<link>http://clarissethorn.com/blog</link> <description>Pro-Sex Outreach, Open-Minded Feminism</description> <lastBuildDate>Fri, 25 May 2012 21:36:55 +0000</lastBuildDate> <language>en</language> <sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod> <sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency> <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1</generator> <atom10:link xmlns:atom10="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ClarisseThorn" /><feedburner:info uri="clarissethorn" /><atom10:link xmlns:atom10="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" rel="hub" href="http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/" /><feedburner:emailServiceId>ClarisseThorn</feedburner:emailServiceId><feedburner:feedburnerHostname>http://feedburner.google.com</feedburner:feedburnerHostname><item> <title>My Mom’s Rape Story, and A Confused Relationship With Feminism http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/6saBqQsz1Ng/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/25/my-moms-rape-story-and-a-confused-relationship-with-feminism/#comments Fri, 25 May 2012 21:22:08 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=3204 This was originally published at the girl-power site Off Our Chests.

My mother is a rape survivor. In 1970, when she was in her twenties, she came home alone one day with the groceries. As she was opening the door, a man came up behind her and forced her into the apartment, where he violently assaulted her. For years afterwards, my mother had Rape Trauma Syndrome — a type of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that affects rape survivors — but neither RTS nor PTSD had yet been identified, and psychiatrists didn’t know what to do with her.

Later in the decade, my mother dumped one of her boyfriends. He then came to her apartment one night, broke in, and raped her. As he got in bed, she was in the middle of a flashback. She cried and said “No,” and he had sex with her anyway. When she tried to tell him later that what he’d done was unacceptable, he informed her that because she’d pursued him during their relationship — because she was the one who originally asked him out — a rape case would never stand up in court.

My mother met my dad many years after these incidents. Mom first told me that she’d been raped in my late teens, because she was considering telling her story to our church congregation, and she wanted me to know before she did that. The full stories came out during intermittent conversations in my twenties. I love both my parents with the fire of a thousand suns, and let me tell you, I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time fantasizing about murdering the men who attacked my mother. I doubt I could find the first guy, but I could probably find the second, and in my early twenties I often imagined shooting him in the head. (Don’t worry, Mom, I don’t think about that anymore.)

Within the last few years, I started thinking about asking Mom’s permission to write about her experiences and my reaction to them. I always shelved the idea because I felt that it wasn’t my story to tell. Last year, the topic came up in conversation, and I finally asked permission; she said yes immediately. I double-checked her consent twice this year, and she said yes both times. Still, I was hesitant, and I only got around to it now — for Mother’s Day. I also asked her to review this piece, and to feel free to veto anything within it.

I am doing my best not to co-opt or appropriate my mother’s story. But her story and her life have shaped mine, intimately — including my views on gender issues, and my course as a feminist activist and writer. A few years ago, a widely-read Harper’s article by established feminist Susan Faludi asserted that the relationship between younger feminists and older feminists is like a battle between girls and our moms. I read the article with interest, but also with a sense of displacement. As a teenager I fought with my mom all the time, but she and I rarely argue anymore, and we never argue about issues of feminism or sexuality at all. If “young” feminism is about rebelling against our mothers, then I missed that boat completely.

In fairness, my mom’s not easy to rebel against. When I was 15, I asked her what she’d do if I ran off with a Hell’s Angel. She laughed. “I’d probably be jealous,” she said.

* * *

I started blogging in 2008 because I wanted to write about sexuality, particularly S&M. However, I identified myself as a feminist from the start, because I wanted to make it obvious that S&M and feminism are not mutually exclusive. The conflicts of feminism and S&M have been a major theme throughout the Feminist Sex Wars. I tend to repeat myself when I write about this, so I’ll just mention my favorite quotation on the matter; it comes from the German radical feminist Alice Schwarzer, who said that “Female masochism is collaboration!”

When I came out of the closet to my mom, I had been freaking out about my S&M identity for a while — but quietly. I told my parents about my sexuality because I wanted to go into therapy, but I wanted a Kink Aware therapist who wouldn’t shame me for my S&M preferences. The specific therapist I preferred was out-of-network for my health insurance, which meant I needed help paying for it. My dad was cool with it, but he didn’t say much. My mother paused when I told her… and then she explained that S&M is part of her sexuality, too.

I was shocked. I was also incredibly relieved. If my brilliant, independent mother was into S&M, then suddenly I felt much more okay about being into it myself. It turned out that she had explored S&M late in life — and she went through the same anxiety about feminism and S&M that I’d felt. “You’re not giving up your liberation,” she told me.

Mom also acknowledged the stereotype that S&M arises from abusive experiences. “I once worried that being raped made me into S&M,” she said. “But I remember having S&M feelings when I was very young, long before I was raped. I was like this all along.” When she said that, I caught my breath in recognition.

This is another topic I often repeat myself about, but that’s because it’s important. As it happens, the biggest and best-designed study on S&M found that there is no correlation between abusive experiences and being into S&M. There’s also plenty of anecdotal evidence within the S&M community that a lot of S&Mers, though not all, feel our S&M identities to be innate (sometimes described as an “orientation”). This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with understanding or processing abuse through consensual S&M. The psychologist Peggy Kleinplatz once published a scholarly article called “Learning From Extraordinary Lovers: Lessons From The Edge,” which discusses how therapists can help their clients by studying alternative sexualities. Kleinplatz included a case study of a couple whose S&M experiences helped them process their histories of abuse. However, abusive experiences should not be seen as the usual “creator” of S&M desires. (For more on this, check out my article on S&M and the psychiatric establishment.)

The stereotype that S&M “comes from” abuse is another reason I worried about writing this article. Basically, this is a prettily-wrapped gift to Internet commentators who enjoy writing posts or hate mail about how fucked up I am, or about how dysfunctional S&M is. I guess there’s no help for that.

* * *

“I’m fascinated that you’ve adopted feminism so thoroughly,” my mother told me once. “I never felt like I was into feminism like you are.”

“What?” I said. “Are you serious?”

“Well, feminism shaped my life,” she said. “I really had my consciousness raised by some of my experiences. Not just being raped, but by other things, like seeing the anger and resentment among my mother and her sisters. Feminism helped me understand how women compete and put each other down because we’re put in that position by men who have power over us. Sometimes, we’re like animals who have been starved into fighting for scraps.

“But,” my mother continued, “I’ve never been sure about calling myself a feminist. There have always been a lot of feminist areas I didn’t feel welcome. Your dad was a card-carrying member of the National Organization for Women when I met him, and I refused to join. We used to joke about it. And you remember that recent article about the history of Ms. Magazine you emailed me? In the article, Gloria Steinem says that anyone could have walked into the Ms. office in the 1970s and gotten a job. But I certainly never felt like I could do that. I was actually living in New York when Ms. started, and I was even working in publishing… but I grew up on a farm in the midwest, and I wasn’t like the women who ran Ms. They felt like a club.”

My upbringing has not been like my mother’s. I grew up with a lot more privilege; my mother used to call me a spoiled “princess” when she was angry, and one of my ex-boyfriends used to tease me by calling me “East Coast Intellectual.” Yet in a lot of ways, it took me a while to get into feminism, too. Gender issues have always been a strand of my thinking, but plenty of feminist discourse never impressed me. In university, I felt like everything I heard from feminism was a tortured conspiracy theory. And although I identified as “feminist” from the very beginning of blogging, it was out of a sense of resistance rather than feeling included. I felt like: Goddamnit, I will show you that I can be an independent and rational woman who values voting and abortion rights and equal opportunity and consent — and be into S&M at the same damn time.

As I kept writing, I was looking at other blogs about gender and sexuality, too. The ones whose analysis really spoke to me were usually feminist blogs. And those were also, often, the bloggers who noticed me in return. My work was highlighted by a number of feminist writers who wanted to raise my profile. Talking to them, I began to understand some sophisticated critiques that I’d previously labeled “conspiracy theories.” I expanded my understanding of topics like rape culture, as well as “tangential” social justice issues like race and class. My mother said to me, long afterwards: “Feminism really reached out and grabbed you, didn’t it.”

In 2011, I heard from a feminist friend about organizations that train volunteer advocates for rape survivors. In Chicago and many other cities, when people who have been raped go to the emergency room, the hospital will ask if they want an advocate. The advocate’s role is to provide immediate crisis counseling and to help the survivor deal with complexities of the medical and legal system. The minute I heard about advocacy, I knew I wanted to do it.

In 1970, my mother didn’t have an advocate, for the simple reason that advocates did not yet exist. Rape Trauma Syndrome was first recognized by feminists in the 1970s, and assault advocacy was developed by feminists during that time as well.

I told Mom all about the advocacy curriculum while I was completing it, and she drank up every detail. “I never got support like that,” she said. “My boyfriend insisted that we go to the emergency room, and I guess he tried to advocate for me, but the doctors and nurses ignored me for 20 hours and then sent me home. It was worse that the nurses did. If sisterhood was powerful, then couldn’t they reach out to me somehow?” (Rape survivors — at least in Illinois — are now prioritized in emergency rooms, second only to life-and-death situations.)

Mom often regales me with tales about how things used to be. For example, when she became editor of her college newspaper in the 1960s, all the dudes on staff quit because they wouldn’t work under a woman. (Some returned later, rather sheepishly.) Other favorites have to do with menstruation. It turns out that back in the day, doctors – who were of course always male — simply refused to accept the existence of PMS. Apparently, it was accepted among doctors that a woman who felt cramps while menstruating was “making it up.” (Female nurses who attempted to describe the actual feeling were ignored.) It was understood that a woman who felt unusually emotional or even physical pain while menstruating was just being moody and hysterical. (You know how women are!) As more women became doctors and feminism gained traction and science advanced with a broader perspective and scientists discovered the actual physical causes of cramps, PMS became recognized as a real thing. Cramps were no longer “typical female hysteria.”

Which, of course, makes it all the more ironic that PMS is now often used as an excuse to discount women as hysterical. It makes me laugh, in my cynical way.

It’s kind of astonishing that a woman like my mother would disclaim a strong connection with feminism. And yet she does.

* * *

This year I had my first Full-On Internet Feminist Scandal, during which I received hate mail and hate comments from other feminists. (I name the event in capital letters because email from other feminists, some of whom I don’t even know, has told me that if you stick with Internet Feminism long enough, it’s basically inevitable that you obtain one of these.) The worst of it fell on a holiday when I was visiting my mother. Mom was helping out at church, and wanted me to attend the sermon. I sobbed for hours before leaving home; I managed to make it to church, but I was such a wreck when I got there that she put me in a back room so I could be alone to cry.

To be clear, I definitely think that I’ve screwed up on some social justice issues in the past, and I’m sure that I will in the future. I am doing my best to keep myself honest and work on the areas where I’ve been called out. That’s a crucial part of social justice work, and it’s one I try to take seriously.

But I have to tell you, the piece I wrote that drew the biggest backlash was one that my mother loved. (In the interests of accountability, I’ll say that I do think a lot of the critiques are valid and important, like this one for example — and, for those in the audience who are familiar with feminist call-out culture, I recommend this insightful comment plus this other insightful comment from a brilliant Feministe commenter named saurus.) When I wrote the initial draft, I felt so uncertain that I asked Mom to review it, and she said: “I think this is one of the best things you’ve ever written.” Yet one key factor in many of these critiques is that I failed to make enough space for rape survivors. I plan to write differently about the topic in the future, but there’s real irony in the fact that the most important rape survivor in my life believes that one of my best pieces is the same one that got me hate mail for failing rape survivors. (Of course, I also received incredibly personal comments about my sex life. The Feminist Sex Wars ain’t over yet.)

Mom and I discussed it later, of course. She read some of the commentary online, and she came back shaking her head. “The things some feminists are saying about you really floored me,” she said. “But I’m not completely surprised. Feminism has always been one of those movements that eats its young. That’s one reason I never identified with it. I think there are a lot of people my age who started out living feminist lives, who now wouldn’t be caught dead calling themselves feminist. Women who had careers, who raised sensitive, loving sons and strong daughters… who find the baggage of the ‘feminist’ label distasteful.”

I’ve thought a lot about my mother’s comment that feminism “eats its young.” One 2009 New Yorker article about feminism by Ariel Levy offered an interesting analysis of feminist divisions, but included one offhand claim that isn’t explained or justified: “Revolutions are supposed to devour their young.” Is that so? Nobody told me. (Perhaps ironically, Levy presents this claim while stating that feminism has actually turned against its elders.)

Some commentators have told me that if I can’t take the heat, then I just shouldn’t write about feminism. It hurts to think it, but maybe they’re right. Somehow, the idea of being “a good feminist” has become utterly tangled up in my identity. It’s a weak spot and a sore spot, in a way that I didn’t anticipate and don’t fully understand. I find social justice criticism to be nourishing when it’s generous and constructive, sometimes even when it’s aggressive — but sometimes it feels so incredibly destructive. But as I said, I’m not the only feminist writer who’s cried for hours after an Internet Feminist Scandal. How much of the problem is the vitriol within some critiques, and how much is that feminism has become “who we are” rather than “something we do”?

I think we can all agree that it’s good to call out other people when they’re screwing up — but there has to be a way for us to build a movement without eating our young. Yet from what my mother tells me, we’ve never been good at that.

On the bright side, I don’t have to engage politically with feminism in order to be a feminist, or volunteer for feminist causes, or do feminist work. And it helps to understand that I don’t have to be “a good feminist” for my mother to be proud of me. (My dad’s another matter.)

* * *

During one of our recent conversations, I confirmed again with my mother that I had permission to write about her experience. Then I asked her if she’s out of the closet as a rape survivor.

“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “I guess so. I don’t really think about it. I’m happy with my life now.” She paused and drank her tea for a moment. “I don’t think of myself as a rape survivor anymore,” she added. “By 1980, ten years after the attack, I really thought I was emerging from the cave. And I was, but I was still metaphorically covered in dirt and cobwebs, with grit in my mouth. In the first few years I was with your dad — the early 1980s — I had residual fears. I had become frightened by subways, elevators, and surprise noises, and he helped me work my way through those very effectively. By 25 years, it was simply no longer a part of my current self. I’d say I am wiser and stronger for it, but I think an experience so shocking is a lousy way to build character. And a waste of time! I lost too many years. I hope that things like victim advocacy saves people.”

I’m glad that my mother feels good about life today, and I myself don’t have the urge to track those guys down and rend them limb from limb. (Much.) Yet I wonder if the men who attacked her ever think about what they did. I wonder if the ex-boyfriend ever understood how thoroughly he brutalized someone he claimed to love, or how male privilege played a role in his actions. These days, I write a lot about masculinity, and I try to understand men’s perspective on gender issues. Writing about men and gender is tricky territory, though. What if I end up shoring up the entitlement that led that those assholes to attack my mom?

Mom told me that she Googled her rapist ex-boyfriend. He has three daughters. She wonders whether he ever thinks about it, too.

Naturally, I also think a lot about feminism, and how we can make it both effective and welcoming. What does it mean when people call it a movement that “eats its young”? What does it mean that feminism has become so tied up in identity? What does it mean when a rape survivor who had a career and raised a feminist daughter won’t call herself a feminist?

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/25/my-moms-rape-story-and-a-confused-relationship-with-feminism/feed/ 0 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/25/my-moms-rape-story-and-a-confused-relationship-with-feminism/ Who Enjoys Casual Sex, Anyway? http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/WRcHXhMTesg/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/18/who-enjoys-casual-sex-anyway/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 15:00:54 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=3190 A slightly shorter version of this article originally appeared at Role/Reboot.

The above image is from the art site PostSecret.com. People send postcards to PostSecrets with real secrets written on them. This one says, “Since I joined a gay men’s chorus, I haven’t had casual sex. Singing is better.”

I can be a pretty brazen lady. Sometimes it surprises me how much this will give people the incorrect impression about my sexual habits. I actually dated one guy for two years who, towards the end of our relationship, asked me about “all those one-night stands.” I was like, what are you even talking about? and it turned out that he’d gone through our entire relationship thinking that I’d had a ton of one-night stands before we dated. Two years!

I am not so into casual sex. This is not because I think there’s anything wrong with it — and in fact, if you are a lady who’s thinking of going for lots of casual sex, then I highly recommend Adaya Adler’s article on awesome casual sex for single girls. But personally, I’m not so into it.

How to define casual sex, though? I’m taking a polyamorous approach to my relationships these days, and I’m okay with having multiple ongoing sexual relationships at different levels of intensity. So when I say I’m not so into casual sex, am I avoiding one-night stands, or does the phrase cover more than that? I’ve concluded that (for me at least) casual sex is casual as long as there seems to be little potential for a deeper emotional relationship. I don’t have to feel True Love for every guy I have sex with, but I want us to care about each other, to have some kind of ongoing understanding. At the very least, we’ve gotta be able to go out to dinner and have a nice heartfelt conversation.

I mean, for one thing, the sex is just plain better if you care about each other. Anecdotally, this seems to be true for people of all genders, although there are probably exceptions. (When it comes to sexuality, there are always exceptions.) I will point out, however, that research appears to show in multiple ways that women are less interested in casual sex than men. For example, women tend to estimate that sex with a stranger would probably be no good, while men tend to estimate that sex with a stranger would be average. Which is quite reasonable, given the fact that research finds that many men acknowledge not caring about their partner’s pleasure during casual hookups. For another example, as the FAQ for the Kinsey institute tells us, “Many women express that their most satisfying sexual experiences entail being connected to someone.” There could be a lot of different reasons for this — I’m rarely interested in the nature vs. nurture debate — but I think that whatever the source, the general patterns are worth noting.

Back in 2008, when I first started blogging about sex and S&M, one of my first blog posts analyzed my feelings about both casual sex and casual S&M. I had already concluded that neither really works for me. And yet it seems like sometimes I have to re-learn this lesson. I end up “trying it on for size” again, like a sweater unearthed from the back of my closet, whose dullness I forget until I see it in the mirror. I find myself brushing my hair the next morning next to someone who feels like a stranger.

It’s not that casual sex is valueless, exactly — I learn something from almost all my sexual encounters. And I’ve had one or two casual encounters that worked quite well for my goals at the time, and were quite pleasant. But although I haven’t had a whole lot of casual sex, it’s usually been so boring. Plus, after casual sex I get hit with the additional payload of automatic, socially-induced questioning of my own self-worth, being as I’m a lady who just had casual sex. I’d like to say that I’m a Perfectly Independent Modern Girl whose self-esteem is never challenged by this kind of thing, but I’d be lying, and I think that stereotype of the Modern Girl is a problematic stereotype anyway.

Plus, there’s an old stereotype that if a lady has sex on the first date, she “ought” to be treated as “slutty” and “disposable” and “not relationship material” because she did so. This stereotype is dying, but it’s a slow death. And one thing I wonder is whether a relationship is more likely to develop as “casual” if it starts with first-date sex, as opposed to escalating more slowly. Is it really true, that men “won’t respect you in the morning” if you have sex right away? Is it true, subconsciously, even when men say it’s not true — and believe that they’re being honest?

I’ve wondered a lot what it is about casual sex that makes some people react with mild distaste, the way I do, while others react with glee and abandon — and others react with virulent hatred and aggressive rejection. Aside from the apparent gender split, what are the characteristics of people who experience casual sex as usually fun, those who experience it as usually boring, and those who experience it as usually destructive?

From my experiences and observations, it seems to me that people who absolutely love casual sex often:

* Have a lot of physical turn-ons (as opposed to psychological ones).

* Are not carrying difficult feelings from abusive sexual experiences.

* Don’t tend to get attached to partners quickly, or know how to manage their experiences so that they don’t get attached. A friend once told me about a woman who never allowed herself to have orgasms during casual sex, because she had observed of herself that she started getting emotionally attached quite quickly.

But I’m very curious about the experiences of others, and whether anyone disagrees with my brief points above. Comments are quite welcome.

The next image is also from PostSecret … and I can tell you that for me it feels like a punch in the gut, so you might want to take a deep breath before you look at it:

It says, “I sleep around because I WANT to devalue sex. That way, I can devalue being raped.”

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/18/who-enjoys-casual-sex-anyway/feed/ 43 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/18/who-enjoys-casual-sex-anyway/ [food justice] Confections of a Pickup Artist Chaser http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/7uva2ggRK9s/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/14/food-justice-confections-of-a-pickup-artist-chaser/#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 16:37:30 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=3179 There are delicious recipes at the end! Read this post for the recipes!

As a vegan, I eat amazingly delicious chocolate chip cookies constantly. Photo credit: photographer Timothy Boomer, agency Dreamstime.com.

I feel hyper-aware that this post may alienate some readers, because it’s not about sex or gender, and in fact it is a post about being vegan, i.e. not eating animal products. Lot of folks are touchy about that. So, I want to do some pre-emptive damage control: I want to clarify up front that I have no interest in calling anyone an asshole. If you’re not vegan, then I want to try and change your mind … but I don’t think you’re an Incontrovertibly Bad Person, and I hope we can still be friends.

And, look, I’m not gonna pretend I’m perfect. I screw up all the time, on all kinds of social justice issues, and I’ll be learning for the rest of my life.

For me, the hardest thing about being vegan has nothing to do with the food, although I think many foods made from animal products are delicious, and occasionally I have trouble resisting them. For me, the hard part is all about social situations. If I’m at a social event where non-vegan food is served and there are no other vegans, sometimes I just eat it — especially if it will Become A Big Social Problem if I don’t eat it. I also sometimes eat non-vegan food that’s been rescued from the trash (some of us call this “freegan”). And occasionally, when I’m spending a lot of time with someone who’s non-vegan, then I’ll sometimes break veganism in front of them in order to reassure them that I’m not judging them. I have vegan friends who consider this an unacceptable level of accommodation; sorry folks.

I am aware that stigmatizing, judging, and attacking non-vegans is one tactic for convincing them to go vegan. Personally, I find it stressful and frequently counterproductive. I’d rather set an example and be welcoming. (Yet I acknowledge that it’s possible I wouldn’t be able to do this effectively if aggressive vegans did not exist. Aggressive vegans help create the space where I get to look “reasonable” and “welcoming.” The blogger Kinsey Hope once wrote a really brilliant activist typology that describes these dynamics. And of course, it’s worth noting that I’m often characterized as an appeaser by feminists, too.)

So. That said? If you think you’re going to Get Upset Or Offended by this post, please just don’t read it. Seriously. But if you’re willing to not freak out for a moment, then here are my two primary arguments for why you should go vegan:

1. It’s easy. Yes, there will be some shitty social situations: awkward moments at restaurants, pushback from your non-vegan friends, and so on. Yes, you will have to avoid some very delicious foods. And food labels will become a whole new world of confusion. But even with all these factors, veganism really isn’t as hard as people make it out to be.

There’s a lot of delicious vegan food out there. A number of my favorite foods were vegan before I went vegan, and some of yours probably are as well. (Recipes coming up!) Here is a free vegan starter guide that includes recipes. Here is a very comprehensive list of vegan cookbooks; they range from “easy” to “incredibly complicated Martha-Stewart-land.” I am a fiend for baked goods, and I like Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. And there’s an increasing number of high-quality all-vegan restaurants. My favorite ones in Chicago are Native Foods (delicious cardamom rose cupcakes!) and Urban Vegan (delicious fake orange chicken!).

I won’t get involved in appeals-to-healthitude, because I know both healthy vegans and unhealthy vegans, and the science is inconclusive … but I will point that out again: the science is inconclusive. Unless you have an unusual disorder, modern nutrition has identified no conclusive scientific reasons for not being vegan. Plus: If you aren’t vegan, but you don’t pay any attention to eating healthy food, then you’re being a hypocrite if you make a “health argument” for being non-vegan even if the science was conclusive, which it’s not. And! If you’re really into health, there’s a highly-recommended book called Thrive written by a vegan professional athlete named Brendan Brazier.

(Full disclosure: the above Amazon book links contain my referral code, so you’re kicking me a tiny commission if you buy through one of those links. If you don’t want to do that, then search for the books on your own.)

Some of my friends specifically do things like convince people to try veganism for short periods, or run Vegan Weeks at universities or whatever, just to show how (a) delicious and (b) easy vegan food can be. It works surprisingly well. A key ingredient in my own adoption of veganism was knowing vegans, and seeing how simple it was to be vegan. I used to push back really strongly … I think I resisted mostly because it was very hard to acknowledge that by eating animal products, I was participating in an incredibly fucked up system. First I had to recognize that I was doing something really bad, that I had been doing so for my entire life, and that most people I love do it too. This is a familiar problem for activists, of course; most people resist acknowledging that they participate in a racist, sexist culture, too. (As one of my vegan friends puts it: “I’ve found that people usually go through the strongest asshole anti-vegan phase right before they convert to veganism.”)

Of all the social-justice acts out there, I actually think veganism is one of the lowest-hanging fruit. It’s just so easy that the only reason non-vegan culture can possibly persist is through a really high degree of not giving a shit. In a way, that’s understandable; I don’t have much of a connection to animals myself. A lot of my vegan friends love animals and want to be around them all the time; I don’t. If a smelly dog never jumps on me again, it will be too soon. But the fact is, animals have senses and feelings. Interacting with any animal for longer than thirty seconds can conclusively show you that animals like and dislike things, and that they feel something that looks exactly like pain. Which brings me to ….

2. If you care about consent, then veganism is transparently the right thing to do. There are environmental arguments and stuff, but I mean, seriously, let’s call a spade a spade: when you eat meat, you’re eating the murdered body of an animal who died for no reason other than your transient pleasure. As for animal products: many things that happen to animals on factory farms are abominable and obscene, as two minutes of Googling or this website or this video can show you.

Even if you decide to eat animal products that come only from well-treated animals, there’s no way to be sure that those animals were actually well-treated unless you’re raising them yourself. As this vegan FAQ points out, there’s an amazing amount of animal suffering that still occurs on “humane” farms. Some of those farms are doubtless fairly pleasant for the animals, but others …. Well, let’s just say that calling some “humane” farms more merciful than factory farms is like saying that being burned alive is preferable to dying in a medieval torture device. Here’s just one article on the topic, from Salon.

Personally, when I went vegan, a lot of the reason it felt easy was because I no longer had to spend tons of mental energy suppressing my empathy. I was amazed at how relieved I felt. Again, I’m not pretending to be perfect about it — I eat non-vegan food sometimes in social situations, sometimes when it’s about to be thrown away, and sometimes just when I’m drunk. If you need to make accommodations in order to feel comfortable being vegan, then I’m the last person who will criticize you. I’ll just be glad you’re taking steps towards being vegan.

It took me a long time to decide to go vegan, and I understand that it might take you a long time, too. I’ve listed a lot of resources in this post and I hope you’ll consider looking at them. Questions are welcome in the comments, although I may not be able to answer them. I wish you luck. And if you’re already vegan, then congratulations and high-5!

Now for recipes!

I promise that these recipes are beloved by non-vegans as well as vegans. In fact, even when I wasn’t vegan, they were some of my favorites. When I feed these dishes to non-vegans, they are frequently startled that the food isn’t vegan. (Sometimes I save the Big Reveal for last. Heh, heh.)

(One of my other favorite gentle pro-vegan tactics is to walk into restaurants and ask if they have anything vegan on the menu. When the answer is no, I smile and thank them and leave.)

Organic and fair-trade ingredients are obviously encouraged. I’m not as good about organic and fair-trade as I could be, mostly because of expense, but I try to do it when I can.

Kickass Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

This is a modified version of a recipe that I originally found here, and some of the text comes from that recipe.

+ 1 and 1/2 cups of FLOUR

+ 1 teaspoon BAKING SODA

+ 1 teaspoon SALT

+ 3/4 cup of OIL

+ 2 tablespoons COCONUT MILK (or ALMOND MILK or SOY MILK)

+ 1 & 1/3 cups of UNREFINED SUGAR

+ HALF A BANANA

+ 1 1/2 tablespoons VANILLA EXTRACT (I’ve occasionally used RUM as a replacement; when I do that, I like to add some CINNAMON)

+ 2 1/2 cups OATMEAL

+ 12 oz. of DARK CHOCOLATE CHIPS

Heat your oven to 350 degrees.

Mix FLOUR, BAKING SODA and SALT together. Set aside.

Mix together the OIL and SUGAR. Mix until creamy. Thoroughly mash the BANANA into the mixture.

Add the COCONUT MILK.

Add the VANILLA.

Stir this mixture until it is a uniform color (this will not take long).

Slowly stir in the FLOUR mixture. Mix this well.

Stir in OATMEAL and CHOCOLATE-CHIPS.

Preheat oven to baking temperature (usually 350 F).

Place large tablespoons full of the batter onto an ungreased cookie sheet (an air filled cookie sheet works best, as the air between the two layers of the sheet keeps the bottom of baked items from burning).

Bake the cookies for about 9 to 13 minutes (ovens vary in temperature). Check them by gently pressing on the top of one of the cookies. If the inside looks moist, but not too wet, they are probably done. It might take you a couple of tries to get the time down, so bake only a few at a time when starting out. Do not, I repeat, do not expect to see them turn slightly brown when done cooking. Without real eggs, they will not get that dark. They will, however, turn a golden tan.

When they are done, remove them from the oven and allow them to sit on the sheet for about a minute or two before placing them on a wire rack. Be careful with them as they tend to be quite delicate until they have cooled.

Kickass Chocolate Cake

I think I modified this recipe from an Internet source too, but I can’t find it now.

+ 1 1/2 cups FLOUR

+ 1 cup SUGAR

+ 1/2 cup UNSWEETENED COCOA

+ 1 tablespoon GROUND CLOVES

+ 1 teaspoon BAKING SODA

+ 1 teaspoon CAYENNE PEPPER

+ 1/4 teaspoon SALT

+ 1 cup ALMOND MILK (or COLD WATER)

+ 1/4 cup OIL

+ 1 tablespoon BALSAMIC VINEGAR

+ 1 tablespoon VANILLA (once I replaced this with ORANGE EXTRACT and added some CINNAMON, and the result was amazing)

Preheat oven to baking temperature.

In a bowl beat together the OIL, SUGAR, SALT, SPICES and COCOA until well-combined. Add the remaining ingredients, and stir until well-combined. Pour into a greased enamel plate or cake dish and bake 20-30 minutes. Don’t worry if the batter tastes quite spicy — it mellows out a lot, when you bake it so that the end result is more chocolate with a spicy after-taste. Cool.

Then mix the following ingredients together, and pour the icing on top:

+ 1 cup POWDERED SUGAR

+ 1/2 cup UNSWEETENED COCOA

+ 6 tablespoons COCONUT MILK (or ALMOND MILK or SOY MILK)

Tofu Tikka Masala

This is a modified recipe that originated with a friend.

+ 5 tablespoons OIL

+ 2 medium ONIONS, thinly sliced

+ 5 large GARLIC CLOVES, finely chopped

+ 2 BAY LEAVES

+ 1 inch fresh GINGER, finely chopped

+ 1/2 inch CINNAMON STICK

+ 4 CLOVES

+ 4 PEPPERCORNS

+ 1 CARDAMOM POD

+ 2 pounds TOFU

+ 1 tablespoon GROUND CORIANDER

+ 1 teaspoon GARAM MASALA

+ 1 teaspoon GROUND CUMIN

+ 1/2 teaspoon CAYENNE PEPPER

+ 1/2 teaspoon GROUND TURMERIC

+ 14 ounces CANNED TOMATOES

+ SALT to taste

+ 2/3 cup SOY YOGURT

Heat OIL in large, heavy-bottomed sauce pan.

Add ONIONS, GARLIC, GINGER, BAY LEAVES, and WHOLE SPICES; fry gently on medium heat until sautéed.

Add the TOFU, and fry until the pieces are lightly golden brown on all sides. (Here are some tips on frying tofu so it has a light crust.)

Stir in CORIANDER, GARAM MASALA, CUMIN, CAYENNE, TURMERIC, TOMATOES, and SALT. Cook for a while (10 minutes works).

Add SOY YOGURT and cook for another while.

As a general rule, the longer you cook a spicy dish like this, the spicier it’ll be.

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/14/food-justice-confections-of-a-pickup-artist-chaser/feed/ 74 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/14/food-justice-confections-of-a-pickup-artist-chaser/ The Psychology of S&M http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/3ClMvinvP7Q/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/07/the-psychology-of-sm/#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 12:24:48 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=3161

The above image shows an old-school phrenology diagram from the 1800s. (Phrenology was a ridiculous pseudo-science that was nevertheless popular, back in the day.) I found the image at the BibliOdyssey blog, which showcases eclectic historic science and art prints.

BDSM is a 6-for-4 deal of an acronym: Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism and Masochism. It’s sometimes referred to as S&M, B&D, leather, or fetish. As an S&M writer and educator, I get lots of questions about the psychology of S&M. People ask whether it’s a disorder, how psychologists would describe it, etc. I’m an advocate, not a psychologist, but I’ve read up on the history and done my best to keep tabs on current research.

First things first: S&M is not a pathology, and people who practice S&M are not “damaged” in some way. There aren’t many S&M studies, but in 2008, this conclusion was supported by a large and well-designed survey that reached 20,000 people. The survey was done by public health researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and it found that S&Mers “were no more likely [than non-S&Mers] to have been coerced into sexual activity and were not significantly more likely to be unhappy or anxious.” Another recent study found that consensual S&M usually increases intimacy for a couple.

I’d like to note briefly that people have told me about using consensual, intimate, trusting S&M activities in order to work through previous non-consensual, abusive experiences that they’d had. There’s nothing wrong with that. Indeed, the psychologist Peggy Kleinplatz once published a scholarly article called “Learning From Extraordinary Lovers: Lessons From The Edge,” which discusses how therapists can help their clients by studying alternative sexualities. Kleinplatz included a case study of a couple whose S&M experiences helped them process and deal with past abuse.

Still, as the 2008 Australia survey shows us, most people don’t practice S&M because they’ve been abused or because they’re unhappy. People who practice S&M have the same record of unhappiness and abusive history as non-S&M people. Yet S&M was first described as a disorder in 1886, when a doctor named Richard Krafft-Ebing published the manual Psychopathia Sexualis. This landmark tome hauled many sexual practices into the light, then attempted to categorize them. Of course, the doctor’s ideas hewed close to contemporary mainstream ideas of what was acceptable, and so he thought that basically everything was a disorder — including, for example, homosexuality.

It’s interesting to imagine what our mental health paradigm might be if Psychopathia Sexualis had never existed. It had a huge influence on psychiatry. Later, the psychiatric establishment began publishing a text called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. The DSM doesn’t specialize in sexuality, but it includes quite a lot of it. The first edition of the DSM came out in 1952; it’s currently undergoing its fifth revision, and the proposed new language can be found at the DSM-5 website.

Like Psychopathia Sexualis, the original DSM called homosexuality a disorder. This changed in 1973, partly in response to gay activists. But subsequent versions of the DSM are still criticized for many reasons. Our cultural diagnoses of mental illness are shaped by lots of people with very different motives, and truth is hard to find. A 2010 New Yorker article by Louis Menand outlined many critiques of the DSM, such as the allegation that today’s psychiatry “is creating ever more expansive criteria for mental illness that end up labelling as sick people who are just different.” Naturally, the medical establishment has an incentive to do this, since it makes money selling treatments for illness, and more illness means more treatment.

S&M is currently in the DSM (heh, you see what I did there?). My understanding, however, is that S&M occupies a strange space within the much-edited manual. S&M is no longer listed as all-disorder-all-the-time, though it once was. But if a person has an urge towards S&M, and that person feels unhappy about it, then it is classified as a disorder. In other words, an S&Mer is labeled “healthy” if she’s happy about S&M, and “unhealthy” if she’s unhappy about it.

Actually, this is basically the spot that homosexuality occupied for a while. And the reason homosexuality was taken out is the same reason S&M should be taken out: because a person who wants a completely consensual type of sexuality, and who is unhappy about it, is probably better off working to change the unhappiness rather than the sexuality. Like homosexuality, S&M is stigmatized and misunderstood. A person who is stigmatized and misunderstood is likely to be unhappy, but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with her.

Within the S&M community, we have ways of working around this problem. Some people are campaigning to change the DSM directly. Others are more indirect. Years ago, the activist Race Bannon made a handwritten list of doctors and lawyers who were S&M-friendly, and began passing it around to his friends. Names were quickly added to Bannon’s list, and when the Internet became popular, the list migrated online. Now, the Kink Aware Professionals list is enormous and includes profession categories from accounting to web design — not just doctors. When I was going through my own complicated and difficult S&M coming-out process, I was lucky enough to find the list. My S&M-friendly therapist talked me through my anxiety and socially-created disgust, rather than diagnosing me with a spurious “disorder.”

There’s a great organization called the Community-Academic Consortium of Research on Alternative Sexualities; one of their projects is an annual conference to sensitize psychologists and therapists to the needs of alternative sexuality communities. The next conference will be Thursday, May 24th, and this year it’s in Chicago. Also in my home city of Chicago, there’s a project based at DePaul University that seeks to change the representation of S&M in human sexuality textbooks. The Kink Representation Outreach Project involves talking to different S&Mers about their actual experience (what an idea!) and getting their recommendations about how these texts might better represent S&M. And finally, if you want some idea of the sparse and scattershot research that’s been done on S&M, the blog Kink Research Overviews is a good place to start.

Within the S&M community, there’s some talk of S&M as its own “sexual orientation.” I have mixed feelings about this, and I’ve written about those mixed feelings. I think it can sometimes be helpful, but I’d rather move to a paradigm where we encourage people to see any consensual sexual act as awesome, rather than talking like “orientation” is what legitimizes sexuality. Nothing legitimizes sex except consent.

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/07/the-psychology-of-sm/feed/ 55 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/07/the-psychology-of-sm/ Relationship Tools: Monogamy, Polyamory, Competition, and Jealousy http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/TFFwRIPiyNk/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/01/relationship-tools-monogamy-polyamory-competition-and-jealousy/#comments Tue, 01 May 2012 13:00:12 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=3100 This was originally published at the gender-lens site Role/Reboot, under the title “When Jealousy is a Turn-On.”

* * *

The above image is from the art site PostSecret.com. People send postcards to PostSecrets with real secrets written on them. This one says, “I wish you would stop comparing me to your kinky ex.”

* * *

Last year, I wrote a piece called “In Praise of Monogamy“. I currently practice polyamory in my relationships, but I spent years dating monogamously. I’ve noticed that when people talk about monogamy, they usually either assume that it’s the only way to go … or they assume that it has to be thrown out the window entirely. I think that this either-or approach is completely wrongheaded, so the goal of “In Praise of Monogamy” was to talk about the advantages of monogamy in a more neutral, nuanced way. Different relationship models are all tools in a toolbox, and some people are better with some tools than others.

“In Praise of Monogamy” was probably one of my most successful articles ever — it was republished at a ton of websites, including high-profile venues like The Guardian. Simultaneously, the article got a lot of really mixed comments. Some people felt that I wasn’t praising monogamy enough; others felt that I wasn’t praising non-monogamy enough; there were lots of other frustrations too. My big takeaway was that these conversations don’t happen enough, most people aren’t used to having them, and it’s really hard to know where it start.

Jealousy is one obvious starting point, because people always bring it up in conversations about non-monogamy. I talked a little bit about jealousy in “In Praise of Monogamy.” Specifically, I wrote:

Some people experience jealousy more than, or less than, or differently from other people. Plenty of people in non-monogamous relationships experience jealousy — and plenty of non-monogamous people handle it just fine, through open-hearted communication. (Often, jealousy is managed through very detailed relationship agreements such as this fascinating polyamory “relationship contract”.)

But there are also plenty of people who appear to lack the “jealousy chip.”

And then there are plenty of people who experience so much jealousy, who feel that jealousy is such a big part of their emotional makeup, that the best way to manage it is simply through monogamy.

Personally, I used to get a lot more jealous than I do now. I think I’m less likely to get jealous these days partly because I’ve gotten better at finding low-drama men. Jealousy has a reputation for being an irrational emotion, and sometimes it genuinely is an unreasonable, cruel power-grab. But I think jealousy is often quite rational, and often arises in response to a genuine emotional threat … or deliberate manipulation.

There’s another reason, though … I’ve also noticed that some switch in my brain has flipped, and I’ve started to eroticize jealousy. I occasionally find myself fantasizing about men I care about sleeping with other women, and sometimes the fantasy is hot because I feel mildly jealous. I cannot explain how this happened. It surprised me the first time it happened, believe me. What’s really fascinating is that I think the same part of me that eroticizes jealousy, is the part that used to make me feel sick at the thought of my partner sleeping with someone else. S&M masochism: the gift that never stops giving!

I think it’s important to note here that I didn’t become less jealous because I felt like I “should,” or because I was told not to be jealous. In fact, I had an early boyfriend who acted like I was a hysterical bitch every time I got jealous … and he made things much worse. With him, I just felt awful when I got jealous; I couldn’t get past it. I felt like he was judging me for something I couldn’t help; I felt like my mind was fragmenting as I tried to force myself to “think better” without any outside support; and worst of all, I felt like I couldn’t rely on him to respect my feelings.

It was the men who treated my emotions like they were reasonable and understandable who decreased my jealousy. It’s much harder to be jealous when your partner is saying, “I totally understand,” than it is when your partner is saying, “What the hell is the matter with you?” Maybe that’s what makes monogamy such an effective jealousy-management tactic: monogamy can be like a great big sign or sticker or button you can give to your partner that says, “I respect your jealousy.” Which is not to say that monogamy is always effective for this — we all know that monogamous people get jealous all the time! (Which only adds to my point that monogamy might be viewed as just one of many tactics, rather than an answer, when jealousy is a problem.)

Now, back to the current article. Jealousy is an incredibly hot-button topic, so I’m nervous about this, but let’s focus in on it a little more.

* * *

The Feeling of Jealousy

Jealousy and its cousin, competition, are both things that happen a lot in relationships. Some people are so uncomfortable acknowledging this that they repress those feelings, or ignore the behavior that goes along with them … but I’ve rarely seen that end well. I believe that some people lack jealousy and competitive urges, but I’ve also seen a lot of people who feel those things but can’t admit it. Not even to themselves.

I dated a guy last year who told me at the start of our relationship that he never got jealous. At first I took him at his word, but I quickly noticed that he changed the subject aggressively when I mentioned past lovers. We had a mutual friend with whom I had a lot of chemistry; when the three of us were together, my boyfriend acted uncomfortable and irritable, and when I specifically acted in ways that made it obvious I was with him — like by giving him Public Displays of Affection in front of the other guy — he relaxed.

I sighed internally when I observed this, and I felt frustrated, but wasn’t sure how to talk about it without sounding like I was calling him a liar. Fortunately, he brought it up later. “I think I do get jealous sometimes, and I just don’t like to think about it because it makes me feel like a bad person,” he said, one night while we were making dinner. In that moment, my respect for him skyrocketed. It’s hard for people to keep track of themselves like that, and to shift their self-image when confronted with new evidence.

Some people seem to interpret their lovers’ jealousy as a sign of love. Hey, I’ll admit that I’ve had moments of being flattered or pleased when my boyfriends show signs of jealousy — or when they act a little competitive. Sometimes those things are scary, though … or threatening … or frustrating, like in my example above. It’s complicated!

However, I often see those dynamics play out in ways that the participants won’t admit, no matter how much evidence comes up. I think it gets especially complicated when people experience jealousy as a sexual thing, a turn-on. Most people have a hard enough time discussing their sexuality in the first place. When you add an ingredient as controversial as jealousy, the potential discussions become that much more combustible.

When I was researching pickup artists for my awesome book Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser, I found a number of discussions in that community that praise competitive feelings because they’re seen as making the relationship more fun. A lot of these guys say competition among different lovers within open relationships is awesome because it keeps everyone a little uncertain, and encourages them to be “on top of their game.” This contrasts drastically with most polyamorous perspectives; in my experience, poly folks see jealousy and competition as things that should be compartmentalized and managed very carefully, rather than encouraged or exalted. For polyamory theorists, a feeling of safety is often the goal, as opposed to a feeling of competition.

And emotional safety is certainly a concern, because jealousy is one of the most intense and overwhelming emotions out there. It’s such a hard feeling to sit with and work through. My worst experiences of jealousy felt like I was choking, like I couldn’t breathe, like I was sick to my stomach, like I was terribly obsessed, like I couldn’t think of anything but the jealousy and how much it hurt. And yet … I’ve occasionally felt jealousy that was weak, almost nice, where I felt a little twinge of it and turned to my lover and got reassured … and that made me feel more safe, more cared for, more loved.

The bottom line is that people experience jealousy and competitive urges in many different ways. It’s important to acknowledge that and honor it. I don’t see it as productive to frame things like “jealousy is bad,” or “competition is awesome.” I’d much rather frame things like: “Jealousy and competition happen sometimes, and how do we deal with them when they come up so that everyone involved feels comfortable and happy?”

* * *

The Toolkit

I firmly believe that the primary tools for dealing with jealousy and competitive urges are honesty, good faith and respect. If you’re feeling jealous, then take a deep breath. (I’m pretty sure that most relationship drama could be avoided if more people took deep breaths.) Hopefully, you’re dating someone who you like and trust (if you’re not, what’s the point?). Remind yourself that this person, who you like and trust, probably is operating in good faith and isn’t trying to hurt you. Respect that this person has their own desires, which won’t always overlap perfectly with your own. Don’t assume that your partner is obliged to do everything you want — but do be honest about what’s hurting you, so you can work it out together.

And, in turn: if your partner is jealous, respect that emotion. Remind yourself that this person, who you like and trust, probably is operating in good faith and isn’t trying to control you. Be honest about how your partner’s jealousy makes you feel, and think about ways to reassure your partner while protecting your own needs and boundaries.

The most stable relationship formation for dealing with jealousy and competitive urges appears to be monogamy. To be sure, I think people have plenty of other reasons for choosing monogamy. But the relationship tool that seems to work most thoroughly, and most often, and for the most people, is simply … being monogamous.

There are many ways of approaching non-monogamy, but the one I’m most familiar with is polyamory. A lot of polyamorists, though not all, organize their relationships into hierarchies: they have one or more “primary relationships,” and then “secondary relationships” and other relationships that don’t make it to secondary level. Sometimes a primary partner will have “veto power” — i.e., if one partner wants to get a new partner, then the primary partner can explicitly block that partner. This seems to help control a lot of jealousy and competitive behavior.

Some poly folks say that they see hierarchies and veto power as “blunt instruments,” and that they prefer to negotiate every interaction case-by-case. This sounds fine to me as long as it works for them, of course. But I would offer this: I think that blunt instruments are sometimes the most useful tool for a given project. And in fact, blunt instruments are more often useful than finer-tuned instruments. The whole idea of finer-tuned instruments is that they’re useful for precise circumstances … but they’re also harder to use, and more fragile. Some people don’t have the time or inclination to create a whole new toolkit for every individual relationship. Some people will settle for a slightly less precise, perfect relationship in exchange for a more stable one. Sometimes it’s simply easier to use a blunter, but more universally effective tool.

I will also add that I have seen plenty of polyamorous relationships in which there were unspoken hierarchies, and unspoken veto power. This resulted in maneuvering that struck me as both underhanded and unnecessary. I’ve always felt that it would be better for everyone involved if those dynamics were put out on the surface.

Finally, for people who like jealousy and competition …. If S&M has taught me anything, it’s that it’s quite possible to play with pain and power within a safe, loving framework. The key is to compartmentalize the whole process and discuss it openly. If people are into competitive relationships, then okay. If people like jealousy, then okay. But in that case, they really ought to look for partners who share those tastes, and to find ways that they can deal with them openly and honestly.

In S&M, there’s a huge emphasis on careful communication tactics — safewords are the most famous example, but there are plenty of others. There’s also a huge emphasis on talking about the S&M encounter and processing it together afterwards; we call this aftercare. If jealousy and competitiveness can be understood as consensual games of pain and power, then I think people who want to play those games would do well to learn about S&M communication tactics. If you’re going to have fun making your partner feel an emotion as intense as jealousy, then you might consider giving your partner a safeword.

* * *

The above image is also from PostSecret. The card says, “I want to watch my wife make love to another man.”

* * *

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/01/relationship-tools-monogamy-polyamory-competition-and-jealousy/feed/ 1 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/05/01/relationship-tools-monogamy-polyamory-competition-and-jealousy/ Inter-Generational Relationships; Another Pickup Artist Interview; Modesty; and more http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/P8ammP4NnkA/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/30/inter-generational-relationships-another-pickup-artist-interview-modesty-and-more/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:30:41 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=3092 In mid-December, I took on the role of editing the Sex + Relationships Section at the gender-lens site Role/Reboot. Role/Reboot is a nonprofit organization that is specifically designed to talk about gender issues with an audience that has little exposure to them.  This editorship has been a bit of an experiment for me, and there are aspects of it that I struggle with. The focus of the site has narrowed since I came on board; there’s less and less space for me to write and feature the kind of in-depth sexual analysis that I’m naturally inclined towards.

But these changes are part of the site finding its voice and its niche, and being accessible to a wide range of people. So while I struggle with it, I’m trying to go with it for now, and see what happens.

I don’t choose every piece that is published in the Sex + Relationships section, but I choose a lot of them. (My writers contribute to other sections, too.) Here are some of my favorites since early February, when I wrote my last post highlighting Role/Reboot articles:

* The Story of Leah and Vanessa, written by Rachel Swirsky (who is part of the team at Alas! A Blog). Rachel is an amazing feminist writer who actually won the Nebula award for one of her science fiction novellas. She writes with a lot of nuance; this piece is an examination of one cross-generational relationship that works, and the pitfalls of cross-generational relationships in general.

* I Taught Men to Pick Up Women: A Q&A with Former Dating Coach Mark Manson, by me! For this, I interviewed Mark, who features heavily in my book Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser. (Mark has his own site at PostMasculine.com). He’s a smart and empathic guy, and while I certainly don’t always agree with him, I always find his perspective interesting.

* Ask An Internet Sociopath, co-written by me and Internet Sociopath (who has a mind-bending Twitter account @AskASociopath). Internet Sociopath is one of my recurring commenters; those of you who have been reading for a while might remember some of his comments. I’ve never quite known what to make of him, but who could pass up a sociopath advice column?

* How Modesty Hurts Men Too, written by Sierra (who is part of the team at No Longer Quivering). I love Sierra’s work; she writes about her experiences leaving the evangelical Christian Quiverfull movement, and a while back I arranged for her piece on leaving for college to be reposted at Feministe. This article talks about how what she terms “the modesty doctrine” harms men as well as women. It follows her piece about modesty and self-harm, How Modesty Made Me Fat.

* Male Kindness Isn’t Always A Mask For Desire, written by a gentleman who called himself “Too Shy For This.” The gent asked not to publish the piece under his real name because he feels that it comes off as a bit arrogant. It’s a brief piece about how women often assume that male kindness = interest in sex, and what that might imply for many women’s wider perspectives.

Moving forward, Role/Reboot is specifically focusing on personal narratives and timely cultural critiques that are pegged to a recent news item. If you’re interested in pitching me your own work, or you know someone who is, please do get in touch with me: clarisse at rolereboot dot org.

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/30/inter-generational-relationships-another-pickup-artist-interview-modesty-and-more/feed/ 4 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/30/inter-generational-relationships-another-pickup-artist-interview-modesty-and-more/ My Interview with World-Famous Pickup Coach Adam Lyons, and Updates to “Confessions” http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/p_yWUdjVZGs/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/25/my-interview-with-world-famous-pickup-coach-adam-lyons-and-updates-to-confessions/#comments Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:41:04 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=3070 Right after I released Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser, I met the world-famous pickup artist Adam Lyons at the SXSW-interactive conference, where I announced the book release and spoke on a panel about feminism and pickup artistry. I seized the chance to interview Adam and add his perspective to my book. You can read the interview below, and it is currently part of Confessions, but the process of updating the book was weird enough that I want to talk about that first. If you don’t care about the intricacies of ebook publishing, then you should skip down to the photo of Adam and his wife.

(Adam Lyons is not the same Adam as my partner in Confessions, by the way. They’re totally different Adams. If I’d known Adam Lyons before I published Confessions, then I would have given “my” Adam a different pseudonym. C’est la vie.)

I’m learning a lot of lessons from publishing Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser. It’s been so interesting and challenging … although I feel kinda bad for my readers, who are in the role of guinea pigs as I test new approaches! Thanks for your patience, folks. I promise that the release of The S&M Feminist: Best of Clarisse Thorn will go much more smoothly.

Publishing an ebook with Amazon Kindle can be frustrating, but Kindle is such a big platform that it can’t be ignored. The next biggest ebook publisher is Smashwords; unlike Smashwords, if I update the Kindle file, the change takes a while to register. What’s worse, if I make a change and I want the people who already bought the Kindle book to receive the change, then I have to email Amazon and ask them to allow those folks to download the new version. On Smashwords, a person who’s bought the book can download any version, anytime.

Anyway, I emailed Amazon around March 20th, telling them that I’d fixed some technical errors (a few footnote links) and added a new section. I asked Amazon to allow people who already paid for the book to download the new version. (This request was in line with their policy as I understood it from a previous email exchange.) I also asked them to let readers know that if they don’t want to download the new version of the book, they could find the extra section on my blog.

So this morning, I got a message from one of my readers, telling me that Amazon sent her the following message yesterday (April 24th — over a month after I filed the original request!):

We are happy to announce that an updated version of your past Kindle purchase of Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews with Hideous Men by Clarisse Thorn is now available. The version you received had the following issues that have been corrected:

Significant editorial issues were present.
Also, new content has been added.

Then the email explains how to download the new version, with no further details about the changes. Sigh. Oh well. I apologize for the confusion. I thought it would be easy to update the book with my Adam Lyons interview, but it seems that the reality — even with e-publishing — is that a work should be treated as complete from the first day it’s on the market.

Anyway, if you bought Confessions before March 20th, then you should now be able to download the new version on either Smashwords or Kindle. (The physical copies are totally up-to-date; I released them on April 15th.)

And! Without further ado, here’s the section about Adam Lyons. It appears at the end of Chapter 6: Down The Rabbit Hole.

* * *

Adam Lyons with his wife, Amanda.

After I released this book, I was recruited for a panel about feminism and pickup artistry at the South-by-Southwest Interactive conference. It was a really interesting panel that included the famous PUA coach Adam Lyons. Naturally, I grabbed the chance to interview Adam Lyons so that I could add his perspective to this book. (Since the interview took place after this book’s initial release, you know you’re reading Confessions Version 2.0 if you’re reading this sentence right now.)

We met in an apartment that Adam Lyons rents for PUA training courses. The place contained a hefty amount of booze, a bunch of leftover pizza, and some instructors who were all worn out after a weekend of teaching. The guys invited me to go play Lazer Tag after the interview, but I regretfully had to decline.

Adam Lyons is one of nine coaches listed as “significant figures” in the Wikipedia entry for the seduction community. Compared to some other top coaches, he’s relatively new, but he got into the community when it was still pretty underground. “In maybe 2005 or 2006,” he told me, “The Game had just come out. I was halfway through reading The Game and I knew I had to try this. So I managed to find this bootcamp company and get in touch with them. My contact was like, ‘Come and meet me in a Chinese restaurant,’ so I took an envelope full of cash and I met him in a Chinese restaurant. He took the cash and counted it, and told me to meet the group in a particular bar later that week.”

“What did you learn?” I asked.

“In my first program, I learned the ‘fall on the floor technique,’ where you run up to a girl and you just fall on the floor. It was ridiculous.”

I laughed. “That would totally work on me. I’d think it was hilarious.”

“It can work surprisingly well,” Adam Lyons acknowledged. “But I once introduced a guy to my wife who then kept falling out of his chair, and it was so terrible. Anyway, most of the other ‘techniques’ didn’t work at all. For example, in that first program, they made me walk up to all these girls in the street and say, ‘I’m the kissing bandit — now you have to kiss me!’ It was so awkward.”

Within a few months, Adam Lyons soaked up everything the community had to offer and had begun coaching for local PUA companies. Now he runs his own company along with his wife. We talked a lot about social phobia, and how some PUA techniques line up with treatments for social phobia. Adam Lyons echoed a point that I’d already heard from other PUAs, like Mark Manson: that social phobia techniques may be helpful for some guys, but not all guys… and more importantly, applying treatments for social phobia to men who aren’t phobic will be utterly counterproductive.

“For people who genuinely have a clinical phobia, there are basically two ways of getting rid of it,” said Adam Lyons. “One of them is ‘flooding’ and the other is ‘systematic desensitization.’ In systematic desensitization, you slowly expose a person to that stimulus until they’re okay with it. So if they have a phobia of spiders, you might show them a photo of a spider, then show them videos, then put them in the same room with a spider in a tank, and then slowly put a spider on their hand. With ‘flooding,’ you’d do something like drop someone in a bath full of spiders.

“When picking up girls,” he continued, “with ‘flooding,’ you force a guy to do a lot of approaches with a stupid routine or wearing a stupid outfit, until he’s not scared of women anymore. So when a student who overcomes their phobia that way goes to teach someone else, they’ll use the ‘flooding’ technique. But the other person might not actually have a phobia, they might just be a little scared, which isn’t as bad and requires a different approach. So they’re taking a technique, which is a proven psychological technique, and applying it to someone who doesn’t need it. And any individual technique taught to the wrong person is going to give the wrong message. For example, the minute you tell a guy who’s already confident that he should just say what he feels, then you’ve got a whole new problem coming up — he’ll be over-aggressive. So that’s my main issue with old-fashioned routine-based game. The right techniques, but only for certain people.”

“You have other issues?” I asked.

“Probably thousands,” he said ruefully, and we both laughed. “What most of these guys need is emotional help, not pickup artistry. But I think the community has really changed,” he added. “Or rather, it’s come to a tipping point. When I look at the Internet analytics for pickup, I see that pickup artistry as a topic isn’t nearly as popular as it was a few years ago. But men are searching for dating advice now in a way that they never used to. Men are asking Google questions like ‘How do I find a girlfriend?’ — most men never used to do that. Dating advice for men has finally reached the point I’ve been waiting for, where it’s really mainstream and acceptable. It’s going to be a whole new landscape.”

Again, all this was analysis I’d heard from other guys like Mark, but it was interesting to hear it from such a prominent PUA. Most of the top coaches aren’t so interested in subverting the industry.

Adam Lyons also gave me one of the sweetest stories I’ve heard from a PUA coach, ever. It was about a man who came to his course in order to get his wife back. “We’re doing this program,” he told me, “and there’s this guy turns up, he’s totally built, and he’s also nervous and quiet. He sits through the seminar silently and then asks to talk to me alone. Once we’re in another room, he starts crying and he says: ‘I’m not here to pick up a girl. I’m here to pick up my wife.’”

It turned out that this guy was a successful professional boxer, and this woman pursued him for years. Eventually he married her, but soon afterwards he decided that the boxing life wasn’t good for him, so he quit and started a nonprofit for teaching kids how to box. She lost interest in him and eventually told him that either she wanted to be able to sleep with other people, or she wanted a divorce. He granted the exception to their monogamy because he was afraid of losing her, but he was miserable.

“So,” said Adam Lyons, “I told this boxer: ‘I’m going to teach you to get a girl. If it’s your wife, that’s great, but if it isn’t then you’ll have the skill set to find someone else.’ I taught him a bunch of things, but ultimately we decided to re-create his lifestyle from when he was a pro boxer, in a different way. He started holding youth boxing championships. He didn’t make much money by setting up the championships, but that was okay because he had another job, and he had this great social position with all these hot girls and young boxers who admire him. So his wife noticed this and she regained interest in him, and they renewed their vows.”

(As it happens, the couple broke up for good a couple years later. But apparently the boxer felt a lot better about it when they did break up, and he reported feeling like he found himself through the whole process of creating the championships.)

Adam Lyons is himself married to a sultry and beautiful woman, Amanda Lyons, who helps a lot with his PUA training and marketing. Amanda is not known for her conversational restraint, nor for her empathy. At one point she had a big fight on Twitter with one of my feminist co-panelists, after she accused us of mentioning rape during the panel because it’s a “feminist trump card.”

Still, Amanda and I were able to get along, and she’s certainly smart. It was interesting to watch the couple interact. When I came over to interview Adam Lyons, he was telling his wife a story about how he charmed a local baker into giving him pies for free — and deconstructing his tactics. It looked like a fun relationship: the two of them get to talk about social dynamics and manipulation all the time. And he clearly loves her exactly as she is.

“My wife’s such a dude,” Adam Lyons told me. “Amanda drinks beer, I drink wine. Amanda likes football, I don’t. Out of the two of us, I try to be sympathetic to girls and issues that they have, but Amanda has no sympathy for girls really. Or boys, to be completely fair.” He glanced over at where his wife was involved in her laptop. “Amanda is CEO of her own company — she’s really dominated the pickup industry,” he said fondly. “She’s a badass. She starts fights with feminists.”

“How does it feel to be a prominent PUA who’s married?” I asked.

“I crossed #1 PUA the day I got married,” Adam Lyons said. “I was #1 worldwide within 3 months after I got married. Everywhere, every PUA site put me at #1 on every list.”

Which tells us something about PUAs really want, doesn’t it?

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/25/my-interview-with-world-famous-pickup-coach-adam-lyons-and-updates-to-confessions/feed/ 50 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/25/my-interview-with-world-famous-pickup-coach-adam-lyons-and-updates-to-confessions/ “50 Shades of Grey,” “Fight Club,” and the Complications of Male Dominance http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/xUF0hlmpUy0/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/20/50-shades-of-grey-fight-club-and-the-complications-of-male-dominance/#comments Sat, 21 Apr 2012 03:38:30 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=3048 This is a longer version of an article that originally appeared at Role/Reboot.

Much is being made of the highly successful S&M erotica novel 50 Shades of Grey. People are blaming feminism for making women into submissives, blaming feminism for preventing women from being submissives, blaming women for having sexual desires at all, and a whole lot of other boring and typical stuff that comes up in any conversation about women and S&M. News flash: it’s not the feminist revolution that is “causing” women to have fantasies of submission. S&M fantasies have been around since the beginning of time. (And the 1950s S&M-sensation book, The Story of O, was much better written than 50 Shades of Grey.)

As an S&M writer, I hear a lot of allegations about how “all” (or “almost all”) women are sexually submissive and how this must Mean Something. This is echoed in the coverage of 50 Shades of Grey, in which everyone is demanding to know What It All Means About Women. I wrote a piece a while back called “‘Inherent Female Submission’: The Wrong Question,” in which I took on a lot of this stuff. But there’s another submerged question here — about men. There’s plenty of talk and stereotypes about how men are inherently violent, or more aggressive than women, or “the dominant sex.”

As I said in my previous article: I think it’s quite questionable whether women are “inherently submissive,” but my conclusion is that I don’t care. It doesn’t actually matter to me whether women in general are “inherently submissive” (though I really don’t think women are), or whether submissive women’s preferences are philosophically Deep And Meaningful (though I’m not convinced they are). What matters is:

1. How women (or any other people) can explore sexually submissive preferences consensually,

2. How women (or any other people) can compartmentalize submissive preferences so that their whole lives are safe and fulfilling and happy, and

3. How women (or any other people) can be treated well in arenas that aren’t even relevant to their sexuality — like the workplace.

This is also how I feel about these ideas of “inherent male violence.” I don’t buy that men are “the dominant sex” or that men are “inherently violent.” Based on what I’ve read, it seems quite clear that individuals with higher testosterone levels — who are, incidentally, not always men — often experience more aggressive feelings. Yet that’s a far cry from large-scale generalizations, and it’s also frequently irrelevant to questions about how people can best deal with those aggressive feelings. Plus, psychological submission can be a very separate thing from physical aggression levels.

Much of the time, when it comes to aggression, anger management is the answer, the same way a naturally shy or submissive person needs to learn to set boundaries. But there are circumstances where catharsis is completely acceptable. Lots of perfectly decent men have urges towards violent dominance; what do they do about it? How much do they agonize, like Christian Grey in 50 Shades of Grey, and how much do they explore their desires in a consensual and reasonable way?

I always thought that the late-90s movie Fight Club was fascinating primarily because of its lens on masculinity and violence. It’s not just about the violence men to do each other, but to themselves. Quotes include “You have to give up; you have to know that someday you’re gonna die,” and “The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.” I first watched it before I knew much about S&M, but now whenever I think about it, I think about how the idea of a fight club — where people would get together and fight, for catharsis and community — is so very reminiscent of how a lot of people experience S&M. Fight Club even has safewords. Someone says stop, you stop. I obviously don’t support the endpoint of the Fight Club story (i.e., blowing up buildings), but the idea of establishing a men’s community via a fight club seems reasonable to me.

So, what are the practicalities of dealing with aggressive or dominant tendencies in the sexual arena? As an S&M person, I’ve experimented with dominance as well as submission, but because violence is so associated with masculinity, I turned to some egalitarian male S&Mers for advice. I believe that even for non-S&M people, their perspectives make a really good lens for ideas of gender and violence and power. Of course, the first thing one of my friends told me was: “I’m not sure I really see dominance in general as being particularly masculine. I don’t really think it’s a gender associated thing.”

That gentleman, who comments around the Internet under the name Scootah, went on to add: “I’ve certainly worried about my kinks in the past. I mean fundamentally, I get really, really turned on by grabbing someone by the hair, throwing them into the wall, backhanding them, etc. That’s a pretty disturbing thought for an egalitarian who’s worked with abuse victims. I spend a lot of time considering the ethics of my kinks; my partners’ enthusiastic consent is a major priority.”

Jay Wiseman, author of the famous S&M primer SM101, talks about his own early fears towards the beginning of that book. He writes about how he began having sadistic fantasies, and went to the public library to research them. All he could find was portraits of serial killers, which scared the hell out of him. He writes:

I decided to keep myself under surveillance. I made up my mind that I was not going to hurt anybody. If I thought I was turning into someone that would harm somebody else, then I would either put myself in a mental institution or commit suicide. And thus I lived, waiting and watching to see if I was turning into someone that I needed to shoot.

Fortunately, Wiseman found partners who were open to exploring S&M with him, and went on to write extensively about safety and consent and communication within S&M. Trying to communicate in an egalitarian way is arguably the most complicated part of any S&M encounter; as Scootah told me, “There are certainly elements that could potentially unbalance a relationship in my favor. I’m a big reasonably strong guy. I do usually make more money than my partners. I also have this whole sense of position in the local S&M community. I mostly just try to be aware of those things. I try to be very careful about not taking advantage of that and negotiate clearly and not pressure people.”

There are lots of ways to do clear negotiation, including asking open-ended questions before any S&M actually happens: “What are you interested in? Could you go into that more?” There’s also a huge emphasis on talking through the S&M encounter afterwards, as part of the post-S&M processing we call aftercare. As another gent who goes by Noir said: “It really helped me to have a few great, feminist S&M partners. Having that echo of ‘it’s OK, I want this,’ as well as the honest feedback when I do wrong really helped shape how I experience S&M, and with who. It’s meant I learned how better to read and grasp the people in my, er, grasp.”

Noir also noted, “I strive to use dominance and submission as a tool for helping my partners become stronger, in ways that also feed my S&M preferences. For example, I tend to form long-term interests with women who want a ‘safe space’ to extend and explore their ability to be sluts, with all that can imply. But in the process, we also explore how becoming more confident in one’s sexuality also can reflect into everyday life. Also, just coming to spaces in the S&M community can be a goldmine of information. All a dominant man has to do is read, listen, open up and understand. One thing I learned was that my fears about reenforcing our messed-up society were shared by women into kink… but also that my ways of approaching the topic, as ‘oh, we’re so controlled by society!’ were themselves pushing too much agency out of women’s choices. There’s a balance there that we guys who identify as both feminist and kinky have to respect, and that can come from listening to feminist women struggle with these issues, themselves.”

The alternative sexuality advocate Pepper Mint (who has his own blog) told me that in terms of putting gender on his experiences, “I am a bit genderqueer, and I personally experience dominance with either a feminine or masculine vibe from moment to moment. Certain activities — like punching — feel masculine, while others — like whipping — feminine in the moment. Also, I switch, meaning that I don’t always take the dominant role. Strangely, my most clearly masculine S&M activity is masochism. I always feel very manly while taking pain. I don’t think I can clearly explain why these things have attached to gender in my head, though presumably I’m being affected by cultural tropes to some extent.”

The consensus in general was that dominance, whether masculine or feminine, is something that happens in an encounter… not outside it. As Pepper put it, “New guys often want to play hard or do hardcore things, and will often boast and swagger. Kinky women almost always recognize this as dangerous bullshit. Learn to chill out and not take yourself too seriously, and learn to start with a light careful touch when playing with someone new. Learn to ask for help and guidance, both from others in your S&M community and from your partners.”

Scootah agreed: “The first mistake I see newbie doms make is trying too hard to be some kind of bad ass. Admit your inexperience. Be seen learning. Be modest and have a good time. Learn to communicate well, and to really be friends with your prospective partners.”

For me, the bottom line of these conversations is that questioning gender roles, and understanding gender complications, is an ongoing process. People have a lot of urges and preferences that are politically inconvenient and which we will never fully understand. Whether we’re shaped by biology or culture, those feelings will still exist for now, and we have to deal with them. There are ways to do almost anything such that people respect each other, though — whatever the implications for gender or power. Violence is complicated ground, but it can be used in balanced and consensual ways that end up bonding people together. 50 Shades of Grey and Fight Club are both examples, and I haven’t even touched competitive sports!

* * *

Linkbait time! Here’s what some other folks are writing about Fifty Shades of Grey:

* Feminist writer Jaclyn Friedman — who, incidentally, recently released a great book designed to help women explore their sexuality on their own terms — wrote the tidiest rebuttal to Roiphe’s weirdness for The Guardian. Here’s a great quotation:

As a feminist, my problem with the mass-marketing of the pale, swooning female submissive tied up for the love of her man isn’t that she exists, but that no other kind of “taboo” sexual women seem to. We don’t get mainstream narratives inviting us to identify with women who like to dominate in bed, or mass-marketed portrayals of women of color and queer women as sexual heroines in control of their choices…. And therein lies the rub. When the media only repeats stories about one very narrow idea of “transgressive” female sexuality, it limits our sexual imaginations, and therefore the possibilities of our sexual lives.

* The sex & tech writer Violet Blue has a big link roundup, called Fifty Shades of Linkbait. It has some interesting articles, but I’m mostly linking to it because this line made me crack up:

Fifty Shades of Grey will be awesome for you if you secretly wish someone would do a Halle-Berry-as-Catwoman treatment to The Story Of O.

* A.V. Flox, the Love & Sex editor at BlogHer, wrote thoughtfully about The Troubling Message in Fifty Shades of Grey. Snip:

It is a story we have heard before, though I daresay Disney does a far better job in “Beauty and the Beast.” This, perhaps, is the most egregious attempt against people who live a BDSM lifestyle. Not only does Fifty Shades of Grey make broken monsters out of people who have examined their desires and had the courage to see where they will take them, but it promises readers that they can be cured — and cured through bad communication, passive aggression, and petulant fits, at that. … In telling us this story, E.L. James is directly tapping into this fantasy of transforming a lover to suit us perfectly. If I could forgive the damage she does BDSM in the process, I’d leave it alone. But I can’t.

* The well-known S&M erotica author Laura Antoniou wrote a send-up called Fifty Shades of Sell Out that was a huge hit on Facebook. If you don’t have Facebook, you can also read it on her blog.

* Even McSweeney’s got in on the action with a little item called Fifty Shades to Leave Your Lover. I quote:

Just slip this restricting bodice over your back, Jack.

Make a new plan, as to our deployment of safe words and variations therein, Stan.

* * *

Note: This post was edited in late May 2012 to include the Wiseman quotation.

* * *

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/20/50-shades-of-grey-fight-club-and-the-complications-of-male-dominance/feed/ 10 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/20/50-shades-of-grey-fight-club-and-the-complications-of-male-dominance/ Can We Make This More Complicated? http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/zA2WbBxweA8/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/17/can-we-make-this-more-complicated/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:46:48 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=3016 Things aren’t black and white. Life is complicated. I’d like to think that these are obvious truths, but how do we express them, how do we understand them, how do we work towards them? Especially while identifying as part of a movement that is, arguably, a blunt ideology … such as feminism?

Some of my most valuable feminist experiences arose from being trained as an advocate for sexual assault survivors. Advocates are called in for crisis counseling and to help survivors understand the options they have for dealing with assault. My training instructed me to foreground three themes while interacting with a survivor:

#1. I believe you.
#2. It’s not your fault.
#3. You have options.

The point is to help survivors cope, and help them find resources. But while these principles seem clear, it’s never even close to un-complicated. A survivor’s story is never reducible to stereotypes or easy choices. The advocate’s role is to be there and listen without judgment — to try and help find a path through a thicket of pain, confusion, stigma, medical problems, and legal issues — and to support the survivor in their choices even if the advocate doesn’t agree with them. The point is to understand, not to judge.

I’m pretty sure that this is the kind of activism I am best suited for: understanding, communicating, building. Telling stories, where appropriate (and keeping confidence, where appropriate).

Of course, there are plenty of people that it’s very difficult to feel empathy for, as a feminist. Rape survivors are a group that feminists are expected to have empathy for, and expected to recognize as having complicated stories; we all know that’s crucial. On the other hand, I recently published a book about pickup artists (a subculture of men who trade tips on how to seduce women), and I’ve taken heat from feminists who feel that I’m over-sympathetic to those guys. Don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not an “advocate” for pickup artists in the same way that I want to advocate for assault survivors. But I believe that there’s value in empathy here, too.

As one of my feminist friends observed while we discussed the pickup artist book, I am arguably providing a valuable service by giving the men in that subculture a non-judgmental space to look at feminism. Also, by giving them — as my friend put it — “space to be ambivalent about some of the problematic things they do.”

When trying to encourage a person to question what they’re doing, it helps to understand that person first — and to offer them a sense of that understanding. I think there are a lot of icky things about the pickup artist community, and some terrible people in it. But it’s not black-and-white, and there are decent guys who learn the tactics too. If a guy is trying to learn tactics for seducing women, is he doing it out of loneliness? Or perhaps out of desire for a strange revenge on the “opposite” sex? What about both? How would these different motives change my interactions with him, perhaps even enable me to influence the way he thinks about women? With me, could he have the space to heal the damage he himself has retained from our broken social norms around sex and gender? And how does understanding his perspective make my own richer — how does it make things more complicated?

* * *

One of the exciting things about being an Internet writer is that my old writing never goes away. It’s always there, cached and mirrored and easily found by both friends and enemies. Obviously, this is also one of the most un-exciting things about being an Internet writer. It’s rare that I completely disagree with an older article that I’ve written; but there are some old articles that make me feel self-conscious, because I understand the complexity of those topics much better today, and my opinions have become much more nuanced.

An example would be the way that I’ve written about BDSM and abuse. I write a lot about my experiences with consensual BDSM — Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism and Masochism — and I’m a feminist, but BDSM has always been a controversial topic within feminism. Sometimes it’s been controversial enough that BDSMer-feminists have been silenced: an editor at the iconic feminist magazine Ms. once threatened to leave if the magazine published an article by a masochistic woman, and thereby successfully buried the topic. Sometimes it’s been controversial enough to inspire non-consensual violence: a group of radical feminists literally attacked a lesbian BDSM club with crowbars sometime around the 1980s, claiming that they did it in the name of ending violence against women.

So being a BDSMer-feminist makes for defensiveness, and I began from a defensive position. My first post about BDSM and abuse was called “Evidence that the BDSM Community Does Not Enable Abuse,” and outlined initiatives within the community that oppose abusive BDSM. Around the same time, I remember making comments I now regret, comments that I believed were critical but were actually harsh towards survivors — or comments that gave too sunny a view of the BDSM community, which is far from flawless. My next post on the topic, eighteen months later, was more empathic and complex. It was called “The Alt Sex Anti-Abuse Dream Team,” and outlined how I would personally create an anti-abuse initiative that was friendly to alternative sexuality abuse survivors.

Now, these posts seem simple to me, but I was growing out of my defensiveness. I started feeling like I was genuinely moving the conversation forward when I wrote a post called “Thinking More Clearly About BDSM vs. Abuse,” in which I wrote specifically about examples of abusive behavior within the community, and used radical feminist theory about abusive relationships to reflect on how a non-abusive BDSM relationship could look. Building bridges; creating synthesis rather than antithesis.

Women with strong and different sexual desires exist, and especially with the Internet, we can’t be permanently silenced. (Although even on the Internet, there are still some attempts; my comments are often deleted on sites associated with radical feminism, such as the Anti-Porn Men Project, though I do my absolute best to comment inoffensively.) But I try to push aside my self-righteousness, because I really don’t want this to be a fight where all I do is scream “BDSM can be feminist!” I want to acknowledge and deal with real problems, like how BDSM might be used as a cover for abuse and how we can deal with that. I want to be established in cooperation, not resistance. I want to move things forward; I want to make things more complicated.

Sex-positive feminists — the BDSMers, the sex workers, the pornographers, et cetera — we have so much up-close-and-personal experience with the complexities of consent, the beautiful and ugly realities of desire, and with the edgy cases where consent can become confusing. Feminism needs us! But within feminism, our actual experience is so often stereotyped and discounted — as in this debate with anti-porn feminist Gail Dines, who sneers about “young women who strip, wax, and fuck themselves into empowerment.” Could activities like stripping or waxing or fucking perhaps be more complicated than “empowering” vs. “not empowering”? Apparently not.

The most frustrating part of this particular feminist split is that someone like me couldn’t exist if radical feminism had not existed first. “Radical feminism” has become a widely accepted term for a specific type of feminism, a set of ideas that emphasizes systemic inequality and community organizing. It’s sometimes viewed in opposition to “sex-positive feminism,” which talks a lot about individual experiences and personal choices, and would include me. But these categories are recently constructed and are not always cleanly delineated. And the analysis of radical feminists, as well as the work they’ve done, is what established space for women like me to be who we are.

The pioneering sex-positive feminist Susie Bright was attacked by radical feminists, but upon the death of the infamous Andrea Dworkin, Susie Bright wrote a sad obituary: “I have tape recordings from colleges where I would go listen to Andrea lecture in rapt attention and turn my little cassette over to capture every word. I never dreamed that I would one day become one of the people she vilified. … I know it’s strange that I have such a tragic affection for her, when she apparently only had loathing for my kind.”

This very vilification is a large part of why it’s so hard to acknowledge complication. We are forced, again and again, to take such simplistic and adversarial stances. I don’t think that all stripping or waxing or fucking is empowering, I think it’s so much more complicated. But instead of getting into that, I’ve wasted too much time defending my right to make love consensually without feeling terrible about myself and/or being dismissed as a brainless perverted whore.

I don’t want you to think I believe “my side” of the so-called “Feminist Sex Wars” is “blameless.” The brilliant sex worker activist Audacia Ray recently wrote an amazing piece in which she called out sex-positive feminists for our own, sometimes simplistic thinking. For example, when people are talking about coerced and trafficked sex workers, that is not usually the best time to for a consenting sex worker to talk about how much she loves her job. Sometimes “our side” horns in on those conversations inappropriately, though.

In many ways, making a simpler case is more marketable; campaigns deal in soundbites. When it comes to the law, there must be bright lines before which an act is unpunished and after which it is a crime. And often, movements are established in resistance. Part of feminist progress can be laid at the feet of a willingness to be simple about things. Slogans like “No means no” paved the way for work like my anti-rape advocacy.

Yet the minute we actually start creating organizations and institutions, we must be willing to complicate things, or we will serve people badly. If I’ve learned this lesson anywhere, I’ve learned it in international charity work, wherein rich countries throw money at poor countries and few real problems are addressed. Where does the money go? How is it spent? Who gets bribed, who gets shorted? Does the Third World even want the “solutions” we think they want? These questions are just the tip of the iceberg. So many charity organizations have incredibly simple slogans for getting cash, after which the money disappears into a black hole of conflicting social forces. It’s all very well to send a billion dollars to people in need, but the extensive problems and complexities of these international aid systems has been well-documented — see, for example, Letting Them Die by Catherine Campbell or The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani. (Pisani also has a blog.) If only those of us in the donor countries would talk more about the complications.

For me, when I personally oversimplify what I’m trying to say, I admit that it can feel slick and clever and fun in the moment. But it’s almost like a drug; I feel hungover later. (It is so hard to write punchy prose that’s complicated. Ironically, when I am more willing to simplify my message my writing is often more successful; some of my most successful pieces are, I believe, far from my best.) I feel so very exhausted with the simplification of these conversations — yet I acknowledge that sometimes it’s my own fault, my own defensiveness, including the reflexive anger and mental blocks that arise from my defensiveness. (And there are still people I won’t try to understand, like anti-feminists who think women shouldn’t vote. I’m okay with viewing that as uncomplicated BS.)

One of my feminist friends has told me that I am a philosopher, I’m not really a feminist. And yet one of my writer friends has told me that I am clearly an activist, not an aesthete. I keep finding myself in the middle of these continua. I worry sometimes that it is really not possible to be an activist who seeks complication. Yet it seems to me that if anything can save the world, it’s empathy. And empathy requires us to allow people’s stories to be complicated.

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/17/can-we-make-this-more-complicated/feed/ 12 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/17/can-we-make-this-more-complicated/ Sappy Reflections http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/OHRsqwOn-G8/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/15/sappy-reflections-2/#comments Sun, 15 Apr 2012 20:36:38 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=3000 So, firstly, you can now buy Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser in physical form. Yes! A real paperback! It took a lot of work to fix Confessions up for print, but it was worth it. I’ve got the first copy on the table next to me right now, and it looks lovely. Buy it!

Also, over the last week, I’ve given a bunch of lectures, and I’ve had the opportunity to visit my old college campus and talk to my old advisor. And I’ve been working on formatting my upcoming Best Of Clarisse Thorn. (You can download a free electronic sample over at Smashwords; I included 12 of my favorite articles. I’ll eventually be selling a version with a lot more articles, both in electronic form and paper form.)

It all leads me naturally to thinking about how far I’ve come, and the people I owe thanks to.

By now, I’ve given my lectures and workshops in a lot of venues, from museums to conferences to universities. Different people have worked to bring me in, but it’s actually most common for university students to raise money to bring me to their campus.

And these students floor me. Seriously. When I was an undergraduate, I spent all my time daydreaming and playing Dungeons and Dragons and hanging out with my friends. (Okay, I did schoolwork too.) I had so little interest in activism or organizing. And there’s nothing wrong with that; I love my college friends, and my college experience was good for me. It helped me fix myself up post-high school, which was the worst period of my life. But I feel like I was pretty different from the students who are hiring me now, and I admire them.

I get the most amazing comments. I’ll meet students who stun me with their poise and drive, and then they’ll say things like “Clarisse, I can’t tell you how much your writing means to me,” or “I read your coming-out story every three months because it makes me feel okay about myself.” It’s amazing and, in a way, it’s nerve-wracking. I kind of feel unworthy, because I mess up my relationships plenty … I mess up my activism plenty, too. Sometime I feel like I shouldn’t be writing about anything, ever, because I don’t really know what I’m talking about. When I started running lectures and workshops and other events, I did it for free or super cheap; I was grateful for the opportunity to practice, to create more conversation around topics I believe are important. At first, I never imagined that I’d get to the point where people fly me in, where I charge money for it, where I’m selling books and articles.

But what’s really astonishing is that I’ve gotten legitimately good at it. I was especially happy with how my sexual communication workshop went down, this week — it was such a good group, such a good discussion. I felt so much pride, both in myself and in the people who were attending. Later, I went to my old campus and walked through the library and had lunch with my advisor, and I felt nothing but gratitude. (My advisor, by the way, is totally amused that I’m a feminist sex writer now. No one saw that coming.)

And yeah, I guess I’m different from these students who bring me in, but I’m so like them, too. The same way I’m so like a lot of my readers and commenters and the other bloggers I’ve worked with over the years. I wouldn’t be able to do any of this if I didn’t have their support. Your support. Not just financial and organizational, but intellectual too. So I wanted to give you all some sappy reflections. I appreciate it so much. Thank you.

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/15/sappy-reflections-2/feed/ 2 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/15/sappy-reflections-2/ [classic repost] BDSM As A Sexual Orientation, and Complications of the Orientation Model http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/MVLgrFXdvfc/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/09/classic-repost-bdsm-as-a-sexual-orientation-and-complications-of-the-orientation-model/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:00:07 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=2947 I originally published this post in slightly different form back in 2009. I decided to edit it a little for clarity, because I’m going to include it in the upcoming Best Of Clarisse Thorn … so here’s the edited version.

* * *

I love this image:

(The image is a list with “Homosexual Agenda” written at the top. There follows a list: “1. Spend time with family, 2. Be treated equally, 3. Buy milk.”)

I love that because it so perfectly highlights how preposterous all those right-wing accusations about “the gay agenda” are. Actually, gay people just want to live their lives like everyone else; the to-do list for most gay people looks a lot like most other people’s. (Apparently the image originated at a site called TopPun, and you can buy it in stickers and keychains.)

In a way, that sticker also highlights some problems with the very concept of sexual orientations — the way we sort ourselves into groups based on sexuality and its apparent innateness. Why do people have to insist on being so different from each other? A question that sometimes gets raised in BDSM contexts: is BDSM a “sexual orientation”? And I have such mixed feelings about that question. I feel intense BDSM as an incredibly important aspect of my sexuality, perhaps an innate one, but I don’t want us to fall into the same traps that beset homosexuality.

I remember the first moment it occurred to me to consider BDSM an orientation — the first time I used that word. I believe I was writing up my coming-out story at the time; I was discussing the way I freaked out when I came into BDSM, and I wrote: In retrospect, it seems surreal that I reacted so badly to my BDSM orientation.

I remember that I felt vaguely electrified at what I was saying, a little scared … but also comforted. At the time, I hadn’t had much contact with other sex theorists, and I thought I was saying something radical. I was scared that my words might appear too radical to be taken seriously. Also, since our culture mostly discusses the idea of “orientation” in regards to gay/lesbian/bi/transgender/queer, it seemed to me that — if I dared refer to it as “my BDSM orientation” — then a comparison with LGBTQ was implied in my statement.

Would the world believe that my BDSM desires could be as “real,” as “deep-rooted,” as “unavoidable” as the sexual orientation of a gay/lesbian/bi/transgender/queer person? Would I offend GLBTQ people by implying that my sexual needs are as “real,” “deep-rooted” and “unavoidable” as theirs?

I later found out that some LGBTQ people do get offended by it, and others don’t. Sometime you end up with ridiculous arguments like this one from a comments thread on an incredibly BDSM-phobic blog: one person says, “As a lesbian, I would like to say a sincere fuck you to people comparing BDSM to homosexuality,” to which another person replies, “As a queer person myself, I would like to say a sincere fuck you to people who claim that I ought to see my BDSM and my queerness differently.” As for me, Clarisse, I’ll be frank with you — I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t have a dog in that fight, and I’m staying out of it. I’m straight as the day is long, but I’ve also been invited to speak about BDSM at queer conventions and to write about BDSM on queer blogs. So I’ll hang out with the people who are cool with me, and everyone else can kick me out of their LGBTQ circles as much as they want.

But I used to feel a lot more worried about how I’d be perceived for talking about BDSM as an orientation. Still, as weird as the concept of “BDSM as an orientation” felt when I first thought of it, it also felt right. When I looked back at my memories and previous actions, it was quite obvious that I have always had these needs, desires and fantasies. Acknowledging this, and applying the word “orientation” to BDSM, helped me come to terms with my BDSM identity.

The “BDSM orientation” idea cleared a mental path for me to think of BDSM as a inbuilt part of myself, like my bone structure or eye color. BDSM became something that it was desirable to accept, come to terms with … even embrace. It was a hugely liberating way of thinking about it: if I thought of BDSM as an orientation, that meant I didn’t have to worry about or fight it anymore.

Since then, I’ve been so buried in sexuality theory and I’ve talked to so many BDSM people that — well, now the idea of a “BDSM orientation” seems kinda boring. I am reminded that it’s a radical concept only when I talk to people who don’t think about these things all the time. I think that the idea of BDSM as an orientation occurs naturally to people who think a lot about BDSM sexuality, because so many kinksters either know we’re BDSM people all along, or instantly recognize BDSM once we find it. Here’s an article about a BDSM-related legal case that quotes sexologist Charles Moser at the end, as he very eloquently describes how BDSM can be considered a sexual orientation:

When I talk to someone who is identifying as BDSM and ask them have you always felt this way, and they almost always report that ‘This has been the way I was all along. I didn’t realize it. I thought I was interested in more traditional male/female relationships but now I realize that I really like the power and control aspects of relationship.

… They are very clear often that, ‘my relationships which were vanilla were not fulfilling. I always felt like there was something missing. Now that I’m doing BDSM, I am fulfilled. This feels really right to me. This really gets me to my core. It’s who I am.’

… And so in the same way as someone who is homosexual, they couldn’t really change — they somehow felt fulfilled in the same-sex relationship — similarly in a BDSM relationship or scenario, they similarly feel the same factors, and in my mind, that allows me to classify people who fit that as a sexual orientation. I cannot change someone who’s into BDSM to not be BDSM.

That’s how I feel. Absolutely.

And yet I disagree with Moser on one key point: not all BDSM people are like this. I know that people exist who do BDSM, who don’t feel it the same way I do. They don’t feel that it’s been with them all along. It’s not deep-rooted for them. It’s not unavoidable, it’s not necessary, it doesn’t go to their core. They can change from being into BDSM to not doing BDSM, because it’s not built-in; it’s just something they do sometimes, for fun. There are also plenty of people who have equally strong feelings about their BDSM sexuality, but who have different BDSM preferences from mine. And that’s totally okay with me! I will always say that I’ve got no problem with whatever people want to do, as long as it’s kept among consenting adults.

But what does the existence of people like that mean for BDSM as an orientation? Are they somehow less “entitled” to practice BDSM, because it’s not as deep-rooted or important to them as it is for, say, me? No, that can’t be true. I’m not going to claim that my feelings are “more real” than theirs, or somehow more important, just because BDSM goes straight to my core but not to theirs. They’ve got as much right as I do to practice these activities, as long as they do it consensually.

So, where does that leave us? It means that BDSM is an orientation for some people, but not for others. I’m fine with that. Does that mean we’re done here? Well, no ….

… because if BDSM is an orientation for some people but not others, then we’re in a bit of a weird place when it comes to societal recognition. In the case I cited above, Charles Moser is claiming that we BDSMers can’t change ourselves and that therefore, we don’t deserve to be stigmatized for our sexuality.

On the surface, this might seem reasonable, but actually, whether or not people can alter their sexual needs, there’s no reason people shouldn’t be able to do what they want with other consenting adults. If any of us phrase the argument as: “I can’t change myself, so please don’t hate me!” then we are implicitly saying, “If I could change myself, I would … but I can’t, so please have pity on me!” In other words, we are implicitly saying: “BDSMers can’t ‘fix’ our sexual needs — it’s not ‘our fault’ — so please don’t hate us.”

And when we say that, we are accepting and validating the way our culture tries to shame our sexuality. We are fundamentally agreeing with the opposition and begging for an exception, rather than trying to change the rule. We are calling BDSM a “fault,” rather than stating that freely exercising sexuality is our “right.” When we make BDSM into an orientation, we are often casting BDSM sexuality as something that we would “fix” if we could. But BDSM is not broken in the first place!

Also, using the orientation argument leaves the entire segment of the population that doesn’t feel BDSM as an orientation standing out in the cold. If we go with the orientation model, and say that it’s okay for BDSM-identified people to practice BDSM only because we feel it as a deep-rooted orientation … then we are implying that it’s not okay for people to practice BDSM if they don’t feel it as a deep-rooted orientation.

Something like this has happened in some gay/lesbian communities: people who have sex with folks of the same gender, but don’t identify as strictly gay or lesbian, have sometimes been stigmatized within gay/lesbian communities or even disallowed from gay/lesbian gatherings. I understand that there are historical reasons that kind of thing happened, and analyzing the phenomenon would take up a whole post. I’m pretty sure books have been written about it. But the point is that when it did happen, it left bisexual people — as well as others who don’t fit neatly within the “gay/lesbian orientation” — out in the cold. And I don’t want to support that with BDSM.

So I’ve tended to avoid that kind of language. I think it is important to move away from “I can’t help having these needs,” and towards “It’s fundamentally unimportant whether we can change our sexual desires; the only really important thing is whether or not we practice them consensually.”

… But …

… there’s always a but …

I’ll admit that I feel anxiety about abandoning the “orientation model.” I still haven’t taken the word “orientation” out of my BDSM overview lecture, because it is useful for convincing people that BDSM is okay. Many people, at this point, have accepted the LGBTQ orientation as something that should not be stigmatized. The word “orientation” can really help them understand what BDSM means to us and why it’s not okay to stigmatize that, either.

Furthermore, there are obviously people out there (like Charles Moser) who are seeking to protect BDSM legally, as a sexual orientation. They want to make BDSM a protected class, so that we can’t get fired or have our kids taken away or suffer other consequences for being into BDSM anymore. If talking about BDSM as a sexual orientation means I can worry less about those potential consequences, then is it worth it? Maybe.

And, of course, I don’t want to forget how much the idea of an “orientation” comforted me when I was first coming into BDSM. It made me feel so much better to recognize BDSM as an inbuilt part of myself. I don’t want to take that comfort away from anyone else.

So, when I try to campaign for general sexual freedom and acceptance — “orientation” or no “orientation” — I imagine that I’ll still end up using the word sometimes. But I’ll always try to be conscious of it, and I’ll always try to speak in ways that support this statement:

It’s fundamentally unimportant whether we can change our sexual desires; the only really important thing is whether or not we practice them consensually.

* * *

Related links:

The excellent Kink Research Overviews blog has a thorough post on BDSM innateness.

Also, the blogger Trinity at the now-quiet SM-Feminist blog wrote a more feminist-theory-oriented post on this topic around the same time that I wrote my original post.

* * *

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/09/classic-repost-bdsm-as-a-sexual-orientation-and-complications-of-the-orientation-model/feed/ 18 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/09/classic-repost-bdsm-as-a-sexual-orientation-and-complications-of-the-orientation-model/ April Fool’s Day… and some things I actually believe http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/_GN6REF9mIU/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/03/april-fools-day-and-some-things-i-actually-believ/#comments Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:24:08 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=2919 Firstly, just in case anyone missed the update: my previous post was an April Fool’s joke. There is a long list of things that I don’t believe in that post, and I decided to write a post to cover the big ones.

Also, this picture is awesome:

Anyway! Things I Said In My April Fools Post That Contradict My Beliefs:

* The most important thing I don’t believe is that cheating is a good example of polyamorous leanings. While I’m sure some people resolve non-monogamous leanings by cheating, I see cheating in a monogamous relationship as a huge red flag, even if that person later decides to be polyamorous. This isn’t to say that people who cheat are Incontrovertibly Bad People, and I understand that relationships can be very complicated. I try to be empathic to people who feel trapped in relationships for whatever reason, even if they cheat. But the bottom line for me is that polyamory requires a lot of honesty and self-knowledge and integrity, and cheating is usually the opposite of those things.

I will freely admit that I have some intense personal baggage around this topic, but I’m not the only polyamorous person who espouses this view. Many poly people get especially pissed at people who cheat and then label “cheating” as polyamory; that is not okay. Here’s an excerpt from an excellent piece by Technomom called Coming Clean: Transitioning from Cheating to Polyamory:

Note: I use male pronouns in the following article for the sake of simplicity, but I’ve encountered both men and women in this situation. My advice is the same to both.

Frequently, newcomers to various poly groups introduce themselves with a tale of woe. Alas, after entering into a committed monogamous relationship (usually a marriage), the poor man has just discovered that he is, in fact, polyamorous. In most cases, the newcomer has already strayed into infidelity, and wishes to have his cake and eat it too now. He asks for advice regarding how he can convince his wife to accept the relationship with the new lover so that they can all live happily ever after.

The newcomer, who I’ll call Phil, is usually surprised to find that he is not, in fact, welcomed with open arms. Most of us are very hostile to people who cheat on their partners and call it polyamory, because that has absolutely nothing to do with how we are living our lives.

… In over 20 years of being polyamorous and knowing other poly people, I have never, not even once, known of anyone who has been able to move from an affair in a monogamous relationship to a healthy polyamorous relationship involving the same people. I’ve known of people who did cheat on their partners in monogamous relationships who later moved on to be polyamorous, but they did not salvage the original monogamous relationship.

I’ve known people whose spouses cheated on them in monogamous relationships who ended the monogamous relationship, then went on to explore polyamory very happily themselves. (That fact surprises a fair number of those seeking help in this situation.) What you have to realize is that the real issue between you and your spouse right now is not polyamory or sex. It is your betrayal of the agreements between the two of you. It is about your dishonesty and dishonorable behavior. You have broken her trust.

She then gives advice anyways, and I think it’s really good advice.

* My standards for consent and communication are not “too complex.” What does it even mean to have standards for consent and communication that are “too complex”?

* I don’t believe that “true submission” is about allowing your partner to dictate your life, and I think any statement about “what submission really means” is intensely problematic. Submission (and dominance, and every other type of S&M) is different for everyone; for more on this, there’s always my post BDSM Roles, “Topping From The Bottom,” and “Service Top”.

Sometimes, in the middle of a really intense BDSM scene, I will enjoy having my partner tell me to do something that I actually really hate … but this is not the norm for me, it requires a lot of trust and intense connection, and I certainly don’t think it’s a good norm for everyone. I explored this a bit in my post on Anger, Fear and Pain.

Also, while I accept that some people are cool with it if their partners demand major life changes as part of the S&M relationship … that’s not how I do things personally. And I have trouble imagining any situation in which I’d choose a man over my writing. If a guy really feels so threatened by my writing that he wants me to stop entirely, then we are a terrible match and I’m kind of surprised we started dating in the first place.

* I would never use the phrase “real man” outside a sarcastic context. It capitalizes on too many socially-inculcated male insecurities that I think are completely unfair. For more on this, I really like Charlie Glickman’s article Picking And Choosing From The “Act Like A Man” Box. I’ve also explored the topic of masculinity in many places, including my old “questions” series and obviously in my super awesome book Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser.

* I love the Beatles, but I was always skeptical of the quotation “Love is the answer.” I mean, love is awesome, don’t get me wrong; I’m very pro-love and pro-empathy. But … “the answer”? The answer to what? Does this mean we never have to work on our relationships or make space for each other because love will magically make everything work? My most problematic ex-boyfriend once told me “I just want to feel like you love me more than you love yourself,” which was the point that I should’ve walked out the door. Anyone who says something like that does not have your best interests at heart.

* Finally, “You have the second prettiest hair I’ve ever seen” is just not a very good neg, at least not for me. I like my negs served with epoxy, thank you.

The image at the top of this post shows a classical Greek-style picture of a couple at a table, except that the woman is smoking a cigarette and the man is reading a newspaper and the table is kind of Victorian-looking and there are coffee cups. I have no idea where it came from but I love it so much.

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/03/april-fools-day-and-some-things-i-actually-believ/feed/ 22 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/03/april-fools-day-and-some-things-i-actually-believ/ I Found The Answer http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/-MiX1KylbtA/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/01/i-found-the-answer/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2012 22:55:28 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=2899 I am surprised to find myself writing this blog post. But I always try to leave space for my feelings to evolve, and I’m really happy to say that I think I’ve come to a new and much healthier place.

Honestly, I’ve had a rough year. I broke my neck, I emerged from a toxic obsession with pickup artists, etc. At times I despaired of whether I could ever possibly find True Love.

But I’ve met this amazing man, and I know it sounds so cliché, and I am just embarrassed to be writing this right now. But like the Beatles say, “Love is the answer.” He caught my attention by saying that I have the second prettiest hair he’s ever seen, which showed me that he reads my work and can effectively throw a neg. He’s in a monogamous marriage, but he’s cheating on his wife with me, so it seems obvious that there’s room for this to develop into genuine polyamory.

And … this is so important, but I don’t know how to say it in a way that you will all understand. I’m going to give it a shot, though. I recognize now that my standards for consent and communication have been much too complex, and I need to just put all my trust in a real man. Actually, it makes me genuinely happy to be in a relationship where it’s my job to make him happy, no matter what. That’s what submission really means. I hope you all can support me in this decision, even if you don’t agree with it.

My partner doesn’t want me to blog about my sex life anymore, and obviously I will defer to his wishes. I’m hoping that maybe he’ll allow me to write about relationships in a more general sense — like giving advice on how to maintain a relationship and keep your man. Thank you all for reading my work for so long. I appreciate it immensely and while I know that I am taking a very different stand from my past writing, I hope that some of you will follow me if I get permission to write about my relationships again.

UPDATE, April 2: The above was an April Fools joke. :) Here’s what I actually believe about all this stuff.

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/01/i-found-the-answer/feed/ 19 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/04/01/i-found-the-answer/ The Theory of an S&M Encounter “Gone Wrong” http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/KXs9a4_w_Kw/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/03/28/the-theory-of-an-sm-encounter-gone-wrong/#comments Wed, 28 Mar 2012 15:30:27 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=2879 A few months ago, I wrote a post called What Happens After an S&M Encounter “Gone Wrong”. (The comments on that post are great, by the way. My readers are so smart!) I intended it to be the first of two posts, and now, at long last, here’s the second half.

I’ve often thought that BDSMers should talk more about our “failed encounters”. Sometimes the best way to learn is through “failure”, or by looking at others’ “failures”. But when a BDSM scene “goes wrong”, it’s often highly personal for everyone concerned. So it’s really hard to talk about and really hard to write about — both for the dominant and submissive partners. This is just like any relationship, really. After all, people rarely talk about their most embarrassing or awkward or otherwise difficult “mistakes made” during vanilla sex, right?

(I use phrases like “failed encounter” and “gone wrong” and “mistakes” with caution, because I think these situations can often be viewed as learning experiences, and therefore they are successful for a lot of purposes! But certainly in the moment they feel like screwups, and a lot of the time they can make the whole relationship very difficult, and I think that most people who have been through them feel as though some kind of failure happened … whether it was a failure of understanding, communication, empathy, caution, or something else.)

Much of the problem, I think, is that people have such a hard time communicating after serious miscommunications and mistakes.

The following quotation is from Staci Newmahr’s Playing At The Edge, an excellent ethnography of the BDSM community. (I’ve changed a few jargon terms so I don’t have to define them for you, but I left two: “top” and “bottom”. A top is a blanket term for a dominant and/or sadist. A bottom is a blanket term for a masochist and/or submissive.)

Sophie had been engaged in a long and intimate S&M relationship with Carl, a friend whom she deeply trusted. During the encounter she describes below, Carl changed his approach, and Sophie subsequently felt that Carl was somehow not quite himself. Sophie and Carl never quite recovered from the incident; though they remained friends and tried to do S&M again, it was, according to Sophie, never the same.

Sophie says:

He was very much a rope top. That was his big thing, was tying people up. And he was excellent at typing people up. And our dynamic was always — I mean, yes, he would absolutely hurt me when the time came for that, but there was also always this element — even when he was hurting me, it was done in this incredibly, like, touchingly caring way. And especially when he was tying me up, it was this soothing, wonderful thing.

So one day … Carl starts an encounter with me. Carl had decided in his head, from all the things that he’s heard me say about how I play with another partner, that that’s what I really want from an interaction, in order for it to be the most gratifying and valuable. So we proceeded to have an encounter where Carl was not Carl. And I didn’t stop it because it was so like, I couldn’t understand what was going on. I couldn’t understand why it felt so horrible. And it wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, because I trust him completely. [ ... ] I just couldn’t figure out what the problem is, I felt horrible through the whole thing. And he was so out of touch with me that he wasn’t even aware of how horrible I was feeling. The encounter went on for some time … and the second it was over, I … was just, like, you know, traumatized. And he was like, “Oh my God, what’s wrong?” [and] he carried me into the other room. I said something like, “Where did my Carly go?” and then he started to cry. [ ... ] He’s like, “I was trying to give you this sadistic experience.”

In Sophie’s story, Carl’s risk backfires. … The risks were unsuccessful; each ended up emotionally distraught and distant. Ultimately, they sacrificed the relationship. (pages 179-180)

Man, that description is so intense. Let’s talk about it.

My previous post was about The Practice, and I gave a lot of concrete tips in that post. Now for ….

The Theory

Staci Newmahr suggests that one of the things BDSMers get from our activities is a “trust-risk-access” cycle, in which we take risks in order to create trust and intimacy:

In reveling in a trust-risk-access cycle, participants feel knowing of, and knowable to, another. When the scene fails, this intimacy fails; in SM, when the outcomes are unfavorable, participants feel like strangers to one another. Trust, on this level, is the trust that players deeply understand one another; it is destroyed when participants in a scene feel like strangers.

I don’t think all BDSM is quite so emotionally risky. For example, I think that there’s a lot of BDSM that’s focused on specific sensations. I’ve had BDSM encounters where my goal was simply to experience a new physical sensation, so I did that, and it was all very carefully bounded and discussed. In those encounters, there were no real risks except for the physical activity, and frankly, the vast majority of S&M activities are way safer than most people think. (A lot safer than riding a bike, I’d say.) The point of those encounters was to test my body and ride out the chemical surges that resulted.

But I do think that what Newmahr describes as a “trust-risk-access” cycle is a real thing, and that many BDSMers are seeking it.

More importantly, this trust-risk-access cycle is not even remotely unique to BDSM. (Newmahr doesn’t claim that it is … although she might disagree with me when I say that the cycle is at least a little bit present in almost all sexual interactions.) However, I do suspect that BDSM gives us a particularly useful window on trust-risk-access. In BDSM, participants are not only deliberately going through this cycle and talking about how to accomplish it — we are also usually compartmentalizing those boundary-tests.

In my just-released book Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser, I floated what I call The Theory of Strategic Ambiguity. (Read excerpts from reviews and learn where to buy the book by clicking here.) Briefly, the idea is that people look for a certain level of “strategic ambiguity” in relationships — also known as contrast, challenge, unpredictability or novelty. The urge manifests differently for different people. Some people do this by playing flirtatious games, some people do it with psychological S&M, some people do it by traveling to exciting new places, some people do it by having a challenging joint project like a business, etc.

I think it’s impossible to deny that people want strategic ambiguity, but I also think that different people probably incline towards different “types” — and I also think that people want different levels. You could look at strategic ambiguity as a continuum, with “total safety” or “total certainty” on one end, and “total uncertainty” on the other end. Nobody wants to be on either end. And nobody wants to feel a type that they don’t like. I may be into S&M, but even I don’t want to be hurt too much, and there are certain types of pain that I prefer over others.

And so I also believe that some of the most important lessons of S&M are ways of categorizing, controlling, and compartmentalizing a desired sense of ambiguity. For example: jealousy. Although many people don’t, plenty of people really get off on jealousy. A large percentage of them do not admit it even to themselves, as I have observed among my friends since age sixteen. Others acknowledge that they find it arousing in some sense … but also feel incredibly conflicted and horrible about it at the same time. And others try to compartmentalize it: they talk about it carefully, play with jealousy together, get off on it, and then hopefully stop doing it until next time.

(I’ve previously analyzed jealousy in one of my polyamory posts, and discussed how I only feel it rarely today … and I’ve mentioned that when I feel jealousy nowadays, it usually feels mild and kind of hot. Yet when I was younger, it was much more terrible and soul-searing and never ever sexy.)

Methods that BDSMers use to compartmentalize our activities include planning things with an incredible amount of detail ahead of time (like with checklists), using safewords, or having encounters that are limited to a certain period of time. Similarly, some people who successfully compartmentalize jealousy are in various kinky sex communities such as S&M or swing. They do it with cuckoldry scenarios and so on, like where one partner is tied up and watches the other partner have sex with someone else.

Another type of strategic ambiguity is adversarial flirtation. Pickup artists have developed the best theories of flirtation that I have ever seen, and a lot of the game seems to be about creating a playful adversarial sense with a consenting partner. And again, at this point, it all looks like exactly the same thing to me. For example, negs are a pickup artist term that indicates “a remark, sometimes humorous, used to point out a woman’s flaws.” Some people hate negs, some people are really into them, and sometimes people use them too harshly and screw up — the same way a person can screw up an S&M scene. So how different is it when a guy negs me and we laugh about it together … as opposed to an S&M partner who insults me during an encounter and then snuggles with me afterwards?

I think that Staci Newmahr’s trust-risk-access cycle is another way of talking about this: a deliberate method of taking interpersonal risks with people we like. A deliberate method of posing challenges for the relationship, so that when the relationship clears the challenge it’s stronger than ever.

But in a “failed encounter,” both people have to deal with the emotional consequences of “failing the challenge.” The bad emotional consequences are in proportion to how intense the encounter was, and it becomes all about talking it through and comforting each other afterwards. For a relationship to survive a failed encounter, it often needs really good compartmentalization.

And I suspect that this is the same for relationships that involve other types of contrast, challenge, unpredictability and novelty, too. I find jealousy kinda hot sometimes … but when I’m dating someone who I suspect gets off on jealousy yet won’t talk about it, I lose patience very quickly. I suspect that most people who are thoughtful about relationships (including some pickup artists) would benefit a lot from learning the respectful communication tactics promoted by many S&M communities, even if they don’t plan to engage in overt S&M themselves.

]]> http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/03/28/the-theory-of-an-sm-encounter-gone-wrong/feed/ 178 http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/03/28/the-theory-of-an-sm-encounter-gone-wrong/ Help Me Choose Past Blog Entries For My Upcoming “Best Of” http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ClarisseThorn/~3/x9TkTV4vU5E/ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/03/26/help-me-choose-past-blog-entries-for-my-upcoming-best-of/#comments Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:30:10 +0000 Clarisse http://clarissethorn.com/blog/?p=2861 Aaaaaall riiiiiiight. I’ve been doing basically nothing but boring formatting work and promotion for Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser for weeks now … (By the way, it’s now available in every possible e-format over on Smashwords, and I’m working on formatting paper copies now.)

Next, I want to release a “Best Of” my blog so far — both as a nicely-formatted ebook, and a paper book.

I’m curious to know what you, my readers, think is the “best of” my blog. Or, alternatively: are there any posts that you think were good, but never got the attention that they deserved? Please do comment and let me know! If you’ve been reading for a while and aren’t sure you can remember it all, you might try glancing at my extensive Greatest Hits page. Thanks in advance.

Also, this:

The above image was created by Luke Surl. It depicts a page from one of those classic Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books: “As you journey along the path you meet an old man. He tells you that modern neuroscience has proved that all our actions and decisions are merely the machinations of a predetermined universe and that our concept of ‘free will’ is naught but a comforting illusion. If you agree with his hypothesis, turn to page 72. If you disagree, turn to page 72.”

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