Ex-gay? Ex-dominant? Ex-switch?

You heard of the exgay movement? About the ex-sm movement? Take a look at this, but be warned, it is very painful.

This is slightly different than you might see in general from an ex-gay movement. This is a man who by his own choice wishes to stop being a pro-dom.  It is a story of a man who has been abused from the early start of his life, from bullying to living with his father who, according to him, had ‘deviant desires’, using dogs as sexual instruments on women, involving his son in pornographic movies, the son became a ‘lap dog’. The dad took his own life, and  the rest of this man’s story is one of abuse (rape, abuse from people he trusted, violence, etc). As the documentary goes on, it becomes clear for me as a viewer that this is exploitative documentary.

At one point Rick says, after some type of fisting session that involves removing feces from the bottom of the submissive, ‘This is all a part of the human cycle, don’t judge me’.
And I kinda don’t want to judge him. His past life catch up with him, and the grim reality of lonelyness is a harsh one. The harshest. And Rick is honest.  The documentary is called ‘Me and my slaves’ but it should be called ‘Me and my pain’. It is hard to watch a human being in pain.
This is him, trying to perform his own absolution saving himself. The christian concept of absolution,attracts to those who are in so much pain, to those who cannot see any way out of a life they consider as doomed.

“I’ve lost myself…I’ve given it up, there is nothing there that I can do.”
Rick

And for that, I will not go through the whole documentary here with you. There is so much to say about this man. But I’m already exploiting him enough.

In the movie Bruno, with Sasha Baron Cohen as the austrian fashionista/reporter/celebrity, there is a specific favorite part of mine He reaches a decision to become straight, because all of the other male celebrities in the U.S are straight.  So he finds someone who can make him straight.  This is in no way on the same levels of Rick, in terms of despair, but it still says a lot about those people who seek out or get forced in to the ex-gay movement. The despair felt, because ones sexual and emotional level is not on the same as the normative society’s. A  society that can punish you, shun you, kill you, ignore your very existence. What then does that mean, this whole regiment of becoming straight? By being around men and being socialised into becoming a straight man, not thinking about men in a sexual sense, the gay or bisexual man is supposed to become liberated from what is seen as a troublesome practice and instead find a woman to marry.Being gay according to the ex-gay movement is something that you choose to do, it’s a choice in terms of sexual practice, and this practice is wrong.  The impure thoughts of a broken individual that is becoming healed through therapy. For this movement, they do seem to have very little appreciation of  any possible emotional links to a person of the same sex, and if there is, they are taught and can be re-wired.
So here we are then. Bruno is going to be rewired. Or is he?

Can we apply the same concept to BDSMers? That we ‘are’ sadomasochists, that our bodies inhabit the lust as a essence and there is nothing more? What would that stance actually mean in terms of fighting for BDSM-rights, or queer rights? These are important questions. Is BDSM something that we are or something that we do? I can’t answer that for you, but this is where I am coming from.
My personal stance is that I am a queer person.  With certain tastes of sexual practices. I can’t define my self as a submissive or as a bottom.  Those are not a direct, linked part to my identity.  It’s something I do.  But also, by doing, I can reclaim it, bit by bit, becoming more, going further in to myself and getting to know parts of me. Parts that are not constant, but ever so changing. Parts that I maybe have not been able to reach.

I think I might be looking for something. I don’t know really what, and if there is ever a final point in which I can rest, or if I even want there to be one, but in the meantime, I can rest in those discoveries I’ve done about myself today, in this minute. It is not about being essential. It is about exploration and appropriation of feelings, practices and structures.

 

Here is a clip of one of the ways in which Bruno is supposed to become straight.

I know, I know, the mockery of the military is brilliant on so many levels but there is one more reason why I’m posting this. Because the ex-gay movement exist and it needs to be meet and challenged for what it is.

I don’t want to pass judgement on those who seek council in the hands on the ex-gay movement. We live in a world that is homophobic, sexist, racist, misogynist, etc, and it can be so fucking lonely. What I will pass judgement on is those who exploit the fears that they themselves manage to maintain.
They are, in short:

Utter Fucktards.

The Lies about the Lies, part 2

First part by Xzenu Cronström Beskow can be found here.

To recap, the ten lies that Melissa Farley claims to uncover, are:

1. Pain is pleasure; humiliation is enjoyable; bondage is liberation.
2. Sadomasochism is love and trust, not domination and annihilation.
3. Sadomasochism is not racist and anti Semitic even though we “act” like slave owners and enslaved Africans, Nazis and persecuted Jews.
4. Sadomasochism is consensual; no one gets hurt if they don’t want to get hurt. No one has died from sadomasochistic “scenes.”
5. Sadomasochism is only about sex. It doesn’t extend into the rest of the relationship.
6. Sadomasochistic pornography has no relationship to the sadomasochistic society we live in. “If it feels good, go with it.” “We create our own sexuality.”
7. Lesbians “into sadomasochism” are feminists, devoted to women, and a women-only lesbian community. Lesbian pornography is “by women, for women.”
8. Since lesbians are superior to men, we can “play” with sadomasochism in a liberating way that heterosexuals can not.
9. Re-enacting abuse heals abuse. Sadomasochism heals emotional wounds from childhood sexual assault.
10. Sadomasochism is political dissent. It is progressive and even “transgressive” in that it breaks the rules of the dominant sexual ideology.

Part 2: The Strawman Sadomasochist
To some extent, all ten points listed in part one are to some extent a “Strawman Political” version of sadomasochists. In this part I will focus on six points where this “Strawman sadomasochist” is the main problem, while the next part will instead deal with the four points where the main problem is radical feminist dogmatism.

1. Pain is pleasure; humiliation is enjoyable; bondage is liberation.

For some people, the RIGHT kind of pain in the right degree and context can indeed be enjoyable. Same thing goes for humiliation and for being tied up with ropes – which is what the word “bondage” refers to in a BDSM context. (BDSM stands for sadomasochistic sexual practices: Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, Sadism & Masochism.)

During my decades of experience with the BDSM scene, I have *never* encountered a person who claims that all pain is enjoyable. However, I have often encountered this stereotype among people who are prejudiced against sadomasochists and their BDSM practices.

It is also worth noticing that this first point of Farley’s is homage to the novel 1984 and the propaganda of the evil regime in that novel: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” The problem here is not the homage itself, but that she attributes it to the sadomasochists. The strawman sadomasochist she is “exposing” have more in common with the villains of children’s comic books, standing on mountaintops shouting “Muahaha, I’m EVIL!” to the raging thunderstorm, then it has in common with actual people. I assume that Farley has made up the ten points herself, incorrectly presenting her prejudice against sadomasochists as if it was the actual opinions of actual sadomasochists. If the list actually do come from someone who claim to be a sadomasochist, and Farley has not twisted the words or ripped them out of context, then Farley has indeed been extremely lucky with finding a source that is easy to mock.

The Lies about the Ten Lies, by Guestblogger

Ve: When I first read Melissa Farleys piece ‘Ten Lies about Sadomasochism’ I wanted to respond.  I did not know how, but kept the text in the back of my head.

Then, time went by, and I did not give a proper response. Instead, a couple of weeks ago I saw the text was mentioned in a discussiongroup. Closely following, I realised a fellow sex-positive activist who is also an acquaintance of mine was saying all that I never managed to express when it came to Farley’s badly informed rants.

So here, we proudly present our first guestblogger; here is Xzenu Beskow and the first part out of 3, with an examination of the claims made by Melissa Farley.

Part 1: Totalitarian categorism in Radical Feminism

It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and this metaphor is very true for totalitarian branches of radical feminism. Tough everyone divides things and people into categories, it is all too easy to make the categories into prisons instead of tools. This is the point at which categorization turns into what I call categorism: When categorization by skin color or ethnicity turns into racism, where categorization by gender turns into sexism or transphobia, where categorization by sexual orientations turns into homophobia, heterophobia or paraphobia.

Feminism focuses on the categorization of people into men and women, and on the oppression of the second category. At best, this focus is liberating by fighting oppression and by making oppression visible. At worst, however, feminism can be misused to lock people into narrow categories of what it means to have a certain gender or sexuality. And thus, certain branches of radical feminism are infamous for prejudice against gender identity minorities (notably transsexuals, for example with Raymond’s book The Transsexual Empire) and against all sexualities that do not fit their narrow normative orthodoxy.

Such orthodoxy can be relatively harmless when it is very far from what the mainstream believes. If a debater claims in the name of feminism that all heterosexual women are brainwashed victims of male rapists, then the debater is unlikely to accomplish anything other then giving antifeminists an opportunity to ridicule feminism as such. But if the same debater instead claims that all masochists are brainwashed victims of sadistic rapists, then the debater has a chance to cause real harm to real masochists since this sexual minority is already viewed with mistrust and prejudice by many in the mainstream.

One good example is Farley’s “The Ten Lies of Sadomasochism”. In this text, the author makes the claim that there are ten claims that sadomasochists usually make about themselves. She also claims that these ten statements are lies, and that she has successfully exposed them as such.

Three things are wrong about this statement. First of all, her list is highly questionable. Some claims are twisted into generalizations, others are outright outrageous. It is obvious that it is the list of a radical feminist who want to portray sadomasochism in a bad light, not a list that the sadomasochist subculture would agree on. Thus, her whole argument is based on a “Strawman Political”. (See http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawmanPolitical )

Second, not only does she use heavily ideological definitions of what certain words mean, but she also pretends that sadomasochists agree with her definitions of these words.

Third, she generalizes in ways that very consistently imply the word “all” without using the word itself. She talks about how all sadomasochists are, without ever using the word “all”, taking for granted that all sadomasochists form one coherent group. This kind of generalization is a hallmark of categorism.

The ten so-called lies are:

1. Pain is pleasure; humiliation is enjoyable; bondage is liberation.
2. Sadomasochism is love and trust, not domination and annihilation.
3. Sadomasochism is not racist and anti Semitic even though we “act” like slave owners and enslaved Africans, Nazis and persecuted Jews.
4. Sadomasochism is consensual; no one gets hurt if they don’t want to get hurt. No one has died from sadomasochistic “scenes.”
5. Sadomasochism is only about sex. It doesn’t extend into the rest of the relationship.
6. Sadomasochistic pornography has no relationship to the sadomasochistic society we live in. “If it feels good, go with it.” “We create our own sexuality.”
7. Lesbians “into sadomasochism” are feminists, devoted to women, and a women-only lesbian community. Lesbian pornography is “by women, for women.”
8. Since lesbians are superior to men, we can “play” with sadomasochism in a liberating way that heterosexuals can not.
9. Reenacting abuse heals abuse. Sadomasochism heals emotional wounds from childhood sexual assault.
10. Sadomasochism is political dissent. It is progressive and even “transgressive” in that it breaks the rules of the dominant sexual ideology.

In the next two parts we will take a closer look at each of these claims. I have divided this into two chapters: The Strawman Sadomasochist and Sadomasochism Versus Radical Feminist Dogma.

To be continued

By Xzenu Cronström Beskow

The author is a  queerfeminist veteran, active both in struggles against sexual abuse and  for the rights of sexual minorities. Xzenu got  academic degrees in psychology and sexology.

 

On abuse, ‘Dominance’, status & experiences

One more of those ‘please, read, now. Now’.

Ms Pet writes on Sexability how she was getting a non-consensual experience when a leatherdyke topped her without listening to her. This text has elements of incest and non-consensual acts, so please, if you are aware that this can have triggering effects on you, read with care or any other way you see fit.

The importance of not only examine the mechanisms that are on the ‘outside’ but also those within a community cannot be disregarded. Just because one have all the beautiful theories and practices does not mean that ‘power’ that is possible to vield don’t have their base in something that is so harming.
You who experience abuse on the grounds of racism, sexism, classism, queer/transophobia, physical/emotional abilities and so on, I have a hard time believing you are few. All your stories are important. It is not your responsibility to change idiocracy, but every time you speak up it is so fucking important.

Just because we play around with power does not mean that we have to comply to the rules of power in a world that think that power is ‘power over’ .

“‘Power over’ lies in the belief that I can increase my power by taking some of yours. The way I get to feel big is you to feel small, and the way I get to feel secure is to make you feel insecure. ‘Power with is based on the idea that we all can become more powerful by supporting each other in being more powerful”
Easton & Lizt in ‘ The New Bottoming Book’

Nor can we ignore the mechanism, the fact that we live in a world with inequalities and structures. My sad experience is that I’ve met more people who are good at disregarding this in Sweden. It could be that I have the benefit to be based in London, a very multifacetted town, but fact is, there is shit going here as well. There is shit everywhere.

Fight the shit. As much as you can, as much as you want.

//

Ve