This blog post comes to you from New Haven, CT and more precisely, Yale University where I have been invited to speak at Sex Week 2012. Tomorrow afternoon, I will be a part of a round table panel with Professor Gail Dines and Professor Carolyn Bronstein and then I will be speaking with students about sex, sex on camera, and the porn industry in a dialogue moderated by Cindy Gallop.

It’s an incredible honor for me to speak here. I am a smut peddler which is low culture at its finest and here I am in the hallowed halls of the prestigious Yale University Campus. Apparently, my presence here is somewhat controversial as is Sex Week, itself. Reading the news coverage reveals the paradigm of “porn star” at work in the American imagination.

Maybe, just maybe, those who oppose my presence here have a reasonable reason to be concerned but not for the reasons they have articulated. There’s something dangerous about letting someone who has chosen a counter-cultural occupation in a stigmatized profession speak before young people who have lived within a distinguished institutional incubator on the political intersections of pleasure, labor, revolution, and autonomy. A whore with a library card has the potential to be a rhetorical assassin in the intellectual arena.

When you have been repeatedly dehumanized to your face, you start to cultivate a steely reserve that exceeds your nerves. What can anyone say that I have not heard or read in my inbox already? That I should be raped to death, brainwashed by the patriarchy, that I am in-human, that I am a traitor to feminism, that I am deluded, that I am a fucking stupid cunt? It’s the redundancy of these phrases that grates less than the punch that the prose emits.

I am the fearsome porn star. Rather than copulating my way across the campus, I have gone on something of a journey throughout the streets of this town and it’s co-dependent relationship on the exclusive institution in its midst that might possibly own more land than the city.

You see, sex is one manifestation of the tightly controlled madness in my brain. I have always followed the beat of my own drum, always on the outskirts of my cultures and communities, large and small. I don’t know what I’m looking for as I wander these streets as a veritable tourist but somehow I always manage to find at least one thing I was looking for without the conscious awareness that I was seeking it.

As I walked the streets, I noticed a striking number of video surveillance cameras. It was just a side observation and I began to snap cellphone pictures as I walked to help tally them up. Well, there may perhaps have been the knee jerk reactionary desire to take pictures of those taking pictures of me. Regardless, there I was snapping pictures of the video surveillance outside of a retail front office for a city district manager who was very curious about the pictures I was taking before inviting me into his office. There, he delivered a diatribe on how notions of a panopticon are just moronic liberal hogwash as well as his plans to get even more cameras onto the streets of New Haven.

Well, there you go.

My wanderings took me also to Occupy New Haven. As a resident of Oakland, CA I know firsthand how these camps have been received. Even as the weather is frigid and hypothermia is a legitimate risk of camping outdoors (especially when open flames of any kind of forbidden by law), the camp still stands and the protesters have a pretty reasonable relationship with the city and its police. Their greatest disruptions so far have come from students at the university. Erected on October 15, 2011 the camp is situated in between the city hall and a campus dormitory building, both of which look down upon the encampment in the park.

The punchline to this layout is the fact the city hall building of New Haven has a gorgeous and massive skylight that creates something just short of a literal glass ceiling. Looking down upon the city hall with a clear view into the building and its hallways and offices is Bank Of America.

Upon seeing the camp, the chill in the air hit me a little harder along with the reminder that the homeless lack even the minimal shelter of a tent to protect them from New England winter. There they are, holding the space, reminding people that their investment in cultivating change is serious. Although the number of campers has dwindled there is still a strong and consistent presence and individuals who have been there camping for 118 days without interruption.

What I love about the Occupy Movement is the easy access to political think tanks across the country. The culture shock of Yale has been striking to me. I did my undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, home of the banana slugs, which is relatively well known for being a hippie school with a solid University of California accredited education. I take my experiences in education in a weird little town where the surf meets the forest for granted, sometimes. Not everyone read philosophy texts at the top of 60 foot redwood trees? Not everyone hiked 20 minutes through a forest between classes? Not everyone has a tradition of running naked at the first rain of the academic school year?

The prismatic walls of my liberal bubble have been shattered by the prevailing Yale culture. The Occupy camp here in New Haven has been my primary means of assuaging my homesickness and working on my long-range goals for systemic change as well. Here I am, talking smut with the heirs to America and tactical politics with a group of crusty protesters braving the freezing weather to speak up for what is right and ethical.

It’s liberating to sit with them. I came today with some bags of food containing fruit, bread, cheese, yogurt, and granola. Experience has taught me that most of the food donations to Occupy Camps tend to run along the lines of junk food which is certainly tasty but not always the best possible option. As I cracked open a sourdough baguette to pass and share with some goat cheese, several of my new acquaintances commented that they had never tasted goat cheese before.

The street outreach worker in me still lives. Although some people have homes in houses, experience has taught me that whether or not someone’s home has visible walls does not mean that you are any less a guest in that space. It is a long and international tradition to offer gifts of food as a sign of friendship and good faith when entering someone’s home. Sharing lunch turned into an opportunity to visit the New Haven City Hall for some research on resources, public meetings, and tax assessor maps. Having packed a wardrobe of largely “straight drag” items, I pulled my fancy notebook out and put my camera around my neck and followed behind to support their information seeking process.

Having someone who looks straight and makes it a point to confidentially and actively observe a situation with visible documentation tools changes the tone of a dialogue between a protester and a city official. The scandalous porn star invited to Yale somehow managed to slip into city hall and pass as someone legitimate based on presentation and accouterments alone. At no point did I lie, I just made it a point to sit back silently from the conversation and conspicuously take notes and maintain strong eye contact on the city officials at all times.

The conversation itself was immensely positive. As I said before, although there may be tensions with what many call crusty hippies the camp does not have a negative relationship with its occupiers and has been maintaining an open door for communication. The alderman that the occupiers spoke with demonstrated his skill as a politician when he worked quickly to find the common ground and establish rapport by discussing his local work around issues such as corporate personhood. He made it clear he was listening, he made it clear that he agreed that great changes to the political process should occur.

Finally, his curiosity broke and he inquired as to who I was. I was honest; I told him I was invited to speak at Yale for the Sex Week events and that I had been talking with the occupiers and was taking notes for my writing. Politicians, even the best that I’ve ever encountered, have some fairly consistent behavioral quirks. They are well practiced in their handshakes and eye contact and quite a bit of what they do to win your confidence is detailed in pick up artist manuals. They do everything they can to establish a connection so strong that the person they are speaking with really does feel heard and special.

I walked back to the camp and chatted with the occupier who instigated the 3 person field trip about how long he had been at the camp, what he was working on, and what his vision for action was. The occupiers I spoke with were all immensely warm and all in possession of a type of authenticity I do not see with most of the Yale students who seem to be consistently anxious and ill at ease with their abundance of un-embodied knowledge.

The other night I sat in a dorm room with many of the sex week organizers and shared stories and histories. Somehow in the cramped social space that had been designated as safe for off-the-record discourse about sexuality I could see some of them finally relax just a bit and begin to speak from their hearts. As the night wore on, their tone changed. There is a the palpable presence of pretension and privilege in a “Yalie,” but it is truly a facet of the institutional culture here. As their tone relaxed, I realized that mine was as well.

Even I had been making it a point to be strategic with words and topic matter in a way that revealed an acute anxiety about how people will judge me by the way I speak and the composition of my rhetoric. Is  it the Neo-Gothic architecture? The sheer number of churches and security cameras looking out and down and that people? Is it everything that you have to deny yourself in order to be a “Yalie” of distinction.

They wear more drag at Yale than they do in the gay bars of San Francisco and they don’t even know it.

Tomorrow, my dear internet friends, I undertake this crazy venture of contrasting the views of two women who possess infinitely more cultural capital than I in regards to scholarship in the arena of pornography. A student actually articulated the situation precisely when he said, “Tomorrow, they’re going to be able to get away with murder and you won’t. That’s just how it is and you have to be that good.” I guess that’s cost of admission if you have the audacity to fuck, think, and speak.

I don’t know what I can hope to accomplish tomorrow at the panel. I don’t know what people are willing to hear when I’m framed as a porn star rather than a curious stranger with infinite questions about the politics and philosophy of the spaces I enter. Perhaps I have so fervently pursued them because it may be more effective to have constant conversations in which I can show someone, at the very least, that I am capable of human thought and emotion and that I have come here of my own accord and on my own journey. I do not ask for the blessings of an institution but I do demand that my humanity be recognized.

I’m here less to be a groupie and more to look these young heirs to America square in the eye and show them that there are greater truths beyond their paradigm. It seems that I have had great successes on this front from my smaller dialogues and I will continue them so long as someone is there to listen, respond, and share their thoughts as well.

For one, I am trying to get to the root of good faith and bad faith conflicts. As a trait found across human nature, we tend to attack easy victims. This goes for rape and this also goes for mob mentality. Let it not be said that I am a fan of lynch mobs. I am certainly a believer of self-defense. If you touch me sexually without permission, be prepared for an herbal refreshment of a caustic remedy I like to call pepper spray. That said, there is no feasible model I can conceive of for a community to retaliate in a formal and systemic manner without bias.

What I am looking at is very much the often cited Gift Of Fear by Gavin DeBecker. Often recommended to those concerned with being the victims of violence, it is also very much a book for bystanders that goes into why we so often have a very bad gut feeling about something we’ve observed but fail to act. I do not think that the BDSM community is exceptional but I do think it has unique barriers that faciliate assault and abuse that must be considered.

First and foremost, we have limited access to law enforcement and the judicial system. Those of us who have looked through assault and abuse trials have seen that even the most so-called perfect victim will go through the ringer. Most rapes aren’t prosecuted because they aren’t picked up by district attorneys and being someone in a sexual alternative community won’t do you any favors. Although we are working to improve conditions and they have gotten vastly better, we can at the least acknowledge that it’s easier to pick up the phone and call for help when you aren’t worried about whether or not you will be involuntarily committed into a psychiatric hold for being kinky or arrested yourself.

Secondly, shame is an isolating factor that facilitates abuse. Many people who are in a sexual minority may have a diminished number of social contacts to go to for help and support. So often we are advised to have our friends and families meet our partners but those rules change if you’re not in a traditional sexual arrangement. Being in the closet is a risk factor but not everyone is safe to come out. One of the major components that strengthens a community is looking out for those factors.

The fact that a lot of people are shit heads to sexual minorities is not the fault of any of these communities. Some would say I shouldn’t talk about the fact that yes, even here, there is a dark side lest the bad reputation get worse. A bad reputation won’t get better from a few human sacrifices in the name of silence. Recognizing that assault and abuse are exceedingly common in all communities including your local dungeon, YMCA, religious organization, knitting circle, and book club, or swing club and creating a system to respond to that is being pragmatic and realistic.

There’s more to responding to sexual assault than a mob with torches and pitchforks. There is also taking a look at the many dark corners we create and just how much it sucks when someone who does bad things to people is on your team.

Right now, I’m going through that feeling in San Francisco as Ross Mirkarimi faces domestic abuse charges. Mirkarimi was the candidate I wanted for sheriff. He is progressive in his politics and moreover I actually spoke to him face to face about sex worker issues and he listened. I felt that he was the best person for the job. Now he is facing multiple allegations of abuse.  It’s bad for politics. Part of me wants it all to be politics, to have it be some outsiders trying to keep a strong candidate away from this office. I mean, how often do you get a sheriff who has serious issues with the cops?

That’s wrapping myself up in my own agenda and my own disappointment at having publicly supported this individual. I don’t want to have put my stock in someone who does that. Then again, I have not been the recipient of these actions. They are complicated. They are complicated as fuck and it can never be said that I think it is simple.

What I do think is that it has to be discussed. My chief complaint with my particular community is the desire to keep the the bad faith as quiet as possible. There are people who speak up, rightfully, for those who are mislabeled as creepy for not fitting into the traditional mold for someone with good intentions and that statement is not inaccurate. We are prone to that kind of bias. What I notice, however, is that we go for those acting in good faith because they are safe targets for criticism. We are often dead silent for our worst repeat offenders.

My biggest outcry are about the people whose names you can mention in certain circles and get, at best, someone creating a defense for a destructive person that individual is and yet everyone will still promote that individual’s shows, work, and feeding grounds. Perhaps that is the biggest sign of the fear they inspire in others. I have literally run into individuals who have gone through scores of victims as a persistent repetitive behavior and modus operandi. I’ve also noticed that some individuals will move from one community to another with very little cross communication. The behaviors of the Catholic Church are not unique. We are often more afraid of the scandal than we are what occurred and that blinds us.

We pride ourselves in negotiation and articulating desire and yet we get into very mixed rhetorical language when it comes to some of our shadier characters. So often I hear something like, “Oh, that’s X and X is always an asshole like that. I mean, I’m not saying X is like, a rapist, but X is kind of rapey. Oh no, I’m not saying X would hurt anyone though. It’s just’s X’s style to be an asshole. That’s why we love X.”

What I’m saying is, if you make an honest mistake you’re likely to be publicly flogged and criticized. If you scream at more than a dozen fetish models and coerce them into silence instead of the no you just agreed on and then fuck them, you’re likely to be left in peace as a hard core edge player or something. That’s an imbalance. We need to look at who we scream at and brainstorm ways to be supportive of people without arguing over whether or not a tribunal would work.

I’ve been to sex community meetings. I am not suggesting this at all for a myriad of reasons.

I am saying, look at the language we use. Are we receptive to hearing the word, “no” or should we think at practicing some social decorum in that arena? When someone says no, they’re giving us a chance to play another day if we handle that situation with respect. Instead of arguing the legalese of what consitutes “technically touching someone” like a 7 year old in the back of Mom and Dad’s minivan on vacation with your siblings, think about respecting someone’s space and boundaries. It means checking our sense of entitlement to other people’s bodies and not making assumptions about free access.

Although many sex communities may have barriers to the outside support, sex communities are also known for the novel invention. What I’m calling for is dialogue around how to respond to assault and abuse and bring the numbers down. It doesn’t matter if sex communities are coming in at the national average for rape when the national average has been estimated to be at a 64% prevalence for women with 70-80% percent of sexual assaults coming from individuals that the victim knows.

It stands to reason that there is sexual assault and abuse occurring in a community where there is increased access with decreased outside support. Saying, “safe, sane, and consensual” is not the same thing as clicking your heels together and saying, “there’s no place like home.” Safe, sane, and consensual are a series of actions. What I’m working to do is isolate how to best respond to them when good faith and bad faith are indeed muddy concepts.

I’m looking to integrate rape, assault, and abuse training into dungeon monitor training along with promoting non-violent communication and assertiveness. I think in many communities, these things would be welcome because it’s more information and education to access. What isn’t going to solve anything is sweeping assault and abuse under the rug as “drama.”

At the same time, our inclination to avoid those who inspire the most genuine fear in favor of easier targets is exactly why I do not like the notion of the mob. However, asking folks to perhaps consider who they publicly endorse as educators at small local gatherings is not the same thing as calling for a black list.  So often I hear excuses like, “well, I know they aren’t so great at that part but they are so talented it would be rude not to promote them because that’s what community is for,” and I’m a little surprised by the cognitive dissonance at play.

Dave Chapelle perhaps best illustrated this cognitive dissonance in stand up with his big about being held hostage on a bus:

Although he is using comedy, what he’s talking about is the dark humor in the fact that he gets approached for smoking a cigarette and everyone is quick to chime in about how offensive that behavior is but everyone was suddenly silent when someone was inappropriately masturbating. Although the context is different, the sentiment is the same. Those who spark fear inspire silence.

My anger at the community comes from having finally figured out that the worse and more repetitive someone’s behavior, the more quiet and euphemistic we get about the situation. I have heard people articulate strongly worded opinions about people that have not held up in any logical way so it is not something to be relied upon as a sole calibrator. On the other hand, if people get quiet and hedgey about someone and offer quick and short forced defenses and mixed messages, that’s when my hairs start to stand on end. This method isn’t helping anyone.

One of the biggest focal points of basic self-defense classes is learning how to say NO loudly. In many ways, hosting these classes at dungeons and sex community spaces will help facilitate better sex negotiation in general because these classes provide detailed attention on asserting limits and boundaries verbally before a situation escalates. Sex spaces will hit demographics that might otherwise miss opportunities for this training or feel uncomfortable attending otherwise. Outreaching for educators who focus on these issues and hosting regular events like these can do more for empowering individuals in your community than coded mix messages will.

There is no acceptable number for assault and abuse. The status quo is unacceptable in this regard. We have all of the same mitigating factors for sexual assault that the mainstream has as well as a few beyond our control. We can answer that by making it a point of discussion and openly providing resources. I want to spend time on that discussion and work with people who are committed to finding what can be added to realistically acknowledge that it occurs and that these occurrences impact our community’s livelihood and growth and find ways to reduce the harm of those occurrences.

As a loud mouthed woman, I have justified concerns about people forming a crowd and calling for you to be burned at the stake. Allow me to repeat: I’m not a fan and I don’t think institutional violence would be helpful. I do think that our community needs resources on how to actively listen to these stories and where to direct people for support and action. We do have limited roles as community members but we are not fully absolved of any and all action or we should truly abandon the term.

Often times, people have a hard time with the conversations they want to have because they don’t have the tools. At the same time, like some of our best human invented tools, we get terrified at the shame of having to need them. We do have kink aware and poly aware professionals and we do have networks that are connected to one another. Being sexually different doesn’t mean that you’re abuser and as such you don’t want to stand idly by while it happens. Being opposed to sexual assault is not a sum zero game and it does not mean loss of liberties. It means being realistic about its occurrence and having a response to it.

We spend time learning intricate knots, we keep up on the latest sex gadgets, and we read books about communication, and we go to workshops on prostate play. We can hang some posters with some phone numbers. We can put sexual assault awareness in our first aid kits. It’s is not about rounding up the rapists and shooting them or dropping the issue entirely after saying “safe, sane, and consensual!” 30 times on the internet.

STOP THESE BILLS

If you like the content that you read here or anywhere else on the internet, please take the time today to click the link on the photo above or at the start of this post to make your voice heard. SOPA and PIPA have fantastic names and expensive lobbies but implementing them will mean a corporate controlled censored internet.

WRONG

A 14 year old girl in Ventura, CA who has obviously been groomed by conservative parents is making a statement: boycott girl scout cookies because the Girl Scouts Of America are welcoming to transgender children who want to be scouts. Although she has another list of complaints surrounding the increasingly progressive nature of the Girl Scouts with their belief in a woman’s right to own her own body, learn about it, access health services, and make independent decisions regarding when to be a parents it’s the issue of trans inclusion that has her (and presumably her family, as she repeatedly mentions) riled up. In her video, she calls the girl scouts “dishonest and unfair” for including a 7 year old transgender girl into a troop and claims that this would disrupt the, “true all girl experience.”

Yeah, that’s some tired-ass transmisogynistic bullshit right there.

It’s not the first time that the Girl Scouts have come under fire from conservatives. Hans Zeiger, a young man who started to develop himself as an emerging conservative pundit when he was still a teenager, came under fire in his 2010 campaign for a 25th Legislative District of Washington seat for statements he made about the Girl Scouts in his adolescent years such as, “the Girl Scouts allow homosexuals and atheists to join their ranks, and they have become a pro-abortion, feminist training corps.” He pulled down his old work, made a formal statement that he did not stand by his old position any longer, and went on to win his campaign.

The 14 year old “founder” of the website Honest Girl Scouts calls up all those old ghosts but her video and campaign are exceptionally focused on transmisogyny. Although the website criticizes partnerships with Planned Parenthood and other more progressive policies, the project is dedicated primarily to maliciously excluding transgender children. More or less, the video is a teenage conservative’s rehashing of the “womyn born womyn” bullshit that comes out of the Michigan Women’s Music Festival. The 14 year old speaker in the video criticizes the girl scouts for not “confirming” the gender of a potential scout.

What the hell does it mean to “confirm the gender” of a 7 year old child? Where the fuck does that line of logic go? Does it require a note from your personal physician indicating the presence of a prepubescent pussy? A quick check by the scout leader before a camping trip? From where I stand, a child’s genitals are NOT THE BUSINESS OF A SCOUTING TROOP. Period. That comment alone is horrifying to me because of what implementing such a policy would even begin to entail.

The video goes on to equate a 7 year old transgender child with an 18 year old high school senior donning a dress and saying he wants to be girl scout in a deliberate attempt to sexualize the space as a man “pretending” to be a woman. It’s outright hateful and wholly irrational to equate a 7 year old child with an 18 year old high school senior wearing drag to violate women and it’s a straw man to boot. It’s a phantom, a fictional construction designed to inspire fear. First off, a 7 year old child is not “manipulating” the system as a way to get all kinds of “womyn born womyn” pussy. Secondly, even if the applicant were a high school senior trying to join the scouts, the risk of rape, assault, murder, harassment, and other violence that comes with being a transwoman in today’s society is already a pretty strong filter.

A policy of inclusion via identity is not a slippery slope for cisgender, heterosexual males to put on a dress and “use” the policy sneak in and violate women at will. That’s nonsense talk. That is what we call a logical fallacy and a bad faith tactic for debate. It’s just a way to derail a conversation and it wouldn’t be worth acknowledging at all save for the fact that this 100% contrived bullshit is so goddamn popular in the political arena right now. Grown-ass adults who cannot see past bigoted fiction should not be in charge of running our country. Marriage is NOT the most important issue facing sexual minorities but when Rick Santorum equated same-sex marriage to bestiality he exposed himself as someone who cannot be depended on for clear, rational, and intelligent thinking. Positing the notion that if a policy of inclusion based on gender identity rather than genital morphology will lead to quarterbacks donning drag and raping girl scouts with impunity is just as fucked up if not more so.

The you tube video created by the young woman calling for a total boycott of girl scout cookies until her hate issues are addressed is essentially a playbook of transmisogynistic commentary. The girl scouts have one simple policy for who gets to be a girl scout: being a girl between who is in kindergarten-12th grade. There’s also the  huge class bias revealed in calling for a cookie boycott: those cookie sales make it possible to reduce the cost of GSA hosted camps and excursions for lower income scouts. In other words, not only is this a big FUCK YOU to trans folk it is also a big FUCK YOU to people of a lower income who rely on the GSA for the education, support, and opportunity to go explore the world it provides to their young daughters.

And frankly, even if the applicant were a teenage trans girl it still wouldn’t matter and that individual is still entitled to support. Our culture treats transwomen as lower than trash and the real world risk of unending bodily harm for coming out as trans is a pretty fucking strong goddamn filter. It’s totally disingenuous to state that accepting someone’s preferred gender identity means that “just anyone could claim they ‘want’ to be a girl.”  The GSA has stated that they are responding to an increasing number of requests from transgender children with a warm welcome and what I would really like to see as a part of that response is strong support for transwomen who step up to be girl scout leaders, as well. It’s not about “allowing” transgender children into the scouts, it’s also about transgender women leading them.

Netter's Anatomy Book

Human beings have roughly 20-25,000 known genes. These are the ingredients for making a human and with 20-25,000 different ingredients, there are a metric fuck ton (that’s a scientific term, of course) of recipes to make a human being and they are all legitimate. It is often said we all “start” as female but this is not accurate. We don’t all start out with a pussy, we start out with a genital tubercle that develops as the genetic, chromosomal, and hormonal sequences unfold themselves. To put morphology (what you physically see on the outside) before gender is to literally put the cart in front of the horse. In fact, hormone washes and changes have the ability to reshape the morphology of the flesh between our legs even after puberty.

No, we do not all start as ‘female’ but we are all made out of the same “star stuff” and we’re just beginning to understand what that means.

And since there was a comment that admitting transgender children into the GSA “almost dangerous situation for children,” I would like to spend a moment talking about other venues that create an “almost dangerous” situation for children: school, church, playgrounds, day care, museums, camps, sports teams, locker rooms, and any place where a child is with someone that they know. When gender and sexuality are framed as something that belong to grownups like parents, teachers, clergy, or sexual partners it becomes much harder to internalize the notion that you make the final call about who does or does not touch you and that you have a right to fuck shit up for anyone who thinks they are entitled to it.

The GSA programming includes having conversations where questions are answered in age-appropriate but honest ways. Children have a right to know how their bodies work and teaching them that their body is their own is not what is confusing. Telling children that their body belongs to anyone with the means to take it (especially sky daddies) is what’s exceptionally confusing because it’s insane. Yes, the GSA programming teaches young women that they are the sole owners of their bodies. It helps provide information on how it works by partnering with recognized and accredited medical institutions, it teaches them that no matter what someone says it’s their call what they do or don’t do with their bodies.

This video and it’s accompanying webpage demonstrate transmisogyny very well: teaching bodily autonomy to women is bad but it’s worse to teach bodily autonomy to a trans woman or girl.

The GSA has been moving towards a more progressive stance on gender at a pace faster than any other self-identified feminist space. Although they aren’t perfect, I respect the Girl Scouts for listening to the people they serve more than they listen to the mainstream feminist establishment especially since they’ve had branches of their national organization that first began recognizing that gender is more than male/female since the early and mid-90s before the blogsophere was an established anti-oppression tool. 

And this is the place where I start making people uncomfortable:

To the adults behind this campaign and especially to the parents of Taylor, the 14 year old girl behind this video, you better fucking hope that the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts and the schools and the average American household starts accepting non-gender normative kids. Some bigots will not let go of their male/female fiction until it is pulled out of their cold dead fingers and there are revolutionaries who are prepared to accept those conditions and they are supported by a growing number of allies who are  willing to follow direction and aid the process because they recognize that their own liberation is tied up in the struggle as well.

The Girl Scouts are not a radical organization. I would say that they are progressive but they are not, in fact, creating an anti-oppression militia. They’re pretty passive but it’s not uncommon to see self-defense anti-abuse classes taught to even the littlest girl scout. At best, they’re starting to create a space where young queer, gender queer, and transgender kids can go and not be brutalized. There are radicals out there, though. Some might be in your community already and they have these new fangled tools that allow them to network, support, and cross-educate one another. When people do find their support network and have the opportunity to develop the confidence and self-esteem to defend themselves, they will.

So allow me to repeat myself: you better fucking hope that it’s the Girl Scouts who welcome marginalized children and actively implement policies and leaders who can fully support them because the Girl Scouts won’t teach you how to make a Molotov cocktail.

When you teach hate, what you’re teaching children is how to ignore, deny, and invisibilize the reality of our world and and the people who live in it. When you teach your children that they can act as the owner of someone else’s body, you have taught them a dangerous delusion. There is a human survival instinct and when you tell your children it’s OK to run around and start fucking with that they run the risk of touching the wrong button someday and those odds are going up with each passing moment. Although we convey a message of non-humanity to transgender/gender queer/intersex/non-gender normative humans, the truth is getting out there one tweet and blog post at a time.

When you go out of your way to fuck with people, systemically dehumanize them, rip out their support networks, and threaten their lives at a time when they can quickly and effectively organize, you’re creating something of a problem, especially if you make the police and criminal justice system wholly inaccessible to them as anything but a defendant. In that context, you have left those you’ve fucked with no other option.

If you raise a child to think that they can do whatever the fuck they want to do to someone so long as their victim looks less like Barbie or Ken than they do, you are setting them up to have their entitled ass handed right fucking back to them. If you raise a child to make it clear that no amount of logic, reason, or words will ever change their minds that marginalized people are worth less than they are and your child acts on those delusions, you are raising a future target for justified violence in the form of self-defense.

Something to think about.

Photo By Whole Sex Life

I was nervous the first time I was invited to fuck someone with a strap-on cock of my very own. The leather harness looked complicated to put together, there were straps and buckles everywhere. It actually took me several tries to figure out how to wrangle it all and stick a hard and bouncy appendage between my own legs and eventually I learned that a novice strap-on fucker’s best friend for the learning curve is a blindfold over the bottom’s eyes so they can’t see you struggle with the straps or resort to improvisation and overhand knots when it all becomes too complicated to handle.

Apparently it’s very important to have a cock between your legs if you want to get ahead in the world. Well I have something like 20 goddamn dicks in all kinds of sizes, colors, textures, and relative hardness. I have flaccid packers that I wear just because there’s something about the weight of a dick between your legs that makes you want to get into mischief.

RodeoH is a new San Francisco company that is attempting to take the complications out of cock harnessing. They built a harness out of a machine washable set of boy briefs that you can pull on and get going. It’s easy to wear under clothing even when it’s super tight and stylish and there are no complicated buckles to got lost with when you’re hot, bothered, and ready to go. I love it for being able to wear a flaccid cock while getting coffee because of the ease it creates in loading, unloading, or switching out a cock.

Versatility is key for me. I have a growing collection of strap-on harnesses and I’m no slouch when it comes to grabbing a piece of a rope to make one on the go. I’ve transformed button fly jeans and even saran wrap into harnesses. It’s a lot of fun to be inventive in bed but there’s something to be said for having something easy to carry around in a purse that makes it possible to get going in a few quick moves. There aren’t any rings to lose (or break), the cotton is super breathable, and it’s really simple to use if you’re looking to break out into the world of strap-on sex.

Advanced strap-on tops might be dismayed by the fact that the RodeoH won’t hold some of the bigger and wider cocks out there on the market. The website states that the optimal toy dimensions are about 5″-6″ length by and 1 1/2″-2″ width. This is true. Although it is possible to squeeze in something larger with the flexible ring, this is not a harness for giant dicks. The things that make this harness so quick and easy are it’s lack of straps and buckles. Still, the idea of wearing a harness comfortably all day long as a pair of underwear is the major draw of this harness.

Not to mention the fact that even I sometimes get obsessed with the size of the dick I’m wearing. It’s not the size of what’s between your legs that matters, it’s the pleasure of the people involved that really counts. In the event that I’m cruising for a quickie session in, say the bathroom of a bar or gas station, I’m not going to have the time to do all of the foreplay necessary to warm someone up for some of my monster cocks especially when something right off the bell curve of average cock size will do just fine.

RodeoH is an awesome company that is local to me in the Bay Area and I would very much like to thank them for sending this fun new toy to me. I’m happy to say that my RodeoH has a spot in backpack next to my lipstick, chewing gum, and other vital essentials. I would also like to thank the photographer, Whole Sex Life, for capturing these images.

As I strolled through my neighborhood, I couldn’t help but notice that the political postings calling for a recall of Mayor Jean Quan had been updated. Now I’m a fan of social progress and activism. I support the global Occupy/Decolonize movement. I don’t believe passivity will save us. I believe those being attacked have a right to physically defend themselves. I am also mad as hell about the fact that the physical brutality that Mayor Jean Quan is responsible for is considered an appropriate reason to plaster this bullshit all over the neighborhood that I have to walk through.

I don’t live in the part of Oakland where Mayor Quan lives. My neighborhood is a little more sketchy than that. It doesn’t have any easy access to the BART line, it’s a bit of a walk to get to any real commercial districts, and when I walk my streets I’m going to face no small amount of street harassment. Cat calling is not about compliments or beauty; it’s about harassment and the entitlement to say whatever you want to someone minding their own business just trying to get to the corner store. Whoever placed those signs did not take into the account that there are women who walk these streets with the knowledge that stalking them is not only socially appropriate, it’s heralded as damn near romantic in the mainstream media and cinema.

What do we know about stalking? According to a 2010 CDC report we know:

• 1 in 6 women and 1 in 19 men in the U.S. have experienced stalking at some point in their lives in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed.
• In the United States, approximately 1 in 5 Black non-Hispanic women experienced stalking in her lifetime. The prevalence of stalking for White non-Hispanic and Hispanic women was similar (1 in 6 and 1 in 7, respectively). Additionally, approximately 1 in 3 multiracial non-Hispanic and 1 in 4 American Indian or Alaska Native women reported being stalked at some point during their lives. (Note: the CDC report has a blank regarding women of Asian/Pacific Island descent.)
• More than half of female victims and more than one-third of male victims were stalked before the age of 25.
• People of color continue to bear a heavier burden of sexual violence, stalking, and intimate partner violence.
• The average duration of stalking is 1.8 years, but increases to 2.2 years when involving intimate partners.

California was actually the first state in the country to criminalize stalking in 1990. The penal code states:

• Any person who willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly follows or willfully and maliciously harasses another person and who makes a credible threat with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of his or her immediate family is guilty of the crime of stalking, punishable by imprisonment in a county jail for not more than one year, or by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars ($ 1,000), or by both that fine and imprisonment, or by imprisonment in the state prison. Note: the average duration of stalking by a strange or acquaintance is 1.8 years, many victims will move to a new home, or may actually be asked to leave their job because of the “risk” they pose to the workplace for being a victim.
• This section [stalking] shall not apply to conduct that occurs during labor picketing.

When someone is stalked, they are encouraged by anyone they report the behavior to get a restraining order. A restraining order is great if the individual receiving it is A) confused as to the nature of your relationship and B) reasonable. If someone wants to scare you, hurt you, rape you, or kill you a piece of paper is not going to stop them. A restraining order may reduce your stress and anxiety level but if you are genuinely concerned for your life it’s not going to be a restraining order that saves it. It’s just a piece of documentation for court if your perpetrator is arrested and if your district attorney pursues the case.

Stalking victims are re-victimized by people who either don’t give a shit and even by people with the best intentions. All in all, stalking and repeated malicious harassment are not taken seriously regardless of how many people are impacted each year. The number of women annually reporting stalking? It’s now well over 1,000,000 reports a year in the US. In Oakland, it took me 30 minutes to get a police response to an active burglary in my home when I was alone. A stalking victim in Oakland cannot maintain any faith whatsoever that the police will be able to uphold their restraining or protective orders. 

These stalking signs are numerous in my neighborhood. I understand that they were written as a call to action against a mayor who DID take horrible life harming action against protesters but I’m the one who has to walk the streets of my neighborhood everyday.

I don’t want any part of your revolution if a “tactical political tool” is placing a reminder every 50 fucking feet by my house that stalking is a totally acceptable thing to do to a woman. The signs calling for a recall against Ed Lee in San Francisco, matching the recall signs for Jean Quan, have not been altered to reflect the pro-stalking stance so this isn’t being universally applied to any and all politicians pulling the string on the response to Occupy encampments. This was an articulation of the thoughtless misogyny that happens everyday.

There are men who are stalked but it’s positively fascinating that when it came to a female mayor, the reacting call to violence for her action was, perhaps “appropriately,” altered to reflect a form of violence against women that is systemically ignored and often fatal in the country. It’s a reminder that most anarchist spaces are not safe for marginalized people. The rhetoric matters.

I’m not proposing passivity. I’m asking to consider why some words are chosen for some people and not for others. Why not words like mace, tear gas, restrain, take down, rise against, incarcerate, kettle, or any other immediately related activities that would clearly demonstrate the utter lack of ethics she actually displayed in the way that Occupy Oakland has been handled without bring acute misogyny into it? Why was “stalk” chosen other than the fact that it is one of the scarier things you can imagine if you’re a woman? Why is it justified to throw the women in my neighborhood completely under the bus in regards to the very real world experiences we are having because someone wants to show just how angry they are at the mayor? 

Knock that shit off and think for just 5 fucking seconds about whether or not you’re using the words that fit your intention. My neighborhood in Oakland does not have money or resources. We have bars on our windows and corner stores in the middle of the street. Every single night you can hear gun shots and after a few months you’ll never mistake the sound of gun fire with a car back fire ever again. It’s a load of fucking bullshit to put those signs on my streets in some fucked up way to reach people and get them to join the movement because Jean Quan does not fucking live here. It wasn’t a message for her, it was a message for the residents of my low income neighborhood. Fuck you very much for that, by the way. Our streets don’t get regular cleanup here and there’s a lot of us who already have more than our fair share of worry about stalking.

It took not only misogyny and a total lack of compassion for victims to infect my neighborhood with tons of those signs, it also took a lot of classism. These were signs made my someone who felt entitled to make those of us affected most by that kind of violence deal with the heavy weight of that message.

In many ways, some form of exhibitionism for being a bit peculiar was drilled into my brain. The eccentricity of Sierra Madre, 3 square miles with no electric spot lights in city limits has been documented in many “Bizarre Los Angeles” guides. If you consume American media, you have seen the streets where I live and undoubtedly the property where I went to high school. The classrooms were off to the side of the “Villa Del Sol Oro” which was a scaled model of a favored Italian villa that the original owner, a Tuberculosis doctor, had commissioned to be his office and his home. The basement was constructed to house medical equipment and state of the art refrigerators for medicines. It has one of the first electric elevators in the county. It went on forever in darkness; I got to go through it often as a child during Halloween when the whole villa was turned into a haunted mansion as a fundraiser and it was a doozy.

My freshmen year I got to be the source of the theatrics. The school had all of the classes, freshmen through senior, each take one of the main hallways on the 4 floors of the estate. The seniors got the basement. Clubs were offered the side rooms to transform into their own niche theme. I went with SADD because they got the medical grade kitchen and I was able to sway the vote to recreate a Bedlam clinic as a way to unnerve the patrons. We had teenage girls in hallow makeup, frizzed out hair, wandering in gowns. A sheet was hung up to show a silhouette of someone performing hydrotherapy the way the Victorians did best. We had straight jackets. We had other girls welcoming people in with a clipboard as doctors to welcome them for a tour of the facilities.

And people wonder why I’m kinky.

The 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers was filmed in my hometown. The best shot of it is when the protagonists are looking out of a window into the town square where [spoiler alert] pods are being dispersed to the townsfolk for propagation and inevitable vegetable total takeover. The red scare was green when it was black and white. They used to screen the film in the summer at Canon park and the punchline was that everything looked the same. All of the buildings were the same and so were most of the businesses during my childhood. The gas station was the same and even carrying on in the same brand name. Back To The Future was a movie I watched to feel normal.

After the Victorians, the train tracks came to pieces as public transportation was lobbied against by car companies (“Sorry, wrong meeting.” -W. Hicks) and the town was mostly forgotten. Then in the 40s, 50s, and especially the 60s its canyons at the foot of a spectacular mountain were inhabited by the “Bohemian” crowd. Bikers, modern architects, poets, artists, and other free thinking and pot smoking hippies settled in and turned the canyon area of the city into something of a maze. The idea of fire is a real threat and a puzzle for firefighters to navigate every single time a call comes in because there have been horrific fires. I have seen my friends’ homes singed.

The 80s brought the republican yuppies who occupy the main area of the city. They kind of wrecked everything but brought in their own weirdness. The nuns at my Catholic school told me about a notorious cocaine dealer who was involved in the city council who used to sell to elementary school kids at the pepper tree (seen as a spry young tree in Body Snatchers) and caused something of a quiet scandal. In between the filming of Body Snatchers the tree had grown enormously but had also been struck by lightning creating a wide divide in the tree. Like I said, I watched Back To The Future to feel normal.

My house was right by two fantastic trail heads. My love of hiking was well-groomed by constant access to long and amazing trails. Oh, they went on and on and I explored them with camps and my dogs and friends frequently. There was always the ominous background of it all. One trail head is right near a monastery famous for its larger than life depictions of the Passion Of The Christ and a fire that touched down on my town and caused an evacuation of my school when we saw the flames from our 3rd grade windows touching down on the hills behind our homes and the helicopters dropping water, seemingly, to no avail. There were a lot of natural disasters. There was the Sierra Madre quake and the Northridge quake. I remember them in transformers exploding off into the horizon making green fireworks into a sky just before dawn and in my father’s hand holding a plate of fresh french toast that begin to quiver just before the boom of the quake hit the ground and rattled the glasses and the dishes in the cabinets around us up into their shelves and out into the room in a spray of glass.

Sometimes nature just flipped the fuck out.

I remember the rains after the fires in our hills because no more than maybe 300 yards from where I slept every night, a young boy my age and his father were caught in a flash flood and sudden debris flow through the canyon. There hasn’t been rain where we were that day and the other hikers who survived and shared their witness of the events and all spoke of the sudden horrible rumbling in the distance and the 5 seconds they had to immediately jump to the canyon walls and begin climbing for their lives and watching people sweep by and being unable to do anything about it. Their bodies were recovered under nearly 20 feet of mud where it all collected in a basin. We followed the news. Buried at 7 feet, a shoe from the boy who was exactly my age and went to a karate studio with one of my friends in the neighboring city.

By the age of 9, I had a very well-developed sense of respect for the fact that everything could be turned on your head in an instant. The earth could, and would, move and shake somewhere out of the blue. The hills could catch fire. You could be hiking peacefully and be hit by a moving train of mud, rocks, branches, and water. I had such humility, love, and respect for that mountain and the canyon. As I started to change from a child to a woman, I started to see the other natural disasters in the world of men. I could be walking peacefully down the street and someone with malicious intentions would have impeccable access to my body. All at once, like an earthquake or a flash flood, it could happen in a snap.

My school uniform was a hazard as far as my walk was concerned. It isn’t pornographic images of adult women wearing micro-school girl skirts and having sex in a roleplay that makes the uniform dangerous to the students who wear them authentically. What makes them dangerous are what they are in and of themselves: a clear marker for your age and how much control you have over your own life. People don’t attack children in school uniforms because they saw porn featuring adults or even adult women in pigtails. Between the ages of 9-15 I didn’t look at all like a grown women and there wasn’t anyone with a reasonable mind making and understandable mental switch.

I loved my walks and the serenity and space they gave me in between the world at home and school but there were the constant interruptions. There were the shouts from men saying things I didn’t understand cognitively but always gave me a stomach ache. There was my peer who was called over by a man sitting in a parked car and as soon as she saw him openly masturbating in the driver’s seat. He was an aggressive flasher. She said that it was so far from what she expected that she instantly vomited and most of it landed on her flasher through the window. Even years later, this memory is shrouded for her with embarrassment that she “couldn’t hold her stomach down.” I cannot described the sadness I feel at her palpable sense of having handled it wrong and the sense she had that it was her duty to hold her head high and keep walking unaffected by what had occurred.

There was the older man who always asked me to come play with his puppy in the garage, everyday, until I finally started going out of my way on my route just to avoid him. The times when joggers or dog walkers would impose themselves onto my walks as if they were entitled to stroll with me until I arrived at school. At first I was worried that they were doing this to figure out where I went to school until I realized that it didn’t matter if they followed me there or not: every school has their own set of colors clearly identifying “their” students. Everyone already knew where I was going at 6:30AM and they knew exactly what time the bell was going to ring. In order to be a young girl walking to school in a uniform, you have to start thinking like James Bond. You have to vary your routes, fuck with your schedule, avoid routine, and constantly scan the terrain and look for exits.

No one really talks to you clearly about this because no one wants to talk about why you really need to know any of it. When I got into early feminist reading, I did consider the notion that we “sexualize” the school girl uniform through porn but the truth is so much uglier than that. It isn’t porn that makes the uniform dangerous: it’s the fact that a child is a perfect victim in our society. It isn’t the adult sexual use of a uniform that puts these ideas into someone’s head, it’s the advertisement that you are so very young and have been well-trained to be polite and to comply with what adults say.

I remember my freshmen year of high school. It was fall and I was half-way into my return walk home. I was climbing a steep hill and had been lost in my thoughts until a white truck drove past me and the driver stared intently as I walked. I was used to the drive-by gazers, I was used to the things people would holler, but something about the way he watched me sent shivers down my spine and ripped me out of my day dreams. I was at the halfway point between school and home. It was no-man’s land and I felt like a ground rodent in an open field in a nature documentary as a hawk swooped overhead in predatory circles. I hoped that he wouldn’t come back but I hadn’t ever felt abject fear of an adult like that ever in my life.

5 minutes went by and I could see the canyon opening closer in my vision as I got closer to my house with the family German Shepherd and the locking doors and some sense of safety without the total exposure I felt on the road. I heard the sound of his engine before I saw him. It was as if my brain instantly memorized the unique buzz and hum of his truck as entirely distinct from all others. Every engine is unique but it takes something special for us to pay attention to the micro-differences. He drove by me a second time with the same fixed gaze on me as I walked. Every hair on my neck stood on end. I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t have weapons, I didn’t know what to do.

So I crossed to the other side of the street to ride up against traffic. The idea of a car coming up from behind me seemed like too much of a risk. I would be safer if someone came at my from the front rather than swooping up from behind. I came to the top of the hill where a left turn put you just a hop, skip, and a jump from the trail head into the open wilderness of the mountain canyon. A right turn and just 7 more minutes of walking would have me safe behind my doors. That’s when the truck came back, crossing onto the wrong side of the street with the car pointed right at me. The door was already ajar, his hand was out the window. I could hear him accelerate and not only was he aiming at me, his car was pointed right in the direction of the trail ahead.

My backpack! I felt instantly aware of not just its weight on my back but the fact that in order to distribute its weight I had supportive buckles across my chest and waist. Suddenly, it felt like a massive liability. It would have been easy to reach out and grab any of its loose straps or handles on the back and drag me the short distance into the mouth of the wilderness. I knew that canyon so well and I loved all of the life that flourished inside of it but I knew that it also had the smell of death it in it. Most canyon spaces near urban areas serve as body dumps. When a large search starts for one special missing victim with a team of people dedicated to their recovery, police will usually uncover human remains that do not match the person they are seeking. I knew that I had to lose the backpack and my fingers raced to the clasps as I literally jumped and rolled into the front yard of a stranger and ran to their door for help.

When he missed me, the driver, whose face I still remember like a photograph, corrected his path and sped off quickly away from me and the area with a sense of finality that made me breathe with relief especially when I discovered that no one was answering the front door where I was shouting for help. I walked to my backpack with a sense that I would sooner burn it and everything inside than wear it again but I knew the books were expensive and I knew that everyone would just yell at me. I picked it up and I walked home picking up anything in my path that resembled an effective weapon. I called my parents and I called the police.

Everyone, including myself, said that he was probably just trying to scare me. I still did my sketch and described him in vague ways even though his face seemed so familiar in my brain. It was hard to actually articulate how he looked and the most helpful thing about the software is the ability to change the combinations until it looks right. I did my best but my sketch didn’t look like him. He was white, wore thin glasses, and had blue eyes. I described him as being “just older than college” because he looked to be late 20s, early 30s. Today, that’s my dating range. To my 13-year-old perspective, he was a grownup but a youngish grownup. Definitely not a peer. We all spoke about it as if it were just a really mean prank but there was an edginess around all of the adults including the police and the idea that they weren’t telling me something that I felt entitled to know.

I wasn’t allowed to talk to or from school for awhile and this pissed me off because it was more of a punishment for me than him. There were always hazards in the road, always things to be aware of, and always a hint of danger when I was on my own but the benefit of having my space and independence outweighed those risks every time. I felt claustrophobic at home and school. Danger was something deeply intense and brought mind-blowing fear with it but it was fleeting. It happened once and awhile. I knew the difference between someone sexualizing me from a distance and someone who wanted to make contact. There is a gaze that a pest possesses that is distinct from the gaze of a hungry predator. There is the smile and the nod from someone who thinks you’re attractive that puts a happy kick in your step and there is the smile and the nod that makes you feel violated. Consciously, it’s hard to articulate but the gut feeling comes from a brain making constant micro-assessments of every environment we walk into.

Kind of like the police sketch, I cannot articulate the difference between the driver who makes me want to throw my finger out and yell right back and the one who feels like a punch to the gut telling me to run. This is largely credited to whether or not my brain has conducted a threat assessment. Most of the time, it isn’t someone who is going to rape and murder you but all threats must be assessed because if this is the case you have maybe a split second to make the decision that will save your life whether they come from humans, animals, or the inanimate but living world. When we hear a loud noise, even without consciously thinking through the steps our brains are scouring the database looking for the closest match. Sometimes you can do everything right and still doesn’t matter because there isn’t enough time to react.

When I hike in canyons, every distant rumble gives me pause. I know that there is a sound that has been described to me as wholly unearthly. Given that a flash flood is entirely natural, the unique quality of sound must come from the eerie music that the brain plays when you are now face-to-face with the edge. What makes that sound so different, it evokes a sense of urgent action?

My strange little town is mostly quiet, mostly safe, mostly carefree but when things get weird they get weird fast. What made me hate my school girl skirt was how different the world looked when I was wearing it. From the moment when I would wake up in the morning and fall into the routine of wearing this, wearing that, going through the list and playing each choice up against the rules. You’re not creative in your space, you can only be creative within theirs and ours was exceptionally cramped. I got demerits for non-white shoelaces and once for wearing knee-high stockings that sat higher than my knee by an inch. Every detail was a reminder: you are not in charge of yourself. People interacted with me differently than on weekends when I wore jeans, boots, and ball caps. I felt comfortable, free to move, and I didn’t stick out like the picture of a little girl who does what she is told.

I wanted to dress in a way that was logical for my needs, context, and motivations. A knee jerk adolescent compulsion to wear rebellious punk-rock duds does not totally account for the entire situation. I lived at the foothills of a mountain. Black bears once tried to break into my home. I saw coyotes on my way to school in the morning. Mountain lions were being tranquilized and sent to higher grounds and I was already proud of the number of times that I was the first one to spot the rattle snake. In this setting, penny loafers and a grey pleated wool skirt are kind of fucking stupid.

The pope knows for a fact that the streets are not equally safe for everyone to walk around. He gets carted around in a cart with bulletproof glass, so I think he’s a fucking asshole for sending me off to my education wearing pleats in the streets. The dangers of being a girl on the streets don’t come from porn. You could evaporate every single last image of someone getting fucked in a school girl skirt and it won’t change one damn thing about the fact that I was still a girl and girls aren’t afforded voices or autonomy in our culture.

Most people watching adults getting fucked in school girl skirts are doing so because they enjoy watching and knowing that the people involved are adults getting fucked in school girl skirts. What made my skirt different at 13 than 27 is decision making power. At 13 I had no choice regarding any detail of the skirt. Not the shape, model, size, or accessorizing. It advertised where I was going or coming from and the school would actually punish you for things you were spotted or reported to be doing in your uniform outside of school hours which was a known tool for all of the adults in the city. If you wanted to jack any of us up, you could have said that you saw us smoking cigarettes by the canyon in our skirts and be pretty confident we would be stuck after school in detention for it. Denying it wouldn’t get you anywhere unless you had a parent who would advocate for you in the office.

The uniform was a reminder that I had no control over my context. If there was any protection shining down on me that day with the car it was the fact that I couldn’t get enough time to myself walking and wandering and I loved climbing those canyon and mountain trails with my dog and was so entirely aware of the fact that you could disappear into those woods and make it so no one found you for a long fucking time. I am one of those people who gets my personal energy from long periods of time alone. I am a performer but I am very much an introvert. Not all those who wander are lost and without my time to wander I will become quite mentally lost.

For the longest time, I was drawn to the BDSM moniker of “female dominant” because I’ve always had a strong preference for being the one to instigate a sexual encounter. I experience more gratification and pleasure when I pick someone up. I’ve had fun when someone has successfully seduced me but being chosen for someone always puts me on the kind of guard that makes it hard for me to fully relax and put down my hair. I do not feel specialer, prettier, or smarter when I am approached by a man for flirting or for sex. I feel more safe when I go to the individual that I find myself attracted to and get to determine the context. I am left with fewer questions as to whether the man behind the smile is with me because he is attracted to me or if he is targeting me.

I feel less and less connected to a strong identification with any particular sexual role beyond the fact that I have a creative and constantly reeling mind full of images, ideas, and fantasies. I am, during sex, what I need to be in order to get off and the position is less crucial to the proceedings. In the constant quest for new, I am less aroused by ritual and more by spontaneity. In many ways I seek vocabulary for kinkiness that represents the ways I identify with queerness. What I do know is that I like having sex with people I approach who are keen and positively responsive to the notion of happy fun sexy times with me at a time and place of my choosing when our interactions commence.

I speak about my interactions with men because my queerer interactions play out a bit differently than sitting in a straight bar and being approached by presumably straight cisgender strange men. As a whole, I have more fun with male partners who do give me plenty of room and the space to be the actor in regards to sex rather than the reactor. I don’t think that this is an inherently “dominant” feature because I don’t really know what I’ll be into in the immediate context of the sexual hyperspace will be in that moment. Maybe I’ll fuck their ass, maybe they’ll fuck mine. Until we start talking I don’t wholly know where the strongest overlap between interests and proclivities will fall. What I want to do during sex depends a whole lot on how my day went and how my body is feeling. Whatever is I wind up doing, I will experience more gratification if I have decision making power on the context.

I’ve been drawn to urbanity with close proximity to wilderness through the course of my life. I choose the campus of UC Santa Cruz pretty much based on geography alone. I knew that I wanted to attend a University of California campus and so far as an undergrad academic experience in literature, the discipline I knew I would study from pretty much the age of 12, would be pretty comparable down the line. Lucky me, Santa Cruz was still the weirdo campus of the system with some deep progressive holdouts still clinging to life. I studied with amazing people who changed my paradigms and I did so in a redwood forest by the beach.

Maybe it won’t work for everyone, but if you’re encountering dense philosophical texts for the first time I highly recommend scaling a 60 foot redwood tree to the top and reading it in the sunlight and just thinking about what you read as you watch the sun set into the ocean. It really helped tie things together for me and I’m pretty woo-woo averse. I crave urbanity and concrete by day and total wild isolation at night. I need the museums, the noises, the crowded buses, conversations happening in languages I don’t understand, the most insane thing you ever saw followed by the smartest thing you ever heard followed by someone so sexy it takes your breath away. Sign me up. Sign me up for street food, it’s better than restaurant food, stop worrying about your Purell and eat something grilled on a street corner. At least you can see the kitchen and how many fucked up videos from Applebees kitchen to see that suburbia is evil and trying to kill us.

I’m also pretty happy in the middle of nowhere in the wilderness. Both of these spaces have their dangers. There are bears, mountain lions, and the kind of fucked up serial killers that inspire movies potentially lurking off in the distance. These things happen. However, virtually every single study shows that rape, abuse and assault to children happens predominantly by  people they know. It is more dangerous to a predator to take an unknown child off the street than it is to abuse one that they see everyday. When shit happens, statistically speaking, it’s somewhere and with someone who you know. It’s not to say that I’m safe in hiking out in the mountains but statistically speaking I’m way safer there than I am as a teenager going to high school. Going to high school is probably one of the most hazardous occupations we’ve ever invented.

Wearing a school girl uniform made me feel more vulnerable because of how clearly it marked me as an easy target from far away. Jeans, boots, and a sweatshirt compelled someone to get close enough to me that I could see them but the ill-fashioned skirt, pink blouse, and sweater set me off as vulnerable from an easy distance. I wasn’t dressed to respond to the repeated threats in my context. The forced feminization of the uniform felt like enforced vulnerability.

Porn isn’t in the wrong for using the school girl uniform, schools are already forcing and establishing the dominance pecking order by establishing a school girl uniform. That’s some non-consensual D/s shit and it’s much more appropriate to do between two consenting adults. Consensual outlets for self-aware control freaks, that is my sexual harm reduction method. Your brain is the best sex toy you will ever own and part of fighting oppression is looking into yourself and how it holds you back and how to participate in it. When you eroticize something, you pull it from that context and begin to engage with it in a way that moves towards more awareness. Just playacting doesn’t create the conscious awareness, thinking about why and the context with which you have those feelings is a separate and long process. At the very least, the images jump to the forefront of your brain in a place where you cannot and will not ignore them completely.

So what’s the word for that sexual identity?

I grew up at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in a small and terribly archaic anomaly in Los Angeles County: a city only 3 square miles in size with no electric stop lights within the boundaries of the town, a life-size nativity prominently displayed on city property in the middle of the city square, a city wide dedication to the little league team, an all volunteer fire department, and one of the smallest and still 100% volunteer powered float contributors to the world-renowned Tournament of Roses Parade.

There is something so distinctly American about the Tournament of Roses Parade. On New Years Day (unless it’s a Sunday in which the festivities proper are held until the 2nd) there is the Rose Bowl football game which is preceded by an egregious display of wealth, prominence, and privilege in the form of a parade in which the floats must be 100% covered in organic matter presided over by the Rose Queen and her attending Rose Princesses.

The Rose Court ladies must be students in the Pasadena school district as high school seniors or in the first year at Pasadena City College. It used to be that many young women from other cities would actually enroll at P.C.C. just for the chance to try out for the Rose Court and the chance to reign for the period of one year of American Aristocracy. It is quite an honor; the young ladies are more or less passed from their classes due to the hectic schedule of being a reigning queen or princess. There are endless charity events to attend and the ladies spend a great deal of time at the gorgeous ivory-white Victorian mansion headquarters for the Tournament Of Roses. They are given a wardrobe, etiquette classes, makeup teams, lessons in elocution, and every other element of training to articulate fine breeding.

They are given constant gifts and shuttled around by a staff of knights in white minivans with the rose emblem prominently displayed. Young children bask in their presence and they all have a perfect smile. Now, it used to be that the rose court matched the paint on the mansion and the minivans but there have been great efforts to include women of color. Taking a cue from Mattel, the court is the very definition of mainstream beauty and strikingly similar physiques and flashy white smiles under rhinestone tiaras.

The auditions are held annually at the mansion early on in the fall. Hundreds of anxious young ladies line up around the block in their prettiest outfits practicing their best smiles and rehearsing what they’ll say in the allotted 20 seconds they would stand before the panel of judges who would smile the whole time and thank them kindly for coming out that day.

In the fall of 2002, I was standing in that line. My motives were slightly different and although it is true that it was my mother who encouraged me to attend and stood at my side, it really doesn’t play out the way most people imagine it would go. We both had the same derision for the beauty standards and neither I nor she had any illusion I was going to picked to be part of the court. We were there together purely to enter ground zero of this bizarre ritual. We wanted to peer inside the mansion, we wanted to see these people behind this wholly contrived affair and the incredible amount of money poured into it.

Seriously: this parade has a fucking budget and a prestige that I will never understand. As a small child, I had my city pride in the fact that unlike everyone else in this stupid fucking parade we never hired designers, contractors, engineers, floral specialists, or anything. Children submitted designs, people voted, and then whoever stepped up to lend a hand to build thing showed up at the big warehouse behind the little league fields to work. At 9 years old, I loved the lack of rules governing the operation especially around the issue of child safety in a workplace involving serious risk to life and limb.

I mentioned that everything had to be covered in organic matter. Unless it’s a moving part, you have to stick down flowers, seeds, leaves, rice, or something that grows from the ground onto the exterior. It’s a huge waste of resources and a lot of what is used is wholly edible. In a city where there are people who are homeless, it’s really a cruel joke that millions of dollars are spent cultivating food that will be applied to the side of a 50 foot tall moving nutcracker that sings and has people dressed as elves and bears dancing at the bottom.

At 9 years old, the fact that the foreman on the project told me I could glue corn husks onto the bottom of our larger than life train car with moving wheels by sliding underneath the engine of it all and its amateur construction while it was actively being tested for safety and functionality was a total delight to me. Even at that age I knew I was embarking on a task that was totally and utterly unsafe and situation that no sane adult should ever recommend. The foreman saw only thing: the whole fucking float had to be covered in organic matter and someone had forgotten to get the part underneath the engine that was technically considered in the judging and only a 9 year old would be small enough to get in there now. So I was handed a tray of some seriously fun glue, a bunch of corn husks that I myself had been ironing for hours, and scrunched underneath the hulking, moving, and dangerous iron beast with a smile on my face.

Those are the moments I remember fondly about the tournament of roses. Then again, there was a certain magical bewilderment I always had when thousands of people camped out on the streets of the parade route on New Year’s Eve just to get a good spot to see the parade. Really, it wouldn’t have been too terribly hard for me to have biked out to see this prestigious event and I could not wrap my head around the fact that it was prestigious purely because so many people watched it.

But back to the day of the day of the audition.

My mother and I stood in line with a distinct feeling of otherness and a serious unfamiliarity of how to play this situation as mother daughter. The behavior of the fray did not match our own and I could see that my Mom was struggling for the right way to be supportive despite the fact this whole thing was so clearly stupid and overtly in opposition to the notion that a woman could be a valuable for a brain and not just a mile long white flashy smile and ability to wear a tiara well. I had no idea how to dress for the occasion. “Femininity” was a concept that also baffled me. I had attended my first high school in drag because I literally had no idea where to begin when it came to dressing like a girl. It was obvious that this was an assessment of how well we did by age in balancing girlhood and womanhood.

I hadn’t come into with any intention or desire to win but as I got closer to the front it just made me feel sick to actually go through the process of certain rejection. It didn’t matter why I was there, those assholes with the minivans–no matter how fucking polite–were the ones who made the decisions about which young lady was princess material and who wasn’t. I could be smarmy, I could be witty, I could bitchy, I could be smart as a whip. I could say whatever the fuck I wanted but when it was my turn it wouldn’t amount to anything more than humiliation because they had everything. When it was my turn, I mumbled something along the lines of being there “because it was Pasadena,” and then walking off to the side room for my complimentary portrait holding a massive bouquet or crisp beautiful roses.

I felt like I was in a daze. Until the flashes from the portraits being taken of the cattle line with our numbers pinned onto our shoulders so the judges could remember what we looked like, I just floated through the space locked entirely into my head. I was wearing an orange skirt with even brighter orange polka dots and a vermilion blouse on top with small black heels on my feet from Payless. I looked like the surface and it matched my perspective on everything.

Probably 85% percent of the line is there gunning for the gold. Then you have the other 15% split along more unique motives. One young woman showed up in a Marlene Dietrich tuxedo ensemble, flipped the judges the bird, yelled, “Fuck the patriarchy!” and then strolled off into the portrait room. The judges didn’t even flinch; just smiled their polite smile, thanked her for coming out, and waved her goodbye.

I could have loved her but there was no way for me to get past the crowd to chat with her and then I lost her entirely in the fray. Still I watched and the way that even with the courage she had that I lacked I could still see the lonely hollow in her eyes that crawled back into her own mind just as mine had when I was standing back at her end of the line. My eyes also perked up when I saw a young man with the physique of a quarterback enter the room in deliberately horrible drag; an ill-fitting sequin dress and cheap blonde wig hanging haphazardly from his head.

I watched him and felt instantly the same way that I felt the first time I saw Victor/Victoria. It was sudden and deep envy of men in feminine attire. It’s where my mind always goes when I see pictures of Weimar Berlin. Now this young fellow was obviously putting on a satire but his body posture was otherwise quiet and unassuming. He was very polite and kept mostly to himself never once obviously lingering on the bodies of the women in cocktail dresses and heels standing everywhere around him. I didn’t lose him in the crowd and felt compelled to make his acquaintance when we were spit out into the exit parlor with information about the “Rose Ball” danced hosted for anyone and everyone who tried out for the Tournament Of Roses. It was well-known as the “loser’s ball” and represented a major portion of everyone’s purpose in being at the mansion that day.

It was just like prom but infinitely more elegant and moreover it was 100% free for anyone who came out to the audition and one guest of their choosing. Unlike a high school, they had a public relations board and a lot of market research into anything and everything they did. This is a profitable enterprise. There were no demands on gender or heterosexual conformity. They were 100% hands off. Additionally, they didn’t put us through the horrific rigamorale of drug dogs and metal detectors outside of the dances we were used to attending. They didn’t search our bags, they didn’t police our outfits, they had lots of security to handle any problems but otherwise kept their hands off and let us celebrate our loserdom in decadence.

When I caught up to the young man in drag, I asked him with a smile why he came out. He told me that he and his girlfriend were both pretty broke and wouldn’t be able to afford the $100 tickets to their prom but that this dance would be an even better substitution. She had been looking forward to dressing up and having a night on the town just like the movies had always depicted and she was going to be auditioning herself just for the dance tickets. As fate would have it, she had come down with food poisoning and was at home vomiting. “I figured that if it was important to her, she shouldn’t have to lose out because of that. I guess you’re supposed to wear a dress for the audition so I grabbed one from my mom’s closet.”

I don’t remember the name of this individual and but a decade later, here from this blog, I really wish the best for this guy wherever he is. I got a sense that he was a class act when I was 17 but here I am at 27 and his participation in my memory of that event gives me hope that even at ground zero of some fucked up gender problems there were still teenagers out there playing with gender and questioning the event.

Looking at the blogs, twitter accounts, and tumblrs of young queer and trans activists I get the sense that those auditions for the Tournament of Roses are going to get pretty fucking interesting in the coming years. This is an institution that needs to be challenged and taken down by the youth it caters and markets itself to and I have hopes that this will happen. There’s more and more information and resources available to those asking questions. I was there at the dawn of it but I smile at what there is now and I delight when high schoolers get rowdy and uppity about gender bullshit.

How much longer are people going to keep smiling at the beauty of this meaningless, wasteful, and humiliating tradition? The “Doo-Dah Parade” has been a time honored counter-culture response to the Rose Parade. It’s very dada-esque in many regards and famous for the fact that the crowd was once encouraged to throw tortillas at the people in the parade as a commentary on wasting food. This has fallen out of popularity because of waste and because there was something of a serious tortilla injury at some point. Now you’re more likely to see people in the Hibachi Grill Marching Band preparing hotdogs, wrapping them in tin foil, and launching them from constructed “hot dog bazookas” and firing them for safe consumption into the crowd.

Build a hot dog bazooka, feed the people, and rather than a rose court have a contingent of the “dead rose queens” in zombie makeup and sashes from yesteryear. Make fun of the institutions, have a few laughs. Everyone loves a parade and the Doo-Dah is an open call to anyone with an idea. You show up in the morning with your bizarre performance art and get in the line. The “Invisible Man Marching Band” led by one man with a bandaged body below a suit and sunglasses waving a baton, blowing a whistle, and standing in front of a 30 foot gap leading his brigade. A group of people under the banner, “The Bastard Sons Of Lee Marvin” smoke cigars and get surly walking together as a group. You could see anything, really, and I think it’s much more fun than the Rose Parade any day.

Photo by WholeSexLife.Com

I hope that everyone out there in internet land is getting through the bleakness of winter in the company of loved ones. I am a secular slut but I’ll never be opposed to hanging lights when there is so little sun in the day. All of my very best wishes to everyone and I hope that you have a spectacular New Year. I will be making some changes to my website here early on in the new year and I hope you’ll come back to check out the new look.

It is also my pleasure to announce that I may be coming to your city in 2012! I have been getting booking requests at different universities and venues to help promote sex worker rights, consent culture, and more! It’s an honor to be invited but as a broke ass ‘ho it’s hard to get anywhere when you don’t have a plane ticket. As a low budget backpacker, it will be thrilling to sleep on couches and meet new folks. I’m not a fancy traveler but hitchhiking isn’t quite going to work out this time around.

Kitty and I posing for a quick shot at Pride 2011 with Folsom the dog

The amazing Kitty Stryker and I will be hosting a fundraising event on Jan 24th at the Center for Sex and Culture and we need YOUR help! We’re in need of financial donations to help us travel to the places that would like to learn more about consent and entitlement culture but we also need raffle prizes, performers, snacks, and anything else that can help us hit the road and change the world. If you’re in the bay area, mark your calendars and come out! It’s going to be sex positive fun with all kinds of toys, bur- and boilesque performances, and more!

If you aren’t able to come out but want to lend us a helping hand, send a donation via chip-in or email me: missmaggiemayhem@gmail.com with your ideas or contributions. Thanks for all of your help in advance and help us make our way across the continental landscape.

Christians are such wonderful people. When they get together to celebrate the birth of Jesus, they’re filled with such delight and joy that the mere thought of someone celebrating any other birth, historical events, cultural practice, tilted axis and rotation of the earth, or blockbuster films gunning for an academy award just tears them up to pieces. Without Christians speaking up, how would we know that, “Happy Holidays” is actually a call for Christian genocide? It’s good to have such helpful Christians fighting the “War On Christmas.” Such brave soldiers. How truly oppressed Christians must feel during winter. There’s only hundreds upon hundreds of unconstitutional Christian nativity scenes displayed on state owned property rather than thousands upon thousands.

The best proof of just how brave the Catholic League can be is evidenced in their brand new, “Adopt An Atheist” program. Now there are a lot of atheist and skeptical blogs tearing this to pieces but don’t let that impact how you see this very giving and self-sacrificing program designed to fill those pews (and coffers) up with Christians who don’t know that they are in fact Christians and have gotten confused in this violent “War On Christmas” and are afraid to reveal their true Christ-like self amid all of the loathing and oppression heaped onto people in America who believe that Jesus is their savior.

Seriously, please adopt me. Adoption means that you’ll take care of my finances, right? I’m driving a 2011 bus pass, I live in a tiny apartment in a very exciting part of Oakland, CA, and I am something of a heathen. If ever there were an atheist in dire need of adoption it would be me. In order for me to understand your sincerity, you’ll peruse my wishlist and make sure I have some gifts to put underneath my Christmas Tree, right? That’s what normal people do. Help me be normal!  I don’t usually have a tree and maybe the reason I hate Christmas so much is because I don’t get presents and a couple of years ago I was actually burglarized on Christmas. The best way for me to believe in Christmas Magic would be to see it in its full glory in a giant spread of goods I need and want.

It’s important to remember that if you don’t adopt me and give me a proper Christmas full of gifts and joy, I’m just going to go out and have sex on camera for that money. I know, just those words alone make all of the holy water in the bay area start to boil simultaneously. For every rent check, utility bill, and trip to Haiti I go on, I have to spend hours upon hours of my time having sex with my friends and my personal partner. Is there any other atheist more needy and starving of Jesus’ love? Sure, there are lots of hungry and homeless people in need of adoption in the cold of winter but they aren’t as needy as I am because I’m an atheist whore. I’m morally bankrupt. I have no Christmas tree. I don’t go to church. I read the bible as a piece of ancient global literature.

The Catholic League website makes it clear: if we hurry, these closeted Christians can celebrate Christmas like the rest of us. As an added bonus, they will no longer be looked upon as people who “believe in nothing, stand for nothing and are good for nothing.”

Good for nothing, wow. I thought that going to a place that was hit by a devastating earthquake and left in ruins to sledge, shovel, and clean up the mess was good for something. Now I realize that my work was helpless. The shelters that I built are “atheist shelters.” Oh you might think that they provide cover from the weather, safety from the outdoors, and a place to call home but the families that I worked with know that they live in an “atheist shelter” and it is chillier inside an “atheist shelter” than a real, genuine Christian shelter even in the tropics. It actually snows inside of the good for nothing “atheist shelters” I helped build.

I need someone from the Catholic League to adopt me, clearly. Just the other day my partner and I were talking about planning another volunteer expedition for the summer. Imagine what HORRIBLE things would happen if we showed up, jumped into some manual labor, and did so without any agenda other than clearing debris and constructing shelters. That’s just going to make more snow, isn’t it?

So please, Catholic League. Adopt me. Give it your best shot. Take me as a lascivious little lamb who needs to frolic back into the arms of my eternal shepherd zombie in the cloud castle.

Petri dish holiday tree, Image credit