The Cautious Kinkster

"…The culture tells us to look at the surface. If we want to revoke rapists’ social license to..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:45:25 -0400

“…The culture tells us to look at the surface. If we want to revoke rapists’ social license to operate, we have to learn to look for different things. Because they don’t wear hats that say, “Rapist.” They hang out in the back yard, work on their car and eat some ribs with the neighbors. Just like they were normal. Even while they have captives in their homes….”

- Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers |

This is not the "persecution of old men". This is the prosecution of rapists, and we should applaud it

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:23:03 -0400

This is not the "persecution of old men". This is the prosecution of rapists, and we should applaud it:

…The fact that these men felt they were doing nothing wrong is precisely the problem. The fact that for generations, men of all ages have felt able to use and abuse the bodies of women and children for their own entertainment is the problem, and the fact that our culture legitimises this approach is a bigger problem.

For centuries, men in positions of power were untouchable, while women and children were anything but. One simply could not call a man like Jimmy Savile or Stuart Hall to account for his actions and expect to be taken seriously. One could not accuse a popular football player of rape and expect justice. These things went on, but they went on in silence, with the complicity and of quiet armies of flunkies and facilitators.

The reason that these “old men” are being prosecuted – sorry, “persecuted” – right now is simple. They are being prosecuted because their victims are finally coming forward, and their victims are finally coming forward because society has reached a tipping point when it comes to rape culture.

Rape culture, for those who still require an explanation, is the cultural tolerance of rape and sexual assault. It’s the idea that people who are raped must have in some way provoked it, and I know from experience that it can take years for victims to understand that it is men’s responsibility not to rape. It’s an old prejudice, embedded in our institutions, in our police forces and judiciary systems, in political parties and in public organisations like the BBC. It also infects the tabloid and broadsheet press, who have changed their tune in recent weeks only because the process of consciousness-raising is panic-inducing, and there’s nothing the media loves more than a good panic.

Right now, though, things are changing, and men and boys and those who love and respect men and boys are going to have to shift the way they think about rape, abuse and harrassment – fast. The most important attitude change is going to take place not among abusers, but among the far larger contingent who simply stand by and let it happen. Among the people who have been taught, or learned from hard experience, that these things are simply part of the tissue of power in this society, perhaps not strictly moral, but not worth taking the risk of speaking out about. They’re only women, after all, and they were probably asking for it.

For many, many generations, women and children were told: don’t let yourself get raped, and if you do, for god’s sake don’t whinge about it. Don’t act like a slut. Don’t let your guard down. Don’t ever assume for a second that you have the same right as a man to exist in public or private space without fear of assault and humiliation. That message is slowly, finally, starting to change, so that instead, we’re telling men and boys: do not rape. Do not grope, assault, bully or hurt women, children or anyone over whom you have temporary power. Doing so will no longer increase your social status. If you do it anyway, you will find yourself publicly shamed and possibly up on criminal charges. This is the age of the internet, and nobody forgets….

Got Consent? Part III: FetLife Doesn’t Get It | Disrupting Dinner Parties

Sat, 11 May 2013 06:43:49 -0400

Got Consent? Part III: FetLife Doesn’t Get It | Disrupting Dinner Parties:

…FetLife wants you to believe their walled garden is safe, but not only can anyone create an account in seconds, the walls themselves are full of holes. The security problems with FetLife were put on display when last summer, a simple proxy connection service was set up to allow access to the site without an account. FetLife responded by trying to block the server and assure everyone that the bad person had been stopped, without actually fixing the security holes. This preference for spin over reality is commonplace at FetLife and its allies. For example, I tried to talk to Alan, Esq., one of the leaders of the NCSF, at CatalystCon in March about the FAADE tool. Instead, he went off on a rant about this supposed hack and how fishy a person Maymay was, and loudly declared he had no idea why Maymay did what he did. Really, I said? Because Maymay has been very transparent about it on his blog. It quickly became apparent that Alan had no idea what I was talking about, no any desire to educate himself.[3] Let’s be real. Maymay did this with the express purpose of showing that FetLife was insecure, all the while live-tweeting the event. This is how people who work to expose security flaws so they can be fixed operate, not how hackers opperate. But don’t take my word for it:

“Nobody ‘hacked’ FetLife,” says Yonatan Zunger, chief architect of Google’s social network Google Plus, when we explain the situation. “No locks were picked; someone simply noticed that FetLife never locked the door in the first place.”…

Monogamous Cultural Norms Contribute to Protecting Abusers

Sat, 11 May 2013 05:46:06 -0400

unquietpirate:

Okay. I’m angry today so, instead of doing all the Important Responsible things I need to do like buy groceries and go to the bank, here’s a rant. It’s about what’s wrong with monogamy. But first I’m going to give a bunch of background that has to do with a computer program.

I’ve been working on this post about the Predator Alert Tool for OkCupid and why it’s awesome. There’s something I’ve been struggling to talk about because it’s important but it’s also out of scope for the piece I’m writing, which is about accountability, anonymity, autonomy, and online resistance to rape culture broadly, and not about my radical anti-monogamist agenda. Still, monogamist bullshit shows up everywhere.

PAT-OKC is a browser add-on that highlights OkCupid users’ attitudes about consent and violence. It’s very cool. The tool works by “looking” at a user’s publicly answered Match Questions and then displaying any potentially concerning answers at the top of their profile. One particularly cool aspect of the original version was that it allowed everyone running the tool to share information with each other. It did this by aggregating Match Question answers collected by each version of the tool on a server that all versions of the tool could access. Unfortunately, PAT-OKC no longer has this capacity because (fortunately!) the tool got so many installs that the server’s resources were overloaded. The developer, maymay, had to quickly code up a version that relied only on local data. Because a server is expensive, the local-data-only version is what most PAT-OKC users are running right now.

In other words, if you’re running PAT-OKC, you can currently see “red flagged” answers that are visible to your OkCupid account. But originally, you were able to see “red flagged” answers that were visible to any OkCupid account using PAT-OKC. The server-side code to do this still exists and can easily be run by anyone who wants to host it a version on their own server. There have been some critiques that it does this by “stealing private information” — a claim that is patently ridiculous if you know anything about how OkCupid works.

In case you don’t, it works like this: Users answer Match Questions and decide whether to make their answers public. If you and another user have given public answers to the same question, then you get to see each others’ answers. If you haven’t answered that question or your answer isn’t public, you don’t. OkCupid didn’t always work this way. Originally, there were no such thing as public answers. Then, there was the “WTF” option, which allowed you to make your ALL your answers public to specific users of your choice. In 2010, OkCupid changed their interface to make all new answers public by default unless you checked a box marking that answer “private”. Some people were pretty pissed about this. (In fact, if you’d prefer to make your Match Question answers private by default, here’s a script that will let you do that.) Still, OkCupid has consistently moved towards making that data more and more public. Of course, it’s in the company’s interest to encourage as many public answers as possible, because the opportunity to read attractive strangers’ opinions on politics and oral sex is part of what OkCupid is selling.

The current system, by which you can answer a question to see another user’s answer, is a game that encourages you to make more of your own answers public. There’s nothing “private” about other peoples’ public answers which you can’t currently see. You’re just blocked from seeing them because you’re playing a game. If I’ve answered the same question, I get to see their answer. Those are the rules of the game. And it’s a fun game! I like going to the profile of someone I have a crush on and answering the questions we don’t have in common yet. It’s like unlocking little secrets about people I think are cute. (I’m easily entertained.)

But PAT-OKC doesn’t care about the, “I like broccoli! Do you like broccoli?” game. It’s trying to fight rape culture. So, it looks at what people have posted publicly about consent and violence and then tells other people what they’ve said — even people who haven’t personally answered the same questions about consent and violence. Maybe because those questions are triggering for them. Or maybe because, like many OkCupid questions, all the possible answer choices suck. Or maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it. Whatever.

The point is, PAT-OKC doesn’t do anything I couldn’t do myself. It’s not like there are some questions I’m allowed to answer and other users aren’t, or vice-versa. Every time I look at someone’s profile, I could go through their list of publicly answered questions, find questions about consent and violence that concerned me, answer those questions myself, see what their answers are, and thereby make a decision about whether or not I want to message them. PAT-OKC just gives me that information faster. Cuz computers.

So the argument that PAT-OKC users shouldn’t be allowed to share information about potential rapists because that violates the rules of OkCupid’s dating game seems ludicrous to me. You know what also violates the rules of the “dating game”? Being a rapist. It’s like saying that if I’m going out on a date with someone I met through mutual friends, I shouldn’t be allowed to ask my friends what they think of him, because that might be compromising his “private information”; I should just go on the date with him and find out for myself. Not only would that be a weirdly extremist position to hold about information in the physical world, if my friends happened to know that this guy had a history of saying or doing problematic things around consent, they’d actually be remiss in not mentioning that to me.

Right?

That’s when it clicked that I was actually dealing not just with a misapprehension about how the Internet works but with a busted “real-world” social norm: We’re actually NOT supposed to share information with each other about what people are like in relationships, are we?

I’m not supposed to ask my partners’ exes about their relationships with my partner. I’m not actually supposed to talk to my partners’ exes at all; we’re supposed to hate each other. I’m certainly not supposed to e-mail my ex’s new partner (as a friend of mine once did) to tell her that he has a history of lying, cheating, and bad consent around STIs. If I do, I’ll just get accused of “starting shit.” (Which my friend did. Until the new girlfriend discovered firsthand that her beau was, in fact, lying, cheating, and practicing bad consent around STIs. Now, she and the ex are friends and he’s out of the picture.)

Or there was that time when I asked a co-worker about a boy we both liked, “Hey, do you know what’s up Cameron? I know he’s got this girlfriend back home but then, the other night, he kissed me…” and she said, wide-eyed, “He has a GIRLFRIEND?!” Apparently, she’d been sleeping with him for months and he’d never said a word. When we confronted him about his onion-layers of cheating his flabbergasted response was, “Why would you TALK to each other?! Women cause so much drama.”

This is called the siloing of information. Abusers depend on it to get away with abusing multiple people. And it’s also strongly encouraged in normative relationships — particularly normative heterosexual monogamous relationships — in the name of “privacy.”

I’m not saying that all monogamous heterosexual relationships are abusive. And I also want you to understand that, when I say “monogamy”, I don’t just mean “relationships between two people who agree to be sexually exclusive with each other.” When we talk about “monogamous” relationships in our culture, we’re talking about a LOT more than that. We’re talking about the way our culture does monogamy — which is not simply that two people agree not to have sex with anyone but each other. Rather, it tends to be that two people make their relationship with each other their number one intimacy-priority in life, and they share everything about their lives with each other, and very little about their life together with the outside world.

This expectation of “marital privacy” is so strong that it’s encoded into law. You can’t make someone testify against their spouse in court because our notion that “what’s said in the relationship stays in the relationship” is so sacred. And this notion flows all through our relationship culture, from exempting you from incriminating your partner all the way down to “it’s not polite to kiss and tell.” Meanwhile, there are very few counterbalancing norms on the other side — etiquette that encourages (rather than simply “excusing”) you to be open about your intimacy with others in certain situations. The few that do exist are almost entirely for extreme scenarios like domestic violence, and even those have been hard won by decades of feminist activism.

Some privacy between intimates is lovely, don’t get me wrong. And being able to make decisions about our own privacy preferences is vital for a free society. There are certainly things I like to keep private between my partners and myself because it helps create safer spaces in which to be ourselves and simply because it feels sweet to have little things that are just ours. But, on the flipside, there are certain things it feels equally important to me to be able to communicate about with my partners’ other partners, close friends, family members, exes, etc. Having Max Possible Privacy Setting as the default for what a “meaningful relationship” looks like in our culture, and shaming people (particularly women) who share even the most innocuous information about intimacy, creates fantastic cover for those who ARE being abusive.

And contemporary monogamous culture — not just compulsory monogamy, but the way that many people who ARE choosing to do monogamy are doing it — encourages that culture of information siloing to a degree that is totally out of whack.

So out of whack that we apparently have to think twice about whether it’s okay for some people to share already public information with other people about the possibility that someone might be a rapist.

Finally, I am absolutely not suggesting that the silencing of abuse survivors and others is exclusively caused by monogamous normativity. There’s lots of misogyny here (see: “Women cause so much drama.”), domism within the BDSM scene, and loads of other power structures at play. But the institution of monogamy is also one of them. And I’m not letting it off the hook. Because fuck monogamous culture.

…Okay, I think that’s all.

* puts on flame retardant pants *

Now, I’m going to the grocery store.

"…FetLife doesn’t even wait for users to complain; they proactively search out abuse..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 15:04:43 -0400

“…FetLife doesn’t even wait for users to complain; they proactively search out abuse accusations and, without advance notice, go in and edit or delete them. (At 50x the size of FetLife, Facebook couldn’t do that even if it wanted to.) Nor do they hide this–John Baku and Susan Wright actually argued that FetLife’s policy of autonomously searching out accusations to delete is a benefit to users in conversations at Dark Odyssey Summer Camp last fall….”

- Got Consent? Part III: FetLife Doesn’t Get It | Disrupting Dinner Parties

"…FetLife is essentially saying that if you were raped, the onus is on you to ensure a..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 14:58:48 -0400

“…FetLife is essentially saying that if you were raped, the onus is on you to ensure a convicition, while if you are accused of rape, you can cry libel, and the website will be all over it to protect you and silence the accuser…”

- Got Consent? Part III: FetLife Doesn’t Get It | Disrupting Dinner Parties

5 Ways We Can Teach Men Not to Rape - News & Views - EBONY

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 09:36:00 -0400

5 Ways We Can Teach Men Not to Rape - News & Views - EBONY:

…1. Teach young men about legal consent: Legal consent tops my list for a reason. Without it, sexual contact with someone is rape…whether you intended to rape or not. A woman who is drunk, unconscious or sleeping cannot give legal consent. And it’s not about a woman simply saying “no,” it’s really about making certain she’s saying yes!…

2. Teach young men to see women’s humanity, instead of seeing them as sexual objects for male pleasure: There is a reason why women are shamed into silence and why teenage boys in Steubenville, Ohio are caught on camera laughing about gang raping an unconscious girl at a party. The dehumanization of women spans all areas of American life….

3. Teach young men how to express healthy masculinity: “The question that’s being asked about what women can do to prevent violence against them is the wrong question. It’s not what can a woman say or do that can prevent being attacked. We need to turn that paradigm upside down. We need to focus on the messages that men are getting and about how they relate to women…

4. Teach young men to believe women and girls who come forward: The vast majority of women do not report their rapes to the police and many more only tell one or two people in confidence. That is a result of our proclivity towards victim blaming. What were you wearing? How much did you drink? Why were you there in the first place? When we hear about a rape case in the news or when we hear about one in our own lives, the first reaction should be to believe and support the accuser. There is a misleading perception that many or most rape claims are false. That is simply untrue. When a victim comes forward, they are committing an act of extreme bravery, and we owe it to them, to support (leaving the criminal investigation to law enforcement) them and place blame directly and solely on the perpetrator….

5. Teach males about bystander intervention: Both Men Stopping Violence and Men Can Stop Rape have bystander intervention workshops for men of all ages. “It’s about community accountability,” says Pandit, “We require men to talk to other men in their lives and tell them about these programs. It is important that we have community networks that hold men accountable.”…

"…Even if you believe, as I do, that the predators are not confused and can’t be educated,..."

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 09:17:43 -0400

“…Even if you believe, as I do, that the predators are not confused and can’t be educated, there are two good reasons to believe that consent education can make the climate better. First, because there are rapists who are not that small percentage of predators. Second, the predators absolutely depend on what I call the Social License to Operate, the climate that explains away or excuses what they do in certain circumstances, calls it not rape, calls it the survivor’s fault, minimizes it and lets him get away with it. Without that, the rapists can’t do it over and over because they’d get caught, excluded from their social circles, disciplined by commanding officers or expelled from campus, and they’d either have to stop or end up in prison….”

- Teach Consent! (But What Good Is Teaching Consent?) |

Photo

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 06:43:54 -0400

Deep Inside - A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars | Jon Millward - Blog

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:07:41 -0500

Deep Inside - A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars | Jon Millward - Blog:

Fascinating despite its limitations. Any given piece of evidence in the edifice of science is gonna have its limitations, that’s a big part of the point of replication. & the study of human sexuality tends to get short shrift, lending a beggars can’t be choosers flavor to the mix.

Given all that, however, this is an interesting little looksee at a goodsized subset of porn, presumably the more commercial end of the biz.

The Pervocracy: The Myth of the Boner Werewolf.

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 02:53:17 -0500

The Pervocracy: The Myth of the Boner Werewolf.:

“…There’s a pernicious myth out there that the male sex drive is unstoppable and irresistible—that once a man is aroused, he literally cannot control his actions. We tell jokes about “thinking with the other head” and “all the blood went out of his brain” that aren’t entirely jokes. We have a cultural narrative in which sexual arousal makes a man into a goddamn werewolf.

And we expect women to tiptoe around this uncontrollable male sexuality. We tell them to watch how they dress, lest they wake the beast. We tell them “some guys can’t control themselves”—not won’t, but can’t. We tell them to be careful what they start, because they’ll be expected to finish it. Hell, way too often we outright tell them that they have no right to withdraw consent once sex has started.

My response to myths like this, more and more, is “shit, if I believed that, I’d never have sex with a man again.” I wonder if the story would change if more guys realized that saying “if a woman gets me turned on, she’d better be ready to go all the way” is the same as saying “getting me turned on is dangerous, better not take the risk.”

Then again, I wonder why more men aren’t just insulted by the whole concept. If someone started telling stories about how my gender was controlled by our genitalia and sexual arousal turns us into rapist automatons, I would be outraged. I would explain in very small, very loud words that I am a person and I can goddamn control myself. I wish more men would speak up to say “actually, even when I can’t turn my erection off, I can sure as hell use the rest of my body to put it somewhere it won’t bother anyone.”

I wish our culture prized self-control as much as it does virility, and even more, I wish our culture didn’t act like they were opposites….”

So, somebody called you a Unicorn Hunter? | davidlnoble.com

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:58:18 -0500

So, somebody called you a Unicorn Hunter? | davidlnoble.com:

Decent explication of many of the problems of ‘unicorn hunting’. Unicorn hunting is a kink, polyamory, & swinging term referring to the common scenario of couples looking for a ‘hot bi babe’ to form the perfect triad of their dreams. Since such scenarios working out as planned are as rare, or nearly so, as unicorns, the phrase was born . .. …

"…so many…BDSMers would rather align themselves with systematic abuse than question the..."

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 09:36:44 -0500

“…so many…BDSMers would rather align themselves with systematic abuse than question the sanctity of their groups….”

- This is a story of isolationism and group loyalty. How about we make it a story of compassion? « Kink in exile

"…Those numbers are even worse than victim self-reports of rape in the general population;..."

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 08:39:05 -0500

“

…Those numbers are even worse than victim self-reports of rape in the general population; which the New York Times reports as about 20% based on a study supported by the National Institute of Justice….

…The best data we have shows that a third of kinksters have experienced a consent violation, 30% of kinksters have had their negotiated limits violated and 15% have their safeword ignored….

”

- One In Three Kinksters Reports A Consent Violation «

Don’t assume everyone is okay with being touched, even in...

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 06:43:44 -0500

Don’t assume everyone is okay with being touched, even in the most casual or socially ritualistic ways. Some of us have learned to put up with a certain amount of this, but we don’t necessarily like to be touched.

aspergersissues:

I don’t hug.

Tracking rape culture’s social license to operate online « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 21:07:47 -0500

Tracking rape culture’s social license to operate online « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed:

…if we continue to track spam reports this way, assuming that the publication of this post doesn’t change griefers’ future behaviors, we will eventually see the pattern described above repeat. That is, we’ll see the friends of an alleged abuser start to spam FAADE by reporting themselves with griefer reports. If this hypothesis can be proven, it may provide a far more reliable red flag for identifying social groups where consent violations are likely to be covered up rather than addressed constructively.

Those social groups are, to put it politely, not places where I would want to spend much time….

PSA: it's not being a prude to object to strangers telling you they want to stick their tongue in your wet hole and strangle you FFS

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 18:15:01 -0500

sinshine:

Nor is sending those kinds of messages “perfectly normal” or in any way acceptable.

"…While the scene’s mantra—“safe, sane and consensual”—is heard so often it might as well be..."

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:58:25 -0500

“…While the scene’s mantra—“safe, sane and consensual”—is heard so often it might as well be translated into needlepoint, violations of these maxims are common. In the last year, hundreds of people have come forward to describe the abuse they’ve suffered within the scene….”

- The Story of ‘No’: S&M Sex Clubs Sprout Up on Ivy Campuses, and Coercion Becomes an Issue | Observer

malesubmissionart: BDSM Scene power brokers are doing...

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 23:00:00 -0400

malesubmissionart:

BDSM Scene power brokers are doing everything they know how to silence discussions of the rampant rapes, sexual assaults, and violations of consent in their midst (especially by high-profile, VIP-status people), to censor postings linking to critique, and to prevent important safety and privacy information from spreading.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been sent more than five different Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices for videos I’ve made and posts I’ve written criticizing the “single largest online organ in the BDSM universe,” FetLife.com (aka BitLove, Inc.). Moreover, as of this writing, most of my counter-notices were allowed to proceed unchallenged, a tacit acknowledgement that FetLife is well aware their DMCA takedown notices were improper and that my material was all either non-infringing or fair use. The majority of my content is now back online.

As I recently wrote, the BDSM Scene is an abusive social institution. I believe its institutional structures ought be destroyed as quickly and as mercilessly as possible. No institution deserves loyalty, no demographic compassion, no organization trust, no culture respect. But every person is entitled to each of these.

Since the BDSM Scene’s powers that be have economic incentives to support rape culture, to perpetuate technical ignorance, and to erode Internet user privacy, I’ve begun writing computer code to provide users self-empowering tools. This is an effort to break through the “somebody else’s problem” mindset, and an attempt to show that, on the Internet, users—not institutions—can be in control of our own well-being if we work together.

Volunteers are needed to help write code, beta test new tools (such as those linked below), brainstorm new ideas, and generally disrupt the BDSM Scene-State’s abusive functioning. The game is cat-and-mouse; the goal is to spread this information before Scene-State agents censor it, to implement as many tools empowering users as possible, with or without BDSM Scene permission or assistance. Every reblog counts. Every link shared matters.

maymay:

The free FetLife Epic Thread user script gives FetLife.com threaded comments.

The FetLife Epic Thread user script makes reading long, passionate discussions on FetLife.com easier by adding comment threading for @-replies, a “previous/next” link for related comments, and visual highlights. Instead of needing to scroll past a bunch of unrelated comments, simply click the “Next in thread on page” link to go to the next comment in the thread. Rather than having to scroll up or copy-and-paste to see what a comment is replying to, click the “in reply to” link to see the original comment right under your cursor.

Download and install from maybemaimed.com.

See also:

The privacy information FetLife doesn’t want you to read.

FetLife Age/Sex/Location Search user script lets you search for FetLife profiles by age, sex, location, or role. (via)

FetLife Epic Thread « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 22:03:28 -0400

FetLife Epic Thread « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed:

The FetLife Epic Thread user script makes reading long, passionate discussions on FetLife.com easier by adding comment threading for @-replies, a “previous/next” link for related comments, and visual highlights. Instead of needing to scroll past a bunch of unrelated comments, simply click the “Next in thread on page” link to go to the next comment in the thread. Rather than having to scroll up or copy-and-paste to see what a comment is replying to, click the “in reply to” link to see the original comment right under your cursor….

Since FL management endlessly drag their heels over making the site more useful (seriously, no text search capacities for the endless number of groups render the place an unusable mess, amongst many other problematic design issues), it sure is nice of others (like the much-banned Maymay) to lend a hand with after-ware solutions . .… :D