From the Archives of Mayhem, photo by Sleek Images

I am just home from a preternaturally awesome conference in Los Angeles, CA called Farmhouse. I’ve been to a lot of conferences and as a whole, I tend to enjoy them although the exhaust me. MomentemCon in Washington D.C. was a marvelous affair and I think I shall always file it as my first big family reunion of sex positive feminism and its cousins, second cousins, in-laws, and maybe even a few party crashers, too. I learned a lot and had many a tremendous moment and I was also very much in my comfort bubble.

One of the reasons why I agreed to speak at this crazy little thing called Farmhouse was because it wasn’t but it sounded like a cool idea that I could get behind. I wanted to meet the kind of person who looks out at their backyard in Hollywood, CA with a massive avocado tree casting a fruitful canopy across the space and could see a bunch of people getting together to break down walls and rocks in their brains at a conference. At the same time, I didn’t really think I fit into a very tech-centric conference in Los Angeles. That’s my home town and one that I left because I never felt like I belonged in it. I was intimidated by speaking with a tech satellite event and tangled complicated knots about coming back to old haunts of social and cultural incompetency.

I’ve put a lot of personal work into not running away from things like that. Anxiety is a motherfucker and L.A. gives me a lot of it. That’s the place that civilized me, by and large, produced those early fundamental experiential moments that are etched so indelibly into your brain you take them utterly for granted. Moreover, I literally did grow up in L.A. underneath two large avocado trees that were very likely cross-pollinated over the century they have grown in such a relatively close proximity quite accessible by the L.A. public transit system. These were ideas that ran through my head as I rode a train from Oakland to L.A. Union Station over the course of 12 hours.

Farmhouse was the best conference I think I’ve ever been to and the realization of this hit me in one of those rare and precious times where happiness is a full body experience. Everyone filters the world into something we can navigate. Asking what “reality” looks like is just like asking what the internet looks like. The way the internet looks and interacts with you has a lot to do with with what you’re running, the hardware and the software and the experiences both have had since they first powered on and started to take a look at this universe that humans have created. If you’re a running a committed and positive, “I’m going to get something personally valuable out of this experience,” personal web browser, you’re going to see that which is personally valuable. Part of confronting my anxiety issues was recognizing the kind of project I was going to do and making conscious software decisions that would help facilitate my optimum user experience. I made a choice to stay committed to positivity and listening to people and staying as open as possible to their ideas without letting my very unhelpful anxiety corrupt my network and limit my experience.

The theme of the conference was mapping. The theme of the people was really about navigating your own way. Not one of the speakers got up and laid down concrete directions on how to get from Point A to Point B. No one recited a recipe. Somehow, everyone (and hopefully me) managed to convey a profound truth about navigation. An L.A. tech scene when everyone knows that it’s based in Silicon Valley, why a 5 year old girl in Haiti after the earthquake put in substantial work to acquire money through begging from strangers to ride a bicycle, anarchy on Twitter and how mapping can be hostile to the territory, why Skid Row isn’t just a few street blocks you can identify with a pin, getting across the country powered by absurdism, emerging collective hacker spaces and constructing a network of collaboration, literally inventing a new way to leave planet earth and see the stars, how a theory by Einstein pushed someone as a performance artist, and how the map to invention really is like building a Rube Goldberg Machine.

Thing of it is, when I got up and talked about how the gender map actually hinders our navigation of the world and ourselves and threw in a few nuggets about the queer porn revolution, my whole universe did something funny. It got bigger and smaller at the same time. When your topic is sexuality and when you do make explicit hardcore pornography, you get cordoned off from pretty much everything. In the field we call it the sex ghetto. It’s hard to get your message out when it will always be caught in the filter . The collective reality of our times says that everything I make and do is simultaneously the root of all evil and also devoid of meaning.

Especially because I just had a front end collision with the walls of my work when Visa threw down the hammer or processing credit card payments to the website I run with my partner because there were photographs of me putting rosaries in my vagina. The fact that those photos were constructed for a narrative project on what masturbation can mean to an individual and a visual exploration of the joy I experience during self pleasure and the way that religion has influenced it  rather than something reckless. The photos were actually taken for an art project and my partner and I did make the conscious decision to post them in the context of a porn website but our porn website also covered our personal video and photos of Occupy Oakland and its horrific early raid. Part of my porn site mission is about finding my way to authentic and unrepressed sexuality and that means not mimicking the sexuality of someone else. Politics, religion, poetry, music, movies, and other “non-sexual” things are an indelible part of that and I do not consider my rosary pictures of porn site journalism of Occupy to be belittling these ideas. My whole world is in every single orgasm I’ve ever had in my life.

There was a moment where I felt stupid and terribly small for not getting out there and just busting out my deeply passionate manifesto of how committing social suicide by doing porn and destroying my reputation as a reliable citizen in impeccable social standing is why I came to understand that it is imperative that I chase down every single one of my dreams. I didn’t know it when I did it at the time but I did do it and it was exactly what I was supposed to do. Society is never going to let me back into it. Thing of it is, where can you really go in life if you frame what you’re capable of doing by what anyone will let you accomplish. There is no Google Map for your dreams.

The idea of getting off the map and guiding yourself through dedicated and disciplined self-awareness was heavy on my mind not just because of the conference but because of the challenge being told I could not post pictures on my website because this giant machine with way more direct power over my life said that I couldn’t. The idea of not posting those pictures was never really an option in either my mind or Ned’s and he had the brilliant idea of how to address the situation by re-mapping the website. This was a concurrent event and when I left for the conference it was still a little shaky as to whether or not the new map was stable and whether this banner of overcoming an pretty big obstacle was still standing.

Given that my life has been about wrestling with this problem, I did want to talk about it and I did not do so up at the microphone. In the past, that moment right there would sink me. All I would see is yet another time in my life when I didn’t get up and go with the fire in my belly and speak my present truth. The name of my website in that story is rather irrelevant to what I wanted to share about censorship. Then this crazy thing happened: all kinds of people came up to me to talk and not a single person was anywhere near being inappropriate and genuinely open and excited for an opportunity to come and talk to me about their experiences with gender and porn and the boxes we take for granted that don’t really exist at all.

I didn’t miss my opportunity at all. In those awesome moments of connection I felt as though I pulled myself from what would have otherwise been an emotional nosedive.  On top of this, I was checking in with the website pleased to know that things were still standing and that my community is infinitely bigger than the “sex ghetto” because I am connected to everyone that I don’t know. One of the speakers towards the end of the night, Nova Han, started talking about the bee theory which, whether or not it really was Einstein’s theory or not, it a brilliant thought experiment for connection via action.

Boom. There it was. There it fucking was. This guy, Shane Becker, is living his life independently of me and doing his thing. He moves to Los Angeles and he moves into this cool house with a great backyard and this giant avocado tree and he envisions a bunch of people getting together and trying to figure out, essentially, what it means to do your human thing. Most people just look out their window and see their property. He gets this idea and because life is weird and I wind up getting an email to come down and take part in this plan. But before I shook his hand for the first the time and before we were connected through another guy out there in the world doing his thing and talked through email, we were already connected. Dreams, bees, and avocado trees–boom.

I actually had to go walk for several miles which I accomplished at swift pace because it felt impossible to verbalize just how enormously big and small everything felt all at once. When I had that moment I was stone cold sober but I tripping balls just listening to people and feeling suddenly porous to the world. This kept growing exponentially because other people were hitting a similar peak for a lot of the same reasons. The conversations were electric and it felt as though the wifi signal had gotten into my brain and I could navigate all kinds of ideas at once.

It’s a hard thing to verbalize and despite moving beyond repression and running around and talking to people about avocados, man, and this wifi in my brain because those are really feeble and rudimentary tools for conveying how profound it is to tap into those energetic moments when you’re having a peak emotional experience.  Those moments are so important to have and I utterly bask in them. They are the emotional nutrition to build the muscles of progress. The problem is every attempt to convey that is just a metaphor. Rather than likely confusing people in a ridiculous attempt to stuff an experience like that into rhetoric and ascending into a hypermania, I headed to the bar quite deliberately so that I could actually reign things back into just being happy enough to smile, laugh, hug, and keep coming back to the marvel that it occurred at all. I can maintain the pace of the connection better (though still far from skilled) if I’m hugging people and expressing deep gratitude for the role they’re playing in this full bodied happiness I’m experiencing than if I suddenly rope them into editing what is, effectively, something like 100 You Tube videos playing in my head all at once.

I wish I could construct a map for why this was the best time I’ve ever had a conference but there are no concrete plot points I can relay to you. An abundance of what I experienced was about what I willfully wanted to experience but that’s not the whole story either. The speaker lineup was really fantastic and what stood out to me was the fact that no one gave a “presentation” so much as they really spoke with passion and conviction. The trite way to say that is “from the heart.” I’m accustomed to conferences where I learn something quantitative and measurable. A fact, a skill, a technique gets passed on and I’m grateful for every single teacher I’ve encountered on my way. This conference taught me things I cannot effectively measure or define for any of you.

The power and gratitude I felt towards every single person I interacted with was not about fetishizing them so much as feeling awe in the face of the immensity of human networking. I guess that’s what the word namaste might be signifying, to greet the preternatural potential of every individual on earth, to act with love for all the people. That word is a great meditation for pausing for a moment and willfully and consciously suspend the instinct of your ego to interpret their humanity before they’ve begun expressing it to you and to exit an engagement by reaffirming that we really are all in this life thing together and not to retreat from fierce compassion.

It’s just a conference but it was also glimpse at the meta and every glimpse can be distilled into rocket fuel. The coolest part of making rocket fuel out of a most excellent experience with people is using it and projecting that energy forward into something.

Here I am at the end of another long read, already over 2,300 words. I’ve tried to convey something I felt at a conference listening to people from totally different fields, some of which they invented for themselves, but every one of them being innovated and resolutely reverent of the human experience and it shook me to the core. My writing here is in one way a total failure because they cannot have transported you there to how I experienced the conference. I do know of someone who can do a much better job of expressing that reverence. What I should have done is just shared this video of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and my wishes that everyone in the world could experience it and to keep working towards making it more and more possible for people to do so in the ways that I have the tools and resources to do.

I’m not a morning person. That’s why I told my partner Ned to either come on me before heading off to work in the morning or to physically initiate sex. Ned prefers that I put in a morning sex OK the night beforehand. I tell him to err on the side of “initiate sex” and accept that I’ll tell him to sod off if it’s really not OK. Our relationship is such that those are my boundaries with him. We’ve jumped 30 foot waterfalls, we lived in a tent for a month during a hurricane season, we have a 2 year old mastiff/lab puppy we’ve raised together from the time when she could fit in my arms. I’m happy to negotiate and put in a morning sex request the night prior (like a wakeup call, I dig) but the whole thing of it is I’m not a morning person. You don’t want to ask me anything in the morning. The person you need to be asking is my cunt.

If you rouse me from slumber and demand communication my gut impulse is to swear at you and make the thing that is waking me up go away. The time when I’ve been woken is not a time for questions. I have no answers. I can dig into the action oriented part of my brain and do something. You can make my body respond, my body will be vaguely aware of the context, but my conscious mind will flicker in and out and it will hate you every single step of the way.

In my bed at home and with the familiar context of my partner’s touch, smell, and environmental fingerprint I have very seamless boundaries and so his touch is very welcome. This is also because I’m good (to a fault) at informing him when touch is not welcome and that I’ll be walking the dog through the neighborhood for a few hours or so. Having a solid no boundary is a key component to the “go ahead and start having sex with me in the morning when I’m still out cold” part of a sex life. At the very least, it’s something to talk about and to get that there are some instinctive reactions to interrupted sleep that humans have. For all of my best intentions, you might get clocked in the head. It’s a risk. And if that happened I might be very sad you didn’t attempt again the next day in spite of having been clocked.

It’s not as though we’ve never been injured because of the other. Not in a domestic violence way, not in a ritualistic sex S/M thing, either. It’s purely the byproduct of going out on a lot of outings to the middle of nowhere with one another, often. The glorious wear and tear of intimacy is strewn on our bodies. Some scars have hilarious stories. My right thumb now has a circlular abrasion scar like a small silvered moon from when I was holding a Hitachi Magic Wand against his cock while getting him off with it and the vibrator head took off a layer of skin on my thumb. This is why you use lube and remain aware of whether or not you are sustaining an open abrasion in the process of getting your partner off. Word to the wise. But still, there is comfort and a long history of good faith interactions even when some amount of discomfort may be involved.

I could love you and you could be waking me up and asking me if I want cake and I’ll probably just want to punch you because I’ll want sleep more than cake. I’m an insomniac, sleep is a rare thing for me, so I don’t give it up easily. However, because I trust my partner so much there’s that magical space of semi-consciousness where my body is positively present with sex and my mind is still in a half-sleep state of consciousness. I’ll orgasm rapidly in this state. I may make strange noises. The best way to end it is to let me roll right back into sleeping. This works well when I can sleep in longer than he does. My alarm goes off later.

I love the morning sex but setting an alarm would kill it for me. Alarms kill my libido. I avoid them at all costs. I don’t like having to set alarms to do anything. It doesn’t work. When my partner knocks on the door of my cunt, he’s going to get a warmer response than tapping me on the shoulder. The truth is, he hasn’t gotten kicked in the face yet. The mornings when he does indeed initiate sex while I sleep are often nights when I’ve gone to bed hot and horny while he was knocked out cold. While full on sleep sex has never been reported by my bedmates, the few I’ve spent more than a year sharing beds with have reported the occasional bout of sleep humping.

There appears to be a strange game of kinetic sexual energy at play. It’s exciting. I’ll go to bed horny, softly hump him through the night, then he wakes up and knows because it’s all obvious over time. Co-habitation is a small collective reality. Less a fetish for sleep sex, it’s a potential outlet of intimacy. It’s not just trust but the long simmer and collection of information. He never makes a blind guess when he takes up an opportunity to knock on my pussy for sex. It’s not an action of domination, not that there would be anything wrong with negotiating something like that, so much as it’s the fact that we both have better days when we share quick pleasure before being away all day.

It must suck to leave a warm bed and your lover for an alarm clock. As stated earlier, I find it intolerable. I need time to acclimate to waking consciousness. I need the ritual of grinding my coffee beans, boiling water, and making a pot of coffee. I need to smell it, hold it in my hands, and slowly join the world. Articulation is the last part of my mental hard drive to boot up. That’s why asking questions is difficult. It’s hard for me to vocally iterate anything but my other body processes can run fine without the outward projection of my thoughts. I get the privilege of being able to wake up in the way that lets me thrive. He still has to answer the alarm. Having a bonding moment of pleasure and intimacy is really helpful to make all of that suck less.

I do find that liminal space between sleep and waking fascinating and I’ve never had the opportunity to explore it so much with someone. Really, it started when I told him that he should feel free to ejaculate onto me if he was masturbating in the morning before work. Despite whatever you’ve heard about facials being degrading, I love them. I get as close as I can to the orgasms I come near. It’s such incredible mind-body synthesis that I can say I’ve never been bored by a single orgasm I’ve seen or experienced. Having someone come on me rather than in me allows me to get closer to what’s happening. I love when I’m squirted on after fingering someone in just the right ways. I love watching the whole body contract as well but the epicenter of the orgasm is an exciting place to be.

So it was a warm joke and endearing part of our relationship that he would come all over me before heading to work. I would fall back asleep and sleep into hazy dreamscapes of lust and his fuzzy chest hair. It worked. Then I told him to start knocking on the pussy. On mornings when I would have scowled if he cheerily asked if I wanted coffee, his cock at the opening of my cunt would get it immediately wet and open. When the light is early and I hear him scoot the cats or the dog off the bed before shutting the bed and walking straight to my side of the bed, I start getting wet.

I don’t think I could organicly rise from sleep and request sex. The times when I have are nights with little sleep. I’ve generally been awake for quite some time if I’ve got an eager face. Sometimes I can tell from the very way my partner gets up from the bed 10 minutes before he’s going to initiate sex that he will, just from the way the springs of the bed seem to roll. Maybe it’s because I’ve been making them roll with thrusting. Maybe I’m projecting and throwing sex phermones out into the room. Maybe I’m a Jedi. What I know is that I haven’t been wrong.

It’s rare, but it happens, when his body comes into contact with mine while I’m still sleeping. My hazy half-sleep sex is generally from a brain that understood that it didn’t need all of its systems running for the activity at hand. Actually being surprised is another experience entirely. There’s a rush of vulnerability but also a sudden wave of relief and pleasure. Rather than kick, I tend to wrap my legs around him and pull him closer to me. I recognize him so quickly I don’t ever feel a gap of fear. We sleep beside one another, eat beside one another, and have built a home together. His body feels so much like a part of mine that when he moves to enter my body in the morning it doesn’t feel foreign at all. It feels just right.

Sex workers not only lack the right to make a consensual transaction, sex workers are also denied their rights to justice in American courtrooms. This means all sex workers.Why can’t we go to the police? What the fuck good will it ever do for us? We don’t live in a Law and Order world where our glamorized dead bodies are sneered at and justice is seen as fetishizing the law even when it’s a whore. I’m going to illustrate with a story I obsessed over as it occurred. My favorite coverage came from the OC Weekly and starts off with this paragraph:

No one disputes that an on-duty Irvine police officer got an erection and ejaculated on a motorist during an early-morning traffic stop in Laguna Beach. The female driver reported it, DNA testing confirmed it and officer David Alex Park finally admitted it.

To really paint the picture, an officer of the law stalked this woman. It was such a problem that even his department told him to knock it the fuck off. On this night, he stalked her. He turned off his GPS in the patrol vehicle so the car wouldn’t record where he was. He waited until she was on a secluded road.

He was acquitted.

If you can’t win with that much evidence, what can you win?

Also, let’s say that you want to do something zany like rent an apartment. You’ll be asked to verify your income and that’s tricky when you’re in a criminal business that operates in cash. Until you hit a serious magic number in cash, it really doesn’t matter how much of a deposit you put down. Actually, it gets worse because then you reek of illegal. Now let’s say you want a separate space from your home to work. You can either face the rental hell again to limited success, especially because pro-domme work tends to be loud. You can certainly work independently as an outcall only domme, but you’re not going to catch as much work. So now your option is a house run by someone who will take a cut of your money in exchange for a certain amount of security.

If you’re an activist, you’re more likely to be targeted by law enforcement. When you take to the streets proudly identifying yourself by name and announcing your engagement in an illegal or semi-legal activity, you’re not going to hear the clapping of people whose job it is to curtail illegal activity. They see you making a fool out of them, you see yourself fighting for your rights. The power hierarchy washes everything out down the river.

If you’re a bystander, it’s easy to shut us up if you don’t like what we’re saying. You can take our children away in a flash or kick them out of your schools. You can deport us. You can jail us. It’s easy to make a sex worker go away. People will believe any story that we’re crazy or addicted or dangerous to society and children and school districts. Our careers lend us no credibility and support. I’m going to borrow from the aforementioned case because stripping is a relatively legal form of work and one that the culture is more familiar with as a whole.

 …he made it The Good Cop versus The Slutty Stripper. He pointed out that she’d once had a violent fight with a boyfriend in San Diego. He mocked her inability to keep a driver’s license. He accused her of purposefully “weakening” Park so that he became “a man,” not a cop during the traffic stop. He called her a liar angling for easy lawsuit cash. He called her a whore without saying the word.

“You dance around a pole, don’t you?” Stokke asked.

Superior Court Judge William Evans ruled the question irrelevant.

Stokke saw he was scoring points with the jury.

“Do you place a pole between your legs and go up and down?” he asked.

“No,” said Lucy before the judge interrupted.

“You do the dancing to get men to do what you what them to do,” said Stokke. “And the same thing happened out there on that highway [in Laguna Beach]. You wanted [Park] to take some sex!”

Lucy said, “No sir,” the sex wasn’t consensual. Stokke—usually a mellow fellow with a nasally, monotone voice—gripped his fists, stood upright, clenched his jaws and then thundered, “You had a buzz on [that night], didn’t you?”

As if watching a volley in tennis, the heads of the male-dominated jury spun from Stokke back to Lucy, who sat in the witness box. She said no, but it was hopeless. Jurors stared at her without a hint of sympathy.

In his closing argument, Stokke pounced. He called Lucy one of those “girls who have learned the art of the tease, getting what they want . . . they’ve learned to separate men from their money.” -OC Weekly (2007)

One of the most trite and cliche attacks on sex workers is that they “steal” money from men. The idea is that no one has a right to sell sex. It should be freely available on demand. It’s not just that a sex worker sells a sexual experience. When you hook up with someone or someones, the general idea is that you’re looking for that juicy area in the Venn Diagram called “what I like and what you like.” Ideally, it’s about mutual pleasure and when we hit that pleasure peak we are no longer totally present for that person. This stands out the most obviously when we’re talking about an orgasm. When you’re coming, even if it’s just for a few flashing seconds, you are not rational. Being totally turned on and grooving to your thing, whatever that might be, also means that you’re not totally rational. When you hire a sex worker, you’re hiring them for their presence. You’re paying them to focus 100% on your needs and your pleasure framed by their limits.

Not being penetrated by a client is a limit that a sex worker is entitled to have. Some people may come to the conclusion that sex work is a job that will meet their needs. Whether it’s for the money, the schedule, or the lack of entry barriers someone might realize that cultivating pleasure is something that works for them. If having a cock in you is something you are not OK with doing, your options in sex work are limited and most require more exhibitionism and public exposure. To be a dominatrix is to provide interactive private erotic theater. It means you have a skill set of listening to someone describe a fantasy in terms that may be oblique as hell (“Whatever you want, mistress!”) or finely detailed (“I have a 50 page script I would very much like you to read. Do you have a griffin costume? At the very least, you have to have a lion tail and talons to make this work.”) It means having acumen and skill for utilizing dangerous objects on sensitive regions of the body. Above all, it means being fully and actively present for that person’s experience.

It takes a metric fuck ton to be full and actively present for someone’s experience. The tools I used the most as a pro-domme in my early 20s came from my HIV test counselor trainings. I have easily topped out at 1,000 documented hours of training around my work as an HIV test counselor, clinic coordinator, and HIV Senior Specialist. While a lot of that fell into the pure science around human sexual health and HIV itself,  a large bulk of that was focused on how to be totally present for someone taking the test during a counseling session. This is when I had to ask questions about the most intimate and taboo parts of our lives: sex and drugs. Being an HIV test counselor means diving head first into stigma. It also demonstrated that making assumptions about someone’s identity, orientation, behavior, and desired behavior means that you have not done your job on a level we can document through epidemiology.

I developed a brain muscle from test counseling that served me well as a sex worker in every stripe I have explored. Delivering results was the heavy lifting in that mental workout regimen. I say that it’s a muscle rather than a barrier because when I delivered positive test results, I didn’t have the walls that go up when I protect myself. I remained empathetic. It was my job to hold space and emotionally carry that person through the experience. You can never really know what a result is going to mean for someone. It’s inappropriate to come into the room with a negative test result and a big grin on your face. It is also inappropriate to preface a positive result with a frown and an apology. You come into the room and you are neutral because you are there to hold the space.

I’ve had people sob in my arms after receiving a negative test result because they felt that they “deserved” a positive result. I’ve had people delight at receiving a positive result because it meant that they could access resources for housing, general healthcare, education, and substance use recovery because they had been denied every other way. To color a result with your assumption of what it should mean to hear those words is to cast a judgement and you do not have the information to make that call.

That’s what pulled me to towards being a dominatrix. At the time, I didn’t think I would be a good escort but I knew that I was absolutely fascinated by people with non-traditional turn-on’s. I saw fetishism as this incredible feature of the human psyche and I felt humbled by how little we know about ourselves as a species when I watched someone have an orgasm just from stroking the heel of my shoe. I never knew what that shoe meant for them but I could sure as fuck hold space for them to have their desired experience with it. Because I had developed this emotional brain muscle in the counseling room, it never felt like an expense of energy when someone paid me to facilitate a psycho-physical erotic experience for them. I felt suited for it and then I set to work learning some of the technical skills like caning, bondage, etc.

Every sex worker has their own story of why they chose that career as everyone has their own story and relationship to what they do for a living. Someone who enjoys cooking food will have a different relationship to preparing a meal at home than they will to working at a restaurant. You might LOVE cooking at home but would sustain a severe emotional deficit if you worked at a restaurant. You might LOVE being a chef but avoid cooking any other time. Patrons of a restaurant don’t inquire as to whether or not everyone in establishment involved in the preparation of their meal was totally, utterly, and deeply passionate about having made them that meal and wouldn’t be doing anything else in the world but making them that meal on top of a psychological assessment including substance use inquiries and abuse history.

Most people go out to eat because they want to enjoy a meal and have no responsibility whatsoever for its preparation and cleanup. Meanwhile, there are substantial issues with trafficking and labor violations happening in commercial kitchens across the country.

One of the allegations against the dominatrix is that she peddles in oppressive fantasy structures and advertises them, thereby perpetuating them. Here’s where it’s important to back up and remember that although our sexualities are incredibly fluid over the course of our lives, a lot if not most is forged long before we are exposed to an influx of sexual imagery. Even if you were exposed to porn, even if we debate the running trend of sexual themes and imagery in advertisements, the amount of non-sexual media we consume is greater than the amount of sexual media we consume. Sexuality is the incredible tool that humans can utilize to experience pleasure and to understand themselves and their worlds. Our sexualities, regardless of what kind of erotic content we access, are forged in a world that is racist, sexist, cissexist, homophobic, ableist, and all other forms of oppressive ugliness.

Some fantasies are best played out with a professional. This might be because someone needs practice articulating that desire in language that their partners or future partners can understand or it might be because that fetish or kink is really emotionally loaded for them that can be exceptionally intense for someone who is not prepared or skilled with remaining 100% present during emotional fall out. Some kinks and fetishes are buried under a lot of walls and walls don’t disappear when they’re broken, they crumble. Sometimes pushing that button is going to cause an entire psychological structure to collapse and if you’re a bystander you can be hurt if you’re not ready and not wearing a hard hat. That might come from an “extreme” fetish or it might come from a “simple” one. You don’t know what a fetish means to someone.

To take a popular punching bag for critique, the fetish of “sissification” or “forced feminization” may be a limit for some providers and is not something that they can offer but like all fetishes or kinks it is not inherently evil or oppressive in nature. For some, it may come from the fact that they’re working through the shame of being caught and shamed for being inquisitive about frilly things while having a male body. Having someone call you a sissy while you’re experiencing some of your early moments of sexual arousal or curiosity can imprint. People can have a fetish for “forced feminization” without believing that it is degrading to wear frilly clothes because the rhetoric and the props trigger an emotional release at the same time as a sexual release.

Sexuality is rapid acting tunnel right to some of our rawest nerves. When you’re aroused, you are more physically sensitive and your body starts opening up everywhere. The skin becomes flushed, the pores open, the muscles of the body loosen, the eyes dilate, you may salivate, and sexual fluids might leak. You are physically more open and pliable and our barriers go down. One of the reasons why I identify as a sex hacker is because that’s what this process is like for me. Maybe if I had been born before the digital era I would call myself a sex locksmith.

Now to gain that kind of access into some people, you have to hit them for extended periods of time with specific implements because it’s a physical sensation that triggers something or sets the tone. I don’t have the upper body strength to use a lot of popular BDSM implements for hours a week. It’s athletic to pursue a career in the physical SM arts and it opens you up to repetitive stress injury and you probably don’t have an SM sports medicine specialist you can see about your “flogger shoulder” or “spanking wrist.” Because most SM classes make the assumption that you’ll only being flogging someone recreationally, they not stress some of them vital ergonomics or muscle development exercises you should consider if you’re going to put many weekly hours into doing. You know what else is missing from the image of the dominatrix? Icing your shoulder at the end of a heavy session. Depending on what you’ve been up to, it can be just as physically stressful as pitching at a baseball game.

So far as the athletics behind dominatrix work were concerned, that was not my specialty and I declined sessions that necessitated long periods of heavy upper arm work or referred them out to people I knew were damn good at providing it. There were some forms of role play that squicked me out that I also referred on to a qualified specialist. On the other hand, I was great with forms of roleplay that scared the living daylights out of many of my peers. It’s all about what you have the resources to provide and but we do not control the oppressive context that cultivates desire.

It is said that women who work as a dominatrix and don’t have an “authentic/genuine orientation as a dominant woman” and “just do it for the money,” are less than lifestyle players. That’s fucked up given that sex workers are on the front lines of the fight for sexual freedom. We’re the first to be denied basic rights to say yes and basic rights to say no. Rather than help us fight back against police brutality and unjust incarceration, our communities throw us out because of the way we attract police attention. It’s easy to scorn the whore than to tackle oppression by the state. Once upon a time, hustlers and whores were part of the fabric of the queer rights movement. They were often part of the leadership. Then there was the shift towards assimilation and respectability at the terms of the establishment and the leatherfolk, the gender queer, drag queens, the hustlers, the whores, and the fetishists were pushed to the margins and out of the pictures.

As kinky sex is moving more into the limelight, a lot of kinksters are once again rolling the shit downhill to the sex workers. We’re on the razor edge of oppression and when you see images of the traditional looking mistress, you have to remember the limited box she can operate within. For one, there is the problem of implying that penetrative sex is welcome in a session by being friendly. An escort has to use metaphors to describe what she offers and when you cannot communicate clearly, things will fall apart. It is because an escort has to be a little ambiguous about what is offered that the copy on an ad for a dominatrix will respond to those pre-existing practical tropes and make it clear in as many ways as possible that penetrating her is off the table.

I would like to see everyone be able to ask for what they want sexually, to be heard, and ideally to find someone who compliments that desire. There are a lot of things holding that back and if you made every single dominatrix disappear you would still have a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and misogynist culture to contend with when you’re through. We see more non-sexual images everyday than we do sexual images. We need to look at what is happening to construct the paradigm where sex is defined as a man with a penis fucking a woman with a vagina rather than one or more people sharing pleasure.

When you attack the dominatrix, you are no closer to achieving the goal and you have shamed an entire segment of people for providing and consuming focused time on pleasure.

It’s not playing “oppression olympics” to bring up the struggle that sex workers face. You must triage what is taking place. Cultural oppression is a cancer. We name the various systems of perception it afflicts like different kinds of cancer. Cancer is urgent and none among us can call it something that should be ignored. Ignoring cancer will kill our entire cultural body. An acute emergency, like incarceration or homicide, is something that should be seen symptomatic attack of cultural cancer. Ignoring a heart attack that has wheeled into the ER in order to continue assessing the source of a cancerous on an X-ray is imprudent at best and is a repeated occurrence in many activist circles. We’re willing to let people die on the floors of spaces where they have come for help that we have advertised as providing.

If you want to lift the images in sex worker ads, remember their limited amount of power and the consequences they face for deviating them. Asking someone to be raped, jailed, or murdered to make you feel better in a space is not a just thing to ask. It does not advance the fight for freedom.

There’s nothing like a nerdy action film and Terminator is no exception. Cyborgs, blazing guns, SPLOSIONS, and the battle of humanity against its creations-what’s not to love? The original film is stunning to watch because of the incredible attention paid to the visual details. The shots are well planned and motifs and themes are carried equally well even when the plot has a few holes and the time space continuum is confusing. So far as analysis is concerned, there’s a lot to be said about the way that machines are referenced. The answering machine at Sarah Connor’s house is forever reminding callers that they’ve been “fooled by a machine,” and references to humans ignoring red flags by listening to blaring music through headphones, ignoring emotional gut instincts over “reason,” and ultimately missing the evidence that machines were in control of war spurring the great war run in the background of the film keeping things tight, moving, and lots of fun to watch.

Gender, specifically masculinity, is another interesting background theme in the film. As an interesting piece of trivia, Arnold Schwarzenegger was originally cast in the role of Kyle Reese. We can certainly debate the decision making skills of the former Governator of California (whose ‘signature’ is on my college diploma) but we can all agree that when he told James Cameron that he would make one hell of a homicidal cyborg he was right on the money. The tone of the film would have taken on a strikingly different color if  Lance Henriksen had carried the role in this film. For the record, Henriksen would shine as a cyborg in another classic nerdy action film, Aliens.

Watch the entrance of the Terminator closely: we see him in a prepared warrior crouch through the haze of smoke in his entrance not all too different from the stage debut of an erotic powerhouse. His physique is buff and immaculately sculpted. He is naked and unashamed as the cultural image of masculine perfection. The camera utterly adores his body and relies on shots that are traditionally used on the erotic female form; close-ups on body parts, a camera starting at the feet and working up the body, and situations that create tension in the body to enhance the look of physical features. The terminator stands silhouetted against the cityscape of Los Angeles glittering like the night sky and is framed at the center of everything.

In contrast to this, the character Kyle Reese is practically thrown into a skid row alley and lands trembling in a fetal position. Later in the film, his character would describe time travel as being similar to birth. His body is already damaged; we see scars and burns on his back and rather than strutting, he scurries like a rat. Unlike the Terminator who confidently walks upon to a trio of hard punks posturing with aggression and demands clothing at the expense of death, Reese is immediately pursued. He wears the pants of a homeless man (interestingly, homeless individuals are stripped of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality in general by society) and pulls clothing off the racks of a nearby store. Not one person is killed as the result of his actions whereas the Terminator shocks us by reaching into the chest of one of the punks and ripping out his still beating heart. Reese is seen as practically pathetic so far as his body is concerned but his quick thinking innovation wins us over. He is distinctly human.

Now, the thing to remember is that Michael Biehn is far from being scrawny. He’s certainly got a set of well-defined muscles and he knows his way around a gun as well. His character is that of a life long soldier who has seen the ravages of war and desperation for his entire life. The terminator is the hyperbole of masculinity in both his larger than life physique, completely objective thinking, and patent disregard for any obstacle. Kyle Reese is presented to us as a real man. He still falls into many of the stereotypes with his own quick trigger finger (Sarah Connor advises him to put the gun down on multiple occasions as if femininity is defined as moving away from violence) and strong body but he is also endowed with immense vulnerability.

“Flashbacks” are a common narrative device that explains the story to the viewer but Reese is depicted as emotionally suffering from the war he’s seen. At one point, he sits in his parked car and the construction machines become the war machines of future and the losses he has sustained as a fact of life. The way that he jerks and drives on is the reminder that humans feel pain and loss, that soldiers suffer. He has apparent physical scars, a tattoo/laser brand, and what looks a lot like a form of PTSD especially when the following deleted scene is taken into consideration.

Throughout the course of the film, the terminator’s human skin is battered. The beauty that he had at the start of the film becomes mangled, especially in his face. Eyes are the window to the soul and one of the first things we learn is that the terminator is soulless and terrifying. His power is seen through his relentless resurrection. He’s shot, run over by a truck, set on fire, and blown into pieces and yet he persists. This is also presented by humanity’s quest to persevere against the impossible odds of fighting machines through the inspirational leadership of the unseen John Connor as messiah who wakes up the fighting spirit of the humans and brings them back from the brink of extinction through their will to live.

Notably, Sarah Connor has a continuous buildup of power throughout the film. Physically, she is the weakest link and has the least knowledge of weapons. She is also a powerful observer who always seems to have second thoughts or “bad feelings” about things despite lacking the confidence to act on them at the start of the film. It is after she initiates sex with Reese that she experiences her biggest internal change on both a physical and emotional level. On the physical level, she has conceived the human messiah and on the psychological level she starts to charge barking out the command, “On your feet, soldier!” and pushing Reese to continue forward with her.

What I find fascinating about the love story between Reese and Connor is the question of dominance and submission. Reese is not the leader of the revolution, he is a soldier in it. In the bizarre space time continuum, it is his son that is the leader of the revolution as well as his superior in the human army. In regards to his relationship with Connor, it is made clear that his entire life has been about her despite having never known her. He lives in service to her and the revolution is recorded in matrilineal terms. Despite her obvious love for him, the name of her son is John Connor not John Reese which counters the traditional naming process of first born sons. Moreover, he has never known any pleasure aside from her and in the end he dies for her.

The terminator has one objective: to kill Sarah Connor. At the start of the film, we are led to believe that Kyle Reese has the singular objective of protecting her. After explaining what the terminator is, Connor asks if he can stop it. He pauses solemnly to say that he does not know and ultimately we learn that his mission was not to defeat the bad guy and get the girl as with most action films but rather to find the woman he has served his entire life, consummate that love, and then take her to the next level of battle with that which is inhuman. It is Sarah Connor who ultimately prevails over the machine after what we learn was the conception of her child.

Their love scene is incredibly powerful as it is the keystone of Reese’s mission. Although their child may be the savior of humanity, Connor has little in common with the Virgin Mother of the Redeemer. She is the one who initiates sex between them after he reveals that he is a virgin. We can surmise that she is not. Moreover, the camera spends a fraction of the time eroticizing her body. She is nude only within the crucial plot point of establishing that sex is happening unlike the many scenes that oogle the bodies of men. Although there is very little sex in the movie, it is sex positive and in many ways it has to be. Sexuality is indelible to the human story and it is treated as such in the movie. The love scene is sexy but it is in no way gratuitous and without it the entire story crumbles.

What could have easily been a male dominated impregnation scene is not. It is a female led scene. She is sexually experienced, he is not. She is fully clothed and uninjured, he is shirtless and wears both bandages and scars. They are both vulnerable and emotional but unlike him, she is more comfortable with having feelings of fear and anxiety and more willing to be present with them. She asks him about the women in his time in an admittedly heterosexist frame of inquiry as to whether or not he has experienced intimacy in the past and he responds within the context of war: they are “good fighters.” She clarifies her question to be more specific about her intentions and he opens up about the intimacy he has experienced looking at her photograph. His pain moves her to tears as her hand caresses one of the larger scars on his back. At the end of his monologue, he withdraws from her and walks straight to their handcrafted bombs in another retreat back to war. She chases him and initiates the kiss with both of her hands around his throat.

Her fierce compassion for Reese refuses to give up and she is seen throughout the film protecting him by advocating non-violence as an equally powerful tool for survival. She does not use sex “against” him but rather for him and his emotional well being. On both a micro and macro level, sex is key to survival for individuals on the brink of emotional extinction and for humanity as a whole. Neither character is aware that the product of their lovemaking will be John Connor.

Masculine dominance and power is always being expressed in the movie through violence. Connor’s femininity is expressed through her abject resistance to violence and comfort with sexuality without being an erotic object in the film. In an early scene in the film, she is unshaken by a lewd phone call intended for her roommate with a sense of humor and nothing but warm feelings for the ill-fated duo despite the fact that neither have taken her into remote consideration. When Reese hands her a gun while he gathers supplies, we see her discomfort with it and she does not open fire and even in her final confrontation with the terminator she kills through indirect means. Where most female heroines keep sex appeal in their tool belt, empathy is the strongest tool that Connor wields.

Her empathy is what sets her aside from the other humans in the film. The police fail to actively listen to the situation, the psychiatrist with training in how to listen is depicted as being deeply committed to not listening and being self-involved, her roommate spends every moment possible listening to her music through head phones, and humanity itself is nearly doomed purely because it did not pay attention to the signs that Skynet had become self-aware. Although the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity are present, human vulnerability is honored across the gender spectrum. Although it puts us at risk it is also our salvation.

]]> http://missmaggiemayhem.com/2012/04/23/terminal-masculinity/feed/ 2 missmaggiemayhem terminatorxxx terminator13 Terminator-2 http://missmaggiemayhem.com/2012/04/19/feminist-porn-awards-2012/ http://missmaggiemayhem.com/2012/04/19/feminist-porn-awards-2012/#comments Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:43:56 +0000 Maggie Mayhem http://missmaggiemayhem.com/?p=1902 Continue reading →]]>

The 2012 Feminist Porn Awards are just kicking off in Toronto, and as a new startup we are very proud to have two nominations in the mix less than a year from our launch. The Feminist Porn Awards, run by the awesome sexy ping center Good For Her, are the premier showcase for alternative, queer, progressive work in the adult industry. Since they began in 2006, the awards have featured the work of many of our role models including Shine Louise Houston, Jiz Lee, Tina Horn, Courtney Trouble, and Tristan Taormino. We are honored to be acknowledged alongside these awesome folks and many others, and we were counting on the publicity to promote some really hot new content we’ve been working (and screwing) hard to produce.

Imagine my surprise this bright and sexy morning when I woke up to this rather unsettling email from Verotel, the credit card processor for Meet The Mayhems. The email informs me that our account is now subject to a €500 fee, which they assume we cannot afford, so they have been kind enough to terminate our account for us. You can read my rant about this here if you’re interested. To have our credit card processing yanked without warning only a few days before the FPA award ceremony is a serious and unexpected challenge.

Financial douchebaggery aside, the bottom line is that we can’t take your money for a few days. Does that mean that we’re going to deny you the incredible sexiness you’ve come to expect from us? Hell no! You awesome perverts mean more to us than that. It’s time for a whole long weekend of FREE PORNO! 

Running our own small, homemade independent porn site together has been a challenging but rewarding experience. Over the past year the two of us have built our own small business completely from scratch. We make up for having next to no investment capital by pouring our own time and skills into the project. The result is a true DIY porn site where everything from web development to editing to accounting, shooting, legal issues, photography, and marketing is done in our little Oakland apartment by the Mayhems ourselves.

Naturally there has been quite a steep learning curve in many of these professional skills, but we started small and have learned by doing. We ask our customers for only $8 per month, significantly below the industry standard price, with the caveat that a bad flu or a business trip might interrupt our schedule of updates. The quality of our product has grown steadily over the past year, and our membership has been slowly growing with it. We are now poised to launch innovative new sections of our website including homemade adult product sales and written erotica, and we have agreements with other independent adult performers and small studios who want to launch their own small porn sites using our software architecture. We are working not only to create an independent income stream for ourselves, but also to create a viable business model for all of the little guys in porn who want the tools to profit from their work without sacrificing their creative and entrepreneurial autonomy.

We’re excited to share some of the fruits of our labor with you free, for a limited time. Enjoy, and stay tuned for tons of new footing in the coming weeks, including performances by Wolf Hudson, James Darling, Ruby Reaper, Denali Winter, and Bianca Stone!

• The Feminist Porn Awards 2012 are upon us! Both Ned and I are so honored to have received nominations for our website, MeetTheMayhems.Com as well as for our first feature length flick, Tresspass. Grab tickets to see the awards or cheer us on by checking out the livestream by Girlzporn.

The Feminist Porn Awards takes place April 20th at 9 pm at the Berkeley Church at 315 Queen Street East, Toronto, Canada. Live streaming will commence at 8 pm E.S.T (6 pm P.S.T), kicking off with live interviews with talent in attendance and their spectacular red carpet entrances.

• Godless Perverts: Atheism and Alternative Sexualities

What’s it like to be a queer or kinky atheist? Alt-sex communities might favor calling the goddess or tantric rituals instead of a church revival, but the belief that a spiritual life makes you a better person is as common as in Middle America. The reality is that for nonbelievers, dungeons and Pride Parades can be as unwelcoming as the neighborhoods they grew up in.

Godless perverts of all stripes are encouraged to join us at the Center for Sex and Culture on Thursday, April 26 to explore the role of atheists, agnostics, and skeptics in alternative sexuality. The panel features Greta Christina, Charlie Glickman, Chris Hall, and Maggie Mayhem speaking about how to be a good perv without God(dess), community attitudes that privilege religious and spiritual beliefs, how science can be ecstatic, what atheists call out when they come, and much more.

$10-20 sliding scale
The Center for Sex and Culture
1349 Mission Street between 9th and 10th Streets

• Farmhouse Conference 2 is happening in Hollywood, CA on May 5 and I am thrilled to have joined the lineup. No slides, no projector. Just awesome people telling incredible stories. The theme this year is “Mapping” and the lineup is becoming more and more awesome by the day. My talk will be called Navigating The Gender Landscape. 

When I get out and away from everything busy, I try to suck it all in by stopping at vistas to close my eyes and breathe to know it. The environmental transitions on the hike are hazy, luminous, and often radical. The nature shapes the path and the path shapes nature. There are times when it feels combatively narrow and terribly unsteady and shows the sheer persistence of all the animals like me who just went there anyway. Mostly it is the path of least resistance or the best access to the resources and it just feels like a natural journey carved by the landscape that we happen to follow as creatures on a ride. This is why it’s vital to stop and know it by the sounds and feel with your eyes shut and you whole mind open. When you’ve been walking so long that your legs tire, it can be impossible to know if the hills are getting higher or if the valleys are getting lower. It’s like being so underwater you aren’t rightly sure which direction leads to the surface.

On this walk, it was the ferns I saw among the different contexts and conditions that draw forth the diversity of speciation. There are so many varieties of these botanical cephalopods, such a sprawl of greens and curls that seem to conclude solely due to a lack of resources rather than any kind of formal aesthetic completion. They reek of endless potential and flying spores and kinetic energy in the coils. They’re always moving; you can almost hear it like a faraway echo in a shell, the slightest vibration of motion, the constant spritzes of freshness being unveiled.

This fern is pristine and crisp. It’s barely been out of the warmth of the soil but it’s raring to unfold upward and outward and what a grand place to grow indeed. It has everything a fern really needs to thrive. The valley captures the sunlight and it seems to tumble down like a shower between the leaves of the canopy above. The ground is covered in soft redwood bark that looks and feels like warm fur because the earth just soaks the sunlight up all day and holds onto it. Those leaves are all busy doing strange light alchemy but the ground just basks in it all. It’s nice to stand in the moment and remind myself that I’m not surrounded by things, but processes of life all dancing with the light.

It’s a rich, warm, wet spot in the forest today and I would much rather wear that than the fabric on my back. How can I get to know this moment better wearing all of these clothes? I’m just another part of this ecosystem and I’ve been expected.  Right here, right now is a beautiful place to sprout and so, I do. I peel of clothing, socks, and finally my boots casting them off to the side where I can pick them up again when the the situation changes.

Crouching low on the ground, my skin twitches at the shock of the sudden transition. I close my eyes and feel each place where a tiny ray of light touches my skin and I follow the path of warmness. At first I can hold onto one for a short distance but before long I can hold the strings of sunlight on my skin like chords and follow their voyage everywhere in my body, even my eyelids and between my toes. When I open my eyes again, I can twice as many shades of green, then three times as many. If I keep observing they may never stop coming and spreading out into all directions and planes. My eyes are dilating with the pleasure of the moment and the safety of the soft light. Sleepy nerves throughout my body start to rouse and lift outward. It feels vaguely prickly as the first wave of nerves flicker on and rush forward but then it evens as everything thickens and warms and rushes from my inside to talk to my outside.

It’s easy for everything to get in right now. My breaths become deeper and longer and the warm flush begins; my pores open up and lubricate with sweat, my thighs start to widen, my cunt begins to swell and open and drip. My muscles begin to loosen and before long my bare ass brushes against the soil. I bounce lightly as my muscles continue to warm and stretch and soon I am flexible enough to brush my bush onto the earth. I continue with the motion and can feel the sensation of individual hairs on individual grains. After more swelling and warming and soft vibrations of loosening muscles, my raw open cunt dips down to kiss the soil and I cannot help but grind.

Me, the earth, you, and the universe too: here I am opening up to you. I roll onto my belly and arch my back as far as it can go, until my breasts fall back toward my throat and the tops of my feet and ankles are pressed flat into the dirt. The more I can arch and the longer I can hold that tension, the easier it is for everything around me to fuck every hole in my body; my pores, ducts, ears, nostrils, tastebuds, and other places of in-and-out traffic. The pose starts burn, a shake sets into my body, and I want to stay here and let it overwhelm me. There is mud on my asshole and so what if all of this really does amount to some hippie chick in the woods bullshit? Because this thing, whatever it is, happens all of the time out here and it feels so good that every cell inside me is stepping forward and back to satisfy its own thirst for this kind of pleasure.

That’s when I start to howl and nothing near me is startled or even moved by my spasmodic display that makes me roll forward like a cresting wave as those electric pops fire off down my spine and out into everywhere. Every noise I make echoes off the mountain walls and bounces from the tree trunks and even runs through the spirals of the fractal ferns by my side but nature does not flinch. All the world’s an orgasm and this is my contribution. It has me gyrating and smothering the ground with my breasts and pointed nipples.I am hot and sore and sweaty; that’s when the breeze comes and knocks the morning fog of the branches and leaves above in a fine mist with a crystal sheen.

After awhile I, I rise from the ground and walk to the stream. It’s not until the water hits my ankles that I realize I had never been here before but knew exactly where to go because everything around me said that it was so, and I followed.

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.

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