Sugar daddies are okay; cougars are toast

So, after my advice the other day, I found this New York Times article, about how Google has begun a ban on advertising for cougar dating sites.

Cougars, for those of you who have been asleep, are older women who want to date younger men. Sites like Cougar Life promise to set up older, sexy, successful women with young hot studs. Google has decided that the whole concept isn’t “family-friendly,” and therefore is no longer allowing advertising from such sites on its content network – including sites like Ask.com, YoutTube and MySpace.

The kicker? Sugar daddy sites are still fine.

Mind you, I’m not all that thrilled with either concept – at least not as they are peddled by such dating sites. I’m not against May-December romances in either direction, but the commodification and objectification aspects bug me.

Nonetheless, this is flat-out discrimination. Cougar Life boasts that it “pairs women in their prime with younger men and ends the double standard!” The very language stating that such sites aren’t “family-friendly” brings bile to my mouth: it suggests pretty strongly that older men who cheat and have affairs with younger women are fine, but we mustn’t promote the idea that older women – who might even be MILFs! – might do the same thing. What about the CHILDREN??

Google has been on thin ice for a while when it comes to its motto of not being evil, but this sort of tears it for me. When Google starts trotting out the “family values” crap and applying different standards of “adult content” to women than they do to men, I start to become very afraid about how freaking huge Google is, and how much it owns.

Incidentally, though we know Facebook is evil, too, it should be noted that they’re still allowing the cougars to mate over there.

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Don’t screw with my nine-toed friends.

There must be more I can do to advance the cause of healthy feminist kink, but, as Trinity knows, it’s impossible to ignore the incredible vitriol and anti-kink rhetoric coming from radical feminists like Nine Deuce. I never go to those pages on my own, but I’ve gotten back to the blogrolls lately, and there have been more links to that space on Let Them Eat… It becomes impossible to ignore after a while, like a train wreck you can’t look away from. It’s relatively easy for me to ignore the insane right wing – not because I don’t think they have influence: they have a terrible amount of influence in this country. But they’re big and they’re a constant target of their polar opposites on the left as well as of reasonable people throughout the land, and I don’t feel much of a personal responsibility to battle them on a daily basis.

Feminists, though…well, they’re supposed to be on my side, right? I’m a woman, I’m a feminist, I see and experience oppression under the same patriarchal systems of power that they do, yes? Yet it seems to be the job of these particular wingnuts to invalidate kinky women’s experiences, undermine our sense of agency, silence us and rail against any type of education that might give us some other perspective than “BDSM is bad. Reallllly baaaaad.”

We know all this. I know all this. And it may be a sign of my own masochism that I keep feeling the need to dip my toes into these discussions and wait for them to get torn off by crocodiles. It’s probably long since time for me to quit it, since I’m increasingly surrounded by 8- and 9-toed peers who keep braving the waters as well.

But as anyone who knows me well knows, if you want me to shut up and leave you alone, there is one damn thing you don’t do. And that’s attack people I care about.

The short version: Orlando dives into the soup, like he does. (I think his toes are still intact, but his whole body’s poked full of holes.) After getting his left brain chewed on for offering facts and studies by women who’d rather he shut up if he can’t provide personal experience, then getting the other cheek slapped for daring to provide the “anecdotal evidence” that their own arguments so often rest on, and other bits of his head ripped off every time he tries to understand and be civil, he finally responds from a place of hurt and exhaustion having spent most of the previous week in the hospital caretaking his wife, who has aggressive cancer. He pours out his soul and implores these people he still considers intellectual peers and reasonable people to have compassion for the real human beings we’re talking about when we talk about this subject.

And they accuse him of using his wife’s cancer as a manipulative ploy to score points on the Internet.

Now, I don’t know Orlando in real life, though I came close to doing so and hope to meet him and his Murre – may she be whole and healthy and strong again – before long. But his voice is one I respect mightily and am wholly moved by regularly, and I’ve come to have a serious affection for him and for Murre both by extension and by direct contact.

In some ways, I have a purer affection for them both than I might if I knew them, as I still know them only as they present themselves online, and not as who they truly are, warts and all. I daresay many of us have similar online relationships, and are similarly protective of them.

And so I just want to give a shout-out to the blogosphere at large and say this:

Do not. Fuck. With people I care about.

To Polly, Nine Deuce, Joan Kelly (a “passive-aggressive liar with a martyr complex”?? Really??), Laurelin, and the rest of you who jumped in to kick someone already in pain in the guts: how dare you. This is not some troll trying to get you in a twist by jumping in with stupid counter-arguments. This is a thoughtful, careful, real human being who is doing his best to give you the respect he somehow continues to assume you deserve even as he is in disagreement with you. This is someone who consistently, throughout the time I’ve been reading him, has made an honest attempt to engage you in discourse and given you ample opportunity to get to know him. And when in his frustration and exhaustion he finally stops beating his head against the brick walls of your own anger and pain and shows you his throat, you don’t hesitate to step up and slit it.

You cruel, twisted fucks. And you dare to say that what consensual kinksters do is evil.

Fuck you. Fuck you right in the ear, until you learn how to think a bit better about who deserves your compassion.

(Sorry, Orlando. I had to.)

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This is not my fault, I swear…

Following the hubbub around the misogynist remarks made by Rob at The Oh Team on This Week in Kink, a friend and former co-worker of mine made this for me. I feel loved.

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This week in WTF: Fevered Egos

I’ve been behind on my current events, in particular reading the sex blogs I generally frequent, since my move. But I’m starting to catch up, so let the outrage begin.

Exactly one month ago, Maymay posted about a This Week in Kink podcast in which the following statement appeared:

I firmly and strongly believe that it is a woman’s role to be submissive to a man. I believe that submission in men is taught at conception because as soon as women realize that they’re pregnant, they start planning that child’s fucking future and quite often that the mother is definitely the beginning of the emasculation. That said, I think that women in the past couple of hundred years have gotten entirely too high on their own power and eventually need to be slapped in the fucking head and put in their place.

I’ve been sitting on this for a while because it’s hard for me to think of much else to say besides “Wow. Just fucking wow. Like, seriously?”

Being blinded by rage makes rational argument difficult. Must be the estrogen.

What troubles me most is not that someone said something like this; there will always be assholes and idiots who espouse this kind of garbage, whether it is about women, African-Americans, queers, or submissive men. But it disturbs me greatly that in the BDSM world, where we’re meant to be playing with power, subverting some traditional norms and amplifying others to erotic effect, there are people who still truly believe this kind of outright nonsense. Even worse, that someone with such opinions is such a strong voice in the community.

I love some male tops very much, and as I’ve made quite clear on this blog, I’m a switch. (And this kind of shit is one of the reasons why switches are some of my favorite people to play with.) But I’m disgusted by the tendency in a certain type of male dom to believe that they are simply bringing back the good old days by making women subservient the way God intended. Aren’t we supposed to be progressive? Isn’t the point of alternative sexuality to explore, well, alternatives??

And get a load of the comments over there. Don’t get my started on the whole “I have a right to my opinion and you have the right to yours” crap. Free speech is free speech, and this fuckwad has the right to say whatever he likes, just as I do. But to hide behind free speech, to say that you will “fight to the death” next to me to defend my right to have an opinion, too, when in the same breath you’re saying that I’m a second-class human being, is completely disingenuous. It wasn’t so long ago that women didn’t have the right to an opinion – whether in matters of state or in the home. You can’t have it both ways, asshole.

Does this homunculus mongoloid even understand what he is saying? “That’s cute that you have opinions – here, let me help you have them, even though they’re so clearly wrong – you’ll need me to help enforce your rights, since you’re less than human.” What fun.

It burns my ass, too, that this guy started Fetlife. I was just starting to enjoy myself over there a little bit.

EDIT: It actually wasn’t John, who runs the podcast, who made the comments, it was Rob, who is a DJ on some adult radio thing called The Oh Team. (From the page, I gather that he has “twelve years’ experience as a full-time Master.” Ooooohh, my panties are moist.)

Much more of this, and I’ll be as bitter and angry as people seem to think darling Maymay is. Nice job, kink community.

Huh. Guess I still can’t say much more than “what the fuck.”

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Call Me and I’ll Ignore You For Money

Okay, so I’ve had an account on Niteflirt for some time, but I must admit that I’ve rarely used it. If live domming was frequently uncomfortable for me, phone domming was even worse: without the human element of physical connection, I felt even more objectified than before. And bargaining for more time and thus more money always felt rather sleazy.

Nonetheless, many women seem to do really well with it. And most of those who do fall into one of two camps:

1. Women who will act like bitches and treat you like shit, and

2. Women who pick up the phone and then ignore you.

When I first found this second one out, I was flabbergasted. I mean, I know about the whole bitch-goddess thing; I don’t do it and never did, because I think it’s ridiculous and kind of horrible to charge someone for your abuse.

But to charge someone to be ignored?? I mean, if I wanted that I’d call customer care at my credit card company.

What I wonder is: what do these women do while the men are on the other end ignoring them? Stay quiet? Do nothing? Go about their TV-watching or chatting on another phone with someone else? True, real ignoring can’t be the complete fantasy can it? I mean, maybe she’s masturbating or something and he can hear the sounds??

Talk to me, internets. What the fuck is going on with this ignoring fetish?

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Radical feminism: how far have we come?

I know, I know, I said I wasn’t going to talk about it anymore. If it’s any consolation, I haven’t been over to the radfem blogs lately, though I’m sure I’ll keep on reading Trinity and then it’ll be all over.

But I just finished reading two essays from the old standby that I’m ashamed not to have read yet, Coming to Power, edited by Pat Califia. The first, by Gayle Rubin, is entitled “The Leather Menace: Comments on Politics and SM,” and was completed in the very early 1980s.

It begins with the wonderful line, “It is difficult to discuss the politics of sadomasochism when the politics of sex in general are so depressingly muddled.” As I read on through the article, as well as Califia’s article on the founding and first few years of the lesbian leather association Samois, I was struck by what my leather ancestors, as it were, went through. Raids; attacks by not just the mainstream media but by NOW and other feminist organizations, including lesbian organizations; exclusion from the gay rights movement; silencing by the feminist movement; demonization by nearly everyone; arrests, child custody contests, and so on.

But the thing that killed me was the rhetoric from feminists of the day, like this gem from Diane Russell:

I see sadomasochism as resulting in part from the internalization of heterosexual dominant-submissive role playing. I see sadomasochism among lesbians as involving in addition an internalization of the homophobic heterosexual view of lesbians. Defending such behavior as healthy and compatible with feminism, even proselytizing in favor of it is about the most contra-feminist anti-political and bourgeois stance that I can imagine.

Not to mention Susan Griffin, whose essay “Hunger as Ideology” I have taught to freshman writing classes, who had this incredibly insulting thing to say about it:

The fact is, the whole culture is S/M, we’re all sadomasochists. The people in SAMOIS, or gay people who wear leather, have a more severe form of the disease.

Nice. Sound familiar to anyone here? Has this rhetoric changed in thirty years, like, at all?

I guess it’s nice that we’re now living in an age where S/M is a fact of life, suffuses the fashion industry and music videos, and will not generally get you arrested. Getting tongue-lashed by feminists is not the worst thing that can happen. But I just find myself really sad that this segment of feminism, which tends to claim to speak for all feminists, hasn’t gotten its collective head on straight yet about this issue.

For those following along at home, Pat Califia said it best, back in 1981 or so: “Until women own their own bodies and have the right to seek erotic pleasure completely, with no restrictions, women will not be free.”

As the kids were only too recently saying, period-dot.

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Rage against the people who hate us

I’ve recently stumbled across Trinity’s blog, in particular this post entitled ‘On Not Asking Why.’ The main gist of it is this: Whenever people go about asking women things like “why do you suppose you enjoy getting tied up and beaten,” what they really mean, generally, is “What’s wrong with you anyway,” and at times specifically, “How dare you perform a sexuality that contributes to the patriarchy, you bad bad feminist?”

The overall message of the post is that asking why someone is kinky in the first place is probably intellectual wankery at best anyway, and so my first response to it was to question her logic, and whether it wasn’t still valuable at times to question some of the things that get our rocks off when they’re politically problematic in some way (rape fantasies, for example).

Then I took a gander at the comment thread at a blog called Rage Against the Man-chine that engendered the post and quickly decided that this type of question very likely never leads to good places. Certainly not to fun happy wet ones.

Click the above link at your own risk. My own days of blissful naivete are over. There are radical feminists out there hating on BDSM. Many of them believe that all women who would ever be submissive to a man must have been abused and damaged in their childhoods, and due to past trauma have been groomed and won over to accepting abuse from their male tops “consensually,” scare quotes intentional. Also, male dominants are always actually closet abusers. Also OMG Teh Patriarchy. Also, did you know that in ‘the post patriarchy,’ nobody will be into BDSM? Bet you didn’t know that.

Now don’t get me wrong: I know that we still live very much in a racist, homophobic, patriarchal, broken capitalist system. But seriously: you’re going to tell me that my sexuality is RONG AND BAD because patriarchy exists and I’m perpetuating it by getting my rocks off when men hit me with stuff (because I ask them to)? And you’re going to solve this horrible injustice (occurring chiefly in my pants) by deciding for me that my sexuality is politically incorrect?

Wow, fuck you sideways.

I’m very grateful that Trinity is out there, fighting the good fight and getting into those kinds of spaces, getting her hands dirty and taking a hell of a lot of shit for the sake of trying to set these people, who should be our allies, straight. I for one have no such patience, and will go on observing the melee from a safe distance.

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WTF of the day

So, I’m looking for places to post news of my clips going up (like ya do), and my videographer points me to Mistress Destiny’s Femdom forums.

I’m reading along in the rules of the forum, which all seem relatively reasonable, until I come across this little gem:

Do not dispute the sex of another member on an open Forum. If you are transgendered you are expected to ensure that the membership knows this [emphasis mine]. If you believe a member is misrepresenting his or her sex then bring it to the attention of a moderator in a private message or e-mail.

Wait, what? So, we all know that 47-year-old guys who live in their mother’s basements along with a stockpile of weapons go around on the Internet all the time pretending to be nubile 18-year-old girls. I can understand where this might be a problem if folks on the forums are trying to get together with members of their preferred gender group, and I admire the moderator for suggesting that such disputes be handled privately outside of the boards. I’m sure there’s some great story for why this rule became necessary, though it still irks me in some weird way.

But did I just read that right that transgendered people are expected to disclose their transgenderedness to the members of the forums? What kind of damnfool asshattery is that supposed to be? So, your gender identity is protected from public discussion/dispute so long as you are a cisgendered male or female, but if not you’re expected to tell everyone about it up front?

Um. Okay, this is supposed to be a community about alternative sexuality, yes? Specifically femdom? Right. So…maybe you could be just a tad bit more open-minded than that? And maybe, oh, I don’t know, stop discriminating against people who are a vital part of your community?? You of all people should know that gender is a sticky subject at best, and while I understand your desire to keep the subject of the boards mainly in a femdom context (i.e., no posting male dom videos or whathaveyou), what reason do you have for “expecting” that any of your membership reveal his, her, zir or hir gender to anyone?

I don’t think I’ll be spending much time over there. Or at the least, I’ll be writing an angry letter to the moderator.

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Showgirls: Two Hours and Eight Minutes I’ll Never Get Back

I finally got the opportunity, if it can be so called, to watch Showgirls last night. My very limited knowledge of this movie was limited to 1. its being unstoppably awful, and 2. its being a cult classic, especially admired by the drag queen set. My boyfriend has a habit of having the TV on all the time – a habit I do not share – and decided to select this cinematic gem from On Demand to watch while we sat and did work.

My boyfriend’s wife and I sat there with our laptops, she cruising LiveJournal or FetLife, me attempting to write a very serious blog post about race play. But to no avail: however many times our jaws dropped at the incredible shitpile that is this film, however many snarky remarks we made about the Z-movie dialogue, we could not take our fucking eyes off this movie. It’s like a train wreck with tits. Lots and lots of tits.

I poked at my computer. I wrote some desultory emails and tried to find good news coverage of the Craigslist murder. But my eyes just kept wandering upward, to gaze once more on the marvel of horrid dancing, plastic nudity, and bad sex. It was mesmerizing.

I looked at IMDB just to get some info to write this review, and got sucked into the user comments. Some of my favorite lines:

“[I]t’s the kind of world where we, the audience, are expected to be emotionally invested in the trials and tribulations of a knife-wielding, doggy chow-eating, bipolar crack-whore with aspirations to radically improve her life by becoming a titty dancer.”

“If I remember correctly, Joe Esterhaus [sic] was paid a ridiculous amount of money for the screenplay for this film. As penance for creating this abomination, he should be required to wander the earth, giving money to anyone who sat through it.”

“I guess that Joe [Eszterhas] and I must have different ideas about female empowerment because his idea seems to be to portray women as hookers, strippers, killers and raging lesbian predators (anything outside those four categories and they’re fishfood). He apparently thinks that their best activities for empowerment are knives, lesbianism, sex for cash, violence and nasty sneers.”

That last quotation struck me especially, since I agree with the sentiment that creating female characters that are just as violent, vindictive, petty and power-hungry as the male characters does not a feminist movie make. However, I am curious about the complexity of the empowerment (or disempowerment) of sex workers, and the complicated yet ham-fisted way in which this film treats it. It’s one of my pet peeves when people – especially sex workers themselves – put sex work in a hierarchy of legitimacy: “Oh, I’m a dominatrix – I’d never be a prostitute, or, “She’s not a real domina, she’s just a stripper with a whip.” Well, what’s wrong with being a stripper, or a prostitute for that matter?

A good friend of mine, years ago, told me that if I was going to do this work, I’d have to accept that I was a sex worker. I tried on that moniker and found I didn’t mind it. While I personally would never be able to have “actual sex” for money, I respect those women and men who can and do. And I accept that what I do is a kind of sex for money, though I don’t have what the law calls sexual contact with my clients. For me to look down on strippers or escorts would be hypocrisy of the highest order.

This film, in the midst of all its other faults, manages to bungle this one as well. It attempts to glorify the main character’s goal to become a dancer (why she didn’t move to New York instead is a total mystery), and in spite of the horrid audition process, clearly sees dancing in a topless hotel show as a big step up from doing nude lapdances at a strip club. Yet the one thing the main character, Nomi, will not “stoop to” is whoring. When Gina Gershon (the only character in the whole damn thing with no illusions, and who plays her role with relish) tries to prove to Nomi that she is a whore – not because she literally has sex for money but because she sells her sexuality – she will have none of it. A nude lapdance to climax for $500 is one thing; fucking for cash is quite another.

Right.

Now granted, since the movie is so blantantly awful, it’s hard to tell exactly the point that is being made. That Nomi, in spite of being a sociopathic screwball who steps on everybody who gets in her way, is still redeemable because at least she doesn’t fuck for money? That she is actually a whore and that makes her, and everyone else in the film, part of a huge, corrupt, horrible industry? Or the old saw that every sex worker is actually a victim of a male-dominated system that seeks to chew up the best part of your life and them spit you out – to hell if you survive or not?

It’s kinda hard to tell.

But wait, there’s more.

– The rape scene. OMG the rape scene. I could forgive almost everything in this movie up to this point as over-the-top camp, complete with catfights, casual sexual harrassment, horrifying lapdances, and women throwing shiny marbles on the floor for fellow dancers to slip on. But when one of the only African-American characters in the movie, and possibly the only sympathetic character, gets brought to a room and gets beaten and gang-raped – and yes, we have to endure the entire scene – that’s where the whole thing falls off the cliff.

-The “eroticized” bad stuff. There is scene after scene in this movie where the corruption, misogyny, backstabbing and general horror of Vegas is meant to be revealed, in some sort of pastiche of the “corruption of the innocent in the name of fame” theme. The result of these scenes is doubleplusungood: first of all, each scene is played slow, for the greatest possible erotic effect. Witness the scene where the director tells Nomi to put ice on her nipples to make them perky for the dance number. The whole thing, meant to invoke disgust, succeeds admirably not by actually making it uncomfortable, but by attempting to eroticize the moment and yet managing to make it entirely unsexy.

Which brings me to my next point:

-The general unsexiness. Oh dear gods, is this movie the opposite of hot. Cold, clinically gyrating robot-girls. Ridiculous costumes. Horrific sex scenes. So much nudity that it loses all novelty and appeal. There is a continuous debate amidst the user comments on IMDB as to whether the movie is intentionally bad, intentionally funny, a satire, and so on. This is one instance in which I may agree: if you’re going to make a satire about the merciless world of Las Vegas showbiz, it might as well be completely unarousing.

There are a million more things I could say about how the idea that this is a depiction of female empowerment is a huge steaming pile of fail, how sad I was to see my secret boyfriend Kyle MacLachlan starring in this piece of trash, and how unfunny even some of the moments that were supposed to be funny were. But I don’t feel like wasting even more hours on this crap.

Instead I’ll just finish with the main thought I kept having every time the luminous Gina Gershon appeared on screen.

Now if only her character, instead of a creepy, predatorily bisexual “star” trying to drag a young fresh piece of meat down to her level, were actually a nurturing dominant woman seeking to mentor her replacement using the model of leather D/s…ooo, now that’s a movie I ‘d pay to watch. I’m just damn glad I didn’t lay out any money for this one.

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How deep in Christ do you want me to go?

Somebody please tell me that this is a joke.

While searching for links to the anal sex books I like for the other day’s post, I stumbled across (and barked my metaphysical shins against, and broke my brain upon) a site called Sex In Christ. Among the many things I experienced while looking at its various articles was a profound wish that I had studied the Bible more thoroughly so that I, too, could take Scripture out of context and use it to justify buttsex.

Among the many, many gems: “For a young woman who has never engaged in sexual intercourse, having anal sex allows her to preserve her virginity (i.e., maintain an intact hymen) until marriage. There is no greater gift that a bride can give than to offer her pure, unsullied maidenhead to her husband on their wedding night.”

Ah yes, my darling husband: having only allowed you to relentlessly plow my asshole and mouth with your huge yet still-virginal Christian member (except for the santorum that now sleeks its wood-like shaft, so reminiscent of the Cross on which Our Lord died for our sins), now, at last, on our wedding night, I can offer you my pure, unsullied maidenhead!

Are these people for serious? I mean, really, for reals? I thought the hypocrisy of fundamentalist Christianity knew limits, but apparently not. (Visit the previous link only if you’re curious about the awesome power of God’s “fist of might.”

No, really.)

My favorite, of course, is Bondage in Christ – BDSM in a Christian Marriage. Put your minds to rest, ye Christian soldiers who feel the weight of sin when you take your pleasure from beating your wife’s rear end raw with an incense censer. Before you suffer one more moment’s guilt at shoving the consecrated host up her ass, remember: “Just as we trust in the Lord in our submission to Him and willingly offer it, a wife who is submissive to her husband is offering a great spiritual gift and doing a great service for both herself and her husband.”

More importantly, “a man can adopt a submissive and servile role and allow his wife to dominate him sexually, if it is absolutely clear that outside of the bedroom, the husband is the spiritual head of the marriage.” Lest we forget that dominance in women is unnatural.

Oh, and unsurprisingly, threesomes are okay so long as there aren’t two guys involved, and so long as everyone maintains ‘natural sex roles.’ Just remember that those fags and bulldykes are still going to hell.

I’ve got a better idea. How about I make a movie called Bend Over Jeebus and see how that plays with the fundie crowd? Or, for a more discreet enjoyment of holiness, I propose the installation of The Baby Jesus Buttplug on every pew!

I think I need to go lie down. Maybe in a nun’s outfit.

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