You only need to understand.

Historical Parallels

The right of people to live as they will is purportedly important. I think the right to choose M/s, or by extension any of the other choices that make up WIITWD...to marry many or none, to choose to submit or dominate, and to choose masochism or sadism...is important.

I do not think it is any less important than the freedom of religion, or the freedom to love someone of the same gender, or to freely exhibit one's body.

Historically many things have been unthinkable.

In 1895 when one of the most brilliant dramatic minds of the era was destroyed through hard labor and effectively killed at 46, it was unthinkable to be publicly homosexual. It was still unthinkable in Greenwich Village in 1969. Nobody in 1970 would have seriously predicted that within forty years, U.S. states would begin allowing homosexuals to marry.

To take a lighter, but no less significant tone. How many of the women reading this would want to have to wear a corset daily, or be considered to be immoral. How many women would like to not have the option of wearing jeans or shorts. How many men would like it if your girlfriend could not wear shorts or a skirt, show ankle, or wear high heels? Yet, only a few generations ago, those things dictated morality. They aren't trite traditions that were "cute." They were dull day in day out rules that people lived and died by.

And if you think it's not a very important privilege for you and your female friends to dress as you choose, contemplate for a moment living under sharia and having it revoked.

Only through challenging the norms did things change. Your ability to wear the clothing you do today...or see it on women...is because people from Amelia Bloomer to Coco Chanel broke tradition, and did and wore things which were...patently offensive.

This wasn't a matter of "being a little daring." There was a point in time when baring flesh was a direct blow to adult moral sensibilities. It was an offense. Flesh (or eventually some flesh) was not to be seen. We may not have had Sharia, and stoned people, but it was not simply a neutral choice to bear neck, shoulders, ankle or midriff. At various times simply doing those things was to give unreasonable offense to decent people...to assault them merely by wearing (or not wearing) those things into their presence. And the assault was by obvious association...sexual in nature.

Advocacy

There are many ways to advocate for things that you believe in. I am not saying we should all demonstrate our dynamics in public, or put an M/s flag bumper sticker on our car. To my delight about a week ago, for the first time ever I saw an M/s flag sticker randomly on a car on the open highway rather than parked near an event.

We can write, we can maintain silence, or we can act up.

But it is my feeling that if the envelope is to be pushed forward we need not to shame the envelope pushers. We need not to engage in the inevitable conservatism of a subculture that fears "outing" of shaming those who choose to demonstrate in public.

It is no more offensive for me to walk my slave on a leash in public than for my grandmother to show her kneecaps. In both cases, I can find substantial writing that such things are an obvious sexual assault on contemporary morality which normal people and children should not have to see.
In the case of my grandmother, she wasn't the first person to wear a skirt cut above the knee, and I don't know when she began. But I know that someone did it at a time when it was a patent offense against decency or we wouldn't be doing it now.

I would like to see within the M/s Community and the BDSM Community a wider understanding of the role of Lifestyle Advocates, both those who choose to write and share their points of view, and those who choose to "act out" or "act up" and demonstrate their desires.

It is ludicrous that it is fine to dress in a bikni, or a speedo, or wear a wedding ring, but that non-invasively demonstrating my interpersonal dynamics in public is "non-consensually inflicting my scene on others." It is not. It is creating the envelope to follow the lifestyle I please.

It is important...if we are ever to experience a day where we are all truly free to choose our lifestyles and partnerships. It is important not only that we advocate M/s, but also those other elements of WIITWD, which may be misunderstood or meet with resistance, but are important to the overall picture of a future world in which our right to behave sexually and in our relationships as we please with whom we please, is not questioned.

I do not think that people should non-consensually engage others in their scene. But when I choose to demonstrate my dynamic in public, I am making a political statement. I am saying:

This is not shameful

This is not something I should have to hide

This is not something that you need to be protected from

I hope that this does not hurt you in any way

If this hurts you it is because you are judgmental, not because I am a bad person

If you are not judgmental, I am sharing something that may interest or merely amuse you

If you are judgmental, this is a challenge and a threat, as sure as Stonewall or the Greensboro lunch counter you will come to accept it if not to like it so that others lives are not crushed by being forced to hide their behavior by the weight of presumption that what they are doing is wrong.

Clear Impossibility

The major reason I hear given for not pressing advocacy of M/s issues is that it's clearly impossible that it will ever be culturally acceptable. Anyone can see that. No right thinking person could accept M/s.

Or...showing a woman's bellybutton. Or the public discussion of sex. Or the depiction of sexuality...or homosexuality on TV. Paganism...

I hear people say "well you can't talk about it to children." That may be the 600lb gorilla in the room in most discussions of acting out.

Why not? Why is it easy for us now to say "Billy has two daddies" but not "Susie's Mommy has chosen to obey Susie's Daddy much like you obey Mommy and Daddy. At work she has a lot of responsibility and when she comes home she takes care of Susie and Daddy takes care of her so she does what he says." Is that so difficult. Children aren't idiots. They might well conclude that "always having to obey Daddy would be yukky" but that's fine. We're just telling them about options, not evangelizing. My parents talked to me about issues like racism, homosexuality, and politics in simple, clear terms.

Having been relatively politically sophisticated by the dawn of the Regan era, I can recall the attitude about homosexuality in the 70s. It could never be public because it would never be appropriate to explain to children about two men or women having sex. Yet we've found ways and found that most children are more blase about it than their parents.

The real fear of course is that it would give our children permission to be gay. But children become young adults and need the same permissions we ourselves needed and need.

Bearing in mind that we are advocating acceptance of a lifestyle that is freely embraced and practiced, not nonconsensual chattel slavery, I think that M/s, Poly, and the acceptance of Sadism and Masochism **can and must** become acceptable within our culture. Will that happen tomorrow? No. But following the rules of acceleration of change in the modern era, it will happen in twenty years, rather than forty...within most of our lifetimes. Young people who are learning about M/s now will see themselves acceptable to the mainstream by the time they are middle-aged.

Many things that were unthinkable, are now not only "thinkable" but acceptable. They are not acceptable to every subculture or every group. But there is sufficient traction that we can tell people "It Gets Better," and that is a message we all need to hear about our freedom to choose whatever path is right for us.

Times change, and it is time that we created some change in perceptions about M/s.

Every Blog will have his day...

2011-04-14T14:26:00.000-07:00

In an effort to curb my tendency to be unable to write about a subject in under 4000 words, there are now Tumblr and Twitter accounts for Gordonsdrysin. At the very least, they'll carry occasional visual 'humor."

Self-Sabotage and Passive Aggression in Relationships...

2011-03-13T12:16:00.000-07:00

I recently posted in a group about self-sabotage in M/s relationships. Situations where a slave acts out passive aggressively, or in ways that destroy the benefits of the power exchange. I came up with a number of core reasons that lie behind destructive self-sabotaging or passive aggressive behavior in relationships, and I thought I’d enlarge and repeat the comments as I think they have a wider relevance.

Note that this isn't a book...I skip over or treat quickly some concepts here that I've gone over more deeply in other places...

Genuine Resentment

I think the first thing to start with is genuine resentment. We set up M/s relationships and it's easy to assume that because someone in a book said that girls should just be quiet and listen to Master, that's how it is. But it is supposed to be a “power exchange.” Traditional relationships say each partner has the same authority/power and the same responsibility. In M/s, we shift that around. But it’s an exchange, not a swindle. The Master has to be giving back something for the power exchange to be complete. If the slave/servant isn’t clear on what this is, or doesn’t feel it emotionally…they can feel cheated and that’s going to cause resentment. It is possible for a slave to understand the logic of the exchange but fail to “feel” it in their emotional mind and that leads to trouble.

The slave/servant partner is more likely to act out passive aggressively than the Dominant/Master partner, because they feel less empowerment to use direct methods. But the Master partner sometimes does this too...if they feel eclipsed by a bossy or controlling slave, or trapped in a relationship where the responsibility outweighs the power-trip of ownership or the sexual release that goes with control.

The remedy to this is to go over the relationship dynamics. Carefully talk through them all and ask a lot of questions. An external point of view in the form of classes or books is really helpful to this situation, because few of us even know what questions to start by asking. External sources such as workbooks really help with this, as do workshops such as Lee Harrington's "Delving into Power" which make us really examine our feelings about M/s.

There are good workbooks for this that present discussion topics, checklists and writing assignments. The partners need to look seriously at what they want to get out of the M/s dynamic and why they are in it, and be exceptionally honest with each other about the reasons and their needs.

The Master must be the one to support this. In business we often say that “change will only occur if it is supported by management.” That’s true in M/s as well. The Master is management and must be the one to both encourage honesty and reward it, even if it stings or hurts.

Conditioned Resistance

This is resistance that happens when someone has chosen an M/s path or mindset, but it runs against their programming. We each have programming in the part of the mind that Freud calls "Superego" and Berne calls "Parent." Some people call this the "conscience" and then can't understand why people raised much differently than them "don't know right from wrong." In fact it is a synthesis of everything we were taught in childhood, starting when we're born, and slowly sealing off from about age 8-12. Ideas can get into this part of the mind in adults (advertisers spend millions to figure out how), but it is harder and slower.

Often a "new" idea (I should give myself to a Master) will war with an "old" idea already in programming "you must grow up to be independent and fend for yourself....you can't trust a man...." etc. This contains things we're told by parents, church, peers, siblings. Since very few Westerners were brought up to seek an M/s relationship, most of us have programming that says we're weak/bad/wrong/deficient/losers for choosing to serve. This can be hard to beat and is one reason that slave-training tends to use mental conditioning techniques.

Obviously people should be able to make their own decisions...but the decision to serve another...like the decision to serve the military or a religion...is a personal and valid one.

The remedy here is to work voluntarily on elements of mind control. Mantras, devotions, etc. that help build the Response. Immersion in the M/s Community, talking and sharing with other slaves, attendance at SIGs and workshops, and participation in forums, as well as reading and video (stuff like much of the Insex and related libraries, or Kink.com's Upper Room, which show situations in which real people present and are accepted as slaves)

Resistance to Authority

It would be an ideal world if everyone who sought a Master was completely comfortable with the idea, and simply chose a Master, sat at their feet, and learned and since they wanted a Master, did what their Master said. Unfortunately this is not how human beings are wired.

Let's start by saying that...since M/s is not a really common path in North America...most Westerners who are drawn to it are drawn because they are *missing* something. That doesn't mean every slave is broken or messed up. It can be the same sort of "lack" in life that draws stable people to the military, or priesthood.

Unfortunately, a very common reason for seeking M/s is coming from an abusive background, where there was little or no security. There's a huge amount of writing and literature on this, in terms of abuse meaning inconsistent reinforcement. As simple as "sometimes paying attention to Daddy makes him happy and sometimes paying attention to Daddy makes him angry (depending on if he's drunk or not)." There's the entire gamut of what is termed "codependency" where someone is brought up to have an exaggerated concern for the happiness of another person.

So...as adults you get people who *want* a Master, because a Master represents parent/safety/good/support, etc.

But...they also resent the fuck out of the people who were their original role models in this regard. Maybe even hate them. A lot of girls hate men, openly or on some level.

Amplify this if there's a history of sexual abuse...the reasons can be wildly varied, but they tend to cluster around a combination of fascination/draw to older men and deep resentment at what was done.

So...girls (and presumably boys...I just have no experience) seek a Master and take refuge. Then begin acting out based on their resentments of the people who abused them in the past. That's a simplification, but I'm trying to keep this short. In the end they tear down their relationship by making it a proxy for their first abuser. It's confusing, because they love their abuser and getting consummation...approval from their abuser feels good. But They also have unresolved anger/hatred, etc. and they vent it on the person whose approval they want.

Basically the relationship that feels natural to them is to be periodically abused. So getting attention from their abuser feels really good. But they also resent the fuck out of it and act out subconsciously and passive-aggressively against their abuser.

But it gets worse

What the abused person feels most strongly in life is a need for control. They want someone to control them completely because that will make their life feel under control. But they have never had that, it has always been a lie, always been subject to sudden shifts. So they will "test" often to the point of destruction. They destroy each of their relationships, systematically because if they can chip away a little bit of control, more will follow, and they feel that actually getting what they want is an unnatural state. It has always been a lie so it must be a lie, and they may honestly feel in danger if they don't uncover the lie and see where the abuse is going to come from.

Again, a simplification.

This is probably the hardest form to deal with...I don't have any ready answers, but an

awareness of the behavior on the part of the slave
tolerance of shifts on the part of the Master

are good starts. I use hypnosis a lot to try and break the original mental conditioning, but that can only be part of a holistic approach. Ritualization of abuse can also help by making the time and the acting out afterwards "expected and acceptable."

Finding channels for the acting out can be tough...often the thing that a girl who has violent tendencies is most terrified of is...her own violence, and accepting that she has rage, let alone finding ways to work through it can be tremendously difficult.

Self-Limitation

The principal of Homeostasis states that every system tries to stay the same. This is true of rivers and of dysfunctional families. Human beings also try to stay the same. If a man was raised to think that he'll be moderately successful, have a good paying office job, but that he's not destined for great things, it is very difficult for him to break that mental mold and grasp for greatness. People who are raised to believe that they like their father will be a drunkard and failure have a hard time not being a drunkard and a failure. We want to rise to the level we've been told we can.

That includes happiness. If we were raised in a place that wasn't entirely happy...especially if that unhappiness was a result of classic "codependence" or abuse, we are used to the idea that we may be happy today, but miserable tomorrow.

People who get suddenly rich often crack up and will do self-sabotaging, destructive things to get rid of the money. They feel threatened by it and don't really feel they deserve it. The classic scenario for this...which our media actually promotes...is someone who wins the lottery and gives it all to charity because despite having had imaginings of being rich when they bought the ticket, they actually feel very threatened by BEING rich.

The same thing can happen with happiness. We can get what we want, and find there is too much of it. It doesn't feel right. If we are happy and not abused one...two...three days...that may be more than feels right. After a week...something is wrong. So we act to return ourselves to the cycle of fight/argument/abuse/catharsis that we had before.

Self-Hate

This ties so closely into the above two, that I am almost inclined not to break it out, but I think it deserves a quick mention of its own. Self-Hate is very closely attached to self-destruction. It is the perfection of the cycle of abuse mentioned above.

When we're very young we depend on our caregivers (usually parents) for everything. We need the attention of our caregiver to survive. If this care is freely given and consistent, we grow up fairly stable. If it is sometimes present and sometimes not we develop mental issues. Our minds seek control and a consistent universe.

If crying = formula, life is good.
If crying = formula unless the light is out life is still okay.
But if crying = maybe there will be formula and maybe not...we have a hard time with that loss of control.

That just keeps mushrooming through childhood. So if parents are cyclically abusive...if a word sometimes gets a smile, and sometimes a curse. We can't really handle that. We have two choices and you may be surprised which one we pick.

The first is to accept that the world is beyond our control, and shrug and not care. And the human mind is equipped to do that about as well as a dumptruck is to run in a Grand Prix race. Which is to say "poorly or not at all." Because just giving up and figuring things are beyond our control is not a survival trait. If people thought that way our species would have died out. So...as tormenting and tortuous as it seems...we seek to find a way to control the situation.

And the first element of that is to believe that it's our fault. If it is not our fault, how can we control it. It must be our fault and that makes us powerful. If the reason mom sometimes doesn't pay us attention or is cruel to us is our fault, then we can control it by acting differently. And so...the cycle of self-hate begins.

We get more information, and may understand that "mom only hates us when she is drinking," or "dad is only dismissive when he's stressed about mom being out." But that doesn't fix the cycle that causes us to hate ourselves saying "if only we could do better...things would be okay."

The thing to understand about the cycle of self-hate is that it involves enormous frustration, because of course we can't do better and can't exert control. It creates anxiety and that invokes the "fight flight" instinct.

It's worth noting that fight/flight in humans isn't the same as in cheetahs or gazzelles. Humans aren't good runners, and can't run fast and long. The human flight instinct is to run away and *hide.* So while the first part is panic, the second part is domancy. In primitive times, crawl in a hole and try to stop breathing and thinking and making scent...in modern times...hide in the bedroom under the covers with the lights out.

Depression is the actualization of human flight instincts

Fight is also not necessarily throwing sticks or stones, or even epithets. It can be acted out as passive aggression. And where you find Depression from self-hate induced anxiety....you'll also find Fight...most likely in the form of passive aggression.

Self hate is hard to heal and takes a lot of work. Start by understanding and identifying episodes. One element that can help is very strongly enforced rules and guidelines...where the slave/submissive type can *know* that a certain action will *always* get a certain result.

This helps break up the core anxiety of uncertainty and move the current situation away from remembered abuse.

Towards an Understanding of M/s in Western Thought

2011-02-22T11:01:00.001-08:00

With the need to manage various real-world events bearing down on me, most of my writing in the past few weeks has been in response to writing on FetLife. This started life as a post in response to a very intelligent question about M/s and inequality, suggesting that it was a division of responsibility rather than negotiated inequality. I began to enlarge on that theory and...a lot of thoughts of the past few months came pouring out, albeit in somewhat rough form.

This is not an end-all-and-be-all philosophical breakdown of M/s, but rather the core and germ of an attempt to build an understanding of M/s from a standpoint of modern thought that can serve not as a "justification and defense" but as a model for building future culture and directions. My intent in writing this is not to set forward "rules" or "laws" but rather observations about how things are and notes about correspondences and similarities that help us to see the shape of what already exists.

Nobody has impacted human thought a lot by telling people what they ought to do. People who tell you how you "ought" to behave are usually voices crying in the wilderness...I'll leave that for the Objectivists. The best thinkers have shown us what we are doing and therefore made it easier for us to choose how to do it better, or in ways that bring us or those around us greater benefits.

Towards an Understanding of M/s in Western Thought

It is my position that M/s is not a recidivist philosophy, hearkening back to the middle ages or the time of Pharoahs, but rather an extension of our growing understanding of the human mind to create lifestyles which meet our diverse emotional needs within the framework of post-enlightenment thought.

I think that the whole concept of "inequality" creates confusion, and I think it's worth digging through two and a half centuries of history to look at the evolution of the concept of equality and inequality.

The Enlightenment

Most Americans and many other people derive their concept of equality from Jefferson's assertion that "all men are created equal." The statement, in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, is a distillation of the concept of Nautral Law, which was framed in the two centuries before, notably by Hobbes and Locke.

Locke writes of "life, liberty and property," as natural rights.

In Leviathan Hobbes says:

Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.

And as to the faculties of the mind, setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon general and infallible rules, called science, which very few have and but in few things, as being not a native faculty born with us, nor attained, as prudence, while we look after somewhat else, I find yet a greater equality amongst men than that of strength. For prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto

In short, he says that while there are differences in strength and intelligence among us, they are not so great that the very greatest of us deserves to be considered something greater than the least. In talking about "prudence" Hobbes means "common sense" and he makes the...questionable assumption that with time everyone gets it equally.

So, that frames the thought of two and a half centuries ago. But the men who wrote these things did not yet understand the scientific fact of evolution, and the science of psychology did not really exist.

Post-Enlightenment

About halfway between then and now, Friedrich Nietzsche laid the groundwork for post-evolutionary post-enlightenment thought. Nietzsche was, and is controversial, but his core work cannot be disputed and is merely iconic of his period. The Enlightenment held the seeds of the rejection of the concept that all human meaning is defined in relationship to God, a looming inevitability in human thought which boils from roots in Erasmus and before through Voltaire. Neitzsche put forward in no uncertain terms the proposition that it is a disservice for us to accept the then-prevailing idea that man's life is given meaning principally by a relationship with the Divine, and that our suffering is either our "pitiful lot in life," as beings inherently inferior to God, or actually visited on us as judgment by the higher power of God.

I am not putting forward Nietzche as a "one stop philosophy source" or personal deity. I'm merely calling him out as iconic and significant in an array of human thought that includes hundreds of others, such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Adler. Nietzsche himself was anti-Darwinian, nobody is right about everything.

Despite the fact that some of the Nazis embraced a distorted version of Nietzsche's doctrines, he is still considered one of the most important thinkers and writers of his era, and the foundation of the world after Darwin can be seen clearly in his writing. The Atomic era only added relevance to his picture of a scientific universe.

This isn't the time or place to go into a full investigation of Nietzsche, but he puts forward several concepts that link closely with modern M/s practice, including the concept of the "Superman" and the concept of "Will to Power," both of which sound cooler in German.

The "Superman" is Nietzsche's term for what we might well call a "humanist guru." A person who has through realism and suffering arrived at "a point of enlightenment beyond and removed from the constraints of society."

"Direct experience of the harsh and impersonal nature of the universe leads to a unique understanding of reality that sets a person above and beyond the comparatively shallow belief systems and illusionary hopes of the mass of humanity."

The concept of the "will to power" at firsts contrasts with Freuds' "pleasure principle" but was central to the work of Adler and through Maslow has found its way into the core of modern psychology and our understanding of human thought.

In shortest description, it puts foward the idea that since we are self-aware beings, we can understand our control or lack of control of our environment, and that we have a central and defining need to exert control over it. This concept can be seen in modern developmental psychology as well as 19th century philosophy.

Inequality in M/s

So...what does all that have to do with M/s?

The M/s relationship is best seen through the window of the Will to Power and the needs it creates in us, as an answer to lack of equality in the individual.

I would further suggest that this view of M/s presents a philosophical core that makes us different from Eastern European or Central American sex traffickers, who may carry out actions that are superficially similar but morally and ethically different in the extreme.

To understand that, consider that a man being whipped for a crime in public and a man being flogged at a recreation of the Passion on Easter would appear identical to a visiting Alien from another world, but carry vastly different meanings for us, even though the events have some shared roots.

Perfection of Will

In M/s we create a hierarchy of will that suits the "M" and the "s" partner. The only real distincton that is shared by all M/s relationships is a subordination of will of one partner to the other.

The concept of Natural Law, that "all men are created equal" falls greiviously short of the experience of the modern world. Or we may say "they are created equal and are never thereafter equal." The "Rain Man" is not equal to his brother. But the enlightenment philosophers provided the first key...we need to see all men as of inherently equal worth...no one less important in the universal sense than another.

The problem is that we cannot live in an idealistic vacuum that denies the existence of specific inequality born of nature and nurture (our genes and our upbringing). So we need new, modern, models that respect the enlightment concept of equality in terms of universal worth, while addressing the needs of situationally unequal humans.

M/s provides a number of structures that have the potential to be healthy for certain people with certain needs. That does not mean they are right for everyone or should be visited on people who do not want or need them.

There is the presumption that those who seek Mastery are more comfortable with the Will to Power than their subordinates, whose pursuit of the Will to Power may have been frustrated. This suggests that the "M" is further along in progress towards personal enlightenment in the sense of the "Superman" than the "s," or is at least more comfortable walking on that road.

Feeling powerless is one of the most negative of human experiences. Through surrender to the "M" the "s" gets to experience the benefit of power by proxy...a feeling that through taking control of their own life and surrendering they have the benefit of the Will to Power in terms of their own protection. I consider this the very most basic level of M/s, a core on which everything else may build.

A characteristic of many M/s relationships is some form of suffering, whether through Discipline or BDSM. The very act of giving up is to some extent a "suffering," and discipline is a "suffering" through hardship and deprivation. The discipline and or suffering may expand the ability to experience enlightenment in terms of the Will to Power and the progress towards enlightenment.

Other Angles

I would add that the prevalence of kink and sexual power dynamics bridges the perceived rivalry between Adler's Power principles and Freud's Pleasure principles, showing them as closely interrelated.

There are also many couples that believe that sprituality should form a strong element of M/s tradition and teaching.

In the esoteric world, Aliester Crowley wrote in 1904 "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," which is understood by those who study the esoteric to mean the pursuit of the concept of "True Will" not an injunction to party down and do whatever you want. The line is drawn from Rabelais, at the start of the Enlightment "Do as thou wilt, because men that are free, of gentle birth, well bred and at home in civilized company possess a natural instinct that inclines them to virtue and saves them from vice. This instinct they name their honor."

Crowley's "True Will" is similar in most regards, and probably not coincidentally (Crowley was familiar with Steiner, who wrote extensively though sometimes critically of Nietzche) with Nietzche's concept of the "Superman" enlightenment.

Through the later rephrase of "An it harm none, do what ye will" by Doreen Valiente following the general direction of Gerald Gardner in 1964, it became the "Wiccan Rede" probably the most widely adhered principle in modern esoteric tradition, and is a profound underlying concept of most modern esoteric thought.

Summary

"Equality" is an Enlightenment ideal, at odds with the Post-enlightenment experience of the real world in which birth order, socioeconomic status, trauma, and genetics produce profound inequality. M/s represents a partnering of those with a strong Will to Power and those whose Will to Power is conflicted or has been damaged to allow the fruits of equality, and the potential for an environment in which both partners can experience personal growth, whether that takes the form of healing, new growth, or both.

Brooks and Hughes attack on Sex Educators

2011-02-13T10:29:00.001-08:00

This is a courtesy Repost of information forwarded by Maymay, a well known Sexual Freedom Advocate, Blogger, and Activst, and the founder of Kink for All.

The Kink for All program has been aimed heavily at promoting awareness among teens and adults of the alt-sex community. I'm just going to say up front that I know people who have very hard lives in terms of dealing with their sexuality whose lives would be richer, more positive and generally better if they had been exposed to a positive, accepting, environment to learn more about alternative sexuality, including kink, when they were much younger.

The original article is here: http://maybemaimed.com/2011/02/07/margaret-brooks-demonstrates-how-opportunism-trumps-facts-in-anti-sex-campaigns/

The same folks who all but flat-out accused of me being a sexual predator, Margaret Brooks & Donna M. Hughes, are at it again. This time they're claiming that my friends, sexuality educators certified by AASECT, are to blame for increasing HIV/AIDS rates on campus. Their logic? The educators were talking about sex. No, really, that's the argument. (See links, below.)

Please help by blogging/forwarding/tweeting/facebooking the below links any which way you can. There's a press release, also available on the web, at the end of this mailing, and it would be especially helpful if you can forward it along with the other listed links to other well-connected individuals or folks with some publishing muscle.

PRESS RELEASE (copied, below):

http://brownsheec.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/for-immediate-release-sexuality-educators-set-the-record-straight-“talking-about-sexuality-does-not-increase-sexually-transmitted-infections”-despite-what-non-experts-report/

Dr. Charlie Glickman's great dissection:
http://www.charlieglickman.com/2011/02/margaret-brooks-attacks-sex-ed-again/

Shanna Katz's response:
http://shannakatz.com/2011/02/07/sex-education-does-not-lead-to-increased-sti-transmission/

My own slightly zoomed-out commentary:
http://maybemaimed.com/2011/02/07/margaret-brooks-demonstrates-how-opportunism-trumps-facts-in-anti-sex-campaigns/

Thanks for helping defend quality sex education from baseless smear campaigns like this.

Cheers,
-maymay
Blog: http://maybemaimed.com
Talk show: http://KinkOnTap.com
Community: http://KinkForAll.org

EXTERNAL REFERENCES:

[0] http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall/browse_thread/thread/4020d397e88241ed/d129d5809c3a34d5
[1] http://maybemaimed.com/2010/03/24/the-salvation-army-incites-personal-attacks-against-me-a-blog-reply/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Sexuality educators set the record straight: “Talking about sexuality does not increase sexually transmitted infections” despite what non-experts report.

Contact:
Megan Andelloux
HiOhMegan@gmail.com
401-345-8685

Contact: Aida Manduley
Aida_manduley@brown.edu
787-233-0025

In yet another attempt to shut down access to quality sex education, South-Eastern New England conservative advocates hit the sex panic button in a multi-state, email and phone campaign to colleges all over New England last week.

On February 3rd and 4th , certified sexuality educator and sexologist Megan Andelloux (AASECT, ACS) received word that numerous colleges and university faculty received a document stating that colleges who brought sex educators such as Ms. Andelloux onto their campuses were linked to the increasing rate of transmission of HIV in RI. Furthermore, among other misleading “facts” that were “cited,” the author of this bulletin claimed that Brown University was facing an HIV crisis, which is false.

Citizens Against Trafficking, the face behind the fear-mongering, spammed numerous local institutions from a University of Rhode Island account with its latest malicious missive that targeted specific individuals as well as Brown University. The author of the letter, Margaret Brooks, an Economics Professor at Bridgewater State, suggested that colleges and universities that host sexuality speakers, including those who are professionally accredited, are partly to blame for the four new cases of HIV which have been diagnosed amongst RI college students this year.

Ms. Andelloux states: “My heart goes out to those students who have recently tested positive for HIV. However, there is no evidence of any link between campus presentations on sexual issues and the spike in HIV cases. Rather, I would suggest that this demonstrates a need for more high-quality sex education to college students.“ It is unclear why people at URI or Citizens Against Trafficking, a coalition to combat all forms of human trafficking, is attempting to stop adults from accessing sexual information from qualified, trained educators. What is certain however, is that this Professor of Economics miscalculated her suggestion that a correlation exists between increased HIV rates in Rhode Island and the type of sex education these speakers provided at Brown University: one that emphasized accurate information, risk-reduction, pleasure, and health.

Barrier methods have been shown by the CDC to reduce the transmission of HIV and other STIs (Sexually Transmitted Infections). Research has shown that when individuals have access to medically accurate information, are aware of sexual risk reduction methods, and have access to learn about sexual health, the number of infections and transmission of STIs decreases, pain during sex decreases, and condom use increases. The CAT circulated bulletin is blatantly misleading about many issues, and often omits information that is crucial to understanding the full picture of sex education at Brown and in Rhode Island.

When individuals who do not hold any background in sexuality education speak out in opposition because of their fear or prejudice, society becomes rooted in outdated beliefs and pseudo-science that do injustice to people everywhere. Furthermore, when those individuals personally and publicly attack those devoted to providing sex education with false and misinformed accusations, it not only hurts those who are defamed, but also the community at large.

We ask for an immediate retraction of the vilifying and inaccurate statements made by Ms. Margaret Brooks and Citizens Against Trafficking in their latest newsletter. We also ask that esteemed local universities such as URI and Bridgewater State continue to hold their employees to ethical standards of normal scientific inquiry and require that their faculty hold some modicum of expertise in a field of education before raising the public level of panic over it.

Megan Andelloux is available to answer any questions the press, Margaret Brooks, University of Rhode Island or Citizens Against Trafficking holds. Aida Manduley, the Chair of Brown University’s Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council and Brown University’s is available to discuss the upcoming Sex Week and sexuality workshops held at Brown University.

Signed,
Megan Andelloux
Shanna Katz
Reid Mihalko
Aida Manduley

Can a Master Rape a slave?

2011-02-10T16:50:00.000-08:00

This is an essay I originally wrote in response to a discussion in an M/s group on Fet. The question that was raised was whether or not a Master could rape his slave (presuming a relationship in which all rights to the slave's body were assigned to the Master).

I'm reposting it here, because I think it points up a larger issue in how M/s relates to other elements of WIITWD (what it is that we do...a very wide and generic term for 'stuff you might find on Fetlife'). M/s often seems to involve situations in which consent is given once, in advance, with the presumption that future objections may be, to some extent, rejected. This is by no means true of all M/s relationships, but it does describe many of them, and is a part of the "hype" and "look and feel" of M/s.

I think that's worth investigating and discussing, and taking a very realistic look at.

In regards to the question of whether or not a Master can rape a slave, I think that you'll see two extreme opinions on this in the M/s and Alt-Sex Community, and in most cases, extreme opinions are somewhat unfortunate.

1) Rape is nonconsensual sex. Consent is defined as contemporaneous (meaning "right here right now"), so if consent is withdrawn at any time for any reason it's Rape. You can't change that in any way any how.

2) M/s involves a one time Consent that covers many future situations. You cannot withdraw consent within the framework of an M/s relationship, and anyone whose dynamic allows the slave to withdraw consent doesn't have a "true" M/s dynamic, etc.

I think both of those statements are extreme and unrealistic in everyday terms when dealing with power exchange relationships. I thnk to understand the realities, we need to understand

a) The core questions - contemporaneous consent and the specialness of sex
b) Issues of semantics - dancing around the meaning of the word "rape"
c) The Law - where does the law fall on this question
d) Common Practice - what do most people in M/s actually do
e) The Morals and Ethics - what is moral and ethical
f) The Underlying Reasons - why would anyone choose to give a consent that allowed for future rape

a) Contemporaneous Consent and the Specialness of Sex

"Contemporaneous" is a fancy legal way of saying "here and now." The question of rape in relation to M/s is really a question about whether or not you can consent to future treatment that you don't want at the time. It's that simple. If I tell you now that it's okay to have sex with me tuesday, and tuesday rolls around and I say "no" and you have sex with me anyway, is that okay.

The second issue is whether or not Sex is somehow "special." We pretty much acknowledge that you can give up some future rights. Is Sex...legally or ethically...a special thing. Can we sign a paper and agree to sell our car, or give up our right to our own image, but cannot meaningfully say that we give up the right to make a decision about sex in the future? To some extent that's undecidable. To some people sex is a magical romantic thing which has huge spiritual import and is more special than all other things. To others, the right to put a penis into a vagina is like the right to store your goods in the bus station locker for 24 hours...a commodity that can be bought, bartered, sold or assigned to someone else. Where you fall on that spectrum is probably going to have a lot to do with how you emotionalize this issue.

b) Issues of semantics - dancing around the meaning of the word "rape"

So, let's dispense with the logic loop of "if I gave consent it can't be rape." We've observed above that the issue is whether or not you can give up your right today to sex you have tomorrow. Let's just say that generally if you're resisting or don't want it, it fits the colloquial defintion of rape. We can also say that if you don't feel it's rape it isn't. But, let's not get caught up on the word rather than the concept.

In the end, this gives way to a larger question. Can you or I tell someone else he or she was raped? Is rape a matter of personal judgment, or is it an external thing. I'd aruge that we use the word in two different senses in BDSM. One is the legal sense in which, if an act meets certain criteria, it's rape. the other is the erotic/sexual sense in which someone may either say that a nonconsensual act wasn't rape, because of previous consent, or may actively identify it as rape, but feel it was hot and be fine with it.

In an ideal world we'd have different words for both. But on the other hand, the word is part of what makes it hot. It's sort of like the "Zombie Killer" game. It would be less exciting if we called it a "Zombie computer based image remover" game. I'm told there's a new term which is being put forward to describe this type of play...A.S.E or "Agressive Sexual Expression." I think that's a good way to explain it to outsiders, but...it isn't a term that is going to make most girls wet or most guys hard.

Another term that I'll make some use of below is c/nc or "consensual/non consensual." c/nc enshrines the basic concept of giving permission to act in a manner that would usually be non-consensual. How people play c/nc differs...some leave a safeword or escape clause, others work on the theory that once you've started...it is the obligation of the aggressor to see things through and not back down.

I think we have to consider that there's a dichotomy between the legal and bedroom uses of the word, and that it can mean different things in those contexts...an unwelcome assault which is legally culpable, and a...needed or accepted...assault which results in a strong erotic reaction.

So let's try and live with the dichotomy that we mean different things and assign different values to the word "rape" and move along.

c) The Law - where does the law fall on this question

The law is pretty unambiguous. You can't waive your right to say "no" to sex. If you have sex with someone when they are saying "no" it's rape according to the law. That's just how it is. If you can show a contract and a history of power dynamics, that might get you lenient treatment in front of some juries, but it's still ultimately rape, you just might not get a harsh sentence for doing it.

However people do things that are against the law all the time. Speed. Smoke weed. Download MP3s. Play cards for money. The general theory is that the law exists largely to allow us to come down on people when they create a problem. So the law tends to run in absolutes, whereas human behavior tends to be shades of grey.

This means that if you are doing something with your partner that is strictly speaking against the law, unless it's hurting someone else or causing a social problem...or your partner chooses to have you prosecuted for it...it isn't going to cause trouble.

It's worth noting that in many parts of the U.S. the law also includes the "specialness" of sex. A consenting adult can sell the services of their hands to rub another adult down, but cannot legally sell the services of their sex to get another adult off. Britain, Canada, and Mexico are more sensible. But the law often regards selling sexual contact as different than selling any other kind of contact.

But...when it comes to the law, there isn't a lot of tolerance for forced sex. This is why choosing a slave is often a matter of great trust.

d) Common Practice - what do most people in M/s actually do

I think this is a very important point. There is a tendency for people to get very worked up by framing this as a debate between people who believe that consent should always be contemporaneous, and people who believe that people, often women, should be kept locked up as slaves against their will.

While that's an obvious logical fallacy....tantamount to assuming that anyone who opposes government control on food portions in restaurants advocates everyone being morbidly obsese, many people get worked up over it.

So let's frame what the two sides in this debate really advocate.

I'm going to allow for a few "troo Masters" who do believe that all women should be locked up in chains a la John Norman. But...there are people who believe in a flat earth too. I see these people post on lists. But...in the Eastern U.S. Kink community I have met and talked at some length with...easily more than seventy people in M/s couples, and none of them has ever advocated anything remotely like that.

So...really the debate is between people who feel that

Consent must always be contemporaraneous and that to engage in any action which goes against contemporaneous consent is inherently unethical.

and

Entering into a Master/slave relationship with a c/nc dynamic, or any other explicit c/nc agreement is designed to suggest that there is leeway in interpreting consent. The slave has asked the Master to do his or her scene, and allow for some recovery time and hope that in the end everything works out and the slave/submissive is happier for it. The Master may also get some slack on keeping someone from running away suddenly and pell mell.

So really the argument is smaller than it seems, becuase it's mostly about "how long is a reasonable cooling off, getting your head together and deciding" period. And people never talk about that here because it's unromantic, it suggests failed relationships, and it's scary because Masters have to think about the possibility of a slave they restrained who no, really, no shit, in the calm light of day is through. And mostly it's about looking away and hoping we never really have to make that decision.

But really the issue isn't "Consent once and never have another choice" or "You can always choose to withdraw consent." That may be the ideal, but in practice with real human beings the alternate is not "Consent once and never have another choice" but "Consent once and I get to hold onto you and push you through a scene/some period of time and hope that in the end you think it was a good idea."

I'm hesistant to draw lines in the sand, but I think that is where the M/s Community differs from Human trafficking. Human trafficking does not care about the mental or emotional state of the person involved. M/s presumes overarching consent, while allowing for the concept that consent may be temporarily withdrawn, usually because of the powerful emotions involved, or the very internal conflicts that are a draw to an M/s power dynamic. Conceptually this allows for levels of trust and emotional experience that can't exist without the overarching trust. I do not think that anybody in the legitimate M/s community wants to see truly unwilling slaves.

I think this is important because...otherwise this argument seems much more overblown than it really is. And a lot of Masters like to talk in absolutes because it makes them seem badass, even though they wouldn't really follow through on those absolutes. The norm of people who support c/nc situations is I think one scene or one short time period, with some leeway based on how long and well you know the person and what you guess about their future behavior.

e) The Morals and Ethics - what is moral and ethical

Americans in particular are quick to jump up and say "you have to consent to everything always ever..." But in practice we don't live like that.

I had the interesting experience several years ago of running a game in which people roleplayed a simulation of day to day life. One thing that they immediately complained about was that they were not given enough starting money to buy cars or houses. We explained patiently that of course they weren't...but for a small amount of money and instlallment payments, they could buy a house or car now. A really startling number of them despite in fact owning both cars and houses that were owned by a bank, chose in the game to adopt unrealistic premises rather than sign a loan agreement to buy a house or car. Americans hate the idea of obligation. Our culture is about options and choices.

So the question that was framed by the OP becomes "is it ethical to take someone's future choices away from them." Not "is it legal" but "is it an ethical deal to make."

In a surprising number of other situations it is.

People can sign up for the military and give up their rights. Not just what to wear, and where to sleep, but even the right to run away from a dangerous situation. While it is vanishing rare in the U.S., the Army shot Eddie Slovik to death for that in 1945.

People can sign up for schools that sharply curtail their rights, and even our housing developments may limit our future choices.

The late Jack McGeorge drew strong paralells to religious orders. And in fact those may be the best example. One who enters a religious order may agree to give up something so simple as the right to speak for five years. No policeman would enforce that agreement, but it is a moral and ethical agreement.

We'd argue that the monk can always walk away, but the soldier certainly cannot. Our society limits giving up choices in order to protect individuals. But that doesn't it morally and ethically wrong to accept a commitment from them which waives future rights.

But all this only makes sense if we can see reasons for it....underlying reasons...

f) The Underlying Reasons - why would anyone choose to give a consent that allowed for future rape

A friend of mine was talking about her first experience with having sex when she actually did not want it...she qualified that it wasn't "real" rape...but summarized:

" I told him no, I didn't want to do it, to leave me alone, and was pretty wholly non-participatory, but in the end I couldn't help but get fucked. IT WAS AWESOME! I loved not wanting it but having it thrust on me anyhow."

I've found a lot of reasons people seek a c/nc relationship. Often it is expressed as "want" or "need" rather than like. Sometimes it is a product of a traumatic sexual background, but in some cases it isn't. Nurture may be a factor and Nature may be a factor, but some people end up wanting or needing the experience of raping or being raped.

Psychology Today tells us that:

From 1973 through 2008, nine surveys of women's rape fantasies have been published. They show that about four in 10 women admit having them (31 to 57 percent) with a median frequency of about once a month. Actual prevalence of rape fantasies is probably higher because women may not feel comfortable admitting them.

Presumably men have about the same level of fantasy of overpowering women, though I don't know of a good survey on the subject.

Common Chimpanzees are fairly prolific rapists, and also very violent towards each other. So are men. It's fair to suggest our common ancestor Sahelanthropus tchadensis was a violent rapist too. Sadly, rape is nothing like unnatural. It's been a pretty good tool for reproduction of the strongest for seven million years. So has killing each other.

In modern civilization, we don't believe in killing or rape. But...we still need something to do with those instincts. We can't just back down seven million years and say "well let's go watch the Food Network." We need outlets. We have a lot of outlets for our need to commit violence. From football to FPS games. But we don't have a lot of outlets for being the victim of violence, and we don't have a lot of outlets for sexual violence.

I do not think anyone in modern M/s is advocating a society where rape is acceptable. I think some people do advocate the right of consenting adults, in the course of experimentation to pre-obligate themselves in a way that leaves thier partner reasonably ethically blameless if they use force to extract sex. I think most people involved in modern M/s would not advocate this as a continual state, but as something that might happen on a transitory basis. It's advocating the right to give up consent in order to have a peak experience, and while the law doesn't support that, it's not unreasonable.

I put it ethically in much the same category as waivers at other dangerous amusements. Whatever the waiver says it does not actually protect the attraction owner against harming you. In many cases what is more important is that it fixes in your mind that you gave the attraction owner the ethical right to scare you endanger you. We presume a jury would take that into account if there was an accident. But we also hope at the end of the day there isn't an accident and the waiver merely acted to make sure everyone was on the same page about what was going on.

In the M/s Community we are building a new model for lifestyles. That model suggests that consenting adults can choose to make their own power dynamics, not merely follow the confused models of traditional marriage. Over the past hundred fifty years, we've ceased to have a clear agreed upon picture of what western marriage means, if it ever did. M/s is one of many lifestyle movements that present options for adults to define their own "tailor made" relationship dynamics, and take them seriously.

It's worth noting that the idea that you can rape your wife is fairly new. In 17th Century England Cheif Justice Sir Matthew Hale stated, "The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract, the wife hath given herself in kind unto the husband which she cannot retract"

Surprisingly or not that was pretty much the legal picture into the 1970s, and marital rape wasn't illegal in all 50 states until 1993.

The point here is that history long suggested that it was possible for one partner to give up their right to consent. We're really just sorting out how we feel about that as a society. I applaud the legal protections accorded to women, and feel that any exceptions must be a matter of private trust and mutual respect. But I think it is ethical for adults to make those exceptions.

For the most part I think that kink, fetish, and M/s are healthy reactions. Rather than covert abusive relationships, partners are able to lay their sexual needs on the table, including needs to be abused or be an abuser. Those needs can't always be made to evaporate, but they can be evaluated fairly and made an open matter which both parties consider and consent to. This honesty often allows the components of sexual force to be limited to the sexual spectrum, allowing the couple (or triad, etc.) to be "normal" in all other respects. We may think it would be better if these needs did not exist, but they do.

I know at least two individuals who cannot orgasm without some element of coercion or force involved. The more realistic, the stronger their sexual response. Should their choice be a dangerous life of seeking abusive partners, or sexual frustration? Or should they be allowed to give up their right to consent to a partner they trust to use it in a manner that they believe will be exciting to them, but not ruin their lives?

In forging a new ethic for human relationships in the era when traditional marriage has largely collapsed, I think many would wish to retain the right of people to enter into those relationships if they choose, and uphold their end of the "deal" as a matter of ethics, without lessening the legal protections afforded by modern law. This creates a situation in which the qualities of older relationships...which to some may mean love and protection and to other simply meet an aching need...can exist on the basis of formal or informal private agreement outside the law, while the law can afford the maximum protection to everyone.

In a modern era which grants us many rights, some people may choose to give up rights. That doesn't make it the law and shouldn't. But it doesn't make those people immoral or unethical for choosing to accept those relationships on the basis of mutual trust and respect.

Graduation and Presenting at BR

2011-01-24T11:32:00.000-08:00

I don't usually post much in the way of personal promotion here, but I wanted to take the time to post two brief notes, as I've had a few small personal milestones.

I'm now a Clinical Hypnotherapist. I recently completed a DETC Accredited degree in Hypnotherapy. While this is not exactly an MBA or PhD, it was a non-trivial amount of work. Much to my chagrin it was also a non-trivial amount of money... I'll be paying for it well into the next two years. But you get what you pay for. There are a lot of places where you can learn something about hypnosis, but programs that are accredited by the Department of Education through a legitimate accrediting body are...not quite as easy as some other routes. I'm reasonably proud of having followed through on it.

I need to complete 300 clinical hours for Certification, so that's a ways off, but...it is the first step. Maryland, DC, and Virginia don't have any restrictions on the advertisement or practice of hypnotherapy, but in almost all states that do, I'd be eligible to practice and...I wouldn't have wanted to without meaningful training. It also clears my time to begin the groundwork for a Masters in Psychology which I've been thinking about more and more seriously.

I don't really know about practicing, though I'm considering hanging a shingle out on the Kink Aware Professionals site, just because there are so few KAP's listed in the DC Metro Area. I'd have to have some semblance of an office to do that, at least space I could use to see patients.

I do want to be clear that I draw a strong line between the practice of Clinical Hynotherapy and the use of Hypnosis as an Erotic entertainment. I do think there is crossover in the area of "sexual self improvement" but the two shouldn't be mixed up.

It's unusual to find Psychologists who have acted as both entertainers and therapists, but in the field of hypnosis it is not unusual to find practitioners who have also done entertainment work. Hypnotists are workmen and engineers. True, I think they might make some contribution to the science, just as I think a lot of bright Engineers contribute to the Sciences by making direct observations. But that's not the focus.

Different fields different standards.

From my point of view Hypnosis is to Psychology what Engineering is to Science. Scientists want to know why gravity works. Engineers need to understand it precisely enough to build a bridge that doesn't fall down. A good, high level, engineer needs to understand a lot of science. But their work is mechnanical...building things or changing things. Psychologists study the mind. Hypnotists reach into the mind and actually change it, using the information and models we get from Psychologists. I guess in the long run I've always been a hands-on sort of guy.

I do not have credentials in Psychology though once upon a time I wrote a substantial portion of a Master's thesis in it. Only problem is it wasn't my thesis, but I got a pretty good grade. It's a long story and I was younger and more reckless then and it helped someone who needed it. In a lot of ways I was disappointed by Psychology and Psychiatry. Despite loving some individual Psychiatrists profoundly, the actual practice of Psychiatry seems bizzarely remote from human concerns, and Psychology often seems to take a hands-off approach to personal change that resembles those movies where an unskilled passenger finds themselves unexpectedly at the controls of a jet and must be talked down by the tower.

I'm all about personal accomplishment. But how would you feel if you had a tumor and the Doctor started by saying "well, first, you're going to need to get some scalpels and anethsize yourself...make sure to wash your hands." And I think that people have been so heavily trained to the idea that accepting any intervention in their own mind as "wrong" that they often fight help tooth and nail.

Most of us aren't responsible for the things that are in our subconscious mind. It was put there by someone else. By what logic should we not have the option of allowing the mental equivalent of a surgeon to take it out or rewire it? Hypnosis is not some strange side-branch of mental understanding. Properly practiced it is understanding how our minds came to be the way they are, and reaching into them to change the things that we are normally stuck with because we cannot consciously access them.

In any case and on a lighter note, I've been asked to present on Erotic Hypnosis at BR on Tuesday March 22, at 8pm. Obviously I'd love to have friends come out and watch. Here's the information.

And thanks to everyone who gave support and encouragement along the way...

A Little About the Making of a Dominant...

2010-11-20T23:01:00.000-08:00

In the last three years, I've spent an intense amount of time both in "real life" and online, breaking down, analyzing, and understanding the minds of young girls.

The motivation for this is my personal modality as a Trainer. A few years ago I came off of a D/s relationship where in the end I felt I had failed as a Dominant and a Trainer. The relationship ended fairly amicably, but I felt I had not succeeded in doing the things I should to cause desirable change in my partner. In the next year I floundered through several models of "Training" and eventually began to amass the one which I consider "mine" through an assimilation of sources and parts. I'm still capable of abject failure, but I certainly have a better idea what I'm doing.

I have always felt very strongly that you cannot analyze and change other people if you cannot analyze and change yourself. There is that old proverb..."do not try to remove the splinter from your brother's eye before you remove the log from you own eye. When I began, I could not tell you why I was drawn to identify as a Trainer or a Dominant, but I felt that I should be able to. Normally I don't share my revelations, but several factors led me to decide to publish an autobiographical analysis.

I'm not particularly proud of the things I am revealing. In many ways it's pushing back the curtain and exposing some things I'd be as happy to hide. My relatively prosaic past, middle class upbringing, media interests, and anxiety - it would be just as comfortable to keep these things under wraps.

On the other hand, one of the things I've gotten most strongly from girls is that they want to understand how Dominant men think, and what motivates them. I also think that there is an allergy among Dominants to admitting that anxiety and other psychological factors color their behavior and desire for control. I think there is a tendency to focus on the psychological factors in the submissive partner, and make the assumption that the Dominant must be stable, fully formed, and needs no questioning or improvement.

Contrasting that is some media presentation that Dominants are "messed up." That Dommes are "paying back" a patriarchal society, and that Male Dominants are weak, twisted individual who have to prove their manliness by beating up women. Obviously this has improved a lot over the past twenty years, as BDSM and D/s have become more culturally normative.

Within the community, there doesn't seem to be much curiosity about Dominance and Sadism. We speculate endlessly on what makes someone want to get beaten up, but we don't need to ask why someone would want to beat them up. I think there is a mistaken feeling that because most people repress violent instincts, everyone would be a Dom if they weren't sexually inhibited. But that's not particularly true. I know a lot of easygoing people who simply are not driven toward any sort of sexual Dominance. I think the question "how are we made" bears asking, and I think a good understanding of the formation of Dominance as a psychosexual practice is as important as an understanding of submission.

I can write (generally and without breaking confidences) about the experiences of dozens of girls who have shared their backgrounds with me. I only have one real case study for a Dominant, and that's me...so...I see it as somewhat of a duty to put forward as accurate an analysis as I am able to.

An Overview

In the next few pages I'll examine my overall personality development and underlying anxieties with a focus on factors leading to the development of psychosexual sadism, control urges, and a D/s oriented lifestyle. My basic thesis is that Dominance, like submission, is born in pain and anxiety, potentially representing the "fight" side of a "fight/flight" coin.

The Mechanism of Anxiety

My understanding of human beings and their motivations is very scientific and mechanical. I don't think religion and spirituality are always "bad," but I think often religion and mysticism serve as mental camoflague to put in a layer of uncertainty and confusion and keep us from having to address our core motives. They provide dozens of easy templates for ennobling our basic survival instincts and allowing us to feel alternately proud or guilty about them without really analyzing their function.

Biology did not build us to be happy. It built us to reproduce other human beings. Our emotions...including love...are outgrowths of that, a reward system to make us engage in behavior which makes us likely to survive longer and make more small humans. For that reason, our emotions are often in conflict and we are not always "happy" doing the things that are "best," since they may conflict with our basic needs.

We are also wired for a world less complex than the one we inhabit. We are social creatures, but the rise of Visa, Electrical Power, and Starbucks have happened in a period of time that is non-existent evolutionarily. Our evolutionary mechanisms still think grain silos are a pretty nifty new idea.

Out ability to intellectualize has allowed us to go beyond our evolutionary mechanisms in a way that gibbons, chimpanzees, and certain conservative legislators cannot. That has given us unprecedented power over our environment. But it hasn't particularly given us happiness.

I have no doubt Dominance is driven by anxiety...essentially "insecurity." That's something most Dominants don't want to confess, but it's transparently true. We do things because some part of our heirarchy of needs isn't being met, or is threatened. We Dominate others to meet a need in ourselves, and fight down our own insecurity. How realistic we are about this largely determines how good at it we will actually be.

It is less clear why we become sadists. I know that hurting others discharges emotional energy for me, and makes me "feel better" by allowing me to act out on aggressive instincts. It seems probable that sadism is a response to anxiety. Fight and flight are anxiety responses. Cruelty and sadism represent acting out a "fight" response.

Three Questions

In analyzing myself, I boil down to three questions to investigate

a) Am I anxious and if so what am I afraid of?

b) How was I exposed to violence and why did I become a sadist?

c) How did these things play together to create my personality?

Nothing to Fear but Fear itself

As a child, adult, and even now, I suffer from panic attacks, though I did not realize this until my 30s. I accepted panic as a fact of life, and accepted that I must "behave" even when I was tremendously anxious.

I was aware that in my 20s I could be rash, insistent, or brash, and "lash out," and that I had spent a lot of energy learning how to control that. I was aware that I feared paralysis and that many of my drives were to prove to myself I would not be paralyzed in a crisis. I eventually learned that when my pulse pounded and it seemed as if the walls were drawing in, that didn't necessarily mean I should jump up and "do something."

Even in high school, I recognized that I was prone to panic or freezing up, but I didn't think about it in terms of an anxiety disorder. I threw myself into activities that pushed my boundaries and forced me to cope with

I can remember episodes where panic drove me to behavior that was stupid or pointless. A night spent working on the car with bondo, because I became obsessed at the fear that it was rusting out (to be fair the work needed to be done, but it wasn't the priority my anxiety made it).

I have begun to realize that I can define my life as a battle against the emotion of anxiety/panic. As a child I felt at the mercy of panic...I felt helpless and incapable. And just as Scarlett O'Hara's personality was shaped by the starvation that ends reel I of Gone with the Wind (for those not familiar this is the oft-mocked scene where Vivian Leigh says "as God is my witness I will never go hungry again,") on some unknown day of my childhood, I said "As God is my witness I will never be powerless and unable to change things again."

Too Smart for my Own Good

The first key was determining what is "different" about me. I've always known that in a specific way I was "more intelligent" than many people. I'm reluctant to say that, because it sounds like bragging, and it's not entirely true.

I'm no super-genius. In addition to never owning a product manufactured by "ACME," there are some things I'm positively dumb about. My SAT scores were impossibly split...99th percentile Verbal and something in the high thirties for Math. I still count on my fingers to do bistromath if I don't have a calculator.

I'm not particularly good at memorization.

What I am good at is "understanding things." Systems, webs, social environments, networks. I can picture, feel, and experience these powerfully.

This has especially connoted to people. I can think about how other people think.

I always had a good understanding of the way in which people behaved. I could often tell in a televison show when an actor was behaving "unrealistically" and had a strong feel in literature for when a character was behaving "right." I was limited in some ways to my own experience, and my own experience was as a fight-oriented alpha who despised flight.

Learning About the Mind

In high school I encountered personality theory, and finally had words and terms to hang on the things I understood, and had a clear map to begin tying them all together. I'd puzzled out a lot of it from various fiction and nonfiction reading, but in Junior Psych it all made sense.

Shortly after that I spent a good bit of time helping a friend of my who had major medical issues earn a Master's degree, including doing work on various papers, and in the end doing a good bit of independent reading on my own. Having gotten the rudiments of the "system" of people, I quickly became adept at seeing its functionings...and I began the slow tenuous process of figuring out my own urges, needs, and wants....

The Urge for Control

All human beings want control. From a very early age I was obsessed with it. I never wanted to be a child. All the games I played were games of being an adult. I pictured myself as an adult. I was frustrated by the constraints of being a child...this manifested in many ways, but on the most basic level it was a desperate desire to be taken seriously and listened to.

I was not particularly traumatized as a child. I was spanked a few times, but there was no whiff of sexual impropriety. My father was the adult child of an alcoholic, and doubtless passed the issues of socialization and distance that go with that lot in life.

We also lived in a neighborhood where I had no close playmates except for one girl next door who had Down's Syndrome. So...I had very little socialization except at school. I was an only child and spent a lot of time lonely without fully understanding what "lonely" was.

I spent a lot of time around my parents with them ignoring me. I don't think they did that to be cruel. They had a child who was always around, and they developed a facility for seeming to care about what I was doing and vaguely engaging me while mostly ignoring me and concentrating on something else. That has ended up as a component of my personality in both a positive and negative way.

I invented playmates in my head...always adults. Other children had an imaginary friend. I had an imaginary Air Force Buddy because it was my understanding that was the sort of friend an adult might have

My need for control may have been driven by loneliness and isolation, but it manifested just as strongly at school. On some levels I probably was driven by fear of the removal of socialization...every afternoon I lost the ability to socialize, lost my peer group, and lost the ability to interact.

Certainly it must have been a factor. I didn't get much socialization outside of school, and people were a puzzle to me. I was excited. I wanted to be liked, just like everyone else. No...more than that. I have always been an alpha and I not only wanted them to like me, I wanted them to follow me and do what I said. And I didn't understand why they didn't and wouldn't. In school up through third grade I was a "ringleader" even though I was poor at athletics. I was dangerously smart and that made up for poor abilities at soccer during most of the day.

Lack of socialization, or the withdrawal of socialization may not have been my only fear. I recall reactions to television, books, and other media. In the next section we'll investigate how that played into the development of cruelty in my personality.

A key to my reasons for an obsession with control came in remembering, rehearsing an elaborate statement when returning to vacation bible school (my parents were not particularly religious, but suburban churchgoing was the order of the day) to explain that I had been sick. It got me laughed at and I didn't understand why as it had seemed very polished and sophisticated. I understand now that most 7 year olds don't say "in all actuality I was quite ill."

With one or two exceptions, nearly every major anxiety I can recall in my childhood comes from fear of how people would respond to something, and of not knowing or understanding their responses. And every frustration is a matter of them not responding in the way I wanted, usually because I lacked the tools to explain the situation, or to coerce the response I wanted.

I've considered that I might be mildly autistic, but it seems unlikely. Autism is concerned with having a poor idea how other human beings will respond, and in general I'm very good at predicting how people will respond, good at putting myself in the other person's shoes. I've gotten better at it over time, and certainly my poor socialization gave me some Asperger's-like behavior early in life.

So...small child, poorly socialized, learning how to get others to respond. But why would it matter so much. This is where anxiety fits in. I lived in fear, because when I was wrong or corrected I felt an overwhelming emotion so negative that it made me desperately want to head off every possibility of error. I can identify now that this was a classic panic attack.

I wasn't heavily socialized and I did not know why people behaved the way they did, but I knew that if I learned all the rules and always knew how to act I would never be shamed and thus never panicked.

And...I was very smart.

The problem is that I memorized comparitavely well, but I also understood things. I saw around me an invisible web of relationships nobody else saw. I shocked and astounded my summer camp at age 8 by explaining the basic nature of Watergate as a power struggle between the Executive and Legislative branches. The Counselor was convinced that I did not know what that actually meant, and was astounded when I adequately expressed the relationships.

The key frustration of my life is that there were circumstances where despite complexities that I could slowly and patiently explain, I would be mocked, ridiculed, or shamed anyway. Or something bad would happen to someone else because they could not see how to do the right or sensible thing, and I could not explain it all to them. The response to both of these things was a very unpleasant panic reaction which I wished to avoid.

This was the core of my anxiety. The aching of not quite having the words, the adult words to describe the relationships between things that I understood. As with anxious girls, I am left with the "chicken or the egg" question. Am I anxious because I was born with a chemical imbalance, and thus developed anxious behavior, or is my anxiety a product of my environment. I tend to think that my anxiety formed as a reaction to not being able to explain myself sufficiently, but I cannot rule out that it had an existing chemical trigger. My basis for this tends to be that I do not experience anxiety attacks randomly...I experience them when I experience a loss of control. This strikes me as a learned response.

I didn't like being made fun of, but early on I engaged in relentless acting out, even self-mockery. To some extent this was immunization. If you make fun of yourself others can't mock you. I didn't like actually being made fun of. I assume this was because I understood the social interchange and realized that I risked people not respecting me...it was very clear to me from very early on that people don't follow a buffoon. My speaking and understandings often got me laughed at and mocked, but I learned that if you twisted it just right you could recover laughter into entertainment. And I learned that entertainment is leadership and power. I became an entertainer because people would follow me...obey me...in a way they wouldn't if I simply told them what they ought to do. Even if I clearly knew better.

Comedians tend to be bitter men with grudges and, as I later learned, comedy itself is a dominance mechanism.

Early Childhood

As a small boy I was very much a monster. I always liked Calvin and Hobbes because it shows us something of just how barbarous small children can be. There was nothing innocent about me. And I lived with an awareness that I was a monster. The things I fantasized about and thought about were not what good little boys and girls fantasized about. They did not fall asleep to fantasies of death and killing.

I don't know when these elements of my personality really formed. I remember being obsessed with slapstick violence on television, and the destruction of property. I laughed hilariously at a re-run of I Love Lucy where the two warring families accidentally push a washing machine off a balcony.

One disturbing memory that has come back to me in recent years is of a cute story about a mouse who runs away from home or gets lost. I know this is a pre-school memory because my mother would read the book to me, and I read well before I entered school, which was probably the beginning of my general boredom with the educational system.

The story ends with the mouse safe at home I was very fond of imposing alternate...rather unhappy...endings on stories, but I vividly remember that I felt a chandelier should fall on his head...something I'd seen in some movie and which seemed to me to be the epitome of gratuitous violence. I was angry at the poor little mouse's complacency and happiness. Even at the time I think I justified my desire to do harm as the story being "too trite" or the little mouse being "too cute." I do recall disliking trite, predictable, stories and having some feel for writing that was saccharine.

As an adult, I think the story of his loss scared me. He was anthropomorphic, and for whatever reason, I think I resented being scared of his loss of family and safety and responded by wanting to inflict a punishment on him. That is the earliest I can recall feeling the desire to "wipe that smug satisfaction off someone's face." I wanted to put hurt and misery into his world because it seemed too happy to be real. I've thought about trying to identify the book (it isn't one I still own) in order to see why it differed from other similar stories where I felt no need to punish the protagonist. There was a similar story about a puppy which I adored, and I don't know if I felt the puppy was less responsible for his own misfortune, whether the text played less on my emotions or I identified less with the puppy, or whether I was simply more willing to forgive the behavior of realistic canines than that of anthropomorphic mice.

I don't know that these behaviors were really unusual for small children. I think most children have some violent fantasies. I know that my parents firmly told me that these things were bad, and that I believed them, and so violence became a firm part of my 'acting out' behavior.

I recall going through a phase which I think must have been about age 5 when I was scatologically obsessed. As proud as Freud would be of me, the interesting thing is that I had no actually interest in fecal matter, but rather an adult desire to be "dirty" and say "dirty words." The words associated with feces were the dirtiest I knew, and I became compulsive about working them into conversation. My parents disapproved and eventually curbed the behavior, but it tells me that even at the time, the desire to be allowed to curse and act out in the manner of an adult was strong, as was self-identification as a "bad boy" or "rebel" type.

There was some corporal punishment in my life, but it was restrained, ritualized and fairly trivial. I don't think it really shaped my behavior. I never eroticized it and there was nothing of even subdued eroticism in its presentation. I don't even recall resenting it heavily. I do recall fights and arguments with my parents generally based on them not letting me do anything I pleased. I don't think I was treated badly as a child. My parents were scientific and fair, familiar with Dr. Spock, and trying to bring me up without scarring. My mother suffered from PMDD, and I have no doubt that these occasional cycles of irrational behavior on her part led to an underlying anxiety, but I cannot pinpoint any actual instances until later in my life. I do recall a general feeling that my mother was volatile and might suddenly not be very fun to be around, which was a sad thing as she was in many ways my best friend and playmate during those early years.

I was prone to argument with my parents on some issues but on issues of basic 'right' and 'wrong' accepted their judgment without question. I did not like being "bad," in the sense of disappointingly wrong. At some point I must have been told that "kill" was a very bad word, which left me with a fascination with it. I was afraid to say the word in front of my parents, and was in fact afraid to say the word "kale" because it was very close and I thought they might think I was saying "kill." There was no draconian punishment for this but I was acutely conscious of not doing "really bad things."

Private School

I attended an English style Private School until Third Grade. I was enrolled in Pre-Kindergarten and was still young to start Kindergarten....I made it in only by a few days, so was always among the youngest (and therefore weakest and smallest) kids in my class. But I did well, made friends, and brought about mayhem. I was often in the principal's office, and I was a ring-leader during recess.

The school I attended was unusual, and I think it shaped a lot of my personality. The student body was made up of the children of senior officers at the Pentagon, and diplomatic brats. During the Arab-Israeli War, sons of the two embassy staffs played out their own fight with boxing robots. Most of the diplomatic kids had grown up in the U.S. and the ones that hadn't were somewhat socially handicapped.

This was a weird ferment. I got much of the same background I might have if I'd gone to school with military brats anywhere, but with a much stronger slant on military history and on politics. Political kids were probably half the class, and many of the Officers were amateur military historians, or at least enjoyed telling military stories to their children.

Very little about the Vietnam War was romantic. The U.S. was firmly losing the War, and while one might discuss the most modern and exciting Jets, Vietnam wasn't much talked about. Instead we did in school what I am certain many of the military parents of 1971 did at home. Refought the glories of the Second World War.

It's worth understanding that we were much closer to WWII then than now. Most of the kids in my class had fathers or grandfathers who remembered it. The national obsession with Nazis was just rising, and you were beginning to see swastikas on the cover of every mystery or action novel. Militarists have always been fascinated by the Nazis...they had cool, interesting equipment, and were snappy dressers. We thought the Nazis were cool, though neither understood nor cared about fascism. Small children are tribal Fascists by nature, and to the extent we understood anything at all about the politics, it seemed to be an easy to understand structure of glorious leaders, much more exciting than our own tepid and confused politics.

We thought the great leaders of the past were pretty cool and Hitler (who was epic and shot himself) seemed in many ways more colorful and interesting than Roosevelt or Eisenhower who did not captivate us as children. Of course we didn't know or think much about Racism, but about cool tanks and airplanes. I feel no guilt in this...others in the 20th century have been captivated by that legend. We understood that the concept was "bad" but...the concept of powerful "Captains," "Dictators" "Chiefs" appealed to our primate sense of heirarchical organization. In the end, I don't think I was left with any sympathy for the ideals of Fascism per se...the more I became acquainted with them, the more repulsive they seemed. At the same time on a tribal/personal level, I think we inherited...probably more from the military and Diplomatic fathers, whose shadow lay on all of us than from the Axis...a sort of internal Neitzcheianism. A belief in man and superman, and a firm understanding that we were of the superman strain. None of us ever put it that way of course, nor did we see ourselves as vein. It is simply the projections our fathers laid on us. Even among that group, I must have been very conscious that I would have to work to be a superman, and a certain part of my life-script suggests that an epic fail would be acceptable.

I remember one kid who was particularly fond of describing gruesome tortures his grandfather had told him about from China in the Second World War. Gouging out entrails, and digging out eyes and replacing them with burning coals. He was the most extreme of the kids in our class and I was fascinated by his stories.

During my short stay in Private School...I made a lot of headway: I was put into a box and censured for blacklisting.

The box was amusing. I was so disruptive in class that the teacher said that if I did not stop acting out she was going to put me into a box. She said "box" but I heard "office." I was very fond of playing in cardboard boxes, and I imagined something rather elaborate like an oversized dog kennel. From that point on, I acted out continually and at every turn reminded the teacher that she'd threatened to put me in a box.

The actual box ended up being rather disappointing. Obviously my teacher didn't have a box for children on hand, and had to pull some scrims from the theatre room. She set these up so that she could see me and the other children couldn't, but I was marvellous at moving them when she wasn't watching until I had a private office. I invited people to my office during breaks, and decorated the walls, something I wouldn't have the privilige of doing again until I worked at 1990 K Street in my late 30s.

The censure for blacklisting came about as part of a rising fear that our Nazi-obsessed band of Third Graders was getting out of hand. A facet of the Private School, or at least my little corner of it, was an extended and endless roleplay that had blossomed in First Grade. Understanding that most of the kids in the school were military or ex-military civilian Government, and that this was the Cold-War and Vietnam War era, and the most reasonable thing in the world was that we should all play at being an Army and Government. I suppose children in Idaho might have played at being in the trenches, but the kids in my class were the sons of Bird Colonels and Security Attache's so we played at Geopolitics, and being creative and a good story-maker this was something I excelled at. I soon knew "military" and "government" better than the military kids and was highly skilled at creating an ongoing roleplay in which everyone participated.

Finally feeling my oats as a real political mover and shaker in the extended and endless roleplay of school, I overreached a little bit. There were the few sports-oriented kids who were not interested in our endless military-political roleplay, and of course...certain girls...who liked horses and other girly things. We were happy to admit cool girls, but in due course of time came up with a public enemies list, which basically meant anyone who badmouthed or belittled the ongoing roleplay. It was actually a rather fascinating mechanism, and to be fair it was the fault of our own police culture since it came straight from "FBI" with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. I was forced to apologize and promise never to blacklist people again.

Even in Third Grade, I was aware that I was king in my own fishbowl, but not everywhere. I rode an "early bus" and spent about an hour at school before the teachers arrived. A bus driver stayed to supervise, and I was locked in with a random assortment of kids from other grades and classes. They were not engaged in the roleplay and they did not recognize my importance as a leader-entertainer. I was acutely aware of that, and both hated that hour, and used it to try new material, or engage in behavior that I could not once I put on my "face" as a leader for the other kids.

Media Influences

School wasn't the only place I was getting exposed to violence and adult concepts. I had a fair amount of generally unsupervised television time in the afternoons.

You'll recall my "in all actuality" comment above, and the interesting thing is that I can date it. I am fairly certain that the language came from imitating (badly) Leonard Nimoy's character of "Spock" on Star Trek. To my six year old mind, Mr. Spock was the epitome of civilized restraint...someone who always had the right words, was always cool, and seemed to have no emotions. That sort of detached capability was incredibly attractive to me. Captain Kirk might have been an adventure hero, but Spock had all the answers, people always listened to him when he talked, and he was respected for his mind.

It seems likely that even at that young age I saw having no emotions as something desirable, and that the reason for this is that I associated emotion with pain. I might not have words to express it, but it was clear to me that Mr. Spock did not have panic attacks. I know that I did not watch Star Trek when it aired originally because a friend of mine and I wanted to play a record during the final episode and were overruled because his older (probably just pre-teen) sister was a devoted fan, and was crying because it was the "last episode ever". That would have been June 3, 1969. The show began airing that fall in a 5:00 spot on WTTG Channel 5, and I was astounded to find it was not a stupid girl's show, but full of interesting and...vaguely terrifying stuff.

Star Trek is significant, because it really wasn't children's fare. The show was lumped into the late afternoon schedule of Re-runs with Mr. Ed, and My Favorite Martian by local producers who probably knew nothing about it. In fact it featured provocative writing by people like Robert Bloch, Fredric Brown, Harlan Ellison, and Theodore Sturgeon. In tone and setting it drew from the late 60s countercultural science-fiction revolution that spawned Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Slaughterhouse Five. Thankfully despite this early exposure I never particularly became a "Trekkie" and found much of the later work rather shallow and at best mildly entertaining. My desire to actually pretend to be Mr. Spock was limited to kindergarten where it may be forgivable on account of age.

But...I was seeing at 5pm...remarkably adult ideas and concepts, that went well beyond Dick Van Dyke, I Love Lucy and My Favorite Martian. While possibly less unique, it's worth noting that people died on Star Trek in a way that they didn't in the other afternoon fare, or in cartoons, or even most of the cheesy detective shows of the time. The blood and gore of CSI was much more discreetly dealt with in the days of Dragnet. I certainly saw shooting on TV, and my mother was a fan of detective shows, but they were tame by modern standards.

Afternoon television was followed by the Vietnam war.

I've made a lot in my adult life of the impact of seeing us lose in Vietnam on television. I do remember television pieces discussing the retreat after the Tet Offensive, and showing wounded and injured troops. The number of Wounded, Killed, and MIA would be flashed on the screen every night, and that was probably my first acquaintance with the concept of "Killing."

I know that the war fascinated me. I would race to finish my dinner and go in to watch the National News, because I wanted to see the footage from the War. I do not honestly recall my emotions on this. I was not deeply invested in the War, and really didn't make an association between the dirty young men on TV and the relatives of classmates. I didn't know anyone serving, and most of my class's relations were well above that pay-grade, though there were some older cousins and such. It was impersonal to me, but fascinating.

I was an anxious child and I know I had trouble sleeping early on. I wasn't particularly afraid of the dark, but simply of being alone. I liked the concept of all night places, because it made me feel more secure to know that someone, somewhere was awake. I wanted people awake around me while I slept. I liked to listen to an all news talk-radio station because it had human voices and proved there were people out there. Eventually this led me to ask questions like what a gas-chamber was, and my father set the dial to a light music station that I did not hate.

The years from First to Third Grade were formative for me. It is fairly safe to say that in January 1970 I was a fairly innocent, sheltered kid. By 1974, entering fourth grade, I had a working knowledge of war, torture, things in our universe that were beyond our understanding, the failure of American policy in Vietnam, and the threat of Nuclear Annihilation.

In 1974 I was for the first time exposed to "Duck and Cover" drills. Our private school knew such things were useless. My father was kind enough to explain that it didn't make any difference if a nuclear war broke out everyone would just be dead. I also knew that the Air Raid Drills were on Wednesday.

Unfortuantely I wasn't good at keeping track of what day of the week it was, and when a drill happened on what I thought was a tuesday, I quietly prepared to kiss my ass goodbye. I even was vaguely aware I didn't know for sure the day of the week and remember thinking that it was humiliating to die incinerated with my head between my legs kneeling wondering what day it was.

I think I paid even more attention to the world and politics after that.

But there is still a key missing. I wasn't the only kid to do duck and cover drills. I wasn't the only kid to listen to Dorsey telling stories about bamboo needles and burning eyes out with hot coals. Most of them probably reached age forty without ever using a cocktail toothpick for any purpose other than spearing an olive.

I was fascinated by machines and not by people. In Third Grade, my parents got called about my essay on what object I would be if I were not a person. If you want to give a kid an exercise in existentialism, don't complain about the results. Other kids wanted to be...I don't remember, probably a football or a lampshade. If I'd been smart I would have said a vibrator. If I'd played dumb I would have said "a train." Instead I said "A B-52 bomber."

One reason I recall is that "you wouldn't have to do much work during the day, just sit around all day sipping fuel then casually fly over and rain a string of bombs, then come home." I had a lot of knowledge on this subject...my father was with SAC during the Korean war and their base serviced B-47s bombing Korea. I think my depiction was a little too eerily accurate for my teachers and...truthfully I laugh now to think that it was a rather mature Hunter S. Thompsonesque rant that I might well be willing to publish under my own name even at the present...

I've wondered how the obsession with machines fits in. Clearly I'm not the only kid to be fascinated by trains, though curiously I had less interest in the ones with eyes that talked to you and more interest in the ones that behaved like real trains and did not engage in snappy repartee.

I tend to think that machines were simple and predictable and "safe" and that human beings were unpredictable. I didn't like stories with people in them, and I remember insistently re-writing the ending of one of those "Little Mouse gets lost but comes home" books to include a rather dark physcial comedy ending borrowed from re-runs of I Love Lucy. Even at the time, I had an issue with "Saccharine." I had a violent streak. The poor mouse might have fared worse if I didn't already have a keen sense of how far my mother would actually tolerate my diverging into violent fantasies.

In 1973 ITV in Britain aired World at War a powerful documentary summarizing the Second World War. I was fascinated by it. It must have come to the U.S. in 1974 or 75, so I was eight or nine (I was born late in the year). The "Genocide" episode gripped me fantastically but, not the way that it probably should have. I was never anti-Semitic, and never really had any basis for any sort of racism. My grandfather was mildly racist and I gave him grief about it in ways that are amusing to me now. I'd been told that being born white or black was just a random chance and I remember asking "but what if I had been black" which must have conjured context for him which I was oblivious to.

At any rate, Genocide showed organized executions in concentration camps. Needless to say power of life and death on that precise, organized, scale was fascinating to me. I obviously already knew something of it, but the sheer level of mechanical objectification and cruelty was thrilling. Mass execution, fit into my personal mythological world and stripped of its racism...became a valuable staple in my own fantasies and play.

Night Fantasies

At some point during this period, I began coming up with elaborate torture fantasies that would probably do justice on Fetlife today. The interesting thing about the fantasies is that they were psychosexual in nature, and that I edged towards Dominance in them. I knew that it would make me a bad person if I actually was a torturer. So I concocted scenarios by which I was captured and forced to watch my "buddies" being tortured in an attempt to get me to talk. Genital mutilation figured heavily in these tortures. I impressed my captors by watching dispassionately and without emotion, thus proving my strength, while even having drinks and refreshments. I would watch as much as they chose to dish out.

The erotic nature of these fantasies can't be underestimated. It is also the case that I knew they were "bad." I never talked about them, but from no later (and probably earlier) than age 8 on I never fell asleep without fantasizing about death and torture. These early fantasies were homoerotic (I simply didn't know anything about girls), but I quickly made the transition to heterosexual torture porn when I learned about sex. Sometime before I was 11 I also transited to being the "actor" in these fantasies, and engaged on a wild period of acting out in my own play. Fired by "Genocide" I began to take the lead role as torturer and executioner, though always for "the good of the state."

The separation of my fantasies into "good" and "ugly" came early. I had a set of toy animals that I loved and played only "good games" with. No violence or death was allowed to intrude onto those fantasies. Looking back, I am sure that was somewhat because of the pressure of my parents to play "acceptable" games, rather than ones about the things I learned at school. But it also met my emotional need to feel that there was a place, a part of my psyche that was protected from violence and mayhem. I knew that I was excited by the idea of making people die on meat-hooks, but I also did not want those violent images penetrating to my family and the core of things that made me feel secure.

I've mentioned I very seldom had playmates until 5th and 6th grade. There was a rare set of visits, probably in 2nd and 3rd grade with a local boy who attended the public school, but lived nearby enough that we could potentially live together. He was...by my standards...crass and aggressive, and I don't think I really liked him. We set up to play "army men" and I conceived of a game of skill and strategy. We would each set our men up and then throw blocks to knock them down...taking turns and concentrating. This seemed fun. His interpretation of this was to go into a spastic block throwing fit, using huge pieces and simply throwing them with enough force to take out great swathes of my troops.

I was...mortified to be losing a game I had played many times with myself and thought I should be good at...I felt a sharp sadness and sense of loss and I can now identify a panic attack. I knew that if one was being invaded and one had lost most of one's soldiers one called up civilians to form a Home Guard...I had read extensively about the Battle of Britain at that tender age. Reluctantly I lined up my toy animals who I conceived of as the "citizens" of my room, and was horrified to see them mowed down too. I don't know quite what I expected. Perhaps some idea that he would grasp the nobility of my gesture and acquiescently go down in sudden and unlikely defeat.

I felt tremendously guilty, though even at that age I had enough awareness to make the conscious decision to edit the event out of "continuity" for my play reality, and regard it a fluke brought about by a bad influence. I learned several valuable things from that battle. I learned of the emotional pain of allowing my dark fantasies to mingle with the things and people I loved. I also learned that my understanding the story did not make other children understand it...I could not communicate the grand game I wanted to play. I already realized to some extent that if the game was to be a tragedy, I must accept that I would take the tragic role, because other children lacked the comperhension to appreciate it.

In a noteworthy aside, that friendship resulted in the one homoerotic encounter of my youth...a childish challenge to "show each other our butts." I did...rather reluctantly...and did not find it particularly interesting to see his. Unless I dramatically misremember my reactions, I think they were more anxious than aroused, though they may have served to put a later patina of anxiety on any sexual encounter. Being a good child I dutifully reported this to my parents, and I never saw that playmate again.

Public School

As the economic woes of the early 1970s took their toll, one major decision was to take me out of Private School. Fairfax County had one of the best public school systems in the country and it began to seem ridiculous to be paying twice for my education. Certainly I know that tuition was a big strain on the family.

So with Fourth Grade I entered the bland grey world of Public School.

For all my seeing systems, I didn't question the move, and it probably didn't hit me as hard as a lot of other kids. Each new Grade in Private school had been a crap-shoot...some old faces, some new. Military kids moved a lot, as did Diplomatic kids. Since I had no "out of school" friends, I was used to luck of the draw every fall.

Even so, I think public school must have been a terrible and depressing shock to me. I could not make friends. I had trouble engaging the kids in my Private school at my intellectual level. The kids in public school were not military brats, and I had spent four years learning to fit into a highly military-conscious environment. They didn't care about tanks and guns and planes. Their parents weren't military, the war was largely over and they cared about football and sports.

In private school sports was my one great competitor for entertainment. But it wasn't that big a deal. I tolerated it and it drew some attention away from me as an entertainer-leader. It gave me so quiet time.

In public school I was like Jake and Elwood in the Blues Brothers, called to perform at Bob's Country Bunker, where they have "both kinds of music...Country and Western."

I did not know how to make friends with people I couldn't connect with, and I could not connect with most of the people in my class. I had not learned to socialize with people, I had learned to socialize with Military-Diplomatic brats.

I think it is hard to realize...and I don't think I realized at the time, just how crushing and depressing that change was for me. I also ran into serious math classes for the first time, and my math deficiencies became crushing in a world where lack of teachers meant a 60 student math-class, with 20 minutes per grade of instruction, and 200+ long division problems for homework. I know now that I am mildly dyslexic in regards to numbers, but...at the time I was simply dumb. My schoolteacher-grandmother arrived to help frog-march me through the horrific piles of homework that were an excuse for lack of teacher focus, and I know that I became deeply depressed, which for me meant retreat into fantasy.

At this point in my life I also developed a mild stutter. I say developed simply because in Public School I suddenly became "the stutter machine" and I'd never had anyone make fun of it in private school. Oddly it did not occur to me that I'd developed a stutter, but it certainly must have become much worse. I never entirely got rid of it, but learned through Dorothy Sayers and Masterpiece Theatre that upper class British men affected a stutter, and made it vaugely charming by aping their manners.

In public school, my "social group" consisted of outcasts, misfits and the few other intellectual kids who could think or talk on my level. I did not know how to "play down" to an audience, and it would be a while before I learned. I had one or two friends, and eventually a few more in my neighborhood.

Fantasy Games

The games of Second and Third grade were just the start of long-running threads that ran through my imagination. I created "fantasy worlds" by which I mean that they did not exist, not that they were populated by sorcerers or dragons. I came to that sort of imagery rather late, mostly through reading Tolkien's Lord of the Rings in my Freshman Year in Junior High. I was fascinated and it added a set of fixations which made up the core of late influences on my fantasy life. Other strong references were Lucas' Star Wars and...hilariously...Edgar Rice Burroughs classic "John Carter of Mars" series...beloved of gay Leathermen, penned in stilted Victorian prose and introduced by a gay friend of my father's. I fortunately avoided the "Gor" series until I was too old for that sort of thing. In my senior year in High School I largely stopped reading science fiction and fantasy, and with a few exceptions such as Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and Samuel R. Delaney, have never returned to it, preferring the likes of Hemingway and Henry Miller. Restored somewhat to power from my exile I "woke up" to the real world in 1982, and had mixed emotions about the fantasy world where I spent my lengthy exile.

Stories of the Fall

In retrospect, it is clear to me that I was intensely depressed and in some degree of emotional pain. But I was a fighter and a resilient kid, and I honestly did not understand that at the time. I expressed myself through play and fantasy, and even acting out at my parents, but I never said "I am unhappy." That would be an admission of failure. Instead my fantasies were destructive or self-destructive, vivid, and all-encompassing.

I was very acutely aware of my fall. I had always had fantasies that revolved around rising to a position of great leadership and being assassinated. Assassination was a common story in my childhood, and a fascinating themes in the books I read. It was also freedom from guilt. In my childish brain I knew I was smart, and figured that I would somehow learn to run an Empire. But I was also on some level aware I lacked those skills. Assassination was a way out. It may also have been the result of my place on the Man/Superman scale.

My soft-spoken father was a man of moderated success. While I am sure some of the military boys and diplomats learned at their father's knee not to compromise and to never accept defeat, my own internal "parent" became a mix of my own father and theirs. The shadow of their parents through my peers taught me the value of glory and never backing down. The shadow of my own father taught me about loss, compromise, failure, and holding on to what you have. The sad music he came to favor and would occasionally play...Country, Bluegrass and folk featuring lost and broken men taught me that failure was an acceptable end. One of my favorite songs was "The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down" which was about a train but teaches us...

"In the winter of 65...we were hungry just barely alive...I took a train to Richmond that fell...it's a time that I remember Oh so well....like my father before me, I'm a working man...and like my brother before me...I took a Rebel stand...he was just 18 proud and brave...when a Yankee laid him in his grave...I swear by the mud below my feet...you can't raise no Cain back up once he's in defeat..."

Those ideas seeped into my subconscious...even in Public School I had fantasies that bordered on the tragic because that presented an escape from being Superman. I had an odd split vision of myself. In some ways smarter than the Supermen I was schooled with, but in the end perhaps inferior to them. I can see now where this came from.

For at least a year or more after my exile from Public School, I was obsessed with the history and details of the fictional Empire or State I had created there. It was a disappointment that nobody in Public School cared about it. One particularly significant fantasy was based on my reading of the actual Jules Verne novel 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea. I was captivated by Nemo...an exile who carries on a war against a greater power. I fantasized myself escaping from the ultimate fall of that Empire, carrying out the fight aboard my own version of the Nautilus...an impregnable ship built with the greatest technology that Empire had to offer. Undefeated, I would eventually choose to die alone, my crew gone...a combination of the end of the Disney Movie and Verne's little-known continuation of the Nemo Story in The Mysterious Islandwhere Nemo makes it clear he will open the sea-cocks of Nautilus and die before the Island is destroyed in a volcanic cataclysm. This is my first self-destructive fantasy, and may mark a transition from fantasies of failure through the actions of others (dragged down by assassination) to failure at my own hand (self sabotage).

I can see here the formation of a significant element of my "life script," to use terminology from Berne I've discussed earlier in this blog. "I will do great things, be admired by many, be dragged down by detractors, die, and then they will all miss me and admire me." Vain of course, but life scripts, even failed ones, tend to be.

I was taught that failure. I was the head of an Empire that Ruled the World (or at least the Second and Third Grade), and was reduced to being a failed non-entity at Math and a "stutter machine." It is a testament to my stubborness and tenacity that I retained even in my own head a sense of self-worth. It is not surprising that sense of self-worth was deeply marred by a sense of self-sabotage.

The World of Literature

The only positive of my move was access to a big library with books intended for sixth graders. And a dull librarian who actually didn't care if fourth grade kids checked out adultish books.

The library was in a liberal Northern Virginia County and had been poorly policed. It was littered with books that probably wouldn't past muster in today's more paranoiac environment. I was growing up in the last big wave before America became all about children. There was no McDonald's playland when I was a kid. No Ikea play area. If a store had any provisions for kids...and 95% didn't...it was a few dirty and worn toys in a box.

But this meant that I had access to books on Aztec Sacrifices, on the WWII Resistance and Nazi rule, and any SF from the golden age of jingoism which fell short of open descriptions of sex. The barrier was plain. Anything published before 1960 probably didn't mention sex and so was fine. This opened the door on 25 years of social experimentation...some liberatrian conservative, other more liberal, but all a huge very adult melting pot of ideas. I'd be stunned if they let kids read that stuff now. Science Fiction was fascinating to me, because it was experimental and dealt with people and thought. The stories were abstract backdrops for passion plays of morality. Some of them, many of them, were outmoded, churlish, and conservative, but others were frighteningly forward-reaching. Even at the time I understood they were dated...icons of a future that never was.

My first experience of a feeling of nostalgia was at age six. I know it was provoked by the nostalgic Bluegrass music my father had begun to favor.

In my personal fantasy life, I was also rapidly developing cynicism, genre, and irony as narrative tools. I was capable of enjoying a fantasy about things which I ethically rejected by placing them in a genre where they were appropriate (the past, a foreign state) , or even by framing my enjoyment of a cruel fantasy in a self-consciously ironic depiction of a dystopian present or future.

I never had any trouble separating the psychosexual elements from the politics. While I do think that as little kids we accepted ideas about dictatorship, and glorious leaders without much question, I rapidly came to reject rightist thought...if anything I thought more about it because it was so tied up in the literature of cruelty and murder that I found so fascinating. I rejected the ethics of history's butchers, while still getting off on their ability to torture, maim, and kill, without conscience.

My grandmother was an english teacher, and while a conservative Roosevelt-Democrat, she happened to keep a copy of the seminal dystopian novel 1984 on her bookshelf because it was required High School reading. I read it in late fourth grade. It seemed to be science fiction and I was very interested in science fiction.

I know I read it at that time, because I read it without understanding sex, and I puzzled that out on my own in fifth grade. I already knew some of the concept of sex, but I didn't "connect the dots" until later. I know even then that I recognized the "Truth" behind Orwell's depiction of hypocrisy, shallowness, betrayal and "Doublethink." While highly political, 1984 is a novel that explains how human beings behave hypocritically to survive. What I couldn't know at the time is that Orwell...the British Journalist Eric Blair, was writing from personal experience he describes better in Homage to Catalonia, which he gained while fighting as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War for an anti-Stalinist Communist faction which would eventually be destroyed in internecine conflict.

But...even without fully understanding Julia's motivations for another year, I understood 1984, and had panic attacks while reading it. And I understood that it was a novel where people behaved as they really did in life, not as they did in fairy stories. I could feel that difference.

A move to a different Public School brought a somewhat better fifth and sixth grade. My family moved and there were neighborhood kids. I had never had a local social group and I obsessed over the dynamics of it, worrying myself late into the night. By this time all pretense of "bedtime" had gone by the wayside, and I routinely read until 1 or 2 am, starting a lifelong career in sleep-deprivation.

Sex Ed

I learned about sex from the Random House Dictionary of the English Language. I knew vaguely about the word "sex" and in fifth grade, the girls got sex-education (because of menstruation) which the boys did not. I wouldn't get Sex-Ed until Freshman High School, by which time I was more familiar with the concept, if not the practice, than the teacher.

I systematically researched and learned this mystery. I'd already begun to masturbate in the shower, and I put the links together over a series of weeks. There was no internet, but dogged research in the dictionary...which featured "sexual intercourse" as a term, led through definitions of all the important physical bits, and slowly a picture emerged of how they worked. At the public library I was armed with enough information to seek out the correct books, and for about six months I glutted myself, first at the libraries then at bookstores, which sold racier and more detailed books. I was often given permission at the mall to wander to the bookstore on my own and this became my most valued research time. Within a year, I knew "all there was to know" not only about sex, but about a significant range of human perversions.

It says something that right alongside of that I was researching other "adult words" that had escaped my childish fantasy-relations. I remember tracing the exotic eastern mystery of hari-kiri (seppuku) and entering the fascinating world of ritualized suicide. The connection of violence and ritual was very powerful to me.

Junior High

If Grade School was miserable, and Junior High was worse. I had a few friends in my neighborhood, but when my one good friend moved away I was left alone again. By Junior High "the neighborhood kids" were the wrong ages or off on their own things and not hanging out.

In Junior High I was bullied a lot. Not physically. I got in two fights physically and gave a pretty good account of myself. But I was the loner kid, and I simply had nobody to associate with. None of my knowledges were of interest to anyone. I simply could not "catch on" in public school except with a few kids, because everything I was about was imaginative and intellectual, and that simply could not become popular no matter how hard I pushed. I was never again the "ringleader," and never again popular.

I can look back on this period now and see that I was deeply depressed and miserable, but still escaping into fantasy and refusing to admit defeat. I had a favorite mental fantasy during this period in which fell outside my standard ethos, in which I was actually an alien, spending time studying the world around me. I preferred grey, overcast days because they reminded me of home, where there was a solid cloudscape and never any direct sunlight. I think that the degree of alienation and depression implied in this speaks for itself. Grey days felt more comfortable to me. They matched my mood. I felt alien, with no-one around whom I could speak to. During this period the small group of "local kids" I had played with in our new neighborhood largely fell away, and I was truly isolated in the world.

After age 11, I became consistently more aware of my "double life." I had always known that some of the fantasies I shared with friends at school were not okay with my parents. But as I became more remote from the Private School, and my fantasies became more elaborate, I was aware that they simply "weren't okay."

My fantasies also became more personal, as genre allowed me to be a participant. I eventually created an entire mental fantasy ethos for sexual violence, a sort of cyberpunk post-holocaust future where a decaying empire supported sexual slavery and objectification of women. Acknowledging that the situation was unethical, but viewing the whole thing as a literary exercise, I could explore my darker fantasies to their extremes.

A few times I had clashed...been shamed by...my parents for violence or brutality. The last was probably when I was 10 or 12 and by that time I was simply aware that I should not engage them on these things...I was drawing away from them for most of my play and becoming inwardly focused and the degree to which violence and...later sexuality...figured in my fantasies and play was simply more reason to push them out. They considered me admirably self-entertaining. Many of my games were simply the games of children...though always with a rather sophisticated socio-political overtone. But as I stopped playing and spent more time writing and fantasizing, those fantasies became increasingly sexualized and dark.

The Curse of the Pre-Born

For someone who reads mostly non-fiction now, in my childhood I read a lot of Science-Fiction and Fantasy. Enough for a lifetime, I suppose. In my late teens I read Frank Herbert's classic Dune novels, and was attracted to the character of Alia who was "pre-born". In Herbert's Science-mythology the "pre-born," because of certain genetic experiments in breeding telepaths, become aware inside the womb and share all their mothers thoughts, thus forcing them to fully understand all adult concepts, including sexuality, before they are able to walk.

I saw that trait in myself..."too smart for my own good"

I had always understood things better than most of the people around me. I had always understood systems, ideas, consequences, chains of reaction, better than most others.

And it was an intensely frustrating experience. I felt a strong kinship with Herbert's "pre born," and I remember feeling a strong erotic attraction to Herbert's character of Alia and her self-destructive behavior.

My fear...my great anxiety in life, has always been to have ideas and understand, and not be able to make myself understood. To see and understand things clearly but not be able to do anything about them. Specifically either to be judged and shamed by those who do not understand "the whole picture" or to see others hurt because they cannot see what they need to do to keep themselves from harm.

I used to think I dreaded personal paralysis. Being a coward in a fight through freezing up. But experience tells me that's not the case. I've never been reluctant to fight, and I've usually done moderately well, at least fighting to a draw.

My anxiety is based around knowing and not being able to communicate. If I am having to fight, I feel I have "already lost" because I should have been able to avoid the fight by explaining myself. I am inclined to want good things and positive compromises, and a fight means I have been unable to convince people of those.

I note that one of the few simple drama tricks that still provokes an emotional response from me is a "revelation" scene where people are proved right or understand. To give an example of how simple I am in this regard, National Treasure is a movie I have only ever watched because somebody else had it on. I find the idea silly, a cheap rip off of equally unbelievable but better strung together conspiracy nonsense by Dan Brown. If you are going to write conspiracy nonsense, and you are not Umberto Eco, stay home. That said, the scene where Nick Cage proves to Diane Kruger's character that there really is secret writing on the back of the Declaration of Independence is emotionally effecting enough to me that I actually walked into a room to watch it. I'm a sap...

I'm now convinced that one of the things I love about Casablanca is the "Big reveal," where it becomes clear what Rick Blaine is doing.

Frustration

The core of my anxiety is the frustration of having learned how to lead and control, and then having that ripped away. In late High School kids began to "catch up," and it was also possible to move into subcultures that valued imagination. I was validated, and the validation felt good. It would be late High School before I was once again popular and a "ringleader" the controversial Editor and organizer of the Underground Newspaper.

What I did not realize is that a decade of gross insecurity and hard knocks had left me more fucked up inside than I understood or acknowledged. I already had the curse of knowledge, but the fall from grace and exile had...in retrospect...twisted me more than I realised.

I was sexually frustrated in High School and shortly thereafter, and a few fumbling sexual encounters with teens did little to ease that. They were short, and drowned in guilt or overreaction. An adventurous child, armed with a car that I could drive into the City, I found that I could pay for sex, with women who would be my sex object in return for money, and that was a simpler way to fulfill my sexual needs than begging, wheedling and playing games with teenaged girls, completing my confused sexual education, and bringing me to a none-too-secure adulthood.

A Summary of Issues

My anxiety is the fear that I will not be able to communicate well enough to maintain control, and thus will lose control. I've had poignant reminders of that as partners who were deeply emotionally damaged rejected my logical and even emotional attempts to bring them stability and help them, and flailed away from me. I saw them react in fear and hurt to things they didn't need to fear from me. Fear of being controlled or shaped in a way they didn't want. I have learned to take that in stride, go back, and shape my communications better, more respectfully, and to listen better to their needs.

I now know that the years from about 9-12 are the time during which you form the core of your adult personality. Where you form your Sexual personality and determine how you will relate to the outside world. During those years, my chief emotion was frustration at exile and being unable to achieve control because nobody could understand or appreciate what I was talking about...I fell...very far and hard...

The stutter was a key in understanding. That's evidence that I was being affected on a deep emotional level by the change. And it happened very quickly. I felt completely hamstrung. I was an English speaking man in the land where they spoke "What!"

My adult personality has been about compensating...and ensuring that fall will never happen again. I learned public speaking with an unholy zeal. I was good at it. The off the cuff kinds more than the memorized kinds. Former stutterer or not, I took my state in Extemporaneous speaking. I learned to play an audience.

My sexuality also became an expression of that. I've sought intelligent partners who could understand what I was talking about and who were willing to accept some of the things I said as true and accept guidance.

This is not an adequate forum to enter into all the adult ramifications of this, but I can summarize a few:

I am shocked by the lack of violence in others. I was exposed to details of Southeast Asian torture at 6, Genocide before I was 10. In an environment where those things were seen as "exciting," just as other small boys might find car-crashes or wild tigers attacking people "exciting." In some ways I'm not as cruel as I seem, because I don't find the most brutal forms of human torture "alien" or "unfamiliar." It is always shocking to me to be reminded that others may find it adventurous and frighting to merely think of stabbing people, or drilling holes in them, or other basic physical violence that formed the core of my 6-8 year old fantasies. I find those graphic depictions hidden in the heads of many traumatized girls, but they truly fear themselves for letting them out, and are shamed by them. I have to remember my shame as my mother came upon me unawares in a bookstore, reading a very adult book, and I ran away to be in another aisle to remember how they must feel now, as adults. To me, it is not a matter of starting with the shocking concept that humans might spank each other and working up over years of kink to the idea they might put hooks through their bodies, or impale each other. It is starting with impalment, torture in extremis, and epic violence, and watering that down to an acceptable and survivable level. To that end I tend to be drawn to sharp, extreme, brutal types of play.

I am a realist who seems cynical. I can usually see very clearly how someone's motivations tie back to their basic Maslowian heirarchy of needs. I don't consider myself a cynic, because I see this as inevitable and true of everyone and so I don't tend to fault people for it. Unless a human being is taught new behaviors you cannot slight them for default behaviors, and few of us are taught behaviors in any meaningful way.
I am frustrated by self-deceptive people. Most of us have learned to camoflague our basic motives in ideals or a smokescreen of nobility. I feel this acts against the art of finding a good compromise between "what is good for me" and "what is good for you." It makes enlightened self-interest a sin, and a matter for concealment. If someone insists that they act only for selfless motives...not even acknowledging that selflessness has an emotional payoff for them in terms of moral happiness...it is hard to negotiate with them.

I am burned out on politics. Politics is mostly the art of catering to people's needs to be lied to about their actual motivations and reasons for actions. I may have my personal frustrations, but I feel no need to inflict them on 400 million other Americans. People complain that politics is all lies, and then ask to be lied to, because of course they are noble and want only what is good...not the emotional satisfaction of being right while their neighbor is wrong. They want politicians to work difficult jobs that involve endless frustration and huge risk taking, then have personalities that are not consistent with people who are control-freaks or gamblers. They want pragmatic laws, but want their leaders to be selfless crusaders who want only what is good and do not think of their own position. They expect men (and women) to work for positions of power in society for little monetary reward, then condemn them for accepting easy sexual conquests as a benefit of the power they have gained as if primates sought leadership for any reason other than survival and reproduction. It does not surprise me that many educated people tend to get their politics from sources like Jon Stewart or The Onion which address the degree to which politics of every stripe is about people forcing their leaders to lie to them by tantraumatically refusing to accept truths that are not sugar coated.

There is a vein of poison in me that comes out in humiliation play and certain other types of brutal play. In Lucas' Star Wars epic (let's forget about the later movies) we see the classic depiction of Darth Vader as a villian who is "evil" but started by wanting good, and being willing to cut corners and do whatever it took to accomplish that. We don't know what happened in his past (and the reveal is a disappointment) but we know he endured bitterness and frustration and that it darkened his soul to the point where he may accomplish some good, but has become villanous.

As a pragmatist, I believe in balancing acts, and I actually have a good bit of sympathy for the Empire. Even seeing the movies as a child, the Empire seemed pretty competent to me, and it very much fit the image of the imaginary Empire of my second and third grade fantasy games. Obvioulsly I don't objectively advocate Imperialism or single-party rule. I'm a staunch Democrat and favor Moderate European Socialism. But emotionally, and within my personal life, I embrace the part of me that is dark, and recognize that it does mar all my works with a little bit of poison. The bitterness of my exile cannot be totally offset, and no matter how I try to justify it, some of my cruelty simply goes to feed the need created by that long and bitter fall.

I remember reading Milton in Junior High and being captivated by the fall of Satan. He rebels against God the father, and with a Third of the Angels in Heaven, Lucifer is actually winning, not losing the conflict. It is only when God pulls the trump card and sends his Son in the Chariot of fire that Lucifer is put down. Lucifer loses to a sort of unfair cosmic Hiroshima, God having to pull out the big guns and make the playing field uneven to slant it for his fall to Hell. And in Hell, lying fallen and blasted, he rises to build up a new Kingdom...making the best of what he has rather than begging forgiveness.

I am not entirely good. My resentment, my frustrations, poison me. I seek channels and outlets for them. Constructive ways to release my need to hurt. The more aware I am of these needs, the more likely it is that I will be able to accomplish good. The alternative is to simply give up, and I see no benefit in that, for me or anyone else.

Socially I am careful and isolate myself, dealing only with a small "inner circle" of people in my private persona, and having a public persona as an entertainer that I present to the world. This minimizes my frustrations, by not pushing me constantly into situations where I clash with people who undestand things less well than I do, and where I must either feel I should explain myself endlessly, or walk away frustrated. I tend to be willing to get to know someone only after I've established that they have a high enough level of comprehension to "get it."

I never saw myself as a victim, but my personal mythology and memory of the fantasies in my head tells me I felt victimized. This shifted an already skewed life-script towards self-destruction

I recognize that it's socially awful to argue with people all the time and I don't enjoy being constantly frustrated even if I don't feel the anxiety about it I did in fourth grade. So I structure most of my social situations to minimize the amount of unstructured interaction I have with people who frustrate me.

I'm particularly cautious with Men. They have the most capacity to fuck me over if they fail to understand me and act aggressively both because...unfairly and statistically they tend to be the resource leaders in a community and because, again unfairly they tend to be the least cautiously belligerent. Men are more likely to adopt an "aggressive-aggressive" tack with other men that allows little room for options other than an all out fight or an abject surrender. Statistically fewer women behave like Defensive Tackles.

With women, I can see strong patterns in the women I have been willing to relate to, or on a higher level, to undertake training:

a) They are intelligent

b) Their intelligence embraces "common sense" as much as book smarts, or they have a strong desire to learn "common sense," even if they feel they don't have any.

In terms of training it's obvious that a lot of what I get out of it is an emotional release. Since fourth grade a part of me has been saying "If I could just tie them to a chair and make them understand...beat them if necessary...in the end it would be good for them." In D/s training I actually get to do that though to be fair, it has been rare that a girl I have been willing to train has needed that level of aggression. That said, it is definitely a satisfying feeling and is much of what I get, emotionally, out of training. The feeling that I am actually able to shape and mold someone by communicating because they are open to it and not set on frustrating me.

That leads to perhaps the most important quality:

c) Self aware. The moment I see someone is wrapped up in self-deception, I tend to step away from them. I want to work with people who have already conceeded that there is wood beneath the paint and are willing to work with me on the hard job of stripping it off.

We are all self-deceptive. Even I am. To me self-awareness is being able to admit that and work to step past it, to get inside it and see what we are really about. If someone says "I am self deceptive" and I call them on an act of self deception, I expect a level of self-awarness that allows them...when they are not in the heat of argument...to say "yes I am." The realization doesn't need to be instant, but it needs to be sustainable.

It's perhaps odd that "Easily controlled" is not in the list. The truth is that I don't prize people who are easily controlled...I prize those who have the ability to understand at my level and the self-awareness to want to. I am strong and belligerent enough to push and enforce control if they can bring those qualities to the table.

The Struggle of Division - I still struggle with the desire to divide my world into "ugly" and "good." Much of my psychosexuality falls into the realm of "the bad and the ugly," and so there is a desire to spare people I love from it, and surround them only with my "good." The problem is that they are psychosexually aware too, and much of what draws them to me is the bad and the ugly.

BDSM has been the process of healing and remediating this rift for me. It did damage to my marriage, and has at various times damaged or distanced my D/s relationships. A reluctance to show cruelty and force to those who I love...to keep the "bad" games away from the "good," is still very strong. I overcome it more and more easily and frequently and see that as a path to a "wholeness" in a rift that began with the break between my father's past as the adult child of a failed alcoholic and that of my classmates as the children of driven men of politics and military accomplishment.

Life Script

I think that I have several overlapping life scripts, results of the different time periods of my youth.

From my father, I think I got "I will succeed, but moderately and not too much or they will notice me and I will get in trouble."

From the confluence of my father and the shadow of my peer's fathers and mothers during those formative years in public school I think I got "I will do great things, be admired by many, be dragged down by detractors, die, and then they will all miss me and admire me."

The result has been that I've been conservative, unwilling to take risks, and looked for areas of "safe" success...focusing on subcommunities that seemed not too intimidating. Fishponds that were of such a size they could be managed. There is a strand of self-sabotage in some of my actions, and also an impatience when greatness does not come quickly. Much of my adult learning has been to overcome that, but the emotional echoes remain.

Escape

I learned to be an exile and escape into my imagination. As an adult, even as I abandoned reading fantasy and science fiction, I have escaped into roleplay and fantasy in the real world. Over twenty years directing and producing Live Roleplay I lived out my fantasy to make the other children play the game right, experience it's true emotions, and learn from it. I also lived the frustrations of teaching them out to do so.

While I've never had the faintest interest in WOW or any of the other MMORPGs online, over the last seven years, I've found it easy to submerge a good amount of my time in Linden's Secondlife, where the creation of my childhood Empires is a possibility. I've come and gone, but the ability to present a strong personality in a sexually aware setting...an online environment that favors fetish and allows for extreme play...has been a strong magnet, and also a reasonable training and learning ground.

In the end I have no doubt that my interest in the M/s and D/s world is another form of escape, or at least playing out my fantasies of sexual control and support. On the other hand, it is a very real thing, and involves interaction with real people in a real world, so in many ways it represents an actual accomplishment of the things I want out of life.

Summary

I did not promise a short analysis, and even so I have delivered an incomplete one. I have some ideas of why I became a sexually sadistic Dominant, but not even this lenghthy set of observations constitutes a real "explanation." I hope in presenting it, and baring the details of my past, my psychosexual development, and my conflicts, I have put forward information that will be as helpful to others in understanding Dominance as the girls who have offered me their stories have been in my finding and understanding submission.

Craigslist Shutdown

2010-09-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

For folks who don't follow the news over the weekend, Craigslist has shut down it's "Adult Services" section. For people who don't understand what that means, Craigslist is the single largest advertising forum for independent prostitution in the U.S.

This negatively impacts some friends of mine who identify as sex-workers, and I think it's a significant blow to the sex-positive Community.

Rather than explain why myself, I'm going to crosspost an article by my friend Calico Lane from May of last year, when this first threatened, as I think her viewpoint is more cogent and knowledgeable than mine.

http://blog.misscalico.com/?p=848

PAC - 2 - The Master as Counselor/Therapist...

2010-08-09T15:36:00.000-07:00

The Master as Therapist

In an ideal world, every girl who was drawn to M/s for whatever reason would have a competent Master and a competent Therapist. If, not, let’s hope for one out of two.

A lot of people see “Therapy” as a sort of magical thing that no layman should dare attempt. There is a strong feeling in quarters of the psychological community that laymen with a popular understanding of theories like T/A are more dangerous than no help at all.

Certainly I can see some point to that. Most people aren’t capable of getting past their own defense mechanisms and when rudimentary knowledge of T/A becomes a way to demean a partner by saying “you’re childish” it’s unhelpful. The term “anal retentive” is deeply embedded in our culture now, but it comes from the bastardization of Freud’s teachings in the 1920s, when his personality theory became the talk of every dinner table and individuals were easily dismissed and written off by his models. But it has lost most of its meaning and does little to promote understanding or improvement in human behavior.

On the other hand, a lot of professional Therapists, Counselors, and even Psychiatrists suck. I think there’s a tendency to say “go get professional help,” just like “go open a bank account.” All Counselors are not equal and, unfortunately I have too many bad experiences on tap to deny that some are actively bad. I know some people personally who work as Counselors, some of them with advanced degrees. A few are really insightful, intelligent people who I have immense respect for. Some of them are on my list of people who seem totally incapable of managing their own relationships, let alone aiding others.

I’ve seen Psychology courses…there is nothing being taught there that makes a person who is incapable of ordering their own life capable of helping anyone else. In the end successful counseling is about intelligence, compassion, insight and inspiration. The textbooks have wonderful things to make people better at those, but they can’t make a dysfunctional person a functional therapist.

I used to assume Psychiatrists were better. But within the last year, I had to pull M. from a Psychiatrist, after the Psychiatrist repeatedly broke appointments, and had what I credibly believe was a blood sugar induced panic attack in front of my girl, where she made bizarre accusations, talked about a body-chemistry altering fad diet she was on, and in this erratic state, said that M's depression was "her own fault" if she did not agree to go on the same fad diet. Not being a nutritionist, and being clearly out in left field, I sent M to a different and much more successful Psychiatrist.

My point is that “get help” isn’t a magic wand. I have come to believe that kinky people are very unlikely to or cannot receive meaningful non-crisis psychological counseling from people who do not have at least a compassionate understanding of kink. The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom has some good thoughts on this.

But…in Maryland, I see only three listings for Kink Aware Counselors on the NCSF List.

I know there are other Counselors that are kink-aware and that have some idea of scope. But it’s not a guarantee. I’ve heard dozens of stories about being ranted at by Christian Counselors, being blamed, being vilified, or simply having a professional who cannot understand the underlying family and trauma issues that often occur in people who are profoundly drawn to an M/s or D/s lifestyle.

I’m not against Counseling, or recommending to any Master that they don’t encourage their slave or submissive to seek Counseling. And I think that even a bad Psychiatrist may be able to medicate effectively.

But…I think we have to be realistic and say it’s a mixed bag and not as easy as finding a Dry Cleaner, and that leaves the person who is on the spot holding the bag. For millennia, “counselors” were husbands, wives, friends, pastors, old men, community leaders, bartenders, or troubadors. Anyone who seemed to have more than average perspective and insight.

If you’re a lifestyle Master who has any sort of regular relationship that goes beyond “I see you once a week and beat you,” you are going to need to be a counselor to your submissive or slave. And…what’s better? To have some tools to do a good job and promote understanding, or not.

I feel that the “professionals only” approach to therapy is as if Home Depot were stocked with a special section for homeowners with only the cheap poorly made tools that are imported from developing nations. Because homeowners should not attempt repairs best left to contactors…even on their own house, so to discourage them, we’ll give them the crappiest possible tools, so that if they do try the job, they’ll probably fail.

We also need to consider that, realistically, D/s is about behavior modification, and behavior modification is a therapy. Burying our head in the sand and pretending it isn't to avert responsibility is hardly the mark of a good Master.

I support counseling by good Kink-Aware Counselors. But…you can get the tools to fix your own girl, and you may have no practical choice.

Using the PAC Model

I was reminded of PAC (and Transactional Analysis in general) again a couple of years ago when I picked up Dr. Bob Rubel’s “Protocols for the Female Slave” which contains an outline of PAC theory. Since then I’ve pursued it, though my girl M. has become more the household expert on it.

Berne (who if you remember invented PAC) did a very crass thing back in the late 60s and early 70s. He was one of the first Psychologists who started the trend that serious research Psychologists might actually write books about the human mind that could be understood by people who aren't Doctors. That was very offensive to the Psychological establishment, because it meant that people might actually try to fix themselves instead of depending on their therapists.

So Berne put some really excellent tools out. His work was very respectable, but at the point where he put it in plain English, he alienated a lot of the Community of the day. And unfortunately he also wrote books that now seem horribly dated for their hip language.

It's my belief that most Therapists intrinsically use PAC to some extent to understand personalities, but prefer to think of it as "revised Freudianism." Just like I refer to "slavery" as "power exchange" in front of a studio audience.

Two Paths to Discipline

I think there are two paths to discipline. One is to reinforce the Critical Parent. This means to replace everything “wrong” that is in the Critical Parent with “right” ideas, so that the natural course of action for the trainee is to carry out the desired new behaviors.

This is the method of R. Lee Ermey, the method of Basic Training. The object is not to understand better, but to replace certain drilled behaviors with others.

This is often the goal of D/s. “I am a bad person if I do not accept the abuse and sexual advances of my father” is replaced with “I am a bad person if I do not accept the abuse and sexual advances of my Master.” Who presumably is a person who abuses consensually and within measure.

A fixation on “Serving Master right or wrong” is often a replacement of more destructive urges (including self-destruction) in the Critical Parent. And because this is easy, it’s often the solution that would be female slaves deeply desire and petition for. To have their world shaped by one man.

In the short term this may be the least harmful approach. But I think that the goal of Masters who wish to build self-actualized slaves should be to go further.

It is my personal preference to diminish the role of the Critical Parent and the Rebellious Child, while strengthening the adult. This means

• Strengthening a sense of self worth
• Teaching good decision making processes
• Teaching coping skills
• Explaining the reason behind acts of obedience or service
• Encouraging curiosity and experimentation and providing a safe platform for it.

The PAC model provides three important elements to a D/s couple

a) A tool for understanding contradictory behaviors.

“Ellen desperately wants sex, but feels ashamed and guilty when she has it.”
(The child wants sexual stimulation, but the critical parent says only bad girls accept sexual attention)

“Pauline says she wants to be my slave and obey me, but often lashes out and refuses my orders.”
(Pauline is acting out on the PAC programming given to her by her father…the compliant child wants to seek father’s approval through being a good girl, but the rebellious child wants to lash out at father for abusing/hurting her…additionally the critical parent may chime in that good girls are not sexual slaves)

b) A tool for discussing failures without making each failure about the “bad” girl.

A fairly common structure in D/s is the “bad girl/understanding master.” The girl is a lifelong failure who always “fucks up” and her Master is a long-suffering good guy who punishes but forgives. What separates this from the same (very common) relationship in a non D/s context is the punishment. The Master delivers a punishment after which the girl is “forgiven” which subverts the accumulation of guilt. This can keep a girl with self-destructive/self-sabotaging behaviors on an even plateau, instead of a downward spiral.

By discussing behavioral problems in terms of Parent/Child, the girl can look at them without the guilt and begin to actively work to break the patterns. Understanding self-sabotage in terms of the Critical parent “you’ll never be good enough” and rebellion in terms of the Rebellious child “I hurt” allows discipline to become a joint struggle of the girl’s adult and Master’s adult against previous bad influences and education.

c) A way for the Master to admit fallibility without subverting the paradigm.

We presume that a Master is more mature than a submissive or slave, though…all of us have seen those rather sad situations where this is not the case. But typically the Master has an advantage in age or life-experience. (As always, I assume there is some crossover here in terms of female to male pairings, but it is outside of my experience to give informed advice).

All Masters fail. Despite jokes about “Master is never wrong” nobody undertakes a complex project without problems and setbacks, and training a girl is one of the most complex projects that there can be. PAC provides a model for explaining small to moderate failures without undercutting the authority of the Dominant in the relationship. “I may have been speaking more from my Parent than my Adult when I gave that order…upon reflection in my Adult I feel it is a poor idea and I am going to change or rescind it.”

Summary

PAC is an excellent tool for understanding and interpreting the contradictions in our behavior. By studying it, much “mystifying” human behavior becomes clear and where there is understanding there is the ability to create change.

The Inner Parent, Adult, and Child

2010-07-29T09:37:00.001-07:00

Every girl (in fact every human) is made up of three personality parts.
Most human frustration comes from the failure to understand that fact.

If you’ve ever said, thought or had somebody say of you:

“I can’t understand why I keep getting into relationships like that…”
“You’re crazy bitch”
Even (with apologies to Toad), “I can’t understand what I did last night…”

It was probably because you didn’t understand two very basic sets of facts about how the human mind works. In the next few weeks, we're going to explain them in plain, clear, language...

The first Fact - Parent Adult and Child

Not everyone wants to learn how to understand other people and themselves...

You can curse. You can say "girls are crazy" or "boys are stupid." But if you want to be a good Master (or a good person) you can stop, breathe, and understand about a half dozen facts that aren’t rocket science and will ring true.

Why doesn’t everybody talk about these things all the time. Well there are a lot of reasons. One is that despite living in an advertising driven economy, where knowing how people think is next to gold, our schools and even our peers are very reluctant to talk about what makes people think the way they do. I think there are two basic reasons for this:

a) We’d rather think it’s all someone else’s fault and we’re fine – goes double for aspiring Dominants
b) We fear that to know all is forgive all, and we don’t necessarily want to forgive all…(see a)

You can use a lot of models to understand why people think the way they do. I’m going to teach you the one that is most useful for general purpose, quick understandings of the darker and harder parts of the human personality. It may sound a little complex, but it’s all just simple stuff we all understand and I’m going to make it easy. Ten minutes of understanding these concepts will get you a long way.

If you find this interesting, my girl miranda did a very good writeup on PAC a while back that I strongly recommend.

A Little History about PAC

I'm admit always a little chagrined to haul out Eric Berne's Parent-Adult-Child Model of Personality, because as "Transactional Analysis," it's gotten quite a bit of shit in the past thirty years as being very hippyish and hokey..the late Warren Zevon enshrined the social mockery of T/A as faddish and upper class in his song “Gorilla You’re a Desperado.” Still, like many things that got overblown, it was popular because it made sense and there was some truth in it. The classic music of tomorrow is getting overplayed today.

I was introduced to Eric Berne’s theories many years ago by a friend who was working on a Master’s Degree in Psychology. I largely forgot the details, though it is clear that I assimilated them well enough to make them part of my own personal instinctual understanding and modeling of people.

Berne created a really practical tool that almost anyone can use to hold their personality up and see the shit that is hurting them in their life. I think you can take it too dogmatically, and there's been no end of push to de-popularize it and make it obscure again, but in the end, it's a good simple model for understanding what goes on in people's heads.

The Parent-Adult-Child Model

You may already be familiar with the basic model in Berne's work. It's not too dissimilar to Freud, just different enough that it makes more sense.

The Psyche has three parts:

The Child - everything we feel emotionally. All wants and needs. The only area where this gets weird is that "Child" is a generic term for the self-oriented part of the mind...the part that just wants. So sex is a Child function, because it ties in to hunger for touch, intimacy, stimulus. The Child has two parts

Rebellious Child - "I hate you all, I don't wanna"
Compliant Child - Service, wanting to please

The Parent - everything you've ever been taught to believe. The Parent is "wear your coat," and "nice girls don't do that." And if conflicting adults teach you conflicted things they all go in there. The parent isn't critical and doesn't sort things out. People get fucked up when one thing in their Parent conflicts with another. Bioparents, Guardians, Schoolteachers, Religious Figures, Television, and Older Siblings fill up the Parent. In a later post we're going to talk about what happens when the parent gets severely fucked up, such as ending up with a message that "pleasing men through sex is the only way to have any value whatsoever," or "nothing about sex is good, all sex is abuse."

The parent is responsible for the dangerous myth of a conscience, or that “still small voice” that tells us good from bad. That voice is not common to all humans, and it is why an Afghan may blow you up and a Korowai may eat you, and both sleep very soundly after the fact. Some things are pretty common to most people, so they happen to be in most people’s parent…”thou shalt not kill.” But they exist because they were put there by repetition, not because they are intrinsic to human beings.

The parent forms until about age 8, then from age 8-14, there is a “sealing off” process in which the Mind begins to become more rigid, and information cannot enter the parent as readily.
The Parent has two parts

Nurturing Parent - make sure to wear a raincoat...it's cold outside...
Critical Parent - how could you behave like that...good girls (boys) don't!

The Adult - The Adult is "You." The more you think in ways that aren't based either on kneejerk acceptance of what your parents/elders told you, or simple response to emotions "I wanna piece of cake," the stronger your parent...your "self" is.

Neither the parent nor child think analytically. One acts on basic instincts "I am horny," the other acts on things they have been told "only dirty girls feel horny." The adult gets to sort the mess out. Unfortunately the Adult is often overwhelmed. About half the people you see around you are going through life just listening to their Parents. A smaller minority never outgrow acting entirely from their child. Most end up a tug-of-war between the two, living in a war torn country being periodically ravaged by powers they don't understand.

PAC and Training

While there are a few people who are self-assured, know exactly what they want out of life, and know how to get it, who are drawn to D/s and M/s, the vast majority or not. Even the very strong willed candidate often talks about a lack of focus…they don’t know what they want to do with themselves. Others have a lack of self control that keeps them from getting the things they want an seek a Dominant knowing that they need “discipline.”

The typical 20ish female candidate is caught in a series of emotionally painful spirals between the desires of the Child (which have usually been repressed, overindulged, or both) and the lessons of the Critical Parent which carry all the neuroses and defense mechanisms of the Parents.

In past eras it is probable that the child was heavily repressed, giving us the “repressed” general sensibilities of the Victorian Era, and the dour faces of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, but most trainees you will encounter were not raised that way.

The culture of dour privation is rare. The child of a fucked up alcoholic may have been subjected to tremendous emotional repression through fear of rage or punishment, yet also have been given sporadic gifts, or left largely unsupervised to engage in childhood fantasy. Emotional abuse may have been “bought off” producing a child who is both spoiled, and scared.

I can only imagine that most male submissives who seek a Mistress must have similar core problems, though I will comment that our society gives more conflicted messages to young women than to young men, resulting in…in my opinion…a more fucked up parent.

Young Men are told pretty uniformly that they need to get jobs, be breadwinners, be good at sports and sex, get a good girl, and reproduce. Young Women are told that they need to be astronauts and achievers, but are also still presented with a lot of role models and fiction that suggest they exist to make babies and be a helpmate. The existence of a transition culture is probably beneficial to the human endeavor, but means that modern young girls find themselves at the center of a storm of conflicting demands.

Next we’ll discuss some specific paths to applying PAC to Training, and the situations one is likely to find…

Inside the Barn...

2010-07-16T15:19:00.001-07:00

The last few weeks have been busy, filled with good people and learning new things, and included some real high points for me. I don't normally share contemporary events, but my most recent adventure deserved an entry.

We were lucky enough to be invited by Sister Dee to the site in up in N___________, where she, PD, and others make video.

If you're not familiar with these people, they're, in various combinations, a decent chunk of the history of modern fetish video.

When I was in my twenties, and early 30s, I never really liked porn that much, and I absolutely had no interest in fetish video. Oh sure...I watched a few videos. They looked nothing like real kink, they were posed, and looked exactly like a bunch of people who know nothing about kink trying to pretend that they did. They were an enormous turnoff.

But while I was sleeping, the industry was somewhat revolutionized, and PD's Insex was really the tremendous leader in that. Wikipedia, that repository of all things of importance, sums it up better than I can:

Insex was one of the biggest BDSM pornographic websites on the Internet and arguably the most extreme American pornographic production featuring female submissives. It was also a leading innovator in both live video streaming, pioneering the concept before broadband Internet access existed, and in the depiction of BDSM practices on the Internet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insex

To me, this generation of work brough a psychological and "real" element to the videos that I had never seen in lame 1990s porn. It was fascinating and gripping even if I did blunder onto it a little late because I was convinced that "most kink porn sucks." PD is a former Professor, and speaks intelligently and coherently on the subject. Watching him talk through a former shoot where he worked with a young Princess Donna, you could see both his love for the art, the extreme intelligence he brought to that work, and...a strong sense of proportion and realism about the content.

I should add that other than the graciousness that any guest owes a kind and generous host, I have no connection financial or otherwise to the sites that currently host these talented people and their work, including Infernal-Resstraints http://www.infernalrestraints.com/
http://www.hardtied.com/ and http://www.topgrl.com/ which I've mentioned here before. But their work is good and legitimate and my recommendation is genuine.

At any rate, it was a fun vacation adventure. We took the whole household along, and the chance
to play on some high end toys, as well as enjoy good food and good company was a huge amount of fun.

Daniel, who handles a lot of the technical work, was present with his two wonderful girls, but was also kind enough along with Dee to prep two various pieces of equipment which exceeded our level of complexity. The first was the iron mummy case, which is lowered into a dark hole in the floor. It is...utterly immobilizing, though I can say hauling it up and down by the chain was...a workout. We dropped Jenn into a the dark, and left her there for a while, hanging immobile.

S_____ got to try out a new fucking machine, a one-off by a guy who works or worked for NASA and cost about 5k. It had a magnetic drive, with a set of toggles which could alter the waveform of the stroke to change the effect. At maximum power it shook the floor of the barn for a good number of feet in every direction. Definitely far more creative than your standard Sybian.

miranda was tied up thoroughly by jenn and other friends and placed on an inversion table. Dee told us afterwards we'd taken its cherry...unpainted, it had never been used in a shoot before. It worked pretty well aside from the fact that having been manufactured back in the dark ages, it had no stop after it ran out of gear teeth, and had a tendency to flip the person on it nearly vertical if you missed the last tooth. That said, it was certainly a sturdy affair and miranda was quite blissed out.

Our other big adventure was the water tank. You may recognize this rather elaborate piece of scenery made by metalsmith KGB from the videos. PD was kind enough to allow us to fill it, and let me drown jenn in it. Well, perhaps drown is a bit too strong a word. The water was cold (apparently if the whole thing is filled with warm water it tends to blow out fuses on the water heater), so miranda lashed jenn to a heavy iron grate and sank her in water over her head. She wasn't kept down for too long (we were given some safety suggestions), but...there is something to be said for lowering a human being into water over their head attached to a massive iron object. Later one of the other guests was immersed in what was probably a more practical way, but for sheer gothic elegance I think I preferred our experiment.

There were other guests of course and we saw some very impressive play but...those aren't my stories to tell. I was appreciative of K_______ who put his pretty girl O______ into the hole, an allowed us to use her as a public urinal before dinner. At the risk of a slight misquote of PD "it's pretty perverse to buy a half million dollar farm just so you can dig a hole in the ground, put a girl in it and piss on her."

Of guests whose names are public enough to bear mention, we were fortunate to have 412, and Marina. Marina had come up early for a shoot that is already posted and took place over the next couple of days. http://www.hardtied.com/updates.php? (search down for July July 7, 2010)

I was stunned by the real variety of sinister devices and bits of previous sinister devices. In a way, I think I am permanetly ruined. I never understood quite what it would be like to be a child and get a ticket to Willy Wonka's factory, but I think I have a better appreciation of it now. Of course given Roald Dahl's "My Uncle Oswald" stories, he might have preferred my weekend to a chocolate factory. Still, returning to real-life, where there are not naked girls bolted in cages above the doors, has never been more difficult.

It was an impressive event, as much for the caliber of conversation and the ideas thrown out by the other people present as what I did. It was a learning experience for me, and an honor to be surrounded by people who were so knowledgeable and talented...both the residents, and our fellow guests. Everyone in my household did a tremendous job and pushed personal limits and speaking as someone not easily impressed it was a truly impressive experience.

a few more photos...now I want to redo my backyard...

In front of the big tank

Cages in the back of the barn

The big tank mostly full

The hole

Back of the barn - general

Clever mounting for a gag...

Call for Submissions - Humiliation Anthology

2010-07-02T12:22:00.001-07:00

I've posted this to Fet and several other places. Please circulate it as far and wide as you please, I'd appreciate any signal boost, or link back here.

I Want You To Make me Feel Like Shit: Girls and Humiliation

Initial deadline for submissions January 17, 2011

We are looking for intelligent and reflective fiction and nonfiction writing about humiliation play involving women, with an emphasis on experiences in the 18-35 age range. Our focus is on straight gender, but we will considersubmissions from anyone presenting as female.

Our stated goal is to develop a collection of work on Humiliation that is accessible to anyone seeking to understand Humiliation needs, whether because they experience these needs themselves or because they have encountered someone who expresses these needs and they seek context for understanding. We are not primarily looking to write a guide to play, but a guide to understanding the needs or urges underlying play. This is intended to be a look at the needs and the psychology underlying them, which provides validation to individuals who have similar needs. We want to avoid painting a "happy rosy picture" and present a realistic view that readers can relate to.

It is our hope to create a work which makes Humiliation a better understood and more accessible kink, while allowing those who crave humiliation to understand it better, and feel less alone and "unacceptable."

Categories:

Stories

Humiliation fantasies or real-life humiliation experiences of women 18-35. Please specify if the submission is real-life experience, semi-fictional, or fictional. There is a strong preference for female authors - the focus is women writing about their own experiences.
Micro Length - Experiences (100 words or less)
Flash Length (100-1000 words)
Short Story Length - short stories (1,000 - 7,500 words) - Please include a short author's biography of 500 words or less with a focus on your interest and background in humiliation.

Essays

Nonfiction Essays (2,000 - 12,000 words) - from male or female, Dominant or Submissive authors presenting viewpoints and analysis on the psychology of Humiliation play. We are not looking primarily for "how to" Essays, or details of scenes that worked well, but for essays that investigate the mindset of young women who express a "need" for humiliation play, including personality models and analysis and discussion or breakdown of types of humiliation play

Submissions:

James Gordon
email: james@gordonsdrysin.com
MS-Word or RTF files
No submissions by mail

Deadline:

Deadline is January 17, 2011

Payment:

for work accepted on or after January 17, 2011:
We pay $2.00 for selected micro-fiction and $5.00 for selected Flash Fiction
.5 cents per word or two author copies for fiction and 1 cent per word or four author copies for Essays up to the stated length.
We will negotiate for work of merit which has previously been published online

Publication:

Will be handled privately or through an existing small press.

The Principles of Hypnosis - Ethics Cautions, and Opportunities - Part IV

2010-06-27T09:37:00.001-07:00

Ethics Cautions, and Opportunities

Now that we've discussed the "how" of Hypnosis, let's discuss the realities and their ramifications.

We're talking about fucking around with what is in someone's subconscious. Changing the programming that was solidified between ages 8-14, and designed to be difficult to change. Isn't that bad? Shouldn't we leave that alone?

Physical Play is Okay...but Don't Change anyone

Obviously there is some stigma and fear associated with "mind control" and "hypnosis" in the kink world. It is the same as the stigma associated with breath control, blood, or any other "extreme" kink. To the player whose total experience is to be flogged and get an endorphin high, this doesn't seem like a healthy part of play.

A few years ago, the players who wanted a little light flogging and were aghast at anything that was not the "standard scene" seemed to be a strong majority. This was the time period when M/s practitioners feared marginalization or exclusion by the rest of the kink community.

Now of course that's changing. M/s is increasingly common and is seen as a healthy lifestyle extension of scene power dynamics, not some freakish thing for people who read too much fiction.

The YKINOK (Your Kink is Not Okay) crowd has slowly lost its voice since the turn of the century and while I am sure there are places it remains strong, in the major national and international forums where kink is discussed, there is broad acceptance of individual choice.

I read a story recently on Literotica which in many ways frightened me, not the least because I think ten years ago I might have found it interesting. It depicted a girl who was obsessed with dark sexuality and self destruction, who came to an "enlightened" Master. Her enlightened Master manged to completely "change" her personality.

Being an "enlightened" sort of course he didn't do much in the way of what we would identify as effective mind control. He alternated fairly conventional punishments (which he clearly enjoyed and considered superior to her kink because they were "less dangerous," humiliation and bathroom control (which he apparently just thought was hot), and talking nice. At the end of a few months, with a hard scene, voila her personality changed and remained okay forever after. The author makes sure to flash forward and tell himself this as if...possibly...he is reassuring himself.

I wonder how many Dominants have started down that primrose path with a girl who wanted help, and simply not been able to understand why, somewhere in the middle, it took a detour into a lack of control and a lack of ability to cause change that they could not fully understand.

The 800lb Gorilla ¹

(1) Do not change weight of gorilla in phrase, “800-lb gorilla in the room.” Correct weight is 800 lbs. DO NOT CHANGE GORILLA'S WEIGHT! - Fake AP Stylebook, 2009

I think with hypnosis and kink we need to look at the 800lb Gorilla in the room, which is nonconsent.

The underpinning of both SSC and RACK is "consent." And purists who like black and white lines and hate grey like to enshrine that word and...get very upset when anything blurs a clean definition.

Which..."mind control" does. What if someone can freely give consent. But...they have been influenced so heavily that the consent that they give is to something they would not have consented to before the influence?

There is the ugly spectre of Svengali turning Trilby into a robot-autonomaton, who may give consent to things she ought not - If your girl didn't like sucking cock before, and she now goes down on you like a French whore at every chance, because you changed her mind so that she wants to. Is the act consensual?

At the heart of this issued lies the stark concern that a Dominant can use hypnosis to

a) Make a bad or neglectful relationship seem good, so that a submissive stays when they should leave
b) Make unreasonable levels of control or cruelty seem reasonable
c) Erode the willpower of the submissive and increase their own control, creating an abusive situation.

I think we need to be honest and recognize that when relationships in the community go bad "abuser" is one of the first and most frequently hurled epithets. Often because there are elements of truth in it. Much of WIITWD is consenting to give or receive treatment that in the vanilla world is considered abusive. Vanilla people don't have to answer the question "well sure he pissed in your mouth, but was that abusive or just play?"

So the question can be made simpler. In BDSM we use many techniques and toys to coerce behavior. We use cuffs to keep someone from moving away when we hit them. We use hoods to take away their sight and make them suggestible, disorienting them. We already fuck with people's heads in an extreme fashion.

Is Hypnosis an "atom bomb" a technique so powerful that it must be given some sort of special status, and kept off limits. A weapon so serious that civilized states won't consider its use even when they will drop 10,000 lbs of ordnance that flatten buildings and incinerate civilians? Is it "special."

In regards to Training and Hypnosis, I'm going discuss this on three axis.

1) Universality

Hypnosis is nothing special. All of us use suggestibility all the time to influence human behaviors. Churches, Schools, Radio Advertisers and other institutions use hypnotic modalities that are aimed at bypassing Critical Area of the Mind in order to put information into Modern Memory. Hypnosis is, if anything, more controlled and honest.

It should be readily apparent by now that the vast majority of BDSM scenes involve some level of hypnosis. Impact play scenes may especially tend to introduce a hypnotic modality by overloading the mind with message units from the body.

There is a stigma attached to “doing it deliberately,” even if every Radio Advertiser and morning Drive-Time Jock is doing it deliberately and with full knowledge of the effect. Because it is not called “hypnosis” and they do not admit to playing with the subconscious mind.

Many individuals may find Control through Hypnosis unethical, even though their impact play scenes and whispered suggestions may be accomplishing precisely the same end, through precisely the same mental mechanisms.

2) Limitations

Hypnosis is a tool for making rapid changes to the subconscious mind. It is one of the few effective tools that really can break down inhibitions and prejudices. However...you can't change a person's basic beliefs and inclinations. You can modify, and sculpt...but your power to do this grows in direct proportion to their consensual involvement.

Hypnosis has somewhat of a fail-safe switch. Because few Hypnotists want to lose or abuse subjects there is surprisingly little research into what happens when a Hypnotist violates the boundaries and forces the Critical Area of the Mind to break state and “Safeword” by abreacting.

But in general, we think that the more than happens, the less responsive the subject is to that hypnotist. Just as, if you caused a bottom to “red” every five minutes, they might not wanna do another scene with you. Hypnotism is about the hypnotist and subject working together to open the Critical Area of the Mind. If that consent is withdrawn, then we don't get much effect.

There is not much anecdotal evidence on what happens if you have someone under your control and try to abusively force changes into their subconscious that they do not wish to accept. The reason for this is simple. We know about abreactions because ethical hypnotists occasionally hit "buried land mines" they didn't know about, and withdraw to discuss them. No ethical hypnotist has tried to force a subject to accept something that was strongly opposed to their basic will.

Hypnosis after initial induction is far more effective if it is discussed. There is the potential for implanting secret changes and post hypnotic suggestions, but...the more they are consciously understood the more effective they will be. It is also important to understand that the Critical Area of the Mind is not completely turned off. Our teaching indicates that the Subconscious will not accept a post hypnotic suggestion that is truly damaging or dangerous.

That said, I think it is somewhat "special." It provides a direct path to the subconscious and allows change to happen quickly and cleanly that might take months through standard pain/pleasure reward/penalty behavior modification techniques. It is the bullwhip of the world of mental BDSM...a toy that even the strongest person cannot easily resist. But like the bullwhip it is also capable of a great degree of subtlety and flexibility and is a tool with a great range of useful functions.

3) Goals

The question is, "what is our goal." The classic dyanmic is a partner who wants to be less inhibited about their kink, or to feel more controlled. And we already do things which influence their subconscious mind to make that happen. Our goal is not to subvert them or do things they do not want, but rather to work with them on a shared wish for change.

I think this is an area where we have to be realistic and realize that not every top is good, or unselfish, or foward-thinking, but play is going to occur anyway, and people for all their failings and foibles do move forward and live rewarding lives.

Not every goal is going to be high minded. The guy who wants his girl to suck cock more aggressively while she's indifferent to it isn't exactly seeking to improve her life and enrich her spiritually. He just wants to cum in her mouth more. On the other hand there is presumably

That said, it should be taken as seriously as any other Top/Bottom play. No responsible Top would lie to the bottom about basic safety information or do things to make them less happy and safe in their daily life.

The same rule applies to hypnosis. Because it is a powerful tool for modifying reactions and behavior, it is something that should not be taken lightly.

Some Suggested Guidelines

While hypnosis can be done as a partnership (pathworkings, self-hypnosis, shared visualization, and some methods of clinical hypnosis) in erotic hypnosis the hypnotists tends to assert Control over the subject…just as a Dominant must establish control over a submissive.

The issue of increasing psychological dependence is a difficult one. Much of D/s Training revolves around the dependence of the submissive on the Dominant, often taking the role of a surrogate parent, especially in cases where the trainee did not have a parent or did not have a competent or compassionate parent.

My suggestion is that Hypnosis cannot be used either to subvert that dynamic, nor to put it in place where it does not exist. If there is already a mutual agreement that it should exist, then Hypnosis may be a tool for strengthening it.

I think we need to recognize that it is a non-trivial tool...but it is a good one. You wouldn't use a bullwhip on someone without knowing what you were doing and using care. It is a tool that has the potential to leave lasting or permanent marks.

The ethical implication of Control-Oriented Hypnosis may be likened to a brand in the mind. Very few of us would casually tattoo our name onto someone, or brand them with our symbol.

I think that the degree of change applied through hypnosis should be commensurate with and mirror that within the relationship overall, and should be treated as a “permanent mark.” If it is change that is not directly instigated or requested by the submissive...or if the submissive has a tendency to make unwise requests...it is the role of the Dominant to be responsible and moderate what is done.

Benefits and Outcomes

Hypnosis is the ultimate and most powerful tool to end sleepless nights and tearful cycles of failure. How many times have we looked at a submissive who desperately wants to be okay with their sexuality, who desperately wants to move towards normalacy and be able to enjoy life and who cannot because of conflicts embedded deep in their subconscious which they can understand logically but cannot resolve emotionally. How many times do we hear "I hate myself" or descriptions of a pitched battle within the mind.

Whether the goal is to create an ability to cum in scene while under duress that has frustrated attempts at otherwise satisfying sceneplay, or to dig down and resolve and balance a deep conflict of shame that goes to the core of sexual persona, Hypnosis is one of the more powerful tools available.

It is not a panacea, and must be used as part of an overall approach to Dominance, though even in short sessions it can have substantial effects.

Let's consider some constructive uses:

Breaking Previous Control
Through guided visualization, it is possible to reduce or remove feelings of previous control that are undesirable. The techniques for this are a study unto themselves, however the root element lies in revisiting the past situation of control, and going through a visualization of systematic desensitization, where each time the control is felt less and less strongly.

The applications here should be obvious. How many players in the Community have some fixation...an early and abusive boyfriend, a parent, an abuser...whose control over their current behavior they would like to break forever?

Sexual Trauma and Healing
It is not up to me to suggest whether or not the Dominant should act as a Counselor to his Submissive. That said, I think we must acknowledge that very often the Dominant is put in this position, and has little choice other than to use the best tools at his disposal.

Milton Erickson and other Psychologists who pioneered the use of Hypnosis in Clinical Therapy believed that it was such a powerful tool that only Medical Doctors and Licensed Psychologists should be allowed to use it.

Against this we have the fact that there is no Salesman or Clergyman that is not using hypnotic modality to influence you on a daily basis. From Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” to the latest Car Dealership Blowout, everyone is using hypnotic modality to influence you.

If you approach a clergyman for counseling, he cannot say "go away and see a Doctor that is not my problem." He can counsel you to see a Doctor, but he must also address your needs. I think that in most cases where a relationship exists (as opposed to casual sceneplay) a Dominant is in the same position. He may and should suggest formal counseling. But he is also in the position of being the one who understands, and can see the whole situation, and he must be prepared to provide a first line of understanding and control. The Dominant who shirks this responsibility because he is "not a professional" may in fact be taking the pleasure and passing the buck.

To delve into someone’s past sexual traumas and attempt to aid or resolve them requires a dedication and care. It is my personal opinion that a relationship with a Dominant should not replace (or subvert) Counseling, and potentially medication by a Psychiatrist.

But in the end, the ethical question must revolve around necessity. The broken submissive is a known quantity in our community and the role of many Dominants, Daddies, and Masters as “fixers” well understood.

If the Dominant’s role is to delve, does he or she want the best tools possible? Hypnosis is a good one.

I would recommend advanced training, and a good understanding of the basic principles, as well as a great deal of patience and compassion. The details of how to address Trauma fall outside the scope of this Presentation, but other resources are available online.

Resources

The “high end” choice for Hypnosis is to study Psychology in a University Masters or Doctoral program that includes hypnotherapy. For most of us that is not practical or relevant.

Hypnosis Motivation Institute is an Accredited California-based school that is one of the largest training facilities for Hypnotherapy in the Country. HMI also teaches numerous courses for laypeople, including classes on Neuro-Linguistic Processing, and other elements of the mind.

HMI holds a U.S. Department of Education recognized ACCET Accreditation (ACCET ID #304) for Vocational and Continuing Education.

They offer a free fourteen hour online introductory class, which covers everything I’ve told you here and more. The class is an excellent value, but…please do not suggest to this legitimate institution that you were sent to them by me, to use the information you receive in kinky sexual play. Just as an Amish wood-worker would probably stop making you flogger handles if he knew what they were for, these people are in the business of training Clinical Workers, not supplying you information to take back to your kink practice. That's a sad fact of the vanilla world, and I am trying to build kink resources that stand on their own, but for now this is one of the best resources available and it is vanilla.

Psychological Resources

Understanding the Psychology of yourself and your submissive the first step in being a more effective Dominant or Master. It is my personal feeling that Hypnosis is lacking outside the larger context of an overall psychological approach to D/s, and an understanding of how the human mind really works. I referenced the PAC model explicitly, and I want to suggest the following resources as well:

I'm OK, You're OK,
by Thomas A Harris MD
readily available at Barnes and Noble, or used at Alibris
Harris presents the most human and accessible version of the “Parent /Adult/Child” model of Transactional Analysis put forward by Eric Berne. The book is a simplification, but unless you like thick writing, the simplification is welcome and it forms an excellent introduction.

If you’re a bit more of a mental masochist, check out Berne’s own books on the subject.

Games People Play : The Psychology of Human Relationships
by Eric Berne
Is one of the core references for the PAC model.

The Principles of Hypnosis - basic hypnosis - Part III

2010-06-22T09:34:00.001-07:00

First a shout out to a blog I've been particularly impressed by:

A Journey to a Door

The blog is a set of personal stories on humiliation and life experience. I've gotten a chance to chat with Marilyn, the author, and I'm impressed with her in many ways. She tells a powerful and meaningful set of stories about humiliation and life experience in simple, easy to read prose. Her writing isn't stark, but it isn't pretentious...it's measured, well paced, and has the strong feeling of reality that goes when an author understands the emotional truth of the thing they are writing.

On different, note, the big section of the handout that I am not reproducing here is the induction. For the class, I reproduced some boilerplate inductions, but I'm working on some of my own and I'll post those as I get to them. Until then, there are online resources we'll mention in Part IV where you can get good ideas about inductions.

Today we're going to get into the core principles that provide a structure for hypnotism.

Principles of Hypnosis

So I have someone hypnotized. What do I do now?. Giving Viable suggestions requires understanding of five basic laws.

Reverse Reaction
Repetition
Dominance
Delayed Action
Association

The of Reverse Reaction

Reverse Reaction, also called Reverse Psychology suggests that a person will respond to the stronger part of a suggestion rather than the weaker unless they are strongly disposed not to. It reaches both the Critical and Primitive Areas of the mind. It also allows the subject a “way out” if he or she strongly disagrees with a command, but reinforces it if they desire it.

This emphasizes a basic fact. We are not really doing "involuntary mind control" or "brainwashing" here. The more that the subject is on board with and a voluntary participant in the hypnosis, the more powerful and valid it will be.

Very passive aggressive subjects may try to sabotage their own hypnosis, and that is something to be aware of when making use of this Principle.

An example

“Your eyelids are very heavy. You may try to open them, but you cannot. The harder you try the heavier they become.” This presents an alternative, but the mind will instinctively take the stronger option.

The Principle of Repetition

Repetition simply means to repeat things. We do this with exercise, and study. Flash Cards employ the Principle of Repetition. Constant repetition of suggestions strengthens them. We feel that a suggestion has become an almost absolute part of someone’s psyche when they have heard it around 18-28 times.

We naturally understand this. One common defense mechanism is to stop others from repeating things we do not wish to allow past our critical area of the mind. This Principle is why propaganda is often effective on a massive scale even when people wish objectively to disbelieve it. To reject a message that is very strongly repeated takes energy and effort.

We have defensive behaviors to "tune out" repetitions that we do not wish to allow into our critical are of mind. This may be beneficial - for example turning off a racist or anti-sex message rather than listening to it...or it may be be destructive, such as a partner who cuts his or her spouse off before they repeat any criticism, so that they do not have to internalize something which they know objectively is an actual failing.

The Principle of Dominance

Dominance means taking an authoritative tone. It means exactly what you think that it means. Just as a Dom in scene cannot seem weak-willed, or hesitant, the Hypnotist must seem strong and authoritative. Psychology builds a sense of comfort and pushes exchange as equals. Hypnosis sets up an authoritarian structure in which one partner is in control and directs the experience. This concept should be familiar and comfortable to most of us in the kinky world.

The Principle of Delayed Action

The Principle of Delayed Reaction means that you will not necessarily get a reaction immediately. Because inferences pass into the Subconscious mind slowly, bypassing the Critical Area of Mind, it often takes a day, two days, or even a week, before a reaction takes place. It may be triggered by being in a situation that has been described. For example, if you suggest “your orgasms are deeper and more powerful” that may not happen immediately after hypnosis, but instead happen next Thursday. Patience is important.

The Principle of Association

The Principle of Association suggests that whenever we repeatedly respond to one stimulus in the presence of another, they become associated. So the voice of the hypnotist becomes associated with hypnosis. It also means that once a subject has accepted one suggestion they will be far more likely to suggest another. Thus starting with small suggestions and building a “ladder of success” upwards is critical. Reinforcing the Principle of Association will increase it’s effectiveness.

Obviously this has a lot of potential in regards to eroticization, and D/s training in general. Most "training" already relies on what amounts to Hypnosis (overload of stimulus) to produce a suggestible state, and heighten Association.

Applications to WIITWD

The applications of Hypnosis to BDSM D/s and related Play/Work are many and varied. In many cases they are quite obvious. The focus of this class has been to provide a good basic grounding in how to induce Hypnosis in order to allow you to experiment with a consensual partner.
Orgasm and Arousal Control
If Hypnosis can cure impotence in men and women, it can also extend what is already good. Simply put, suggestions about increasing quality and intensity of orgasm are usually very effective. They can be coupled with The Principle of Association to produce….specific effects.

For example, I have used a suggestion on one of my girls that she becomes aroused when a finger or leather crop is touched to a certain place on her body. This creates an ‘instant turn on’

Other people have taken this further and created a suggestion to orgasm upon hearing a certain word. Obviously this needs to be used carefully, but it is a powerful and effective tool if used with some thought and care.

The Principle of Association provides endless opportunities to fetishize or eroticize various activities or objects.

Visualization
Probably the most commonly used method of hypnosis is visualization. This is much like a guided meditation or Pathworking, but because it is guided by the hypnotist, it can become a sort of “hypno-drama” making very real experiences. This may be a way to roleplay fetishes too intense for actual play, or to increase comfort with fetishes that the subject “isn’t ready for yet.” It is a good and enriching tool that creates a demand for more.

Dream Influences
Suggestions to dream on a certain topic are usually effective. In therapy this is used for venting, but erotic dreams can increase comfort level with erotic subjects or simply create arousal.

Anxiety Relief
Many Dominants find that part of their function is to relieve anxieties in their submissives. As a Dominant, I spent…hundreds of hours…working with anxious girls. This technique cannot replace human caring, touch and comfort. But it can allow the Dominant to “get through” and calm and comfort.

The Physical will respond well to physical suggestions…”your breathing is getting calmer.” With the emotional you need to get behind the reasons for the Anxiety “you may tend to notice that you are feeling more confident about your body…”

Eroticization of Anxiety
For many players, Anxiety already carries an Erotic edge. Hypnosis presents a viable tool for converting more Anxiety into eros.

Control
We discussed control above. Without regard to the ethics, obvious the ability to fetishize objects or activities carries over to people. The ability to associate sexual pleasure, or other positives with a given person may certainly create a level of control, but simply put, this is creating a rather strong chain and should not be done lightly.

Which segues neatly to...next...

Later this week...we'll get into the interesting and fertile ground that makes everybody cream and argue...the Ethics of Erotic Hypnosis and what you can do with it.