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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Bad, bad dominant

Someone just friended me on Facebook whom I haven’t seen in a while: an adorable, pigtailed, somewhat gender-queer boy I’ll call Paul. Paul is younger than I am, very smart, but generally demure around me in a way that drives me crazy. In that good way.

Looking at his picture, I’m reminded of a certain party I attended – not even a play party, but attended by many a freak – where, under the influence of several lovely cocktails, I spent some time with him kneeling at my feet while I pulled his hair. The sounds he made were absolutely delicious.

Dominance is a bit like Spanish for me: I do it better when my inhibitions are down. This isn’t to say that I generally play when I’m drunk; I hardly ever do, in fact, and I know that the party line says it’s a Bad Idea. It is to say, however, that at actual play parties, where drink isn’t allowed, I’m likely to spend a lot more time subbing. You’d think that someone who was a professional for four years would be better at asserting sexual dominance when the opportunity presented itself, but it turns out not so much. It’s a lot easier to be and do that without self-doubt when there’s someone paying you – it’s a fairly clear indicator that they want what you’ve got on offer.

Now and then I wish I had a sweet boy like that to play with from time to time. His relationship status says “It’s complicated.” A promising sign?

I’m often amused by how predictable my desires are. On the one hand, I’m a polyamorous switchy bisexual: it could be said that I don’t even have a type. But it turns out I have several, and what’s entertaining and occasionally distressing to me is how subversively heteronormative they are.

Bet you haven’t seen those two words next to each other very often.

What I mean is this. I am fairly femmy in appearance – very femmy, in fact, aside from the fact that I’m six feet tall and have a large frame. I like to be dominated by men who are manly: handsome, square-jawed men who look terrible in drag. I like commanding voices, sharp words, and cock.

I like, also, to be dominated by women who are manly: butch, short-haired women and bois in suits and ties who grab and take and twist and initiate. I like commanding voices, sharp words, and cock.

I like to dominate women who are more femme than I am. Girls in frilly dresses, with long hair to tangle my hands in and full breasts for me to alternately suck on and slap around, women who let their heads loll back and close their eyes as they part their lips. Makeup to mess up. Little intakes of breath and noises of pleasure. They bring out my butch, and I like to wear leather and strap on my silicone with them.

And I like to dominate men who are a little femmy, too. Not the humiliated sissy slut; as I’ve mentioned before, the kink of self-loathing is not my thing. But boys who look androgynous and sweet in skirts. Boys who can pull off pigtails, but still look like boys. Boys who blush and cast their eyes down when I flirt with them, and who turn to butter when I pull their heads back by the hair. Boys who start out demure but scream and buck and beg when they’re being fucked in the ass.

Growl. Now I’ve distracted myself.

But seriously. It almost bothers me. I’m queer in so many ways, and yet in my sex I continually enact the traditional binary in non-traditional ways.

What do you notice about the ways your sexuality recapitulates, or doesn’t, the expected norms?
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Questioning Desires: A place for sissies and worms?

I realize lately that I’ve been feeling an uncomfortable internal conflict over two major lines of thought I’ve been reading in the blogrolls.

One: the argument that those of us who are kinky and whole have been having with the radical feminists over whether submission is okay for women (In case you’ve been sleeping: the kinkyfeminists say yes, the radfems say you must be brainwashed by the patriarchy).

The other: why is the general image of male submission, and for that matter, female dominance, so fucked up that both truly dominant women and truly submissive males almost don’t want to identify as such and feel that their sexualities are being hijacked?

Now, it’s certainly true that one of the reasons I stopped doing professional domination is because I wanted to stop contributing to the mainstream image of what female dominance and male submission is. With a few lovely exceptions, it was hurting me to be involved in a business that consistently objectified both the client and me, without allowing for true sexual fulfillment for either of us.

I made a post recently about the wacky ignore lines that are available on Niteflirt. I came to the conclusion that ignore lines, along with financial domination, have the same ethical problems for me as heavy humiliation play, only with the added bonus that I would feel like a schmuck for taking their money for doing nothing. Ignoring seems like the end result of the kind of humiliation play I don’t like to engage in: the “you are a worthless disgusting pathetic small-penised worm beneath my queenly notice” variety. It hurts me that this type of request is so popular for certain submissive men, particularly those that seek professionals. Especially since many of the men who want financial domination include a very scary real-life aspect of wanting me to financially destroy them, which I could definitely never do. It’s not too large a distance between “i’m a worthless piece of shit beneath your heel” and “I want to be actually destroyed,” and so I was never comfortable going down that road with my clients.

Yet the thing that keeps itching at my brain is this: if we decide that (as Tom Allen puts it) “sissified sissy maids who insist on talking about their sissy clitty,” men who want to be treated like dirt, and even men who want to have their money taken from them and to be ignored by the object of their worship are all suffering from the delusion that their sexuality is not okay and so they are punishing themselves for it, then are we not invalidating what may be their true desires just as cavalierly as the radfems invalidate the desires and agency of submissive women?

It’s a stretch, I know. And I think the answer lies in how one separates a kink from a pathology. If you are, say, an insensitive prick at work and you treat women like shit, and you go to a dominatrix who treats you like shit for an hour, and then you go back to work and at least for a while you’re a little nicer…well, maybe that kind of domination is doing some good in the world, and maybe those desires are healing. If instead, however, you’re that same prick and you pay a dominatrix to expunge your prickitude so you can go back and be a prick some more, then that seems control-freaky and pathological to me. By the same token: if you enjoy buying a dominatrix gifts and sending her money because you have a lot of money and enjoy showing your admiration in that way without asking anything in return, then that’s cool (these, I must advise those who are considering pro domination, are definitely the unicorns of the paying male submissive world). If instead you send a dominatrix gifts without clearing it with her and then start demanding a bunch of her attention in obsessive ways, or if you send your entire paycheck to a dominatrix each week and are therefore living in a cardboard box, there might be something wrong with you.

But what about the place of the desire for being made to feel less-than in a non-monetary D/s relationship? I don’t want to play make-fun-of-the-small-willy, but I’m sure there are people who truly do. While I find the entire sissy-maid thing distasteful and sexist, I know that there are dominant women out there who do not find it so, and believe it is their prerogative to play with sissy maids. And while I got sick of wearing corsets and heels all the time, I used to get a lot of enjoyment out of decking myself out in traditional fetishwear (until I was obligated to, which is the issue, of course). After all, there are sexist dynamics reflected in male dom/female sub SM play as well, and while I think it’s important to beware of abuse, I also will fight tooth and nail to defend the right of healthy submissive women to do their thing.

I want to reclaim the masculinity and power of the submissive man as much as anyone. But might there also be room for the stereotypical submissive man in there, a way to reframe his desires without destroying them? That is: I’m sick and tired, too, of there being only one idea of what a female dominant is, of what a male submissive is, and that being representative of those entire sexualities. It’s a huge and monolithic image to do battle with, and I want to do my part to encourage greater diversity. But I also think it’s dangerous to decide that the people who really want those things can only be either pathological or participating in a monetized script.

Your comments wanted.

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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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Building content

I’ll be doing a video shoot tomorrow, after rather a long hiatus. It can be difficult, since my videographer lives in New York, but we get him up here to Boston whenever we can to shoot.

The last video work I did was actually with the inestimable Trigger in Minnesota.

He’s one of the best-known human horses in the business, and great to work with. His stuff is over here at The Human Equine, and I’m hoping to do more with him later this year. I also did some work on The Face Seat Cushion site while I was out there, and that was surprisingly fun as well.

Tomorrow, though, I’m going to hook up with my gorgeous amazon girlfriend and a male model I like and trust and do some down and dirty stuff Amazon-style.

More full-weight trampling, some barefoot, some in the new metal-heeled shoes the model tells me he’s bringing for me; more foot worship; more cigarette torture and ball humiliation…ah, yay. I’m also hoping to get some hot, simple footage of me and Madeline going at it – she’s such a beautiful fuck. I can’t quite pass for butch, but I sure can slam her against the wall and have my way with her.

I’ll post here when more clips are up.

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