Posts
Continuing my run through the workshops of Dark Odyssey, I am going to talk a little about Dossie Easton’s “Bottomless Pits: Serious Pain Sluts,” workshop.
I loved the concept of this workshop. The truth is that most of my partners aren’t/ and have not been serious pain sluts. I’m fine with that. I absolutely do not think you judge a submissive by how much pain they can “take” you judge them by what they do with whatever pain they choose to take. And if that is none at all, it’s still fine. D/s is not necessarily about pain at all. Even when I jokingly use the term “pain slut” really I don’t mean it in the full sense. It’s flattering to a girl and a woman who has taken a good bit of pain may like to hear it. But you know there are levels.
Still I’m intrigued by the concept, and I have played with one or two girls who did have a strong appetite for being hurt a lot, as opposed to just being hurt.
I have tremendous respect for Dossie Easton. For folks who don’t recognize her name, she’s a family therapist based in San Francisco, CA. Easton is the co-author with Catherine Liszt (Janet Hardy) of The Ethical Slut, Radical Ecstasy; When Someone You Love is Kinky, The New Topping Book; and The New Bottoming Book. Dossie and Cathy were my introduction to reading about BDSM, and born in 1944, Dossie is a legend in the leather community. Ethical Slut is sort of the quintessential starter book for Polyamory and even if I don't agree with all of it, I think it's a huge starting place, and has done a lot of people a world of good in just making them feel it's a normal, healthy lifestyle. Dossie's Bachelor Thesis says it all Sex is Nice and Pleasure is Good for You.
Easton is frank about her experiences with childhood abuse. She talked about a scene gone bad, where she “came to believe that it was actually non-consensual.” In that scene, she said “I am mostly looking at my father and saying ‘see how hard you can beat me motherfucker.’” This reminded me of a comment in Sarah’s workshop (which we’ll get to in a day or two) where she mentioned that “it is fine to say that you are not looking to re-enact rape, or abuse, that you’ve experienced. But one day they are going to come up.”
That said, the workshop wasn't quite what I'd hoped. It really concentrated an awful lot on the heroics of flogging. I think it was reflective of a sort of older generation of BDSM which revolved around flogger and whip heroics the way that Metal revolved around guitar heroics. Easton is sort of the Pete Townshend of getting flogged (how’s that for taking an analogy one step further than it should ever have been taken).
There was also an undercurrent of spirituality that’s a bit foreign to me. I respect people’s spiritual beliefs, but…I don’t get much involved in church religion and I don’t get much involved in alt-religion.
So lets focus on the good things I did get out of the workshop. First there was a reminder of a lovely quote from e.e. cummings about his promiscuous wife “She was a woman upon whom many men might go like a ship….” However I think the quote may underestimate the original bitterness of cummings sentiments.
A lot of the workshop focused on the concept of going to what Dossie calls “the forever place,” which is sort of an intense verison of flying.
Obviously this is somebody who knows whereof she speaks. She was beaten 7hrs 15 min without a break for her 48th birthday and 5 hours for her 50th. More significant than her professional creds may be a reference from a “Y” gym in SF, where a person who had never met Easton told a friend of hers that she was doing badly at tennis because she had “Dossie arm.” To have one’s name enshrined as someone who wears out arms may be a formidable quality in a bottom.
There was some good practical discussion of the problem that submissives who are “flying” don’t want to stop and Doms who try to make them stop are going to cause problems. “They think if they hit you harder you are going to want them to stop. And the sub is not going to want to stop. So how do you put scenes together.” Along those lines the comment “If a top is overprotective of a bottom that bottom cannot fly. But you must be willing to stop.”
There are other technical issues as well. The typical technique is to relax the shoulders and neck and use breath control to process pain. The recommendation is that you do something that is going to be really painful at the end of an exhale (this also limits the amount of air available for a scream). But the technique isn’t always what is needed. “Someone was telling me not to strain, and at that moment I was too endorphined to feel it unless I strained against it.”
There was discussion of the philosophical concept explored in some recent writing that pain is a natural visceral experience that our society has lost connection with because we are so good at avoiding it.
There was a general commentary on Doms who stop scenes because they are uncomfortable with them, and then blame it on the sub. An observant audience member said “it pisses me off when a top tells me ‘you need to stop’ when it is them that needs to stop.” This can be amplified by abuse. “Don’t tell bottoms that they are being a greedy pig if you are a top and you are worn out and have to stop. Bottoms already feel guilty for the attention they get.” The recommendation was a simple “We have to stop now," or "I need to stop."
One problem with these scenes is that there is not an obvious way to close. Dossie points out that “sometimes going to sex will close the scene, but sometimes it is disappointing,” and that if they’re disappointed coming off the high then equating sex with disappointment is not necessarily the thing you want. She also said that’s its common for orgasm to bring you out of “the space.”
Dossie recalled one scene where she was topping and the submissive seemed to feel a sense of failure calling yellow and saying “I can’t take anymore.” She said “I want five more will you give them to me” and said “Those five strokes made it from a failure into a triumph.” I recalled a very similar ending to a scene one evening…
One suggestion for ending scenes was to start counting strokes. “Counting strokes starts to bring the scene down and makes it finite” Having used that myself to end scenes that involved a lot of impact play where I didn't have a natural stop point, I'm very fond of that idea.
A bit of attention was given to the fact that subs in these situations forget safewords. One good suggestion was a Feedback safeword. “I will squeeze your hand. The harder you squeeze back, the more okay you are.”
All in all there was a lot to learn here, from practical advice “make sure everyone pees in advance,” to technique “moving into someone’s personal space is very effective,” to theory “sometimes it’s good to know what the vulnerabilities are…shared vulnerabilities are amazingly intimate.”
It was a good workshop and there was a lot to learn. I’d hoped to get a bit more into the psychology of pain sluttery, and the drives behind it, but what was presented was useful and the demo was well worth taking notes on as well.
I took away one other lesson as well. I think there are two trunks of BDSM play. One aims at creating an inner experience through a certain detachment. When you are being beaten for five or six hours by various people, I don’t think the relationship is with the person doing the beating. You are not controlling them. They may be getting something out of it, but that thing is a little distant for me.
I prefer the second trunk of BDSM, one that demands and promotes presence. Where there is an intimate experience between me and the girl I am working with, because I am who I am, and she is who she is.
I don’t want to deride “flying,” I think it has it’s place. But it’s not my core kink and I came out of this workshop understanding that better.
Advertising Note: It's seldom that an advertising campaign really hits home with me. I thought the Budweiser frogs were kind of funny, and sure the Gekko is cute. The Caveman can be amusing. But honestly none of those really gripped me. I never collected frog paraphenalia or watched the Caveman's Youtube videos. But now there is AT&T with "More Bars in More Places." That's an advertising campaign I can get behind.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Dead Whores and "Lot 98"
My friend who posts as Angeline DC on Literotica has posted Chapter 2 of her story "The Bidding of Lot 98." This is the second time in a couple of weeks I've pimped one of her stories, but I should note that it's the first time she's posted anything new since August of last year, and before that it was 2002. It just so happens when it rains it pours.
For folks who follow my interactive theatre events, this is the sequel to the piece that provided the inspiration, though not the actual background for the "Holland House" scenario(s), so that may be of interest.
******************************************************
Dead Whores
Not too long ago Deborah Jeanne Palfrey went into a garden shed in Florida, put a nylon rope around her neck and spent the last few moments of her fifty two years of life kicking her life out on the end of it. For those of you who live on Mars (or to be fair in Germany), and have never heard of her, Palfrey was a madam of sorts. She didn’t own a gaudy house with Victorian furniture, but she booked call girls and provided them for sex to men in the DC area. This got her the name “Washington Madam.”
Palfrey was indicted and convicted for a welter of charges that spring from the fact that her business was illegal. When your business is illegal then doing it becomes racketeering, money laundering and using the mail for illegal purposes. For the record, Palfrey was no tyrant. She wasn’t really a madam either, she was an agent. She had clients who would pay good money and were presumably somewhat safe. She put young women with a college education and outside work in touch with them, and in return took a 50% cut, which considering she was advertiser, and ultimately carried most of the risks, seems not unfair.
Palfrey’s suicide seems to have been a willful act and maybe a comment. A woman with Palfrey’s contacts and means could not have been unable to arrange for a more painless exit, nor under any illusion that death on the end of a nylon rope would be pretty. But Palfrey had an intimate connection to another dead woman who died on the end of a rope for her crime of prostitution, Brandy Britton.
Palfrey told ABC News she would never go to Federal Prison. She’d told Washington writer Dan Moldea, who was considering writing a book about her, that “I am not going back to prison. I will commit suicide first.”
[Updated to include Palfrey's suicide note to her Mother and Sister
One might think she was cowardly, a Hollywood pampered queen unwilling to contemplate prison. But she spent eighteen months in prison for a 1993 conviction for running a Prostitution ring in California. So you have to believe that she knew what she was facing. She could expect four to six years. I do not know that if I faced being locked up as a fifty two year old man and spending the last four to six really healthy years of my life in Federal Prison, to emerge nearly sixty years old, I would not strongly consider a quicker and more permanent solution. At the very least she knew what she was facing.
But Palfrey isn't who I really want to write about. The person I really want to talk about is Brandy Britton, a person that even most friends who follow these things don't know ever existed.
Britton was a double major in biology and sociology, the first in her family to earn a degree. She was remembered as very bright. Her career suggests she was temperamental. She became a PhD and eventually ended up being dismissed from University of Maryland Baltimore County.
Britton may not have been an ideal person or an ideal employee. According to NBC News: In 1999, Britton lost her job at UMBC and filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the university. In dismissing the suit, which was is on appeal, a federal judge in Baltimore cited complaints about Britton from UMBC students and colleagues, and an accusation by the National Institutes of Health that Britton falsified data on a federally funded research project. Britton had taught sociology at the school beginning in 1994.
We don’t know much about why the gender-discrimination suit. Normally I'm inclined to give some credit to people who bring forward gender-based suits, but the dismissal seems pretty stiff, I'm not aware UMBC has particularly bad practices, and her colleagues don't seem to have been particularly supportive. There are statements that she’d had another suit against a previous employer. Maybe she was wronged, and just didn't manage to make friends. It's also possible she wasn't the sort of person you'd be sympathetic to, an embittered harridan, raging against others in her department and provoking hatreds, the sort of person everyone gives a sigh of relief to see go.
There is certainly some suggestion she was depressive and temperamental. My personal guess would be a depressive personality who covered for failures at work badly, and may have tended to come back too aggressively when questioned. It's not an unknown pattern for people who are attracted to a secret sex life have trouble getting on well with others, particularly of the same gender in their enviornments. The suits? I suppose if I lost my job my attorney would advise me to sue on any grounds I could come up with. If I was desperate and had a couple of kids and an expensive house, I might.
Like Palfrey you can color Britton as somebody who didn’t want to deal with how the other half lives. She was turning tricks to keep her $400 suburban home in Howard County, and working out of her house, which is probably what got her in troubles. The area she was working is not tolerant of anybody whose sexual habits stray too far from June Cleaver. And there’s a legitimate complaint about running a business in your home. But that’s small fine caliber antics.
Classically Liberal says: Busybody neighbors bare some of the responsibility. They noticed “men pulling up in fancy cars and staying only briefly”. What is missing? They didn’t notice any deterioration of the upscale neighborhood. They didn’t find drug dealers or other prostitutes hanging around outside the door. In fact they didn’t see anything except men periodically driving up to Britton’s home. But they suspected she was having sex and in America that’s practically considered tantamount to genocide. One can have sex, of course, provided they hide the fact and feel guilty about it.
Britton was publicly humiliated when the Howard County Police trolled her, set her up, raided her and arrested her. Interestingly her reaction seems to have been a war between defiance and despair. She cited a book on sex work and demanded a jury trial. I remember reading about the case and had hopes that despite all the safeguards in our criminal system against anyone actually getting a word out to question the basic validity of the laws we might see an extremely well educated, self-confident, sex worker with a clue as to the ability of the word “jury nullification” to bring a courtroom to a halt, take the stand in an open trial. She’d lose of course, but the punishment wouldn’t be that severe.
In her mind she’d already lost. Her finances were hopeless, and a local blogger believes that she was still doing sex work shortly before her trial to raise money. Her attorney says her house was in foreclosure.
I wish she’d fought, but it is a bit much to ask any human being to put themselves into the dehumanizing three ring circus of a court for our benefit. A part of me thinks she was cowardly. Palfrey thought she was cowardly and said it in very nearly so many words.
But there is more here than meets the eye. The Post says: She was a sharp researcher whose dissertation focused on abused and battered women who then found herself, a few years ago, filing domestic-violence charges against her second husband: "He . . . tied me up with strapping tape" and "stabbed me in the neck," she told police…. [Afriend] talked about Britton's fears that she would lose the house where she had raised two children, now grown, as a single parent and where she had been living with her two potbellied pigs, dog and two cats.
While anyone can end up with an abuser, her dissertation topic and subsequent choices suggest a pattern of abuse in her life. In the end the Law was her final abuser.
Britton had other signs of instability. Close friends suggest she was paranoiac. “…she believed, "they" were tapping her phones and bugging her home. It was too much, she said, and she found herself thinking: " 'I'm going to lay down and die. I'm so depressed.' "
In the end flight won out over fight. She hanged herself in the home she feared losing.
She’d worked for Palfrey, who was well aware of her death. The Chicago Tribune says Last year, Palfrey said she, too, was humiliated by her prostitution charges, but said: "I guess I'm made of something that Brandy Britton wasn't made of."
One cannot help but think that Britton was strongly on her mind in those last few minutes, before not breathing became her principal concern. In the end the two women died for the same sin…providing a sexual service to Washington men.
Monica Hesse had a rather compassionate writeup in the Post. She described the fate that befell the recipients of these services:
Maybe we feel sad because of the gendered irony. The powerful men whose names surfaced in the scandal, the ones who did not appear in the courtroom, who did not have to discuss their menstrual cycles publicly, have all remained unscathed.
David Vitter is still that good-looking junior senator from Louisiana. Harlan K. Ullman (creator of "shock and awe") is listed as a senior associate on the Web site of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Former State Department official Randall L. Tobias, who previously oversaw AIDS relief, promoting abstinence and a policy requiring grant recipients to swear they opposed prostitution, slunk back to Indiana after his resignation. There, he was appointed president of the board of the Indianapolis Airport Authority. The city's mayor said that America "believed in second chances."
Britton’s attorney, Flohr who said she was “kind and generous” asked “Her death underscores an important question: Was the public benefited at all by the resources spent on her arrest and prosecution?”
I wanted to write a rant on the injustice of the whole thing and instead wrote an obituary. I think this speaks for itself.
Now here is my two cents. These women committed the crime of having sex with strangers. They provided a service I’ve used. They took risks to make the service available and found plenty of consumers. Aside from scandal caused by legal investigation, they didn’t hurt anyone. Moralists can argue that they “hurt” the fabric of society by providing outlets for sex other than married life. For my part I am going to defer to Tristan Taormino who wrote better than I did about Eliot Spitzer’s choices in her Voice column.
All I will say is this. Brandy Britton may have been depressive, and had financial trouble. But I do not think that there is any serious chance that either of these women would be dead if it was not the case that our country makes prostitution a crime.
In most civilized countries, including Canada and Britain, neither woman was doing anything seriously criminal. Palfrey could be charged under “Procuring and living off the income of prostitution” In Canada, but enforcement is sporadic and rare, as the law is aimed at street pimps. A few changes to her operation to make it a portal would probably bring it under Candian Law. Britton would have had to do outcall, which I think we’d agree is not unreasonable.
I am not aware that life, or the state of morals in these countries is any worse than life here. And if it was, is it worth dying for.
It’s not just that. Humiliation comes up in the case of both women. Why should sex-work be humiliating? At best, some of the great courtesans of history are famous and honored. At worst, working the street, I don’t see it as any worse than any other low wage job. But we don’t treat it that way. Society provides plenty of people as customers to prostitutes, but it is humiliating to be one. I understand the social structures that dictated that approach, but like many things it needs to change.
I tend to take prostitution for granted. I dealt with it back in street days, and know from anecdotes and discussions that it’s much safer and more civilized in the era of Craigslist.
But in the end there are still people who get punished and they are not the people like me who use the services. They are the girls who provide them. And when it happens it makes my blood boil and I want to hurt someone but there is nobody to hurt and it would not do any good. So I write a blog post and preach to the choir. But on some level I feel if even one more person knows about these things, maybe it will matter.
So that's all I have to say. That I don't think this is right and it makes me ashamed for us all.
For folks who follow my interactive theatre events, this is the sequel to the piece that provided the inspiration, though not the actual background for the "Holland House" scenario(s), so that may be of interest.
******************************************************
Dead Whores
Not too long ago Deborah Jeanne Palfrey went into a garden shed in Florida, put a nylon rope around her neck and spent the last few moments of her fifty two years of life kicking her life out on the end of it. For those of you who live on Mars (or to be fair in Germany), and have never heard of her, Palfrey was a madam of sorts. She didn’t own a gaudy house with Victorian furniture, but she booked call girls and provided them for sex to men in the DC area. This got her the name “Washington Madam.”
Palfrey was indicted and convicted for a welter of charges that spring from the fact that her business was illegal. When your business is illegal then doing it becomes racketeering, money laundering and using the mail for illegal purposes. For the record, Palfrey was no tyrant. She wasn’t really a madam either, she was an agent. She had clients who would pay good money and were presumably somewhat safe. She put young women with a college education and outside work in touch with them, and in return took a 50% cut, which considering she was advertiser, and ultimately carried most of the risks, seems not unfair.
Palfrey’s suicide seems to have been a willful act and maybe a comment. A woman with Palfrey’s contacts and means could not have been unable to arrange for a more painless exit, nor under any illusion that death on the end of a nylon rope would be pretty. But Palfrey had an intimate connection to another dead woman who died on the end of a rope for her crime of prostitution, Brandy Britton.
Palfrey told ABC News she would never go to Federal Prison. She’d told Washington writer Dan Moldea, who was considering writing a book about her, that “I am not going back to prison. I will commit suicide first.”
[Updated to include Palfrey's suicide note to her Mother and Sister
One might think she was cowardly, a Hollywood pampered queen unwilling to contemplate prison. But she spent eighteen months in prison for a 1993 conviction for running a Prostitution ring in California. So you have to believe that she knew what she was facing. She could expect four to six years. I do not know that if I faced being locked up as a fifty two year old man and spending the last four to six really healthy years of my life in Federal Prison, to emerge nearly sixty years old, I would not strongly consider a quicker and more permanent solution. At the very least she knew what she was facing.
But Palfrey isn't who I really want to write about. The person I really want to talk about is Brandy Britton, a person that even most friends who follow these things don't know ever existed.
Britton was a double major in biology and sociology, the first in her family to earn a degree. She was remembered as very bright. Her career suggests she was temperamental. She became a PhD and eventually ended up being dismissed from University of Maryland Baltimore County.
Britton may not have been an ideal person or an ideal employee. According to NBC News: In 1999, Britton lost her job at UMBC and filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the university. In dismissing the suit, which was is on appeal, a federal judge in Baltimore cited complaints about Britton from UMBC students and colleagues, and an accusation by the National Institutes of Health that Britton falsified data on a federally funded research project. Britton had taught sociology at the school beginning in 1994.
We don’t know much about why the gender-discrimination suit. Normally I'm inclined to give some credit to people who bring forward gender-based suits, but the dismissal seems pretty stiff, I'm not aware UMBC has particularly bad practices, and her colleagues don't seem to have been particularly supportive. There are statements that she’d had another suit against a previous employer. Maybe she was wronged, and just didn't manage to make friends. It's also possible she wasn't the sort of person you'd be sympathetic to, an embittered harridan, raging against others in her department and provoking hatreds, the sort of person everyone gives a sigh of relief to see go.
There is certainly some suggestion she was depressive and temperamental. My personal guess would be a depressive personality who covered for failures at work badly, and may have tended to come back too aggressively when questioned. It's not an unknown pattern for people who are attracted to a secret sex life have trouble getting on well with others, particularly of the same gender in their enviornments. The suits? I suppose if I lost my job my attorney would advise me to sue on any grounds I could come up with. If I was desperate and had a couple of kids and an expensive house, I might.
Like Palfrey you can color Britton as somebody who didn’t want to deal with how the other half lives. She was turning tricks to keep her $400 suburban home in Howard County, and working out of her house, which is probably what got her in troubles. The area she was working is not tolerant of anybody whose sexual habits stray too far from June Cleaver. And there’s a legitimate complaint about running a business in your home. But that’s small fine caliber antics.
Classically Liberal says: Busybody neighbors bare some of the responsibility. They noticed “men pulling up in fancy cars and staying only briefly”. What is missing? They didn’t notice any deterioration of the upscale neighborhood. They didn’t find drug dealers or other prostitutes hanging around outside the door. In fact they didn’t see anything except men periodically driving up to Britton’s home. But they suspected she was having sex and in America that’s practically considered tantamount to genocide. One can have sex, of course, provided they hide the fact and feel guilty about it.
Britton was publicly humiliated when the Howard County Police trolled her, set her up, raided her and arrested her. Interestingly her reaction seems to have been a war between defiance and despair. She cited a book on sex work and demanded a jury trial. I remember reading about the case and had hopes that despite all the safeguards in our criminal system against anyone actually getting a word out to question the basic validity of the laws we might see an extremely well educated, self-confident, sex worker with a clue as to the ability of the word “jury nullification” to bring a courtroom to a halt, take the stand in an open trial. She’d lose of course, but the punishment wouldn’t be that severe.
In her mind she’d already lost. Her finances were hopeless, and a local blogger believes that she was still doing sex work shortly before her trial to raise money. Her attorney says her house was in foreclosure.
I wish she’d fought, but it is a bit much to ask any human being to put themselves into the dehumanizing three ring circus of a court for our benefit. A part of me thinks she was cowardly. Palfrey thought she was cowardly and said it in very nearly so many words.
But there is more here than meets the eye. The Post says: She was a sharp researcher whose dissertation focused on abused and battered women who then found herself, a few years ago, filing domestic-violence charges against her second husband: "He . . . tied me up with strapping tape" and "stabbed me in the neck," she told police…. [Afriend] talked about Britton's fears that she would lose the house where she had raised two children, now grown, as a single parent and where she had been living with her two potbellied pigs, dog and two cats.
While anyone can end up with an abuser, her dissertation topic and subsequent choices suggest a pattern of abuse in her life. In the end the Law was her final abuser.
Britton had other signs of instability. Close friends suggest she was paranoiac. “…she believed, "they" were tapping her phones and bugging her home. It was too much, she said, and she found herself thinking: " 'I'm going to lay down and die. I'm so depressed.' "
In the end flight won out over fight. She hanged herself in the home she feared losing.
She’d worked for Palfrey, who was well aware of her death. The Chicago Tribune says Last year, Palfrey said she, too, was humiliated by her prostitution charges, but said: "I guess I'm made of something that Brandy Britton wasn't made of."
One cannot help but think that Britton was strongly on her mind in those last few minutes, before not breathing became her principal concern. In the end the two women died for the same sin…providing a sexual service to Washington men.
Monica Hesse had a rather compassionate writeup in the Post. She described the fate that befell the recipients of these services:
Maybe we feel sad because of the gendered irony. The powerful men whose names surfaced in the scandal, the ones who did not appear in the courtroom, who did not have to discuss their menstrual cycles publicly, have all remained unscathed.
David Vitter is still that good-looking junior senator from Louisiana. Harlan K. Ullman (creator of "shock and awe") is listed as a senior associate on the Web site of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Former State Department official Randall L. Tobias, who previously oversaw AIDS relief, promoting abstinence and a policy requiring grant recipients to swear they opposed prostitution, slunk back to Indiana after his resignation. There, he was appointed president of the board of the Indianapolis Airport Authority. The city's mayor said that America "believed in second chances."
Britton’s attorney, Flohr who said she was “kind and generous” asked “Her death underscores an important question: Was the public benefited at all by the resources spent on her arrest and prosecution?”
I wanted to write a rant on the injustice of the whole thing and instead wrote an obituary. I think this speaks for itself.
Now here is my two cents. These women committed the crime of having sex with strangers. They provided a service I’ve used. They took risks to make the service available and found plenty of consumers. Aside from scandal caused by legal investigation, they didn’t hurt anyone. Moralists can argue that they “hurt” the fabric of society by providing outlets for sex other than married life. For my part I am going to defer to Tristan Taormino who wrote better than I did about Eliot Spitzer’s choices in her Voice column.
All I will say is this. Brandy Britton may have been depressive, and had financial trouble. But I do not think that there is any serious chance that either of these women would be dead if it was not the case that our country makes prostitution a crime.
In most civilized countries, including Canada and Britain, neither woman was doing anything seriously criminal. Palfrey could be charged under “Procuring and living off the income of prostitution” In Canada, but enforcement is sporadic and rare, as the law is aimed at street pimps. A few changes to her operation to make it a portal would probably bring it under Candian Law. Britton would have had to do outcall, which I think we’d agree is not unreasonable.
I am not aware that life, or the state of morals in these countries is any worse than life here. And if it was, is it worth dying for.
It’s not just that. Humiliation comes up in the case of both women. Why should sex-work be humiliating? At best, some of the great courtesans of history are famous and honored. At worst, working the street, I don’t see it as any worse than any other low wage job. But we don’t treat it that way. Society provides plenty of people as customers to prostitutes, but it is humiliating to be one. I understand the social structures that dictated that approach, but like many things it needs to change.
I tend to take prostitution for granted. I dealt with it back in street days, and know from anecdotes and discussions that it’s much safer and more civilized in the era of Craigslist.
But in the end there are still people who get punished and they are not the people like me who use the services. They are the girls who provide them. And when it happens it makes my blood boil and I want to hurt someone but there is nobody to hurt and it would not do any good. So I write a blog post and preach to the choir. But on some level I feel if even one more person knows about these things, maybe it will matter.
So that's all I have to say. That I don't think this is right and it makes me ashamed for us all.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Shibari Workshop, Domain, Erotic Fiction
So at the urging of err hmmm...certain people, I have resurrected the old erotic fiction site, and got most of the material back up. There's an "Erotic Fiction" link on the left. This blog also has a domain now Gordonsdrysin.com which will host a permanent link to the Protocols and some other resources as well as the fiction. I'm probably going to float some of it to Literotica, but I don't think that Roncevalles belongs there.
The only thing I don't have is the 1928 Chapter 1 story. It once existed, got killed on my PC because it was composed at a bad time before I backed up to the Lee server, and is not in the Wayback Machine because it was never linked to a top level site. That's a shame, because I think that the Laura Roth/1938 stories were pretentious and amateurish for several reasons, though they were the first time I let any real brutality emerge in my writing. 1928 was an effort to try the same project, but without the pretention of writing from a female POV, and with a bit more honesty and clarity. But fate seems to have decided it is not to be. If anyone happens to have cached it, I'd be grateful, but I don't expect so, it wasn't up for long.
Except for Cocktail Date, I feel awkward showing most of the old work, but there is still a lot I like about the Laura Roth story, so, I'm going to let it stand as a monument to my youth.
The other more recent story is undergoing final revision which consists of getting someone I respect to tell me it's not pathetic. After that likely it will appear here.
Dark Odyssey - Shibari Workshop
It’s time to start backtracking through the notes I made on Workshops at Dark Odyssey, or it’s going to be time for Camp Crucible, and I’ll just be hopelessly behind.
So I‘ve already mentioned that the first workshop I attended at DO was the ropework introduction taught by Shibari Warrior. He’s a decent guy. I’d expected somebody who looked like Bruce Lee but he’s a pretty average looking Caucasian guy who doesn’t even look much like David Carradine in makeup. All practicality.
And he had a couple of pretty good practical hints I got, before I ditched due to my minimal interest in tying up another guy I didn’t know well.
For those joining this program already in progress, a refresher:
I audited the Shibari class, because honestly my ropework is not that great. I’d hoped to pick up a lot of teaching on rope. This was my one bit of moral cowardice. I went through the first half, but then they wanted people to pair up. S. wasn’t onsite yet, and I just didn’t feel like practicing ropework with a guy. I know, I know, I’m homophobic. Sorry, it’s some sort of bizarre aesthetic. I think I’d feel more comfortable sucking a guy’s cock than fumbling through ropework I don’t do well with a guy I didn’t know. Probably vanity.
Maybe I have an inferiority complex over my ropework. I visualize that I’ll have some girl tied up and this huge Japanese cross between a Sumo Wrestler and “The Big Unit” is going to come up to me with a rope and growl. “Your shibari is no good!” like in a bad kung-fu movie. In the worst versions of this vision his mouth appears to be moving in a way that doesn’t match his words. Seriously I’ve mostly dealt in just making women hold still. There is something deeply satisfying to me about a woman who is restrained because she is obeying your will. That said, tying up has it’s place, and you can’t do everything with chain.
So a couple of useful things to pass along.
1) People get cold from constriction. At some point I will inflict my rant on “cold weather scenes” but the bottom line is that people who are tied up get cold even more quickly than those who aren’t. So you can be fine and your sub can be freezing. Fluffy blankets. Warm playspace.
2) If you are doing ropework, you carry EMT shears. Right, we all know this. This is so that if things go pear-shaped we can cut the girl out before something bad happens, with the maximal application of bad being “she chokes to death and dies because you got a rope around her neck,” and any number of other unpleasant variations dangling underneath. These accidents don’t happen too often, but when they do, you want scissors. Rope is replaceable, your play partner is not
I can pick that up reading the internet. This is the sort of detail I actually go to classes to learn:
So our teacher pointed out that when he started out, he went to the trouble of getting a pair of black handled EMT shears. Because they look cooler than the white ones.
Now he uses white. Why? Because in a dark club in a dark bag the black handled ones stick out exactly like a camouflaged sniper in the jungle, which is to say not at all.
I additionally keep my shears in my blood kit. The blood kit (this contains needles, scalpels, mini-sharps container, etc.) is the only bag that’s not black. It’s bright red. So it’s easy to find. Also easy to tell someone else to grab “the red one.” I looked the other night and they weren’t there. Moved to the front pocket. Not a good thing.
He also talked about the quality of the shears. These are the shears that will cut roughly anything. He basically made the point they will cut anything once. If you use them to cut one rope they are probably fine. If you use them to cut someone out of constriction throw them away.
Also carry more than one pair (need to fix that). A certain number of them are crap and don’t work. You don’t know which so two from different manufacturers is a good idea. But he stressed, since they have short useful lifetimes, testing them is not necessarily the answer.
“Jay Wiseman may test his but cutting a penny and they will cut a penny. But I don’t know that after Jay has cut a penny with them, I’d want to rely on them to ever cut anything else.” Not me, just quoting. No offense to the redoubtable Mr. Wiseman.
Favorite other quote from the session was “Practice makes pervert” which the instructor said we could quote him on but wasn’t original.
I’d have learned more if I stayed around. I really need to work on rope. I know some people who are decent at it, but it’s just never been my specialty. Time to learn, really….
The only thing I don't have is the 1928 Chapter 1 story. It once existed, got killed on my PC because it was composed at a bad time before I backed up to the Lee server, and is not in the Wayback Machine because it was never linked to a top level site. That's a shame, because I think that the Laura Roth/1938 stories were pretentious and amateurish for several reasons, though they were the first time I let any real brutality emerge in my writing. 1928 was an effort to try the same project, but without the pretention of writing from a female POV, and with a bit more honesty and clarity. But fate seems to have decided it is not to be. If anyone happens to have cached it, I'd be grateful, but I don't expect so, it wasn't up for long.
Except for Cocktail Date, I feel awkward showing most of the old work, but there is still a lot I like about the Laura Roth story, so, I'm going to let it stand as a monument to my youth.
The other more recent story is undergoing final revision which consists of getting someone I respect to tell me it's not pathetic. After that likely it will appear here.
Dark Odyssey - Shibari Workshop
It’s time to start backtracking through the notes I made on Workshops at Dark Odyssey, or it’s going to be time for Camp Crucible, and I’ll just be hopelessly behind.
So I‘ve already mentioned that the first workshop I attended at DO was the ropework introduction taught by Shibari Warrior. He’s a decent guy. I’d expected somebody who looked like Bruce Lee but he’s a pretty average looking Caucasian guy who doesn’t even look much like David Carradine in makeup. All practicality.
And he had a couple of pretty good practical hints I got, before I ditched due to my minimal interest in tying up another guy I didn’t know well.
For those joining this program already in progress, a refresher:
I audited the Shibari class, because honestly my ropework is not that great. I’d hoped to pick up a lot of teaching on rope. This was my one bit of moral cowardice. I went through the first half, but then they wanted people to pair up. S. wasn’t onsite yet, and I just didn’t feel like practicing ropework with a guy. I know, I know, I’m homophobic. Sorry, it’s some sort of bizarre aesthetic. I think I’d feel more comfortable sucking a guy’s cock than fumbling through ropework I don’t do well with a guy I didn’t know. Probably vanity.
Maybe I have an inferiority complex over my ropework. I visualize that I’ll have some girl tied up and this huge Japanese cross between a Sumo Wrestler and “The Big Unit” is going to come up to me with a rope and growl. “Your shibari is no good!” like in a bad kung-fu movie. In the worst versions of this vision his mouth appears to be moving in a way that doesn’t match his words. Seriously I’ve mostly dealt in just making women hold still. There is something deeply satisfying to me about a woman who is restrained because she is obeying your will. That said, tying up has it’s place, and you can’t do everything with chain.
So a couple of useful things to pass along.
1) People get cold from constriction. At some point I will inflict my rant on “cold weather scenes” but the bottom line is that people who are tied up get cold even more quickly than those who aren’t. So you can be fine and your sub can be freezing. Fluffy blankets. Warm playspace.
2) If you are doing ropework, you carry EMT shears. Right, we all know this. This is so that if things go pear-shaped we can cut the girl out before something bad happens, with the maximal application of bad being “she chokes to death and dies because you got a rope around her neck,” and any number of other unpleasant variations dangling underneath. These accidents don’t happen too often, but when they do, you want scissors. Rope is replaceable, your play partner is not
I can pick that up reading the internet. This is the sort of detail I actually go to classes to learn:
So our teacher pointed out that when he started out, he went to the trouble of getting a pair of black handled EMT shears. Because they look cooler than the white ones.
Now he uses white. Why? Because in a dark club in a dark bag the black handled ones stick out exactly like a camouflaged sniper in the jungle, which is to say not at all.
I additionally keep my shears in my blood kit. The blood kit (this contains needles, scalpels, mini-sharps container, etc.) is the only bag that’s not black. It’s bright red. So it’s easy to find. Also easy to tell someone else to grab “the red one.” I looked the other night and they weren’t there. Moved to the front pocket. Not a good thing.
He also talked about the quality of the shears. These are the shears that will cut roughly anything. He basically made the point they will cut anything once. If you use them to cut one rope they are probably fine. If you use them to cut someone out of constriction throw them away.
Also carry more than one pair (need to fix that). A certain number of them are crap and don’t work. You don’t know which so two from different manufacturers is a good idea. But he stressed, since they have short useful lifetimes, testing them is not necessarily the answer.
“Jay Wiseman may test his but cutting a penny and they will cut a penny. But I don’t know that after Jay has cut a penny with them, I’d want to rely on them to ever cut anything else.” Not me, just quoting. No offense to the redoubtable Mr. Wiseman.
Favorite other quote from the session was “Practice makes pervert” which the instructor said we could quote him on but wasn’t original.
I’d have learned more if I stayed around. I really need to work on rope. I know some people who are decent at it, but it’s just never been my specialty. Time to learn, really….
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Literature Review and High Minded Ideals...
I think when it came to literature review, one thing I probably didn’t really underscore enough was that I find a lot of the tone lacking. Probably one of the big exceptions to this is Dossie and Cathy, who I think wrote some great very off the cuff stuff. But overall I find the tone in most writing about BDSM to be preachy, superior, and to have this undertone that convinces me that it was written by a Dominant trying to convince his (or her) submissives that he was born with “safe sane consensual” tattooed on his forehead. On the submissive side, I actually find a lot of the writing better, but there’s an underlying tone of religious reverence. Where it’s genuine, I think it’s great, but often it almost comes off as if the submissive is trying to talk themselves round to it through writing.
I’ve tried at least not to do that. Realistically I know that has scared some girls off of me. I don’t go around starting with a ninety minute safety lecture that is mostly aimed at convincing a submissive I’m safe to play with, and constantly mentioning safety concerns not because they’re plausible but to prove I’m “safe sane and consensual.”
I’ve actually been reading a bit about the concept of RACK (Risk Aware Consensual Kink) v. SSC (Safe Sane and Consensual) and that’s a topic for a later post.
Either you know me and you trust me or you don’t. I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing to have a little buffer there, where people maybe need to think twice before they get down on their knees. I don’t want to sell myself too hard. I’m not perfect and I don’t shit perfect scenes, so I am only going to present myself so much as “superdom.”
Anyway when I Googled “Last thing the world needs” this morning, no. 27 on the list after “some bastard to blow something else up,” was “another preachy high-toned BDSM blog written by a Dom who writes about BDSM as a sacred charge on a par with guardianship of the holy grail (or possibly the net at a Stanley Cup Playoff game, I get those things confused).
Don’t get me wrong. I think trust is important. But I often think the language and high minded ideas obscure the real truth. The real truth is this. “I am in a room with a girl who is (usually) much younger than me, and less experienced (at least in bdsm, often sexually). She is counting on me for a lot of things. She’s generally a friend or someone I care about, and even if she isn’t she’s a human being who is putting her trust in me. I need to not abuse that trust by fucking up, being careless, being callous, or by failing to have the balls to be what I’ve said I was.” That’s it. You can add as many choirs of angels as you want, but you’re talking about somebody surrendering their body to you and trusting you not to fuck them up. I’d rather cut that very close to the line where I am damn certain I understand it. High concept is great but not if obscures the basic facts.
So…the review…tone aside, I’ve turned up a few gems.
I am still turning the Guy Baldwin edited Slavecraft over in my head (SlaveCraft: Roadmaps for Erotic Servitude--Principles, Skills and Tools by Guy A. Baldwin, M.S.. Daedalus, 2004). This is a fairly classic piece of D/s writing, and one of the better known works on Slave/Submissive psychology. I have found a great deal in it to agree with and a great deal to disagree with. I think the counterpoint written by Pat Califa is a superb touch. I am probably going to try to go through it chapter by chapter here, or at least feature a few of the essays. For now, my principal issue is that I find the writing itself a little lacking…there are a lot of rather high sounding phrases that seem to confuse issues a little…and I find the author a bit too religious for my tastes. Specifically his approach to submission is as an act of quasi-religious devotion. He slaves for a Master, but there is an undertone that suggests he is really serving slavery itself, just as a Monk may slave for the Abbott, but is truly devoted only to God. He uses a lot of nearly religious phraseology in his devotion.
I don’t have an issue with this per-se. It’s a perfectly legitimate approach, and opens to a whole world of ordeal-oriented bdsm/spirituality. But it’s not my path, nor one I’m really suited to guide a submissive on, other than incidentally. The undercurrent is that there is a subtle antagonism towards the Dominant. It’s frankly clear he’s had a few Dominants that he resented, and probably for good reason.
For me, D/s is more about personal intimacy. That’s why I don’t call my submissives “it.” I have a relationship with a girl. It may be about D/s but it is very personal and intimate to me. Even if I make that girl a piece of furniture, I have a close, intimate relationship with that piece of furniture. Slavecraft at once seems to say that intimacy is necessary, then reject many of the things that I see as critical to it.
It is also the case that Principles, Skills and Tools is limited to the essay author’s personal mental tools for handling submission.
That said, it’s a profound book that has a lot of terribly important insights into the submissive mindset. If you don’t know why you submit, there will be some things to learn there. If you do know why, there may be more. It is a book with a lot of ideas. Just don’t sit down and swallow it as the holy bible of Submission. It is valuable, but it is one slave’s opinion.
Sadly I found Master Nage's Guide To Training Consensual Slaves not to be what I needed. I actually liked the book and the author. He’s a little geeky, but overall solid enough. He gives a bow to online play, which is so strikingly common these days. I think that’s important, because I strongly guess that within a decade probably ten times more people will have done BDSM online than have ever done it in person. So those online communities are effectively making it common, and also establishing things that will become de facto standards. I’ve gotten some interesting insights through online play, and while it’s not real life, I think there’s something to it. Interesting Nage points out that D/s is the one element of WIITWD that can be done, completely and really, online. You can’t beat someone. But you can order them to do something and establish that they have done it. So, online D/s is not stunningly less realistic than rl D/s.
But Nage’s book is a simple one for beginners. It has little real detail. It held fairly little for me, maybe a couple of concepts.
I found Rubel’s Protocols (Protocols: Handbook for the female slave: Robert J. Rubel, Ph.D., Nazca Plains, 2006) to be a very useful book. This was in fact the book I wanted. In pattern it is heavily based on the Protocols online by “SlaveMaster” Mike McDade. I’m going to have to be honest here and say that I found some of McDade’s approach a little offputting. I can’t say in any detail, because in theory I have no problems with consensual objectification, etc. I just didn’t warm to it. It is my understanding which may be faulty that a lot of the material McDade uses is related to protocols that used to be available on the Butchmann’s website (now Arizona Power Exchange – APEX), but I cannot find those anywhere and as far as I know outside of possible magazine instances they aren’t published. All this material, (and again I am led to understand), hearkens back to The Leatherman’s Handbook. As noted earlier this is mostly Gay male BDSM, so that may be one reason I find the tone offputting. It’s not a tone I’d take with women, even very tough women who want to be abused. It’s not content, it’s tone.
At any rate, Rubel put a human, and male/female face on Protocols. I liked his book and it was exactly what I wanted. Short on highblown theory and rants about what it is to be a slave, and long on “this is how you stand….this is how you sit…this is how you take care of boots.”
I have tried as much as possible to use original text in my Protocols, but I certainly paraphrased and in some cases quoted Rubel with attribution.
I’m still reading a lot of online material, and we’ll see what that produces, but that’s the literature review so far….
As the great man said “Good night and good luck…”
I’ve tried at least not to do that. Realistically I know that has scared some girls off of me. I don’t go around starting with a ninety minute safety lecture that is mostly aimed at convincing a submissive I’m safe to play with, and constantly mentioning safety concerns not because they’re plausible but to prove I’m “safe sane and consensual.”
I’ve actually been reading a bit about the concept of RACK (Risk Aware Consensual Kink) v. SSC (Safe Sane and Consensual) and that’s a topic for a later post.
Either you know me and you trust me or you don’t. I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing to have a little buffer there, where people maybe need to think twice before they get down on their knees. I don’t want to sell myself too hard. I’m not perfect and I don’t shit perfect scenes, so I am only going to present myself so much as “superdom.”
Anyway when I Googled “Last thing the world needs” this morning, no. 27 on the list after “some bastard to blow something else up,” was “another preachy high-toned BDSM blog written by a Dom who writes about BDSM as a sacred charge on a par with guardianship of the holy grail (or possibly the net at a Stanley Cup Playoff game, I get those things confused).
Don’t get me wrong. I think trust is important. But I often think the language and high minded ideas obscure the real truth. The real truth is this. “I am in a room with a girl who is (usually) much younger than me, and less experienced (at least in bdsm, often sexually). She is counting on me for a lot of things. She’s generally a friend or someone I care about, and even if she isn’t she’s a human being who is putting her trust in me. I need to not abuse that trust by fucking up, being careless, being callous, or by failing to have the balls to be what I’ve said I was.” That’s it. You can add as many choirs of angels as you want, but you’re talking about somebody surrendering their body to you and trusting you not to fuck them up. I’d rather cut that very close to the line where I am damn certain I understand it. High concept is great but not if obscures the basic facts.
So…the review…tone aside, I’ve turned up a few gems.
I am still turning the Guy Baldwin edited Slavecraft over in my head (SlaveCraft: Roadmaps for Erotic Servitude--Principles, Skills and Tools by Guy A. Baldwin, M.S.. Daedalus, 2004). This is a fairly classic piece of D/s writing, and one of the better known works on Slave/Submissive psychology. I have found a great deal in it to agree with and a great deal to disagree with. I think the counterpoint written by Pat Califa is a superb touch. I am probably going to try to go through it chapter by chapter here, or at least feature a few of the essays. For now, my principal issue is that I find the writing itself a little lacking…there are a lot of rather high sounding phrases that seem to confuse issues a little…and I find the author a bit too religious for my tastes. Specifically his approach to submission is as an act of quasi-religious devotion. He slaves for a Master, but there is an undertone that suggests he is really serving slavery itself, just as a Monk may slave for the Abbott, but is truly devoted only to God. He uses a lot of nearly religious phraseology in his devotion.
I don’t have an issue with this per-se. It’s a perfectly legitimate approach, and opens to a whole world of ordeal-oriented bdsm/spirituality. But it’s not my path, nor one I’m really suited to guide a submissive on, other than incidentally. The undercurrent is that there is a subtle antagonism towards the Dominant. It’s frankly clear he’s had a few Dominants that he resented, and probably for good reason.
For me, D/s is more about personal intimacy. That’s why I don’t call my submissives “it.” I have a relationship with a girl. It may be about D/s but it is very personal and intimate to me. Even if I make that girl a piece of furniture, I have a close, intimate relationship with that piece of furniture. Slavecraft at once seems to say that intimacy is necessary, then reject many of the things that I see as critical to it.
It is also the case that Principles, Skills and Tools is limited to the essay author’s personal mental tools for handling submission.
That said, it’s a profound book that has a lot of terribly important insights into the submissive mindset. If you don’t know why you submit, there will be some things to learn there. If you do know why, there may be more. It is a book with a lot of ideas. Just don’t sit down and swallow it as the holy bible of Submission. It is valuable, but it is one slave’s opinion.
Sadly I found Master Nage's Guide To Training Consensual Slaves not to be what I needed. I actually liked the book and the author. He’s a little geeky, but overall solid enough. He gives a bow to online play, which is so strikingly common these days. I think that’s important, because I strongly guess that within a decade probably ten times more people will have done BDSM online than have ever done it in person. So those online communities are effectively making it common, and also establishing things that will become de facto standards. I’ve gotten some interesting insights through online play, and while it’s not real life, I think there’s something to it. Interesting Nage points out that D/s is the one element of WIITWD that can be done, completely and really, online. You can’t beat someone. But you can order them to do something and establish that they have done it. So, online D/s is not stunningly less realistic than rl D/s.
But Nage’s book is a simple one for beginners. It has little real detail. It held fairly little for me, maybe a couple of concepts.
I found Rubel’s Protocols (Protocols: Handbook for the female slave: Robert J. Rubel, Ph.D., Nazca Plains, 2006) to be a very useful book. This was in fact the book I wanted. In pattern it is heavily based on the Protocols online by “SlaveMaster” Mike McDade. I’m going to have to be honest here and say that I found some of McDade’s approach a little offputting. I can’t say in any detail, because in theory I have no problems with consensual objectification, etc. I just didn’t warm to it. It is my understanding which may be faulty that a lot of the material McDade uses is related to protocols that used to be available on the Butchmann’s website (now Arizona Power Exchange – APEX), but I cannot find those anywhere and as far as I know outside of possible magazine instances they aren’t published. All this material, (and again I am led to understand), hearkens back to The Leatherman’s Handbook. As noted earlier this is mostly Gay male BDSM, so that may be one reason I find the tone offputting. It’s not a tone I’d take with women, even very tough women who want to be abused. It’s not content, it’s tone.
At any rate, Rubel put a human, and male/female face on Protocols. I liked his book and it was exactly what I wanted. Short on highblown theory and rants about what it is to be a slave, and long on “this is how you stand….this is how you sit…this is how you take care of boots.”
I have tried as much as possible to use original text in my Protocols, but I certainly paraphrased and in some cases quoted Rubel with attribution.
I’m still reading a lot of online material, and we’ll see what that produces, but that’s the literature review so far….
As the great man said “Good night and good luck…”
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Good Girl 3, and Protocols
An online friend of mine posts to Literotica as Angeline DC. She's a very talented writer, and I think a lot of her. Her story "The Bidding of Lot 98" was inspiration for the Holland House (Holland Court in her story) material that appeared in one of the interactive theatre segments produced by J. and myself.
She's recently published "Be Good Girl - Chapter 3" at Literotica.
I think Good Girl 1 and 2 are very good stories, and they captivated me early on, because neither are your normal fuck fantasy bullshit. They are kind of ugly in some ways and have rough edges and are not your mom's sex fantasy. But they were also written five years ago, and the author's style and capability has matured significantly since then, which you can see with "98."
Good Girl 3 frankly blew me away. You do need to read 2 to understand the subject matter - but this is a piece of erotica that has...essentially no physical component. He holds her hand. Kind of hard. It takes place at a table in a restaurant. It is entirely mental. And honestly it is one of the most powerful pieces of BDSM erotica I've read.
Obviously tastes may vary, but it's worth taking a look and I highly recommend it. *Chuckle* if you leave a positive comment, say who sent you. If you leave a negative comment, say you got the URL from Josh Bolten.
Now for something completely boring...
More than one person has noted there haven't been any posts lately and what the hell happened. The fact is I've been working on a project which I really wanted to have in draft by Dark Odyssey (I did) and completed by Camp Crucible (looks good), and set in stone by MaST.
I've gotten a viable draft of my Protocols for D/s. I actually don't think it's boring, but this is not an exciting sexual read, it's a lot of pages of details on how a submissive and Dominant behave together.
It requires a supplement which is not quite done yet, showing illustrations of all the positions. That will be out shortly, it's really close.
So a couple of notes.
First, I owe a debt to several published sources and to Dr. Robert J. Rubel's Protocols: Handbook for the female slave, as well as the APEX/Butchmann protocols.
One of my concerns has been that there is not a serious set of protocols for submissives. The thrust for D/s is 24/7 slaves. I don't do 24/7 work at this time, and I honestly feel it's kind of poor if a girl who wants to hold down a normal job, have a normal social life, and sub one night a week can't have the same experience as someone who has dedicated to being a "lifestyle" submissive/slave. I wanted to create a set of Protocols that I felt were flexible enough to handle "normal" wear and tear, not just my day to day life at the (non existant) Dude Ranch where I keep my vast "stable" of submissives. I live in a suburban context (albeit very far in the suburbs) and all the girls I am currently working with have lives, jobs and social interests and priorities, including other partners.
I'm making these Protocols available to folks who want to see them, since I've already had about five requests. That said I want to give a few big provisos.
Protocols can be elegant, beautiful, and a huge boost to a D/s relationship. Rubel suggests that protocols “turn routine actions into ‘defined, repeatable, events.’” He adds notes on Protocols as a guide to declaring mutual intent, and focuses on the concept that Protocols make a relationship special, by communicating “to the other person – and anyone watching – just how valued this relationship is.”
1) These are not designed to be "point and click" protocols for the Dominant. You would need to read them, likely save and adapt them, then go over them with a new girl.
2) For Gods' sake, do not dump these on some hapless girl without comment and tell her it was my idea. If you do that, to quote Daniel Plainview from There Will be Blood "One night I'm gonna come to you, inside of your house, wherever you're sleeping, and I'm gonna cut your throat." Just sayin'
3) In all seriousness. Read through these, and talk through them with the girl. These will be a flatulent pain in the ass if you don't walk the girl through them, preferably with your own careful alterations.
I am working on a "getting started" guide, but that's not a major area of concern for me, so you kind of need to read this stuff, understand, and then use.
I am not answerable for failings or lack. If you have something you think should be in these protocols, then by all means download a copy and add it. I haven't even put a Creative Commons License on them, so...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
For the uninitiated that means you can feel free to copy it and make changes to it, as long as you share your changes, but you can't sell it and make money off of it.
She's recently published "Be Good Girl - Chapter 3" at Literotica.
I think Good Girl 1 and 2 are very good stories, and they captivated me early on, because neither are your normal fuck fantasy bullshit. They are kind of ugly in some ways and have rough edges and are not your mom's sex fantasy. But they were also written five years ago, and the author's style and capability has matured significantly since then, which you can see with "98."
Good Girl 3 frankly blew me away. You do need to read 2 to understand the subject matter - but this is a piece of erotica that has...essentially no physical component. He holds her hand. Kind of hard. It takes place at a table in a restaurant. It is entirely mental. And honestly it is one of the most powerful pieces of BDSM erotica I've read.
Obviously tastes may vary, but it's worth taking a look and I highly recommend it. *Chuckle* if you leave a positive comment, say who sent you. If you leave a negative comment, say you got the URL from Josh Bolten.
Now for something completely boring...
More than one person has noted there haven't been any posts lately and what the hell happened. The fact is I've been working on a project which I really wanted to have in draft by Dark Odyssey (I did) and completed by Camp Crucible (looks good), and set in stone by MaST.
I've gotten a viable draft of my Protocols for D/s. I actually don't think it's boring, but this is not an exciting sexual read, it's a lot of pages of details on how a submissive and Dominant behave together.
It requires a supplement which is not quite done yet, showing illustrations of all the positions. That will be out shortly, it's really close.
So a couple of notes.
First, I owe a debt to several published sources and to Dr. Robert J. Rubel's Protocols: Handbook for the female slave, as well as the APEX/Butchmann protocols.
One of my concerns has been that there is not a serious set of protocols for submissives. The thrust for D/s is 24/7 slaves. I don't do 24/7 work at this time, and I honestly feel it's kind of poor if a girl who wants to hold down a normal job, have a normal social life, and sub one night a week can't have the same experience as someone who has dedicated to being a "lifestyle" submissive/slave. I wanted to create a set of Protocols that I felt were flexible enough to handle "normal" wear and tear, not just my day to day life at the (non existant) Dude Ranch where I keep my vast "stable" of submissives. I live in a suburban context (albeit very far in the suburbs) and all the girls I am currently working with have lives, jobs and social interests and priorities, including other partners.
I'm making these Protocols available to folks who want to see them, since I've already had about five requests. That said I want to give a few big provisos.
Protocols can be elegant, beautiful, and a huge boost to a D/s relationship. Rubel suggests that protocols “turn routine actions into ‘defined, repeatable, events.’” He adds notes on Protocols as a guide to declaring mutual intent, and focuses on the concept that Protocols make a relationship special, by communicating “to the other person – and anyone watching – just how valued this relationship is.”
1) These are not designed to be "point and click" protocols for the Dominant. You would need to read them, likely save and adapt them, then go over them with a new girl.
2) For Gods' sake, do not dump these on some hapless girl without comment and tell her it was my idea. If you do that, to quote Daniel Plainview from There Will be Blood "One night I'm gonna come to you, inside of your house, wherever you're sleeping, and I'm gonna cut your throat." Just sayin'
3) In all seriousness. Read through these, and talk through them with the girl. These will be a flatulent pain in the ass if you don't walk the girl through them, preferably with your own careful alterations.
I am working on a "getting started" guide, but that's not a major area of concern for me, so you kind of need to read this stuff, understand, and then use.
I am not answerable for failings or lack. If you have something you think should be in these protocols, then by all means download a copy and add it. I haven't even put a Creative Commons License on them, so...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
For the uninitiated that means you can feel free to copy it and make changes to it, as long as you share your changes, but you can't sell it and make money off of it.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Fantasy "Bear"...has to be seen to be believed
So as you might predict, I have a few friends who write, and some of them write erotica/porn/pr0n. Occasionally one of them tells me that they are uncertain of their writing skill. Not certain their work is really good enough. Hell I write some smut, and I often have some doubts about it.
But sometimes someone does us the service of making us feel not so bad. About giving us a mark to aim for so that on any given day we can, without much soul searching, say “Jesus Christ, at least I’m better than that.”
This was just too entertaining not to share...
Enter “Bear.”
Bear is a discovery of my friend C. who came across a reference on Sensible Erection, which he describes as “Slashdot for porn” where he said “this guy asked them to host his adult site, and in a few days became the laughingstock of the community.” I found the original seed
So what makes “Bear” so truly amusing. First, let me pass along the URL of the members only index to the pay site. This woofer wants $23 a month U.S. which even with the value of the dollar falling faster than Clinton strategist Mark Penn’s career prospects, is still far more money than it is worth. $276 a year? Mull that…
So when I send you to the unprotected members only index page at http://www.fantasybear.net/index.htm, you’ll miss the intro. But if you’re not quite up for going there, let me give you a taste of the tone of this...interesting…site.
NOT a Porn Site,[God forbid that!] Sensual Male Photos. Romance-Fantasies and a whole lot more. This site has alittle of everything.
Get to know him intimately through his fantasies and photos. Fall in love. And breathe hard. Sex isn't a sport. It's a creation between two people. It's the way a man tells a woman how much he loves her.
Fantasy Creations*2000
Has Discovered
BEAR
and wants to share his very special love making skills.
Women: Fall in love, breathe hard, and use Bear as your secret lover, or get your partner to read with you to get their creative sexual spirit moving. Find out what Bear likes and try it on your lover. men: Get turned on. Find out what women really feel when they're truly being made love to. Find out what can really happen to a woman's body if it is stimulated emotionally and physically. Learn to be the lover your partner secretly craves. Try out some of Bear's fantasies.
This site will give you detailed, full length, start to finish, real life, lovemaking fantasies of all kinds. There's also a whole gallery of photos to help you really get into the fantasies, a wisdom section, cartoons and jokes, funny viewers stories, and a chance to get into love making classes.
Fantasies contain mature material (not intended for those under 18), but every effort has been made to keep very detailed love making scenes loving and tasteful, and for nude shots to be tasteful, creative, and artistic.
Bear has the body of a hard working country boy (not the sculpted look of today's male models), has gorgeous green eyes that reflect a man with a thousand faces, has long, soft, naturally curly hair (that the women around him keep wanting to touch! ), satiny smooth skin, and his voice is deep and gentle (unless he's very occasionally roaring like a Bear). This guys a bachelor and though he's had some experience to learn what he knows, is a clean cut, good guy. He just happens to love to please ladies. If you're young or old, skinny, just right or overweight, plain, pretty or not so pretty, Bear will love you. He can always, always , always find a woman's pretty parts: legs, eyes, a warm heart, hair, breasts, butts, feet, hands, knees, ears, and even belly buttons. And even though he can rage like a river in the most masculine show you've ever seen, he can purr like a kitten, act as silly as a chimp, make you laugh 'til your sides hurt, pray like there's no tomorrow, be as creative as Michelangelo, problem solve like Einstein, and turn on twinkly eyes that can make you melt.
Oh, did we mention that he's a born philosopher and teacher - - and there's love and acceptance behind every word? - - - -
I shit you not folks…
What ensues are a number of fantasies that share some really stunning qualities. First it is really difficult to imagine writing about sex in a non-clinical fashion and being this sterile. I am not going to say “vanilla” because that’s really kind of an insult.
The writer is afraid to use any non-dictionary term for the genitalia. He inserts his penis into women’s vaginas which sounds about as romantic to me as a rhinoplasty.
He’s obsessed with the idea of women’s instant and overwhelming reaction to him. Sometimes they come just from looking at him. On the other hand, he only uses the word “come” once or twice…usually he says “orgasm” sometimes three times in a run-on sentence.
The only act you’ll find described here is male-female vaginal penetration. There’s a little kissing some running over of hands, but this guy is clearly deeply spooked by getting his mouth near a woman’s “pretty parts,” and you feel pretty sure he’d feel it was in some way unchivalrous to make a woman put her mouth “down there.”
This is sex writing for people who have a hard time even thinking about sex...
It’s…just…well you gotta read it.
He looks at you with those soft, deep, intense green eyes and your eyes are afraid to look down, and the eye contact goes on and on until you start talking silently to him, sure he can hear every thought. You tell him you want him. You tell him you love him with all your heart and that at that moment, your body belongs to him. You think of submission, not in a cruel way, but in the most loving way possible. You want him to take you to where ever he wants to go. And finally he looks down, passes the food around, looks at the flowers you picked just for him, picks up his fork and ever so slowly reaches across the table to give you the first bite. When you lean forward, he shakes his head 'no', the eye contact solid again, and as you draw back slowly, he moves the fork to your mouth and ever so slowly puts the food in your mouth, drawing the fork away so carefully that it runs across your bottom lip -- that he is now analyzing.
Analyze me baby…
Orgasm number 4, as his hands caress your thighs, your legs, back up and under the dress to your breasts - - finally under the material. Just a light touch with both hands on your nipples and another shudder. No more counting. You're starting to multiple big time.
Look folks, you didn’t think that C, and E, and I would waste your time with something that was just trivially bad did you. This is really stunning stuff...
I think what really makes this stuff creepy and kind of disturbing is his flirting around with hardcore subjects but with so many qualifications that they come out as sort of puerile. I can tell you that I cannot wait for "Fantasy #29 - Super Pleasurable Rape." Just in case, you know, you thought Rape might be ugly or painful or something. Like the reference above to submission which immediately redacts itself You think of submission, not in a cruel way, but in the most loving way possible. That just sort of sets off my weird and creepy meter, though I think it's mostly harmless banality.
Finally…
You put your hands under your bottom to increase the depth of his penetration and he raises to his knees and tucks your knees to your chest and he leans down on your raised knees and pumps long, strong strokes that now have you into almost an unending orgasm. Your vagina is so sensitive that you feel every part of every stroke. You open your eyes, and his eyes meet yours and he leans down and kisses you while still stroking in and out. Because he always waits to come until you say, "Now. Make it with me." you wait until you can't stand it any more, and start to beg, "Now." And you feel a change in his size. He felt full and big and straight before, but now he's really, really full and he feels so good you think you'll explode, and then, just as he's about to make it, you pry your eyes open to watch him as his head goes back, and the most masculine sight you could ever witness is this gorgeous creature tensing into his own orgasm and at the same time, your most satisfying orgasm of all hits.
Whew…the picture, by the way, really begs to have “Bear’s Very Special Greatest Hits – 1972-1974” written on it in a script font, with a track credit to England Dan and John Ford Coley.
Anyway, believe it or not, there is a way to make Bear even more entertaining…
We haven’t figured out really how to make this a drinking game yet, since it’s predictable, but try block copying the story and inserting the name of a friend (preferably one you do not think will throw that bottle of Jack at you). Then begin substituting other words. We found that “Penis,” “Orgasm” and “Make it” were good words to substitute, since the first two at least come up nearly every sentence. We substituted “election” with the name of a politically minded friend, but you could come up with your own bon mots. Hmm…is “mal mots” actually a saying.
So, this is silliness, but it killed enough time at C.’s party I thought it was worth passing along, and given how damn busy things are, it isn’t as if I had anything better to write.
Now for something completely different...
I have to remind myself this is a “Sin Blog” not a “Sex Blog” from time to time. So since Bear is really the afterjoke, I’ll throw this out. I admit I found it just now on SE while looking for the original Bear entry.
For anybody who has ever longed for the “good old days” before people were cruel to each other, and committed atrocious murders, barbarities, when life was simpler and less risky…I’m a History/English double major by original worthless liberal arts education, and stuff like this fascinates me. Not the “great stories,” but these little windows into people’s real lives.
http://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/misc/steele.html
A few of the best:
Alice Was too Fast
Irreparably Sullied by a Cad
But sometimes someone does us the service of making us feel not so bad. About giving us a mark to aim for so that on any given day we can, without much soul searching, say “Jesus Christ, at least I’m better than that.”
This was just too entertaining not to share...
Enter “Bear.”
Bear is a discovery of my friend C. who came across a reference on Sensible Erection, which he describes as “Slashdot for porn” where he said “this guy asked them to host his adult site, and in a few days became the laughingstock of the community.” I found the original seed
So what makes “Bear” so truly amusing. First, let me pass along the URL of the members only index to the pay site. This woofer wants $23 a month U.S. which even with the value of the dollar falling faster than Clinton strategist Mark Penn’s career prospects, is still far more money than it is worth. $276 a year? Mull that…
So when I send you to the unprotected members only index page at http://www.fantasybear.net/index.htm, you’ll miss the intro. But if you’re not quite up for going there, let me give you a taste of the tone of this...interesting…site.
NOT a Porn Site,[God forbid that!] Sensual Male Photos. Romance-Fantasies and a whole lot more. This site has alittle of everything.
Get to know him intimately through his fantasies and photos. Fall in love. And breathe hard. Sex isn't a sport. It's a creation between two people. It's the way a man tells a woman how much he loves her.
Fantasy Creations*2000
Has Discovered
BEAR
and wants to share his very special love making skills.
Women: Fall in love, breathe hard, and use Bear as your secret lover, or get your partner to read with you to get their creative sexual spirit moving. Find out what Bear likes and try it on your lover. men: Get turned on. Find out what women really feel when they're truly being made love to. Find out what can really happen to a woman's body if it is stimulated emotionally and physically. Learn to be the lover your partner secretly craves. Try out some of Bear's fantasies.
This site will give you detailed, full length, start to finish, real life, lovemaking fantasies of all kinds. There's also a whole gallery of photos to help you really get into the fantasies, a wisdom section, cartoons and jokes, funny viewers stories, and a chance to get into love making classes.
Fantasies contain mature material (not intended for those under 18), but every effort has been made to keep very detailed love making scenes loving and tasteful, and for nude shots to be tasteful, creative, and artistic.
Bear has the body of a hard working country boy (not the sculpted look of today's male models), has gorgeous green eyes that reflect a man with a thousand faces, has long, soft, naturally curly hair (that the women around him keep wanting to touch! ), satiny smooth skin, and his voice is deep and gentle (unless he's very occasionally roaring like a Bear). This guys a bachelor and though he's had some experience to learn what he knows, is a clean cut, good guy. He just happens to love to please ladies. If you're young or old, skinny, just right or overweight, plain, pretty or not so pretty, Bear will love you. He can always, always , always find a woman's pretty parts: legs, eyes, a warm heart, hair, breasts, butts, feet, hands, knees, ears, and even belly buttons. And even though he can rage like a river in the most masculine show you've ever seen, he can purr like a kitten, act as silly as a chimp, make you laugh 'til your sides hurt, pray like there's no tomorrow, be as creative as Michelangelo, problem solve like Einstein, and turn on twinkly eyes that can make you melt.
Oh, did we mention that he's a born philosopher and teacher - - and there's love and acceptance behind every word? - - - -
I shit you not folks…
What ensues are a number of fantasies that share some really stunning qualities. First it is really difficult to imagine writing about sex in a non-clinical fashion and being this sterile. I am not going to say “vanilla” because that’s really kind of an insult.
The writer is afraid to use any non-dictionary term for the genitalia. He inserts his penis into women’s vaginas which sounds about as romantic to me as a rhinoplasty.
He’s obsessed with the idea of women’s instant and overwhelming reaction to him. Sometimes they come just from looking at him. On the other hand, he only uses the word “come” once or twice…usually he says “orgasm” sometimes three times in a run-on sentence.
The only act you’ll find described here is male-female vaginal penetration. There’s a little kissing some running over of hands, but this guy is clearly deeply spooked by getting his mouth near a woman’s “pretty parts,” and you feel pretty sure he’d feel it was in some way unchivalrous to make a woman put her mouth “down there.”
This is sex writing for people who have a hard time even thinking about sex...
It’s…just…well you gotta read it.
He looks at you with those soft, deep, intense green eyes and your eyes are afraid to look down, and the eye contact goes on and on until you start talking silently to him, sure he can hear every thought. You tell him you want him. You tell him you love him with all your heart and that at that moment, your body belongs to him. You think of submission, not in a cruel way, but in the most loving way possible. You want him to take you to where ever he wants to go. And finally he looks down, passes the food around, looks at the flowers you picked just for him, picks up his fork and ever so slowly reaches across the table to give you the first bite. When you lean forward, he shakes his head 'no', the eye contact solid again, and as you draw back slowly, he moves the fork to your mouth and ever so slowly puts the food in your mouth, drawing the fork away so carefully that it runs across your bottom lip -- that he is now analyzing.
Analyze me baby…
Orgasm number 4, as his hands caress your thighs, your legs, back up and under the dress to your breasts - - finally under the material. Just a light touch with both hands on your nipples and another shudder. No more counting. You're starting to multiple big time.
Look folks, you didn’t think that C, and E, and I would waste your time with something that was just trivially bad did you. This is really stunning stuff...
I think what really makes this stuff creepy and kind of disturbing is his flirting around with hardcore subjects but with so many qualifications that they come out as sort of puerile. I can tell you that I cannot wait for "Fantasy #29 - Super Pleasurable Rape." Just in case, you know, you thought Rape might be ugly or painful or something. Like the reference above to submission which immediately redacts itself You think of submission, not in a cruel way, but in the most loving way possible. That just sort of sets off my weird and creepy meter, though I think it's mostly harmless banality.
Finally…
You put your hands under your bottom to increase the depth of his penetration and he raises to his knees and tucks your knees to your chest and he leans down on your raised knees and pumps long, strong strokes that now have you into almost an unending orgasm. Your vagina is so sensitive that you feel every part of every stroke. You open your eyes, and his eyes meet yours and he leans down and kisses you while still stroking in and out. Because he always waits to come until you say, "Now. Make it with me." you wait until you can't stand it any more, and start to beg, "Now." And you feel a change in his size. He felt full and big and straight before, but now he's really, really full and he feels so good you think you'll explode, and then, just as he's about to make it, you pry your eyes open to watch him as his head goes back, and the most masculine sight you could ever witness is this gorgeous creature tensing into his own orgasm and at the same time, your most satisfying orgasm of all hits.
Whew…the picture, by the way, really begs to have “Bear’s Very Special Greatest Hits – 1972-1974” written on it in a script font, with a track credit to England Dan and John Ford Coley.
Anyway, believe it or not, there is a way to make Bear even more entertaining…
We haven’t figured out really how to make this a drinking game yet, since it’s predictable, but try block copying the story and inserting the name of a friend (preferably one you do not think will throw that bottle of Jack at you). Then begin substituting other words. We found that “Penis,” “Orgasm” and “Make it” were good words to substitute, since the first two at least come up nearly every sentence. We substituted “election” with the name of a politically minded friend, but you could come up with your own bon mots. Hmm…is “mal mots” actually a saying.
So, this is silliness, but it killed enough time at C.’s party I thought it was worth passing along, and given how damn busy things are, it isn’t as if I had anything better to write.
Now for something completely different...
I have to remind myself this is a “Sin Blog” not a “Sex Blog” from time to time. So since Bear is really the afterjoke, I’ll throw this out. I admit I found it just now on SE while looking for the original Bear entry.
For anybody who has ever longed for the “good old days” before people were cruel to each other, and committed atrocious murders, barbarities, when life was simpler and less risky…I’m a History/English double major by original worthless liberal arts education, and stuff like this fascinates me. Not the “great stories,” but these little windows into people’s real lives.
http://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/misc/steele.html
A few of the best:
Alice Was too Fast
Irreparably Sullied by a Cad
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Whoring, Spitzer, and "things that might be dangerous"
Today, we're going to write a little about Elliot Spitzer. I’m going to be honest and say that this is a recap of an e-mail that I sent to a friend a while back, but it’s been fleshed out a little. I’m still frantically recycling material because I’m under the gun on production and at work.
First let me say I don’t care much about Spitzer much one way or the other. A part of me says he was keeping the Corps a little honest, a part of me says he was a power-hungry personal image developer who screwed other people who were just doing what everybody does in order to forward his political career.
So first a little about prostitution. I know something about it. I’ll admit to a certain fascination with it, and when I’m fascinated by something I find out about it. My “hands on” knowledge is mostly pretty rusty, but I’ve kept up with the concept in a more than casual way. We’ll investigate the fetish value of it at another time. For now suffice it to say I had a broad and misspent youth. I’m familiar with the various systems that were around at the time – escort services, advertising papers and cards, adult massage parlors, outright brothels (not so common anymore) and street action. Nowadays advertising in papers and cards has been replaced by CL and other more modern services, but the principle is still the same.
When I talk about going to prostitutes with friends (and honestly what the fuck is the point of a misspent youth if you aren’t going to brag about it) I usually refer to it as “whoring.” No disresepct to the trade is intended. Prostitution is a trade and in my opinion an honorable one. Whoring is s calling as old as the world…recent studies show that other species whore…and as my wife would remind me, the “Whore of Babylon” is a deific being, worshipped under various names in several of the cultures that gave birth to modern faiths and philosophy.
Let me also add, it’s not a job I’d recommend, and in fact I’ve very recently had occasion to suggest to a friend that they give a very hard think about whether or not it was something they wanted to get into. My reasons aren’t ethical or moral. It’s the same reason I don’t recommend that anyone take up cab driving (which I’ve done) or join the U.S. Army, or teach public school. I respect the people who do all those things, but if you are asking me what field to go into, I am going to tell you that the amount of remuneration for the amount of risk and even emotional risk may be a tough trade-off. On the other hand we need all those professions. Society wouldn’t move forward without them. It’s a calling and one I respect. Everything I’ve read or learned makes me think it’s safer today than it was back when I was seeing girls regularly, more like it was in Canada and Britain back then.
So now that I’ve spun my creds to talk about whoring, let’s talk about Spitzer.
I never met the man. The only person I ever met who worked with him was one of our fucking short-timers. Made a big deal he'd worked in Spitzer's office, name dropped that constantly. Was the most insufferable prick we ever had around. Let me be clear. I’m used to Washington and I don’t call people pricks very much. I don't feel that way about most of my co-workers...the other short timers ranged from irritating to cool. One Coast Guard guy I liked a lot. But this guy was just a complete hyper-motivated ass. He was going places and wanted you to march. I'm a liberal, in some ways an extreme liberal, but...I also favor a certain degree of moderating, getting along and chilling, and this guy was on the warpath all the time. And really he was on the warpath for him. He’d make occasional noises about cause, etc. but it was mostly “I am sticking up for the Chief and running roughshod over you to advance my career.”
If anybody was expecting me to defend the man, I can’t. I try not to be a hypocrite, and it’s the behavior I find most shameful in myself. If I violate the rules, you can find me saying a dozen places I never promised to obey them. If I violate the subset of rules I have said I value, that makes me a failure in my eyes. Spitzer was a man whose rules were “the law books as they stand, the word, not the spirit of the law.” He prosecuted people who were just doing what other people did every day, who thought it was “the system” if not the law. So…when a man like that breaks the letter of the law there’s little I can say for him directly. We all make our beds. Eventually the hangman may go to the gallows, and little sympathy from the outlaw.
There are some things that are interesting to me about this case, though. I admit I haven’t had time to obsessively follow it, so maybe some of these things are well known.
My first reaction is “why the fuck does the Governor of New York have to pay $4000 for a $200 trick?” When I was active a good many years ago Street in Baltimore was $15-35, depending on service. In DC it was never much less than $50. Massage parlours ran about $100 to 150. Escort Services started out at about $200. Based on what I’m seeing today, you’d be $150-200 an hour, maybe a little more depending on the girl. Jessica Cutler (Washingtonienne) was getting dropped about $400 for an afternoon date, but that was presumably more than a quick in out fuck in an hour, unless that’s just exactly what they wanted (which in her case it may have been). Also I don't trust Cutler not to be inflating the figures a little...some of the sums she throws around sound pretty unlikely coming from guys who by my calculation are at my pay grade. Course they were single and probably didn't have much else to do.
So…$4000. One of the things I always think is funny is when you talk to women who are “straight,” about prostitution. I find two things are usually the case. One is that they are invariably fascinated. It’s supposed to be a turn off, but every woman I’ve ever mentioned it to has been very curious. I’ve said before that guys go to prostitutes for one of two reasons, and I guess people can figure out which one is mine. Anyway, the other thing is that they tend to overvalue how much they’d be worth, sometimes dramatically. Usually its innocuous (though not always). It’s a world they know nothing about. People with some kink-aware background, and younger internet savvy girls know more and guess better.
So my first thought was “Jesus fucking Christ, dude….what gives…” And to think that if you’re the Governor of New York, maybe you have to pay high to find a service that you can trust. That basically you’re just paying out the nose for what would come cheap to anybody else.
But I don’t know. I mean honestly for overnight with a girl who is in the echelon of commanding $400, I suppose if you went ten hours, that would work out. Still seems high to me.
So there is an editorial by Brendan Polmer, in the GW Hatchet (for non-local folks that’s the George Washington University Newspaper). I don’t normally out people by name here, but this is printed in a public newspaper. In addition to managing to sound like a complete prig who was writing the piece to suck up to his girlfriend because he’d never do anything like that, he comes out with…
“The report goes on to say that in a wiretapped phone conversation between the Emperor’s Club booker and the prostitute that services Spitzer, the booker states that Spitzer had a history of asking the women “to do things that like, you might not think were safe.” Polmer maturely comments “Eeewwwwww. I don’t know about you but that certainly puts a few unsettling images in my head.” He does not add “which I will whack off to tonight.” How many www’s do Strunk and White give to “eeewwwwwww” anyway? Oh well, what’s a little onomatopoetia between friends.
It gives me a little more respect for Spitzer. I still don’t know what the fuck it means. If it were me on the phone I would have come back with “do you mean he wants to screw without a condom or that he’s into aggressive breath control play…for God’s sakes man, be specific.” But at least maybe he was doing something that was worth putting four grand on the nightstand. And honestly you know, you have to charge high if you are going to do that sort of work. Letting out your body to a stranger to take risks with isn’t a trival thing.
I don’t mean to sound like a callous anus about the money. It’s like when you hear that some Politician got a haircut that cost $1000, and you think “look Hair Cuttery is $18 and I know really good stylists who don’t charge more than $150, and for that I get an Aveda sample.” It’s knowing something about the game. There are people I’ve had sex with who I don’t think you could put a price on the emotional experience, but honestly when you start talking about $4000 I have to think about what that could mean in terms of travel, events, toys, nice things for all my partners, and I cringe a little. It’s just a little over the top to me.
But that’s not really my point…
My question is the basic public commonweal behind the modern sex scandal.
Since the time of John Profumo and Christine Keeler, the press and society has gotten much better at invading privacy. To this day nobody knows exactly for certain whether or not JFK fucked Marilyn. It sure looks that way, but nobody is able to exhume fabric and take samples. Now the tools and, increasingly, legal avenues, exist to track these things.
You could say that Spitzer is an exception because he may have committed financial crime. But on the other hand one tends to think the inaccessibility of this service to him drove him to expenses and desperation that he might well not have undertaken for a boat or a car. Sexual desire is a very powerful drive. It makes us do things whether we want to or not. I'm not excusing him. Your house, your rules. He chose his own rules, and I'm for seeing him hang by them.
Still...
During the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal a noted jurist…and I’ve tried to find the quote and can’t...it was in an NPR radio interview and I have never been able to track it…said something that stuck with me. To paraphrase, “I think there are a lot of people who would lie about that one thing…about sex…who would not lie about anything else.”
So I wonder if we do ourselves any service with sex scandals, or the climate that creates them. Is it possible that we are in fact depriving ourselves of good leadership because technology has outpaced privacy.
Back when it was "lip service" and Kennedy could still fuck anybody he wanted to as long as he didn’t do it in public, it didn't matter. But sex has always been one of the things that drove powerful men to excel. Because it won them the right to have any sex partner they wanted, because women will throw themselves at powerful men.
Let’s take the converse as well. It is very nearly the case that to be considered politically electable, a woman has to be old enough, and modify her looks to enough severity, that she is not seen in a sexual light. Very few people fantasized about Margaret Thatcher, and while I can read masturbatory fantasies about Obama on the internet, I am not reading many about Hillary Clinton. Is that the counter-price. That if men must pretend to have no sexuality, women are held at arms length until their sexuality is deemed “safe.” I have doubt that a woman with much hint of sexual charisma could stand for a major office, though of course some have and do on the state or local level, where deviation from the presumed norm can be compensated with personal charisma and direct dealing.
I understand the concept that we don't want to be led by people who can be led around by their cocks. But powerful people always have been, and I am not sure we want to be led by people who lack natural human urges, or in fact the chutzpah to act on them. A guy who is too cowardly to take a risk to have sex? Is that really the guy I want going to the table to arm wrestle with foreign policy. Insane risks no. But I am not sure I want my country led by the shy kid who can't get the nerve up to ask a girl on a date.
So here, in the "post privacy" era, we're at the point where it's not just "lip service." Powerful men are reduced to insane steps just to fuck somebody they aren't legally married to.
I'm not sure that's healthy. Do we want to limit government to just eunuchs...people too frustrated, cowardly, or uptight to fuck around? Is that going to give us better leaders?
Even one of my very conservative friends, reading about Clinton and Lewinsky in the private kitchen said something to the effect of “it makes you realize just how little privacy the man in that office actually has…limited to just that tiny space where he can be alone and in private.”
Like all social questions this one has no answer other than time. The answer is that variant sexual behavior is already more acceptable in Europe than here, and that as the “other America” is slowly permeated by the America of urban culture, these things will change. Clinton withstood his impeachment challenge. Spitzer was forced down on financial corruption and breaking the law not on sleeping around.
Over time, mores and morals will shift. And every little media source that promotes sanity, reason, and hedonism will help…
Perhaps even one this small...
First let me say I don’t care much about Spitzer much one way or the other. A part of me says he was keeping the Corps a little honest, a part of me says he was a power-hungry personal image developer who screwed other people who were just doing what everybody does in order to forward his political career.
So first a little about prostitution. I know something about it. I’ll admit to a certain fascination with it, and when I’m fascinated by something I find out about it. My “hands on” knowledge is mostly pretty rusty, but I’ve kept up with the concept in a more than casual way. We’ll investigate the fetish value of it at another time. For now suffice it to say I had a broad and misspent youth. I’m familiar with the various systems that were around at the time – escort services, advertising papers and cards, adult massage parlors, outright brothels (not so common anymore) and street action. Nowadays advertising in papers and cards has been replaced by CL and other more modern services, but the principle is still the same.
When I talk about going to prostitutes with friends (and honestly what the fuck is the point of a misspent youth if you aren’t going to brag about it) I usually refer to it as “whoring.” No disresepct to the trade is intended. Prostitution is a trade and in my opinion an honorable one. Whoring is s calling as old as the world…recent studies show that other species whore…and as my wife would remind me, the “Whore of Babylon” is a deific being, worshipped under various names in several of the cultures that gave birth to modern faiths and philosophy.
Let me also add, it’s not a job I’d recommend, and in fact I’ve very recently had occasion to suggest to a friend that they give a very hard think about whether or not it was something they wanted to get into. My reasons aren’t ethical or moral. It’s the same reason I don’t recommend that anyone take up cab driving (which I’ve done) or join the U.S. Army, or teach public school. I respect the people who do all those things, but if you are asking me what field to go into, I am going to tell you that the amount of remuneration for the amount of risk and even emotional risk may be a tough trade-off. On the other hand we need all those professions. Society wouldn’t move forward without them. It’s a calling and one I respect. Everything I’ve read or learned makes me think it’s safer today than it was back when I was seeing girls regularly, more like it was in Canada and Britain back then.
So now that I’ve spun my creds to talk about whoring, let’s talk about Spitzer.
I never met the man. The only person I ever met who worked with him was one of our fucking short-timers. Made a big deal he'd worked in Spitzer's office, name dropped that constantly. Was the most insufferable prick we ever had around. Let me be clear. I’m used to Washington and I don’t call people pricks very much. I don't feel that way about most of my co-workers...the other short timers ranged from irritating to cool. One Coast Guard guy I liked a lot. But this guy was just a complete hyper-motivated ass. He was going places and wanted you to march. I'm a liberal, in some ways an extreme liberal, but...I also favor a certain degree of moderating, getting along and chilling, and this guy was on the warpath all the time. And really he was on the warpath for him. He’d make occasional noises about cause, etc. but it was mostly “I am sticking up for the Chief and running roughshod over you to advance my career.”
If anybody was expecting me to defend the man, I can’t. I try not to be a hypocrite, and it’s the behavior I find most shameful in myself. If I violate the rules, you can find me saying a dozen places I never promised to obey them. If I violate the subset of rules I have said I value, that makes me a failure in my eyes. Spitzer was a man whose rules were “the law books as they stand, the word, not the spirit of the law.” He prosecuted people who were just doing what other people did every day, who thought it was “the system” if not the law. So…when a man like that breaks the letter of the law there’s little I can say for him directly. We all make our beds. Eventually the hangman may go to the gallows, and little sympathy from the outlaw.
There are some things that are interesting to me about this case, though. I admit I haven’t had time to obsessively follow it, so maybe some of these things are well known.
My first reaction is “why the fuck does the Governor of New York have to pay $4000 for a $200 trick?” When I was active a good many years ago Street in Baltimore was $15-35, depending on service. In DC it was never much less than $50. Massage parlours ran about $100 to 150. Escort Services started out at about $200. Based on what I’m seeing today, you’d be $150-200 an hour, maybe a little more depending on the girl. Jessica Cutler (Washingtonienne) was getting dropped about $400 for an afternoon date, but that was presumably more than a quick in out fuck in an hour, unless that’s just exactly what they wanted (which in her case it may have been). Also I don't trust Cutler not to be inflating the figures a little...some of the sums she throws around sound pretty unlikely coming from guys who by my calculation are at my pay grade. Course they were single and probably didn't have much else to do.
So…$4000. One of the things I always think is funny is when you talk to women who are “straight,” about prostitution. I find two things are usually the case. One is that they are invariably fascinated. It’s supposed to be a turn off, but every woman I’ve ever mentioned it to has been very curious. I’ve said before that guys go to prostitutes for one of two reasons, and I guess people can figure out which one is mine. Anyway, the other thing is that they tend to overvalue how much they’d be worth, sometimes dramatically. Usually its innocuous (though not always). It’s a world they know nothing about. People with some kink-aware background, and younger internet savvy girls know more and guess better.
So my first thought was “Jesus fucking Christ, dude….what gives…” And to think that if you’re the Governor of New York, maybe you have to pay high to find a service that you can trust. That basically you’re just paying out the nose for what would come cheap to anybody else.
But I don’t know. I mean honestly for overnight with a girl who is in the echelon of commanding $400, I suppose if you went ten hours, that would work out. Still seems high to me.
So there is an editorial by Brendan Polmer, in the GW Hatchet (for non-local folks that’s the George Washington University Newspaper). I don’t normally out people by name here, but this is printed in a public newspaper. In addition to managing to sound like a complete prig who was writing the piece to suck up to his girlfriend because he’d never do anything like that, he comes out with…
“The report goes on to say that in a wiretapped phone conversation between the Emperor’s Club booker and the prostitute that services Spitzer, the booker states that Spitzer had a history of asking the women “to do things that like, you might not think were safe.” Polmer maturely comments “Eeewwwwww. I don’t know about you but that certainly puts a few unsettling images in my head.” He does not add “which I will whack off to tonight.” How many www’s do Strunk and White give to “eeewwwwwww” anyway? Oh well, what’s a little onomatopoetia between friends.
It gives me a little more respect for Spitzer. I still don’t know what the fuck it means. If it were me on the phone I would have come back with “do you mean he wants to screw without a condom or that he’s into aggressive breath control play…for God’s sakes man, be specific.” But at least maybe he was doing something that was worth putting four grand on the nightstand. And honestly you know, you have to charge high if you are going to do that sort of work. Letting out your body to a stranger to take risks with isn’t a trival thing.
I don’t mean to sound like a callous anus about the money. It’s like when you hear that some Politician got a haircut that cost $1000, and you think “look Hair Cuttery is $18 and I know really good stylists who don’t charge more than $150, and for that I get an Aveda sample.” It’s knowing something about the game. There are people I’ve had sex with who I don’t think you could put a price on the emotional experience, but honestly when you start talking about $4000 I have to think about what that could mean in terms of travel, events, toys, nice things for all my partners, and I cringe a little. It’s just a little over the top to me.
But that’s not really my point…
My question is the basic public commonweal behind the modern sex scandal.
Since the time of John Profumo and Christine Keeler, the press and society has gotten much better at invading privacy. To this day nobody knows exactly for certain whether or not JFK fucked Marilyn. It sure looks that way, but nobody is able to exhume fabric and take samples. Now the tools and, increasingly, legal avenues, exist to track these things.
You could say that Spitzer is an exception because he may have committed financial crime. But on the other hand one tends to think the inaccessibility of this service to him drove him to expenses and desperation that he might well not have undertaken for a boat or a car. Sexual desire is a very powerful drive. It makes us do things whether we want to or not. I'm not excusing him. Your house, your rules. He chose his own rules, and I'm for seeing him hang by them.
Still...
During the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal a noted jurist…and I’ve tried to find the quote and can’t...it was in an NPR radio interview and I have never been able to track it…said something that stuck with me. To paraphrase, “I think there are a lot of people who would lie about that one thing…about sex…who would not lie about anything else.”
So I wonder if we do ourselves any service with sex scandals, or the climate that creates them. Is it possible that we are in fact depriving ourselves of good leadership because technology has outpaced privacy.
Back when it was "lip service" and Kennedy could still fuck anybody he wanted to as long as he didn’t do it in public, it didn't matter. But sex has always been one of the things that drove powerful men to excel. Because it won them the right to have any sex partner they wanted, because women will throw themselves at powerful men.
Let’s take the converse as well. It is very nearly the case that to be considered politically electable, a woman has to be old enough, and modify her looks to enough severity, that she is not seen in a sexual light. Very few people fantasized about Margaret Thatcher, and while I can read masturbatory fantasies about Obama on the internet, I am not reading many about Hillary Clinton. Is that the counter-price. That if men must pretend to have no sexuality, women are held at arms length until their sexuality is deemed “safe.” I have doubt that a woman with much hint of sexual charisma could stand for a major office, though of course some have and do on the state or local level, where deviation from the presumed norm can be compensated with personal charisma and direct dealing.
I understand the concept that we don't want to be led by people who can be led around by their cocks. But powerful people always have been, and I am not sure we want to be led by people who lack natural human urges, or in fact the chutzpah to act on them. A guy who is too cowardly to take a risk to have sex? Is that really the guy I want going to the table to arm wrestle with foreign policy. Insane risks no. But I am not sure I want my country led by the shy kid who can't get the nerve up to ask a girl on a date.
So here, in the "post privacy" era, we're at the point where it's not just "lip service." Powerful men are reduced to insane steps just to fuck somebody they aren't legally married to.
I'm not sure that's healthy. Do we want to limit government to just eunuchs...people too frustrated, cowardly, or uptight to fuck around? Is that going to give us better leaders?
Even one of my very conservative friends, reading about Clinton and Lewinsky in the private kitchen said something to the effect of “it makes you realize just how little privacy the man in that office actually has…limited to just that tiny space where he can be alone and in private.”
Like all social questions this one has no answer other than time. The answer is that variant sexual behavior is already more acceptable in Europe than here, and that as the “other America” is slowly permeated by the America of urban culture, these things will change. Clinton withstood his impeachment challenge. Spitzer was forced down on financial corruption and breaking the law not on sleeping around.
Over time, mores and morals will shift. And every little media source that promotes sanity, reason, and hedonism will help…
Perhaps even one this small...
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