Sex Geek

Interesting thought of the day (courtesy M): for a vanilla person, figuring out a kinky person is like reading a tabloid newspaper. Most of the time in the tabloids, while much of what’s there is potentially titillating, only 20% of what’s written is true, much like most kinksters are interested only in a limited percentage of all the titillating kinky practices out there. The thing is, in both cases, you never know which 20% it is. Hee hee.

I’m totally knackered, but it would be really hard for me to sleep tonight without taking at least a minute or two to post a report about Midori’s rope bondage dojo this weekend.

Okay, so I’ve mentioned before here how I’ve found bondage to be fun but not particularly kinky. The technical competencies of rope bondage have never been the problem; I learned the basics pretty quickly a few years back, memorized them, and felt comfortable enough to get creative pretty fast too. By no means am I an expert, but I can lace someone into a body harness in five minutes or less, sans problème - even did it on TV once! - and add a few limb ties and other interesting bits as needed.

And I have discovered the joys of bondage along the way, or at least some of them. I can get into it from an artistic perspective - oh, look how pretty and symmetrical these knots are, and how the ropes push the breasts out just so, and so on, and so forth. I can also get into it from a meditative frame of mind, in that it can take a long time and require quite a bit of focus to put someone in bondage (sort of like, I dunno, wax-painting Ukrainian Easter eggs or something). But neither of those approaches has ever really made me feel particularly horny, and in fact, when I’m feeling like a big bad top, the last thing I want is for a bunch of ropes to get in the way of someone’s body parts - I want full access for purposes of both torture and pleasure. So what’s the point of bondage if it doesn’t get me off?

Well, as I mentioned in my last post, I figured that if I couldn’t get into the psychology of rope bondage by spending 16 hours learning it from Midori, who quite literally wrote the book on the subject, I would never get it.

Let’s just say I get it now. Heh.

Nonetheless, rope on its own will probably never be a big deal for me. Some people drop into sloppy smiling subspace just by getting a whiff of the distinctive scent of hemp rope - the really expensive shit that the Serious Rope Bondage Geeks love but that, as I discovered this weekend, makes my skin burn like it’s been scoured with steel wool. Yay, allergies. Me, I’m a bit more frugal in my bondage supply shopping; I get my plain ol’ nylon and cotton ropes at Rona, or in one recent case from the fine folks at www.handmaderope.com.

Anyway, so the technical specifications - how many millimetres wide it’s been woven, what special colour it’s been dyed, what imported fibres it’s made of and what special oils it’s been treated with - will likely never get my juices flowing. (Although hey, if it works, don’t knock it - it was really rather boner-inducing to watch the incredibly beautiful DeLano turn into putty when Midori wrapped his face in a wad of hemp to let him breathe in the aroma.)

But this weekend, somewhere between the drill that involved putting beach balls in bondage (gah! not easy!), tying my new friend Mateo’s foot up with a few strategically placed knots so that walking would be therapeutically uncomfortable, and suspending myself in a Swiss seat rope harness rock-climber-style from a ceiling attachment point, I think I finally figured out the element that had been missing for me until this point. And for me at least, it ties directly into dominance.

All of a sudden I’ve realized that it makes perfect sense, from a dominant place, to move someone’s body around into positions that I find pleasing, and instruct them to hold their arms like this and their foot like that while I secure them into the appropriate spot to then do with them as I wish (presumably not a heavy flogging, but rather something more localized, like clothes pegs or needles or canes or just plain old fucking). If I were just doing sensation play tout court, I’d probably not bother with the ropes - I’ve got plenty of pals with whom I can exchange a friendly flogging with no need for restraint because there’s no power dynamic happening. But certainly, the idea of turning someone into my personal fuck-toy/torture bunny by placing them exactly as I want to have them and making it relatively impossible for them to move… yeah, okay, I get it. That’s kinky. It’s workin’ for me.

That’s not to say there’s no longer any appeal in having someone hold a position simply because I tell them to. I mean, it’s pretty hot to say "put your hands against the wall and don’t move until I give you permission" and have someone obey - it always makes me happy to know that even though someone has all the choice in the world, and could move away and run out the door any minute, they still choose to stay put and take whatever I’m dishing out. That kind of desire on the part of a bottom definitely feeds the top’s enjoyment of a scene. Well, this top anyway.

But I’m starting to realize that the psychological reinforcement of that state of submission through bondage can be incredibly powerful, and takes nothing away from a person’s choice in the matter of being there. I mean, I assume that if someone’s letting me tie them to a bamboo pole spreader bar with their face down on the floor and their ass in the air in the first place, they probably kinda want to be face down with their ass in the air. I’m big and tough and all (erm - yeah, right) but I don’t pretend to be a wrestler. And I’m not much into conflict roles in scene anyway.

So there ya have it. Psychology and dominance and people’s lovely bodies, all neatly tied together with the help of some well-placed loops and knots.

I’ve got a graduation certificate, a Rope Dojo water bottle and commemorative graduate-only tote bag, a few more friends from far-off places (Las Vegas! New York!), two unweildy bamboo poles (thank goodness for the lift home - they woulda been interesting to take on the metro), a load of rope, and a new set of tricks up my sleeve.

Now, to put them to use…

So many interesting things are coming my way these days. Here’s a random collection of them for your general entertainment and edification.

1. Simian Mobile Disco’s video for their song "Hustler," sent to me by a lovely fag friend of mine who (rightfully) thought I’d enjoy it. It starts out with girls whispering secrets in each other’s ears broken-telephone-style, and winds up with… well, let’s just say it would have been the best porn I’ve ever seen if they’d made the song twenty minutes longer or so. Dang!

2. An article about "sexsomniacs" - i.e. people who fall asleep and then proposition people. Y’know, rather than the other way around (presumably with some action in between). No really, it’s like they’re wired backwards or something. I might have a high libido, but I must say, if one of my partners were to make a move while they were asleep, I think I’d be more than a little creeped out. Favourite sentence in the article: … "Sometimes they hate it," added Pressman of the reactions of sexsomniacs’ partners. "Sometimes they tolerate it. On rare occasions you have stories of people liking it better than waking sex." …

3. OK, so I read an article about "whipping therapy" in some sort of reputable source a few months back, so I know it’s not a complete load of hogwash. The idea is that if you take a beating it stimulates endorphins, which can contribute to curing depression. Fair enough. Not sure it would be for everyone, but there are reasons we kinky sorts go back for more - that shit feels awesome. I wouldn’t advocate it as a replacement for therapy if you actually do need therapy, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of masochism on the side to help things along. Anyway, this particular article on the topic is hilarious to read. It sounds like it’s been translated from the Russian, so it’s full of charmingly weird sentence structures and has a strangely childlike tone.

4. On the general theme of Halloween, the hotties at Dykes on Mikes are asking for lesbian horror stories. Check out their announcement:

***

Dykes on Mykes (ckut 90.3 fm Montreal) Halloween Special:

Lesbian Horror Stories! We want to hear them from you! What are your lesbian horror stories and worst nightmares?

Have you ever slapped a hunk of steak on the (vegan) BBQ at a lesbian potluck? Or admitted to a lesbian folk circle that you don’t know who Ani Difranco is? Or worse, that you don’t even like her? Have you ever worn make- up and your new hot perfume to a chemical-free lesbian party? Ever admitted that you actually can’t stand processing, or that when someone "checks in", you "check out"? (say goodbye to your lesbian sex life!)

Email us with your lesbian horror stories or worst fears (100-200 words max), and we’ll read them on air to let our listeners know that no one is alone - we’ve all been there.

anonymity guaranteed. write us at dom2 - at - nomorepotlucks-dot-org or *if any of you are feeling really brave, call us  during the show on monday, October 30th between 7-8pm and tell us your stories live on air!*

—
dykes on mykes
http://www.nomorepotlucks.org/chronique-dykes/
www.nomorepotlucks.org

***

I’m kind of fascinated to hear what the show actually ends up sounding like. I mean, I’ve met some weird-ass lesbians in my time - like, say, the one who insists that she really likes her fucked-up pattern of dating someone obnoxious for a week, U-Hauling it, getting into terrible fights, and splitting up six months down the line, thus having to look for a new apartment twice a year. Apparently she enjoys having a perpetual home decoration project on the go. But I never quite thought of the more pathological of our sisters as being horror stories per se.

On the other hand, as I think about this, I’m remembering my former stalker - a dyke I met at a women’s music festival - and realizing that, yup, that was pretty horrorful. Maybe I should write in!

5. Now for some real horror… my favourite issue of late is the proposed move to raise the age of consent from 14 to 16 in Canada. (Feel free to read my strongly worded and researched opinions on the topic here.) And finally there’s going to be some public discussion of the matter! Woo-hoo! Very exciting, indeed. Those Queer McGill folks do such good work. Check out the details below! I’m SO there, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how many others will be joining me!

In the meantime, after eight hours of rope bondage drills and two hours of playing with a two-year-old and a late-ish play party (at which, sadly, I did not get to tie someone up and stick dozens of needles in them… darn), I’m so tired I can barely type. So it’s bedtime for me. More later.

***

As many of you know, the federal government has proposed raising the age of consent for sexual activity from its current 14 years to 16 years. While protecting
youth from sexual exploitation is a worthy endeavour, many doubt the effectiveness of such a change, with groups like the Canadian AIDS Society and Egale Canada opposing the raise. Communtity outreach groups and social services have raised concern about the effects that a higher age of consent could have on the delivery of safe-sex information to young people and the provision of medical care. In order to bring various viewpoint on this issue to the McGill
community and start a debate on this pressing topic, Queer McGill has organised a panel discussion featuring represenatives from various community groups with a stake in the issue. They will be talking about their views on the proposal, and what affect it could have on their work. The event will be held on Wednesday, November 1st, 6PM, Lev Bukhman Room, Shatner Building, 3480 McTavish Street

There will be representatives from Head and Hands, and ACCM, as well as McGill law professor Robert Leckey, who is a legal advisor for Egale Canada. There will
also be the tentative attendance of a representative from the Batshaw Foundation, a group that provides social services to youth. I encourage everyone to come and learn more about this issue from people who work in fields pertaining to youth sexuality and welfare. The discussion will be in English.

***

Highlights of the past few days:

- Very minimal amounts of sleep, resulting in an odd state that feels like a cross between an adrenaline rush and sleepwalking. I think I’m getting old, I’m not used to this anymore.

- Getting a big new contract that involves me dressing in my Corporate Wardrobe again (it’s been a while!) and going into an actual office every day. I’m so accustomed to being out that I almost forgot what it was like to have to actually Come Out to new people, especially professional colleagues. Luckily these folks seem open-minded, so when I referred to "my girlfriend" in one conversation and then "my boyfriend" in another not long after, they didn’t act weird. Neato.

- Being told by my cab driver today that I look like a man. Fascinating, considering I was wearing four-inch heels at the time. I was absurdly flattered. Even more absurdly, I think he actually meant it as a genuine compliment. He didn’t even blink when my friend (a guy) and I spent time ogling the legs of a few Halloween-costumed girls walking by. I love this town.

- Going in 1950s-style nerdy boy drag (except it’s not really drag) to this evening’s Meow Mix, and feeling very much like, well, a nerdy boy, complete with a mild shyness problem. Not my usual state of mind, but oddly, it was kinda workin’ for me. I got to dance with a couple of very sexy girls. Funny how women respond so completely differently when you’re wearing wingtips and a tie compared to when you’re wearing a dress and heels. I got to be either a fey butch or a fag, depending on who I was dancing with, and it kinda worked in both cases. Woo-hoo! (Note to self: invest in plaid pants and sweater vests. This nerd thing is a good bet.)

- Lynnee Breedlove’s performance at this evening’s Meow Mix. I will surely refer back to it in other posts, but the biggest coolest thing about it was his (because the appropriate pronoun for Lynnee, formerly Lynne, is apparently "he" now) explanation of his own gender using the vehicle of stacking dolls - you know, the kind where there’s a big one that you open up to get the next size down inside it and so forth until you’ve got a little tiny wood chip with a face? Yeah. Some of them were such interesting genders as "G.I. Joe" and "RuPaul" and "Peter Pan." Love it. Another idea to add to the gender metaphor basket!

- Receiving an e-mail from a friend of mine containing five or six lovingly shot photos of stacks and stacks of books at a store somewhere in Cambridge. I mean… talk about nerd porn. And she knows that’s what it is to me. Gosh, I have some cool friends.

Highlights of the next couple of days:

- Spending tomorrow and Sunday taking a 16-hour intensive training session with Midori on rope bondage, commonly known as a Rope Dojo. I’ll be a fucking kinky macramé expert by the end of this! If 16 hours with one of the world’s leading experts isn’t enough to help me get into rope bondage, nothing will be. Though the fact that a hot girl wants me to tie her up sometime soon might help too. Lucky me. (And I didn’t even have to wear a sweater vest.)

- Interviewing Martina Navritolova for the Mirror. Watch for it! I’ve been plumbing my sporty dyke friends for tips on what to ask her about, so it should actually be a reasonably competent article even if I’ve never watched tennis in my life.

- Attending a lesbian potluck thrown by the Spawn. I mean, who can resist an invitation from a two-year-old to his moms’ birthday gathering? Pretty impressive, he didn’t even make any spelling mistakes.

- And just to end it all on a sappy note, a phone date with my brother. Let’s hear it now… aawwww!

Righto. It’s 3 a.m. and I have to write up a marketing scenario draft before I hit the sack. Contract work is great, but sometimes the timing just sucks…

I’m not really the sort of person who cries much. No, it’s not my butch side showing; it’s just that I’m pretty even-tempered and even if I’m feeling something strongly, it doesn’t usually turn on the waterworks. So it always strikes me as significant when something triggers tears. It happened the other day in the oddest of circumstances: while I was watching the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet.

The film is based on a 1981 book by Vito Russo about the portrayal of queers and transfolk in Hollywood films, and the roles the real-live queers played behind (and on) the scenes. (Needless to say the book is now going on my literary wish list.) The film is dated at this point; in the past ten years, we’ve seen an explosion of queer film (and television, and theatre, and literature) like never before. But in a way that’s why I enjoyed it. Nowadays it’s not hard to find nuanced portrayals of queer folks, but it’s easy to forget the very recent past in which even the barest hint of queer subtext - and it was indeed there on purpose, as The Celluloid Closet confirms - was something to seek out and savour, if only to counter the vast silence around our lives. In the film, Harvey Fierstein - the actor with the most incredibly cool gravelly voice ever - says "That hunger I felt as a kid looking for gay images was a hunger to not be alone."

My ex-girlfriend is 16 years my senior, and I remember when we were first getting to know each other, and she’d tell me about what it had been like to grow up lesbian in a small town, how it felt to be completely different from everyone around her. Her eyes shone when she described the thrill she felt when she saw lesbian love stories, even though the lesbians in them were pretty much all either pathologized - such as in The Hunger, in which the lesbian was a vampire (with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon, 1983) - or almost completely camouflaged, like the central relationship in the film Fried Green Tomatoes (1991). It’s mind-boggling to think how different it had been for her to grow up queer as compared to my own past.

When I was eight or ten years old, I was at a family dinner at my aunt and uncle’s place. I wasn’t interested in playing with my brothers and the grown-ups’ conversation was boring, so I wandered off to flip through my aunt’s magazine stash in the bathroom. I came across an article in… Châtelaine, maybe? I still have it, I should dig it out one of these days. It was about two high school lesbians who decided to go to their prom together. It featured a big photo of them, both wearing tuxedos with pink high heels and cummerbunds, and matching corsages. I remember being struck with some sense of… familiarity? Recognition? I don’t know what I’d call it, but I do remember quietly tearing the article out of the magazine, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t get caught, and slipping it into my coat pocket.

I think that was the first time I recognized myself in the media that way, though at the time I might not have been able to name why, exactly, I felt so drawn to the story. I felt that draw repeatedly over the years that followed, but even then, it didn’t feel like water in the desert; it was just one element of what was out there, one that happened to speak to me.

Maybe I just didn’t have to look as hard to know that gay people existed. I didn’t need the subtext as much becaue I had the up-front kind of imagery. As I was growing up, queers were all over the news - I was born in 1978, so by the time I was old enough to understand English, the radio was blasting stories about "gay cancer" and there were articles all over my dad’s news magazines about GRID (gay-related immune disease) and eventually HIV and AIDS. By the time  Philadelphia came out in 1993, I was fifteen and I couldn’t understand what the big deal was - the guys in the film never even kissed, and AIDS had been around, like, forever, so why was everyone so impressed about the film? (If it helps, I get it now.)

I remember being electrified when I saw Alicia Silverstone (of all people!) go lesbo and do butch drag in the Aerosmith video for "Crazy" in 1994. But that was pretty frickin’ obvious; really, they might has well have beat viewers over the head with a dyke stick.

I totally missed the lesbian references in the films my ex talked about with such reverence. At 23 I’d never heard of The Hunger, and my parents had rented Fried Green Tomatoes when I was a teenager and it had never registered that there was anything lesbianish about the plot - though having read the book for my book club last year, I can confirm that the film totally butchered the story on that count. To me, lesbians were women who had sex with each other, not women who had a particularly intense sort of friendship.

By the time I got to CEGEP, I wanted to seek out that sort of imagery; I enjoyed it in the small and occasional doses I found here and there, but surely there was more… right? Right indeed. I might not have been out of the closet to anyone but myself and a handful of friends, and I might not have dated any women yet,  but I was a champion student; I knew how to do research, and I knew who to ask if I wanted to get my hands on the knowledge I wanted. Here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote for the bi women’s zine The Fence, entitled "Snapshots of a Bi Girl’s Life," published a couple of years ago:

***

19 years old
D (my boyfriend): Why did you rent four movies?
Me: I’m doing a paper on the portrayal of lesbians in modern mainstream film.
D: I see. And what made you choose that topic?
Me: (thinking fast) Well, I think my teacher’s a lesbian. She’ll probably give me a good mark.
(In fact, I know she is a lesbian, but this has nothing to do with her.)
D: (cracking open his third beer) Yeah. Maybe you’re just a fucking dyke yourself. This fucking women’s studies shit is getting to you.
Me: (defensively) It’s not “getting to me.” Maybe I chose women’s studies because I wanted to. (Feeling ashamed, I press play. Go Fish appears onscreen and I start taking notes.)

***

In fact my teacher at the time was thrilled when I explained the sort of project I had in mind, and immediately listed off a good ten films I should see - so much for needing to do the research myself. Ha! I knew it. You just had to look, the imagery was there.

From there, it was women’s studies throughout CEGEP and university, with plenty of occasions to explore queerness through books and films. Eventually I came all the way out of the closet and found Montreal’s queer community; shortly thereafter I discovered Image+Nation and it quickly became my favourite time of year. For seven years now, I’ve been drinking in at least two dozen queer films every year during the festival - this year’s runs November 16-26 and I’m already getting excited.

So you’d think that watching The Celluloid Closet would be sort of like reminiscing, maybe with a few discoveries of older films from before my time - not so much the inspiration for a crying jag. Well, the first part is true; I recognized a ton of familiar films, and jotted down a number of titles from the ’20s and ’30s I really must make a point of seeing.

The crying jag happened about 3/4 of the way through the film, and it came at me completely out of left field. There’s a short piece, maybe a minute at most, which shows a quick-cut montage of scenes from movies throughout the ages in which one character throws out the classic gay insult: faggot. Faggot. Faggot. Fucking faggot. What are you, a faggot? Stupid faggot. You’re not a faggot, are ya? Fucking faggot. Faggot faggot faggot faggot.

Gawd, it was awful. They might as well have been slapping me in the face over and over again. There was such incredible venom in the voices of each character who uttered the word that, to them and to audiences, was the ultimate put-down, the highest of insults, the worst thing one could possibly be. Castration, impotence, weakness, horror, ugliness, rejection, denial. The whole point of using the word was that it resonated with everyone who saw it - as a cultural reference, you can’t get much clearer than that. It was exactly the same sting when my boyfriend called me a dyke when I was watching Go Fish eight years ago, only amplified over decades of cultural production.

I guess it had never truly hit me how truly hate-filled that one word could be. But it was hard to miss when given such a massive dose of it out of the blue, in the middle of what’s otherwise a pretty mild-mannered documentary film. I found myself crying - not so much for myself, except maybe in the abstract - but for the incredible, horrifying hatred that’s been directed at queers for decades, centuries even, and exemplified so clearly and shamelessly in films, those transparent vehicles for popular culture’s values, paradoxically (or not) the exact place where so many of us have turned to see ourselves.

Earlier in the documentary, the narrative turns to the portrayal of gay men as sisses, and Fierstein comments, "I like the sissy. Was it used in negative ways? Yes, but the way I see it, visibility at any cost! Besides, I am a sissy."

At any cost, indeed.

Sissy, faggot. I use these words today with the utmost in casual, brotherly nonchalance, and many others do too. But I think it sunk in a few levels deeper just how much reclaiming we’ve done, to be able to toss them off with barely a flicker of recognition to what they’ve meant and still mean when used against us. I don’t much mind crying at the movies when it teaches me something like this. If that makes me a faggot and a sissy and a dyke, I’m proud to be exactly that.

When I was in San Francisco not long ago, P and I had dinner with a couple of very interesting pervs, one of whom, G, runs a bi-weekly podcast on the topic of rope bondage. A couple of weeks after I got back, G called me up and asked if I’d like to host a new bi-weekly podcast with him entitled "Coalition of the Consensual: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Culture Wars." In other words, would I like to get on Skype with him once every two weeks to pick apart the latest worldwide news about affronts to sexual freedom of all kinds?

Gee, what do you think my answer was?

We’ll be recording our first podcast in the next week or so, and I will most definitely post a link here in case any of you want to take a listen. G’s got lots of good stuff to say, and I think it’ll be particularly cool because he lives in Wisconsin and I’m here in Montreal, so we’ll be providing commentary from both sides of the border. For those of you who are audiophiles and care about such things, G tells me I have a voice for radio, which I imagine is certainly better than having a face for radio (yowch). Besides, he’s got one of those deep manly voices, so we’ll, uh, harmonize. Anyway, I’m stoked!

So the other day I was doing research for news stories we could shred during the podcast, and I came across a whole whackload of interesting sites that are devoted, to varying degrees of effectiveness and professionalism, to reporting sex-related news stories. I wound up with over 50 windows open in my browser all at once, each containing either an outrageous story or a site that lists outrageous stories. Needless to say it was an entertaining couple of hours. A lot of what I found wasn’t necessarily appropriate for a culture-war discussion, but I’ve saved a few links to blog about in the next little while.

By far the most intelligent thing I came across was PervScan.com. Not much of a name as far as websites go, but it’s pretty impressive. Basically some dude - I do think it’s  a dude and I do think there’s just one of them, but I could be wrong - posts excerpts from news stories (and links to full stories) and then provides a paragraph or two of commentary. He’s smart and witty in a charmingly dry sort of way, and I very much like his politics, from what I can tell so far at least. Plus, he writes well. No spelling errors. Whee! Points all ’round! I highly recommend it if you’ve got a few to spare.

Intelligence aside, by far the most entertaining thing I came across was a site called Cunt Circus. I can’t tell if this is someone’s utterly fucking bizarre attempt at satire, or just plain goofiness, or if it’s a legitimate fetish site. I mean… poorly rendered animations of vulvas with legs doing tightrope acts? Little photoshopped vulvas jumping through hoops? And last but not least… clown erotica?!

I checked deviantdesires.com to see if there exists such thing as a clown fetish, and, well, there certainly seems to be. If you google "clown fetish" there are thousands of hits, although it would appear the actual clown fetish community numbers only in the couple of thousands.

Wow. Totally strange. I mean, I knew about balloon fetishists, or "looners" as they prefer to be called, but clowns? I’ve heard of clown phobias, but fetishes? What will they think of next… Interestingly, I mentioned looners in passing in this blog a couple of months back, and in a completely unrelated event, an acquaintance of mine came out as a looner to me not a week later. It pays to be open-minded, it would seem - people tell you the darnedest things. And I certainly did learn a lot in the subsequent conversation. But I’m not sure what I’ll do if someone I know confesses a clown fetish to me. (To set a pattern, that’d have to happen right around Halloween, which I suppose is reasonably à propos.) I guess it’d just fall into the "your kink is not my kink, but your kink is okay" category, along with, y’know, diaper fetishes and mud wrestling and boob jobs and finger amputations. So long as they’re not getting all hot and bothered at kids’ birthday parties.

Anyway, in case you’re interested in learning about all the completely whacked fetishes people have cooked up, the Deviant Desires site has a complete weird fetish roadmap, which kind of diagrams the connections between the more bizarre fetishes out there. Hey, whatever floats your boat. Me, I’m one of those straightforward queer polyamorous dominant masochistic genderbender-lovers with a mild fetish for hot shoes, nice-smelling old books, leather and corsetry, and an enduring love for needle play, canes, floggers, fisting and strap-ons.

Those other people out there are weird, but we normal folks should still be nice and accepting of them.

I went to a talk this evening given by Eli Clare at McGill, entitled "Gawking, Gaping and Staring: Living in Marked Bodies." Luckily, this time the acoustics were good, so I actually got to hear what he had to say. He’s a most interesting speaker, and all the more so because of the simplicity of what he says. While he was up there talking I was listening and taking notes, as I always do when I go to lectures. But only rarely do I find the ideas still percolating inside me many hours later as I have tonight.

So, the basic idea is that Eli Clare is a disabled tranny/genderqueer who wrote the book Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (which I missed buying tonight because someone beat me to the last copy - darnit). Like Leslie Feinberg, he speaks about intersectionality; unlike Leslie Feinberg, he doesn’t soapbox about it, and he does acknowledge the complexities and difficulties inherent therein. I was thoroughly impressed. Most specifically, Eli speaks on issues of intersectionality between disabled people and people in other sorts of "marked bodies" - particularly trans people and people of colour, but not those two groups exclusively.

One of the things Eli said really struck home - that as a disabled person and a trans person he’s spent his life endlessly explaining his body - "what have you got, what’s wrong with you?" - much like, as he said, people of colour are endlessly asked "where are you from?". He sees this "endless explaining" as the hallmark of people with bodily differences. I guess for me it was just a very real-life articulation of the whole Beauvoirian theoretical concept of being "the Other" - the exception to the rule that is "the norm," and thus always needing to explain and justify one’s existence. He made a really important point in response to an audience member’s comment: "I don’t mean to imply that our experiences of difference are all the same. But these mechanisms cross identity lines."

During the question period at the end, one of the last people in the audience to make a comment said something I found quite intriguing. Ze referred to a quote from Martin Buber - which I tried to find via Google, but no such luck (though the Wikipedia crash course in Buber’s I/Thou theory was really quite interesting!). The basic idea of the quote was that we (whoever "we" means) don’t actually need to understand people who are different from us in order to live alongside them. Ze put it out there as something ze’d been thinking about lately, not so much as a piece of advice per se. Eli kinda shot it down, which I found a bit surprising.

Eli made a good point - that if we can leave that space of not-understanding as an actual space, an emptiness, instead of filling it with preconceived ideas and assumptions, that might be nice, but that humankind’s track record in that department has been abysmal.

Fair enough. But I actually think the idea holds quite a bit of merit. I think it’s a question of which way you take it. Seems to me the concept is right in line with the idea of living in a marked body and needing to constantly explain it to the "normals."

Okay, let me back up a sec and try to better articulate this. You could take the Buber concept in its negative form: "I’m normal, and I don’t need to try figuring out what anyone else’s reality might be, it’s quite enough for me to just be nice to them and remain ignorant." Yah. Not so good. Perhaps better than "that person’s different so I’m going to abuse them" but not exactly what I’d call progressive. And incidentally, if you go by Wiki’s explanation of Buber’s I-Thou concept, the negative interpretation of the quote is probably off the mark - Buber seems to have been much more interested in dialogue, or true connection between people (Ich-Du, or I-Thou), than in monologue (Ich-Es, I-Ego or I-Me), the term he used to describe a process by which people objectify each other and see each other as means to their own ends.

On the other hand, you could take it in the positive: "I’m privileged in XYZ way, and (if applicable) marginalized in XYZ way; I have XYZ knowledge and I lack XYZ knowledge. It’s important to me to be sensitive to other people’s needs, particularly those from marginalized groups, but I don’t necessarily pretend to know everything about their realities and experiences. So while I will make every effort to educate myself about other groups’ concerns, I won’t wait to ‘know’ everything about them before also making efforts to be an ally. I will acknowledge what I know, and acknowledge what I don’t yet know, and remain open to and active in learning at all times, with a view to better understanding in the long run. But in the meantime I will not require every ‘different’ person to justify their existence to me or explain themselves before I deem them worthy of my consideration; I will simply try to be respectful, considerate and sensitive."

This interpretation, rather than creating a space to fill with prejudice, in fact creates a preexisting condition of respect and openness, which one could argue leads to true connection, dialogue, Ich-Du (I-Thou), i.e. ally work. With this understanding, there is no requirement for knowledge, justification, explanation; there is simply openness. This doesn’t in the least preclude or discourage active efforts to learn, it just removes the idea that learning (understanding) is a necessary prerequisite to connection and consideration.

I think that leaving that space of non-knowledge is the very crux of intersectionality, and in many ways I completely disagree that humankind’s track record has been abysmal in that department. I think, on the contrary, that pretty much every successful example of intersectional work has come about thanks to people leaving that space open, and allowing it to be filled over time with accumulated knowledge, rather than filling it from the get-go with snap judgments or misappropriated or decontextualized information. And there are plenty of instances throughout human history where such ally-based work has taken place.

Of course there are tons of examples throughout human history of oppressed groups’ struggles being (mis)appropriated by the dominant culture, and of course plenty more of outright prejudice and hatred. But I don’t think a North American man in the late 1800s needed to "understand" women to support suffrage, any more than I need to be so presumptuous as to say I as a white person "understand" people of colour in 2006 in order to be an anti-racist ally.

I think it’s in fact pretty dangerous to ever assume we truly understand another human being’s experience, or the experience of a group we aren’t part of. The whole point of intersectionality is that it’s wise to try and bridge the chasms between various groups who are suffering under the same oppressive system of mythical normalcy and cultural hierarchy - not that we all need to be able to speak for one another with the same knowledge.

In other words, I want to continue to further my understanding of the many marginalized groups to which I do not belong (as well as the ones to which I do), but by no means do I ever presume to think I will reach a point where I can firmly say I "understand" them. I think that acknowledging my eternal lack of understanding is the only way I’ll be able to continue shrinking that lack, filling that space with understanding legitimately gained through self-education - rather than through requiring people who are different from me to explain themselves - with the express premise that, much like the mathematical concept of the asymptote, I’ll never get to 100%, and the job will never be finished.

Racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, ableism, genderphobia… The day I think I know everything about all of it is the day I deserve a slap in the head, and I don’t want to wait until I get there before I start trying to be a good ally. The very idea is a paradox. And anyway, I’d rather be an eternally half-formed ally - the only kind I think one can legitimately be - than a wrongheaded know-it-all ally who in the end isn’t really one at all. No matter how oppressions intersect within and around each of us, we don’t have the luxury of waiting to be impossibly perfect before we begin to act.

OK, so I’ve just posted this to about seventeen different lists as well as putting it out as a Friendster bulletin, but on the off chance it still hasn’t reached you (or, if it has, that you don’t want to strangle me for the overkill quite yet), here are the details of the new season of CinéKink!

Does it show I’m excited? Well, I’m excited.

Did I mention I’m excited?

***

CinéKink is back by popular demand!

Welcome to the 2006-2007 edition of CinéKink, Montreal’s kinky film and discussion series! Many of you attended one or more screenings during CinéKink’s successful eight-month run in fall/winter 2005-2006… we hope to see you again this year!

Every first Sunday of the month, we’ll be screening an SM-related film. Each screening will followed by a one-hour discussion facilitated by local kinky sex geeks Andrea Zanin and Mylène St Pierre.

The CinéKink film and discussion series aims to be challenging and stimulating to all - from staunchly vanilla to total SM newbie to seasoned kinkster! People of all backgrounds, genders and persuasions are welcome. Come for the cheap flicks, stay for the quality conversation! Bring a friend, bring your mom, bring your lover. Don’t forget your curiosity, your opinions and your open mind.

New this time around: we’re holding the series in a gorgeous new space - The Secret Playground, Montreal’s first sex-positive community centre! Check http://attitudes.cc/Eng/events.htm#spintro for a view of the space and for rental information if you like it as much as we do.

Read on for the details for our first screening this season…

Where? The Secret Playground at 1410 Wolfe St, Suite 301, corner of Ste-Catherine E., near metro Beaudry. No food is provided, but feel free to bring your own; there are numerous restaurants and dépanneurs nearby and the kitchen is available for use.

When? Sunday, November 5. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., screening starts at 7:00. There will be a short break followed by a discussion for up to 90 minutes.

How much? We ask for a $5 contribution to cover the costs of space rental, equipment and movie acquisition. This is a not-for-profit event.

What? “Cruising”
Directed by William Friedkin, 1980
Starring Al Pacino

In a nod to our new digs in the heart of the Gay Village, we picked a flick that’s appropriately centred on gay boys!

Synopsis from www.rottentomatoes.com: “A sadistic serial killer is targeting New York’s gay community and, in response, the NYPD sends rookie cop Steve Burns undercover to find the killer. Burns, who is straight, poses as a homosexual and enters the world of gay S&M sex clubs, learning their rules and mores as he goes along. But as Burns arduously tracks down the murderer, he finds himself growing attracted to these clubs and the gay lifestyle, forcing him to question—and possibly confront—his own sexual identity.”

Review excerpt from www.imdb.com: “’Cruising’ is a very difficult film to watch. Most film-makers, were they making a film set in such an alien and frightening environment, would go overboard on providing us with at least one protagonist we could identify with. But Friedkin takes the very opposite route and presents us entirely with characters who are abhorrent, sleazy or totally ambiguous. Indeed, ambiguity is the film’s raison d’etre - we are never sure of anything, and this becomes both the pictures great strength and source of much audience frustration. … I would urge you to watch the film. It is a uniquely dark, brave piece somewhat compromised by well documented production difficulties and the censors scissors. It has a sinister, compelling momentum and wonderfully ugly, grainy textures that seep into your pores leaving you uncomfortable and unsettled. Sometimes a feel-bad movie can be as bracing as a winter morning. ‘Cruising’ is such an experience, and a fascinating, provocative one at that.”

And if you still want more, here’s an interesting critical article about the film: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/16/cruise.html

Damn, but it’s fun to be a freelancer. Sometimes I get the most incredibly interesting work! One of the most recent clients I’ve taken on is an Iranian-Canadian academic. She’s writing her memoirs, and I get the privilege of editing them. Really, she’s had a super interesting life - from middle-class teen beauty queen to abused wife to immigrant welfare mom to award-winning academic. I don’t want to spoil too many details; suffice it to say, the project is pretty darn cool.

I just finished editing a chapter on beauty pageants - specifically, her participation in the Miss Iran contest when she lived there as a teen. It got me thinking about the idea of beauty pageants. I’ve thought all my life that they’re really pretty frivolous. I remember when I was about 13 or 14, and my uncle - surely thinking he was delivering a compliment - said to me, "You’re pretty and you have a nice figure. Why don’t you try modeling in one of those contests?" And I stared at him without cracking a smile and deadpanned, "Because I’m too smart." He looked rather taken aback, and then laughed; I think he kinda got the message. I remember my father, from the other side of the room, trying to cover up the fact that he was laughing when he overheard. My uncle never broached the subject again.

Of course I’m well aware that beauty queens can have beautiful brains too; my current client is certainly proof of that. But I guess it’s just always seemed to me that the very idea of a beauty pageant is so petty that you sorta have to put aside your intellect if you really want to get into the spirit of the thing. I mean, come on - rating women on poise and charm and how they look in an evening gown? Yowza.

I’d indulge in a rant, but I imagine that most people these days have heard enough beauty-pageant trashings that I really don’t need to add mine to the mix. Besides, it’s all been said before. To wit: a recent article in Bitch magazine, "Miss Interpreted: Beauty Pageants Meet Their New Ideal" by Anna Clark, contains the following intro:

"Does anyone care about beauty pageants anymore? For most feminists these days, beauty pageants hardly even seem worth disdaining. That the theater of young women in evening gowns, body tape, and Vaselined teeth, eager to be judged, is inherently sexist, to say nothing of cheesy, is well understood. But pageants, ingrained as they are in American culture, are starting to seem like a punch line even beyond the walls of women’s-studies classrooms. That is, when they’re acknowledged at all. The declining cultural cachet of Miss America, for example, is evident in its shrinking television audience. Once a mainstay of prime-time programming, the pageant’s ratings began falling steadily in the early 1970s. In 2004, just 6.4 percent of U.S. households tuned in, compared to more than 75 percent of households in 1961."

But despite being a punch line for politically aware people of all genders in a jaded, critical po-mo culture, beauty pageants are a bloody tenacious phenomenon. I find it all quite fascinating.

When I was 18 or 19 and working as a YMCA counter clerk, one of my colleagues was a dark-haired beauty with a lovely figure and loads of charm. She was the kind of girl that everyone fell for the moment they laid eyes on her - sharp and witty, always smiling, and so darn cute, with flashing eyes and a sweet bob that flipped out when she turned her head and fell down around her cheekbones in a most fetching way. Despite my longtime penchant for butch, I was quite taken with her myself, in my own vaguely non-sexual yet aesthetically appreciative way.

One day she asked me if I’d like to come see her at the final ceremonies for - you guessed it - a beauty pageant. Specifically, Quebec’s "Miss Personnalité" contest. How could I say no? I decided to put my righteous women’s studies political reservations on hold and just go see what it was all about. After all, the stereotypes couldn’t hold true all the way… could they? Wasn’t there some obligation to acknowledge how thoroughly 1950s the concept of a beauty pageant was, and jazz it up somehow - y’know, open it to sexy fat girls at least? Have a category for drag queens? Something?

I should have known that it was the Real Thing, that it wasn’t going to be my hoped-for sly po-mo wink at the silliness of pageantry. If nothing else, my colleague’s clandestine boob job - "I, um, need to take a week off for surgery… no, it’s nothing serious…" - and her subsequent tearful breakdown in the staff room - "I’m so depressed, sometimes I just hate myself" - should have clued me in. But I bravely trucked on. No, you’re not a failure. Yes, I promise to cheer for you at the pageant. I gave her a gentle hug over my microwaved dinner - gentle, of course, so as not to squish her poor, tender, recently surgically altered boobs. (Which, I’d taken the time to notice, had been more than nice enough in the first place. And which she kindly unveiled to me post-surgery in that very staff room, which was an altogether confusing experience for me. Do I look? Do I not look? Ack! Professionalism at war with friendship at war with not-so-latent but as-yet-unrequited lesbianism… But I digress.)

The night of the pageant finals arrived, and, well… It was just as bad as I’d hoped it wouldn’t be. The only good part was that my charming counter-clerk colleague actually won the thing - deservedly. The cutting wit, the flashing eyes… I guess they counted for something. Far as I know they didn’t rate her on her cup size. Mais il ne manquait que ça.

The question, in my mind, wasn’t so much about whether or not she deserved the title as whether or not the title deserved her. I mean, here was a girl with everything going for her, who spent thousands of dollars of her hard-earned cash (and boy, did we ever work for our paltry paycheques) to make her perky 20-year-old boobs just that much perkier, and ate out her soul while starving her body for this competition, when in my humble opinion she would have done far better saving for university, leaving her sweet little breasts alone, having an actual full meal once in a while, and maybe dropping a few thou on a Buddhist retreat or some sessions with a therapist to get her priorities straightened out.

On the other hand, I just googled her now, and it turns out she’s now a minor Quebec television personality - a career she always did aspire to. So I guess she’s managed to get where she wanted to go regardless of my humble opinions. I’m glad to see she hasn’t jumped off a bridge.

Nonetheless, while I know I’ve just got a sample of two, it still seems to me the beauty queens of my acquaintance got places in life despite their beauty pageant experience rather than because of it - one by disavowing it (my professor client) and one by surviving it (my body-image-challenged colleague).

Yet still the Miss Personnalité contest continues to be held every year, as does the Miss Québec Universe, and undoubtedly hundreds of other such pageants worldwide. And while I’ve found lots of fodder to support my opinion that pageants suck, I have yet to encounter one that can truly explain to me why it is that they’re still around. Why haven’t they gone the way of the Beta VCR and the flammable polyester blouse? Why the staying power? There must be some reason. I’d be intrigued to hear an analysis of the lasting appeal of the pageant, even in a time when the phenomenon has been soundly criticized by every socially aware demographic under the sun, and when even the most glamourous of the bunch has been relegated from its decades-long slot on mainstream network TV to a second-rate country-and-western channel thanks to poor viewer ratings.

The Bitch article more or less concludes that pageants are no longer representative of the mainstream, but that they do offer media access to winners and therefore the model could be adopted by more alternative groups to draw attention to their causes - citing, among others, the case of the Miss Wheelchair America pageant, which has no beauty-related criteria but rather focuses entirely on public speaking, accomplishments and advocacy work for the disabled.

I dunno. That’s great and all; I’m happy if a riff off the beauty pageant model can attract attention to a worthy cause. But I can’t help but think the model as a whole needs to be turned on its head, if we bother doing anything with it at all. I mean, can’t you picture a beauty pageant à la John Waters? Trashy, genderfucked, ugly, disgusting, completely over-the-top… pageantry with a sadistically campy twist. Duct-tape tits and poo-eating. Miss America filtered through Jerry Springer. I’m actually not a fan of either John or Jerry; camp is fun in theory, but in reality I usually find it a little tedious. I can only sit through so many minutes watching Divine be completely gross before I get the joke already and I just want to puke. But it’s perhaps for that very reason that these are about the only people who could potentially create a beauty pageant that makes sense to me. And if you think about it, that’s pretty sick.

Funny, the things you find when you excavate old boxes. Not long ago I tried this, and I came across a few gems.

- Old e-mails I’d printed out when T and I were first getting to know each other five or six years ago, in which I’d highlighted bits of things he’d written that made me find him appealing. Yeah, I guess we were never really "just friends"…

- A paper I wrote in 1997 for my very first women’s studies class, Feminist Thought 101 (or Fem Thought 1 as we called it) on the topic of "my experiences as a gendered individual." It’s a real treat - I’ll post a few excerpts of it later.

- A piece of prose I had scribbled on scrap paper during a metro ride I took in March of 1999 - one of the rare pieces of fiction I’ve written that isn’t totally raunchy erotica. It’s a sort of dark fictionalization of a real experience of being in the metro when it ground to a halt because of a jumper. Y’know, a subway suicide. Cheerful stuff, really. On the upside, in re-reading it I discovered I was pretty pleased with it, so tonight I typed it up, gave it a good solid edit, and printed it out to submit to the Writers’ Union of Canada’s Short Prose Competition 2006, which has a $2500 prize. I don’t expect to win, but how funny would it be if I did!

- A few pieces of totally raunchy erotica. Big surprise. I’ve been writing that since I was twelve.

- A whole bunch of old birthday cards and other assorted life memorabilia.

And last but not least…

- A packet of birth control pills - which almost, but not quite, inspired nostalgia (or was that nausea?) for my marvelous Marvelon days, age 16 to 21 or so, when I subjected my body to the bizarrely alienating mechanical regulation of externally produced hormones so as to avoid all possibility of unwanted pregnancy. The bubble pack is still encased in its purple sleeve, but it’s missing the bottom right "Wednesday" pill. Was that the last one I ever took? If so, why did I bother buying a new package? What an odd little mystery.

Before Marvelon, there had been a few months of TriPhasil, prescribed by my sweet old GP, which unfortunately produced a violent vomiting session like clockwork every fourth Thursday of the month at precisely 2:30 p.m., conveniently timed to interfere with high school French class. After the third such vomit I made what turned out to be a very upsetting appointment with a gynecologist - my very first. My deadbeat boyfriend was busy that night so I went alone, biking to the clinic from my parents’ place: "I’m going to get a bag of chips!" Luckily the clinic was right beside the closest dépanneur. (Equally luckily, my taste in boyfriends and gynecologists drastically improved over the following few years.)

I told the doctor it was my first time seeing a gyno; he left me in the examination room without saying a word, and came back a few minutes later only to exclaim, "Why aren’t you undressed yet?" and roll his eyes as though I were a misbehaving four-year-old. I chose not to say what I was thinking, which was something along the lines of, "Because, asshole, you didn’t ask me to get undressed, and how was I to know you hadn’t gone off to get a stack of forms for me to fill out or something? This is my first time, like I just said." He waited while I shucked off my pants, examined me (which didn’t hurt a bit, thankfully - at least he got that part right) and told me to meet him in his office.

When I sat down, he casually tossed off, "Well, you might be pregnant," just before answering his desk phone and yakking with a colleague for a few minutes while I tried not to have a heart attack. I remember lifting my hand to reach out and press down on the hang-up button, with the intention of telling him that his goddamn colleague could wait because I’d bloody eat his balls for breakfast if he didn’t tell me what the fuck was going on right fucking now. He saved himself a very nasty scene by a split-second, and even then, only because I wanted his medical expertise more than his ugly, balding little head on a platter. Barely.

In fact I remember being so upset that when I staggered out into the hallway with the pee cup in hand for a pregnancy test, I couldn’t even remember which direction the bathroom was in. Thankfully, my dear GP happened to be walking by, and he took one look at me and gave me a huge hug. "Tell me what’s wrong!" And I burst into tears on his labcoat. He took over from the nasty gyno from that point onwards.

Result: negative pee test, new prescription for Marvelon instead of TriPhasil, lifelong grudge against asshole gyno (I stopped short of lodging an official complaint, realizing my parents would probably find out if it went through), eventual ditching of lowlife boyfriend (who cheated on me by having unsafe sex with his ex), and enduring love for pro-choice politics, my kind old GP, and condoms.

Ahh, to be sixteen again.