Fun things to try in kink: fire play

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To begin, a fairly standard disclaimer in all things kink: Don’t try this at home; don’t try this alone; do your homework. It is usually safer to try new things in kink in front of other people, because most kink activities are fairly risky and having other people around, especially if they’re experienced, can help mitigate those risks.

Fire play is extremely hazardous. Preparing accordingly means having spotters, the right venue and the right equipment. Below is the same set-up I use to demo this on others, most commonly at play parties where there is a rotation of observers and participants throughout the night. There are many fire play techniques but I have found this one to be accessible to beginners.

You will need:

  • At least one spotter (someone who will supervise your practice), who is trained to use a fire extinguisher or fire blanket, and preferably has done this before.
  • A fire extinguisher.
  • A fire blanket.
  • A bowl and cotton balls.
  • Up to snuff first aid, especially for burns.
  • A phone handy for 911, if things get really hairy.
  • A fuel source; I recommend 70% isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol) for the technique detailed below.
  • A barbecue lighter. No matches, no candles, no open flames in general. Zip lighters doable, but not recommended.
  • A victim volunteer; either to ignite the fuel (the “Top”) or be the recipient (the “bottom”).
  • No synthetic fibre clothing on the bottom. Naked is safest. Natural fibres are next best, preferably with no or rolled up sleeves. Ideally neither participant has styled their hair with any kind of mousse, gel, spray, or product with alcohol in it. Long hair should be tied back.
  • Affirmative, informed consent from your volunteer. Your volunteer should also be assured that you will call emergency responders if necessary, even if they ask uncomfortable questions about what you were doing.
  • A venue that is as nonflammable as you can find. Concrete and certain types of tile can take longer to ignite and give you more time to respond to a disaster; carpets grant you no such luxury. In a house, best place is sometimes the basement or the kitchen, depending on how it is set up. If you live in a big city, there might be a dungeon that allows fire play where you can try this (and also meet people to supervise your practice).

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Resettled Syrian refugees collaborate to support wildfire evacuees

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Syrian refugees resettled in Alberta have collaborated to contribute donations to the massive wildfire evacuees, which now include folks from Anzac, Gregoire Lake Estates, and Fort McMurray First Nation:

Khanchet and her family know first-hand how scary it is to leave a community, home and possessions behind, and she was determined to help the people of Fort McMurray.

“It’s not easy to lose everything. We can understand them more than anyone in Canada. We were in the same situation,” said Khanchet, who lives in Calgary.

“Me and my family wanted to do something for these people. Canadian society helped us when we came to Canada.”

Syrian refugees across Calgary are now giving what little they have to northern Albertans, after Khanchet posted an appeal in Arabic on a private Facebook group the newcomers created and frequent.

“(Canadians) gave us everything. And now it’s time to return the favour,” she wrote.

Now I can bubble with national pride. This, right here. This is Canada.

The evacuees number up to 88,000 now. The province has declared a state of emergency, and the military is on standby for emergency evacuations. The fire now spans over 160,000 hectares of forest. You can apparently see it from space.

Reminder that if you have the means, you can support the relief efforts here.

Still zero fatalities.

-Shiv

Oxford, Alabama rescinds transphobic bathroom bill

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Oxford, Alabama has repealed its local ordinance to fine people for using the “wrong” washroom.

Council members voted 3-2 on Wednesday to rescind its controversial restroom measure, which had made it a misdemeanor — punishable by a $500 fine or six months in jail — to use a public bathroom differing from one’s birth gender.

Looks like the Supreme Court is getting through to people. Eventually.

-Shiv

Kat Blaque on The Comments Section

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Today seems to be a good day for finding people who are really on point. This time, we have Kat Blaque on internet comments sections:

In general, comments sections tend to be a massive time-suck that often results in fighting with total strangers and resolving absolutely nothing.

…

That’s one of the reasons I started discussing social justice on my Youtube page. Now I have one definitive video exploring my opinion on a subject, and I feel like something productive has finally come from all my previous frustration.

I encourage you to check her out. She’s right about a lot of stuff, and was one of the most convincing responders to the whole “Rachel Dolezal’s race scam is like trans people” codswallop.

I can’t necessarily formulate a comments policy on AtG just yet, because it’s not my own space–I’m renting New Frontier with two other authors and as far as I can tell, the three of us are collectively responsible for curating comments on this column. That means we have a scattered comments dictatorship right now. But a lot of her experiences with the comments section reflect my own, and inform the comments policy I will formally implement when AtG gets its own space. In a nutshell? We’re not here to convince those who have made up their mind. This blog is for the curious, those who are actively seeking new information, the ones who admit there might be more to learn than what they know, the ones committed to trans allyship who also know what it means to be an ally. Those are the people we’re actually going to reach here.

The main reason we don’t try to convince people who’ve made up their mind is because it seldom works over an internet platform, even less so in the comments section. That’s the sort of thing you do in person. It’s not that I don’t want to encourage you to find ways to resist oppression from the privileged and ignorant–it’s that the privileged and ignorant don’t explicitly seek out social justice blogs to have a conversation about social justice, they do it to specifically derail conversations about social justice.

Unless you happen to be an emergency responder, you probably don’t get paid to clean up train wrecks.

So don’t.

-Shiv

Trudeau is pretty sure you won’t move to Canada

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Trudeau is well-known for talking the talk, especially if it’s about women’s reproductive rights, racial inequality, separately singling out Canada’s shitty treatment of the First Nations, and so on. The new Canadian government is still relatively young and many of us are waiting for results. While a sizeable and noisy minority of Canadians who would fit right in with American Republicans bitch and moan about increased taxes (wahh, wahh, my yacht will take a whole extra payment to pay off now!), Americans are looking at Trump and saying they’ll move to Canada if he wins.

Trudeau explains why you probably won’t: this happens, literally every election, and the immigration numbers don’t ever change. But he’s optimistic that Trump’s extremism will move more people to vote. I think he’s miscalculating. Clinton induces a polarized response herself, for some reasons better than others.

I wish I could be more smug about the American election, but they’ve historically kept Canada on a tight leash and I’d rather my country not be dragged into more interventionist shenanigans where we pretend we’re totally not continuing the Cold War by projecting national anxieties onto the Middle East. The way I see it, both Clinton and Trump will drag Canada along; the only difference is whether we’ll be dragged through mud or shit.

-Shiv

The religion of quackery

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Amy Tuteur authored a piece comparing the various commonalities between woo and organized religion:

4. Predestination

Just like the Calvinist belief in predestination allowed the spiritual elect to be identified by their wealth and success, quackery has its own version of predestination. In quackery, the spiritual elect can be identified by their good health.

Luck played no role in Calvinist predestination. You weren’t wealthy because you were lucky or even skillful. You were lucky because you had been chosen by God. Luck plays no role in pseudoscience. You aren’t healthy because you are lucky; you’re healthy because you are one of the health elect.

It goes without saying that people who get sick must have done something to deserve it or must have been damaged by demons.

7. Faith

Like all religions, quackery requires faith in the face of the inability to prove that it works or is true. Of course in quackery they call it “intuition.”

…

Like any religion, quackery has its own priests, the purveyors of quackery goods and services. Instead of offering rational prescriptions for health, quacks offer (for money) superstitions, affirmations, and support in rejecting rationality. They sell substances with no efficacy (herbs, homeopathy) and provide friendship and companionship as a substitute for knowledge.

Andrew Wakefield, the doctor deprived of his medical license because of research misconduct, is one such priest of pseudoscience, though there are many others.

The article seems on point. Many of my woo-soaked peers were/are extremely ableist, had a tendency to victim blame, and often defined themselves by their fitness (read: their skinniness). Intuition is one of those buzzwords that flies well past any conceivably explicable baggage from our evolutionary history, where we had a selection pressure to quickly assess whether something was a threat, and into supernatural “third eye” territory cultivated by… eating organic, apparently. And there’s certainly no shortage of woo hippies trying to make a living by commercializing and whitewashing Indian practices because they sound spiritual, but not in the Western way.

Approaching quackery as a secular religion has important implications for how we address belief in pseudoscience. It is very difficult to reason people out of beliefs that they didn’t reasons themselves into. Hence education in the sciences, or specific disciplines of immunology, oncology, etc. is doomed to be ineffective. That’s especially true when persisten faith in the face of evidence to the contrary is venerated as devotion.

Reminds me of horseshoe theory. That thing where the more extreme along a spectrum you are, the similar to the other end you are. Quacks and cranks have more in common than they’d like to admit.

-Shiv

 

Please don’t romanticize abuse

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I’ve recently encountered people voluntarily identifying as Narcissists.

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog, you’ll know I’ve been recently hurt by a narcissist. So my reaction is probably a bit more personal than it could be,

BUT

Please don’t do this. There is nothing wrong with being self confident or even admiring your own aesthetics. That is not narcissism. Actually identifying as a narcissist, unless you’ve received that diagnosis and you’re learning Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to mitigate that, is not unlike identifying as an arsonist, or a psychopath. Narcissism is a destructive pathology which requires someone else to break in order to build the narcissist up. Claiming to be one is contradictory–narcissists don’t advertise their condition, because they know it drives people away.

So don’t.

You love yourself. You’re confident in yourself. You think you’re sexy. If this is what you’re trying to say, say that. Calling yourself a narcissist isn’t cute. It’s a personality disorder for a reason.

I’ll file this under “I don’t think that word means what you think it means” and call it a day.

-Shiv

How to flirt: Kinky bootblack edition

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I’m on the train. The weather has finally picked up in true Albertan fashion, zipping from freezing to blistering hot over the course of a single day. I dole out compliments to anyone who looks like they’re trying to hold their self-confidence up with shaky hands. “You look great!” “I like your hair!” “Nice choice of sandals!”

Despite the weather, the punks–myself included–stick to our ripped jeans and hipster beanies. Their symbolic importance exceeds any need for comfort. We’ll accept being a little hot. It’s important to set ourselves apart, and our clothing choices are a convenient short hand for that.

The train pulls into another station, the doors opening to admit a wave of heat and passengers. A woman sits across from me, probably somewhere around my age. She’s absolutely my kind of gal. Side shave on her head, large expressive piercings, resting bitch face, and some god damn gorgeous combat boots. She places one leg on the inactive heat vent between us. I look down at her boots. Black Doc Martens. They’re well-loved, the lines of age striking out across the leather like lighting bolts in the evening sky. Covered in mud and dust. Cracks bared like battle scars. Yellow threads make up the perimeter of each shoe, a snake that bobs in and out of the leather. The train might be air conditioned, but I’m getting hotter nonetheless.

“I really like your boots,” I say. Understatement of the year. I’m not a brand snob but black Docs are notoriously responsive recipients of bootblack TLC. I know I’m blushing. I don’t care. Or maybe I do, and I’m hoping she notices.

She looks up from her phone. “Oh,” she says. “Thanks.” Her smile seems sincere, but it fades away as she returns her attention to her phone. I sink a little on the inside. I don’t want to be obnoxious and persist after being brushed off, so I quietly take a breath and settle for staring out the window, pretending I wasn’t fantasizing about an erotic bootblacking scene.

“I like yours too,” she says after a pause. “Are they new?”

I get a head rush, the kind you have to reign in around strangers whose interest in your has not been confirmed. “Thanks! Not new. I black them myself,” I say. “Have you had yours cared for lately? They look like they could use some TLC.”

I knew the answer was no, of course. I couldn’t see any signs of leather care at all on her shoe, so if she had them blacked, it was ages ago. I try to act somewhat aloof, but I think she can tell I’m really into it.

“No, it never really crossed my mind,” she says.

“You can really extend the lifespan of real leather with proper care,” I say. Yes, that’s right, make it about economics. That’s something normal people do.

“I guess that makes sense,” she says. “But how much does it cost compared to just replacing them?”

I pull out one of my business cards. It’s fairly innocuous, to the untrained eye. The job title is ‘Volunteer Coordinator.’ The business name is unassuming, on the surface, although it was filled with code words common in the BDSM scene. I offer the card and she takes it. The entire card is one long euphemism for spends lots of time at a dungeon. “I do it for fun at certain events, actually, so nothing if you went here. Although tips are always welcome.”

“I’ve heard of this place,” she says. “Isn’t that a sex club?”

“Sort of,” I say. “A lot of stuff happens there, not just sex.”

“Like what?”

I grin. I feel pushed by an almost manic confidence, even if the little voice that tells me I’m not good enough begs me to stop. “Like getting your boots blacked,” I say. “If you ask nicely.” Manic Confidence winks. Little Voice cringes and prepares for the worst.

She stares at the card, flicking away at the corners. The train’s announcer buzzes to life, declaring its next stop. She shoves the card in her pocket, sizing me up as the train lurches to a stop. “I’ll think about it,” she says.

“That’s great! Have a good day,” I say. I’ll think about it, too. Maybe I’m just hopeful, but I swear I can see the corner of her mouth lift into a grin. A new wave of heat and passengers filters through the doors. I see her pause in the middle of the platform, looking at the card, turning it over. She eventually inches away as the train starts again. Someone else takes her spot across from me. I look down at their shoes.

Flip flops.

No flirting for that one.

-Shiv

Wildfire rips through oil sands city

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A wildfire ripped through kilometers of forest to the point of actually hitting the Albertan oil sands capital, Fort McMurray, prompting an evacuation of 20,000 people:

Fire officials face another day of high temperatures and strong winds likely to fuel a raging wildfire that has led to the evacuation of Fort McMurray, Alta., and the expected arrival in Edmonton of nearly 20,000 evacuees.

Late Tuesday, provincial and fire officials reported several residential neighbourhoods in the oilsands capital that they believe have been lost to fire.

…

Perhaps surprisingly, no major injuries have been reported. And Fort McMurray’s critical infrastructure — including the water treatment plant, waste water treatment plant, Highway 63 and the Grant MacEwan Bridge — remained intact Tuesday night.

The Canadian and Albertan governments have a history of being fairly reliable in deploying the Canadian military to assist with disasters of this scale, as well as offering notable financial assistance to those affected. So there’s a silver lining–there’s no fatalities (so far, fingers crossed), and the Province already has a framework in place for mitigating financial loss.

If you have the means, consider donating to The Red Cross. In the flood that devastated southern Alberta in 2013, it was the Red Cross addressing the immediate problems, doling out prepaid bank cards to help people cover food, hotels, rent, clothes, and other necessities. Monetary donations are the most effective as they are going to be understaffed and won’t have time to sort through your old shit.

Our best hopes go out to everyone for safe refuge and a speedy recovery.

The Northlands Expo Centre is holding an emergency centre, if anyone reading this needs info on where they can go. Here is a resource for anyone who wants/needs to give or receive help.

PS. Please save the snark about Fort McMurray’s stereotypical residents.

-Shiv

 

 

Breaking news: AFA proves it is predatory

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The American Family Association says trans protections concerning bathrooms provides predators “no barriers access:”

“We’ve already had people testing this, going into Targets and men trying to go into bathrooms. There is absolutely no barrier,” she told host Stephen Bannon, who said “decent, hard-working people who don’t want their 4-year-old daughter to have to go into a bathroom with a guy with a beard in a dress.”

Just so we’re clear, you wanted to prove how predators would abuse trans protection policies… by abusing Target’s trans protection policy to send cis men into the women’s washroom.

Well, thanks for making that easier for us.

“Let’s punish trans women for the poor behaviour of cis people.” Accountability? Nah. Innocent until proven guilty? Not in the AFA!

Repeat after me: IT IS ALREADY A CRIME TO ASSAULT PEOPLE. TRANS WOMEN ARE NOT ASSAULTING YOU BY EXISTING.

I think I’m going to actually vomit everywhere if I hear any more “concern” about teh womenz from the same political groups that brought us mandatory ultrasounds prior to abortions.

-Shiv