When I first listened to Maymay‘s presentation, I’ll admit my reaction was emotionally-based — I love FetLife, and how dare he say that it’s bad for the community? Insular? Pfah, it’s got all kinds of people on there! And he’s bashing it on the one hand for not being safe enough because its only safety [...]
Earlier today I was listening to a Pandora mix I entitled “Flog Me, I’m Irish” and an advertisement said, “Why be monogamous with your sound selection?” Which I thought was pretty cool, until it went on to imply that the opposite of monogamy is promiscuity, a word which has some pretty negative connotations of indiscriminate [...]
This article was republished with my permission on SafewordMagazine.com’s April 2011 issue here. How necessary are safewords? I was just thinking about them the other day, and how Red/Yellow/Green are pretty common. Why? I’ve seen two reasons cited: It’s universal, so in public play people will recognize it, and if you’re playing with someone new [...]
A friend just posted a link to this interview with Suzanne Venker, co-author (along with Phyllis Schlafly) of The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know—and Men Can’t Say. Feminists will probably be familiar with Schlafly already, and this interview with Venker is… well, read it for yourself. As a note, I do not consider myself a [...]
I know I’ve been pretty quiet on here lately. I write when I have the drive to; if I try to make myself write regularly, it becomes a chore, and I don’t have fun doing it. So when things are busy, I tend to be doing instead of writing. Horrible, I know. This past weekend, [...]
My friend Clarisse recently posted about sexual fluidity, and it got me thinking about my girl. You see, she used to describe herself as lesbian to other people (before we started going out, of course), but actually identified as bisexual. This is because she was one of those women that are mostly attracted to other [...]
A friend of mine, Clarisse Thorn, is organizing this project, so I just thought I’d put the word out. “Your Personal Kink” Contact: Clarisse Thorn 773.761.9200 clarisse at leatherarchives dot org The Leather Archives & Museum, a cultural center in Chicago devoted to preserving the history of alternative sexuality, wants your help documenting the experiences [...]
A few days ago, I had my first tattoo done, and I’d like to talk about that process from an SM/pain perspective. Being familiar with pain, I knew I could handle it; but it was still a new experience, so I was a little apprehensive. In a nutshell, it wasn’t really that bad. There were [...]
I am really not all that into bondage. For some reason, that feels a bit hard for me to admit openly to the BDSM community. It seems like it’s almost expected that people be into it — I mean hell, it’s the first letter in BDSM! I’ve heard others say that they like bondage because [...]
At a recent munch, the discussion topic was “Abuse or BDSM; where do you draw the line?” The discussion was wrought with a lot of charged emotions — a lot of people in the lifestyle seem to have had some bad experiences early on with people masquerading as dominants and sadists, who were really just [...]