You said: “I want her to be able to (try to) fight back. I want her to feel, viscerally, that I am dominating her and there is nothing she can do to stop it*. I want to see that realization wash over her, and for her to try denying it even as she knows it, and then eventually give in. And then I want to put her in more pain, different pain, to where she forgets all over again and tries to struggle again.

That is the sort of domination that gets me off.”

That is the exact kind of domination that appeals to me. It’s physical and raw and basic and nothing else gives me a feeling like it.

Having said that, I find that there is something almost equally powerful in being bound, just in a different way. It’s a different kind of helplessness. When I’m tied up (or down as the case may be), there is really, truly no chance of escape. With ropes or cuffs or whatever securing me in place, I know the only way to get free is if I’m let free. It’s a heady feeling to be that helpless and open, and to have been the one to put myself there. That level of trust kind of makes my head spin.

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents. Thanks for sharing yours.

http://fetlife.com/events/45165

thank you?

i reckon it would be best in a threesome… one could be fucking yu while the other applys the choke.. would be unreal lol

On the other hand, you’re making an assumption about my audience that I think may not be entirely accurate.

I was speaking about your audience being kinky folk in general — in other words, not your audience for that speech at the time that you gave it, but the audience you (intentionally or not) drew by posting it online.

I agree 100% about the Events listing. I myself run a community calendar for the Atlanta area, and it’s a real pain in the ass to have to copy and paste all the details from the FetLife event page. I’ll admit to a bit of laziness here in that sometimes I don’t — I just say “see this FetLife page for more info” (which I know is bad of me, for the reasons you’ve pointed out).

My main point is that FetLife would not only become a better site for the community if Baku listened to (and addressed) your points, but he would also be generating more traffic for FetLife. It’s a win-win situation.

Then again, being a web project manager and programmer myself, I realize that might be more difficult than one might imagine from the outside. So if I had to guess, I’d bet that it would simply be too much work, possibly requiring a huge overhaul of their code and database structure, and that biases their opinion on what is the best way to go. Cognitive dissonance and all that. I still think it would be very much worthwhile for them as a business to do that even if it would be a huge project, but I’ve seen that sort of “what we’ve got is good enough, we’ll just continue with that” thinking before (and been guilty of it myself before, too).

For what it’s worth, back on my blog, I was asked about what, specifically, the FetLife team might do to help the situation. I took a moment to respond:

To address the problems that I (again, somewhat reductively) lumped into the “group coordination/global interactionist perspective” in my essay, I think FetLife should also immediately begin working on creating public-facing options for at least three major components: events, journal entries, and individual group threads. The events section in particular should be prioritized as it is the most valuable for the community as a whole and for individuals who organize events.

The single best thing about FetLife is its “Events near me” page. The single worst thing about this page is that none of these event listings are google-able. That needs to change, ASAP. For extra credit, FetLife should implement the hCalendar microformat in all of its events pages and its event listings pages to enable interoperability with sites like Google Calendar (via tools like the h2vx Events conversion service) so event data can be cleanly, mechanically lifted from FetLife in an automated fashion. (I personally submitted an HTML patch to this effect to John way back in 2008, to help show him what the code changes should look like from the front-end, but AFAIK that patch was ignored.)

There are a few more paragraphs in my comment over on my own blog post, but that’s a good chunk of it.

Also, as far as using “rather specific tech/software terminology,” you’re right that I had some trouble calibrating my language for my audience. On the other hand, you’re making an assumption about my audience that I think may not be entirely accurate. For what it’s worth, for those interested in even more background (both theoretical and technical) to the issues at hand, you’ll probably find a lot of value out of the “anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher” seminar I lead during Atlanta Poly Weekend 2011, in which I once again include FetLife as a case study.