BDSM 101: What & Why?

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Hello lovelies, Shiv here again. I hope you all had a lovely week, what with April Fool’s and something about… Trans Visibility? I’ll write on that later. Ideally you all had a tolerable Easter, too. One can dream. My breakup went from “bad” to “I can’t even,” so I apologize if I’m already slipping on my publication schedule!

Today’s topic is an introduction to BDSM, and what I think needs to be in place for the practice to be considered ethical.

 

What is BDSM?

 

BDSM is an initialism that combines Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, and Sadomasochism (or Sadism & Masochism) into an umbrella, catch-all term for “what kinksters do.”

I start this way only so that you know what the initialism literally means, but my actual definition is as follows:

“A series of practices which involve expressing and exploring interests that may be seen as unconventional through a system of rigorous ethics which conscientiously acknowledges and mitigates physical and emotional risks.”

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On Vocabulary & “Political Correctness”: Transition Reactions p1

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Hi lovelies, Shiv here again. I’ll start with a brief aside: thanks for the supportive messages regarding my last post! Y’all barely know me and you’re offering me those nice messages. It was small, but meant a lot. 🙂

Without further ado:

Transition Reactions is my series of essays covering the way people respond to my gender transition. It will generally speak exclusively of my experiences as a trans woman but will also inevitably intersect with my various other axes of life. This is not a data intensive series (those will come later) and mostly only speaks to my particular experience.

Content Notice — cissexism

One of the more bewildering reactions I’ve had when attempting to educate people on transgender specific terminology is anger: Why do you need all these extra words? I would think the answer is self evident–“because the existing terminology is not adequate”–but that’s not the question that’s really being asked. What they’re actually saying is, why don’t you just accept the way I’m treating you? Why do you have to be offended by everything? Why should I have to change to accommodate you?

I was invited to attend an erotic massage class as a masseuse. The class was marketed as being “for women,” but the demo was performed on an AFAB cis woman. Here we were learning to manipulate AFAB genitalia–something I do not have–and while I was enjoying the material itself very thoroughly, I couldn’t help but sink on the inside. “Women do this, women do that” coupled with a clitoris, vulva and vagina. What of the women who don’t do that, or that, because they weren’t AFAB?

The instructor, who apparently valued my opinion, asked me for feedback and I told them honestly: I loved learning the material, (I’m sure my AFAB partners will too), but it was categorically excluding me because I do not have AFAB genitals. I told them I couldn’t attend their next class for men because I wouldn’t be able to stomach having them point at a penis and testes and go “men do this men do that.” It was clearly designed to be taught to cisgender people for whom genitals and gender are interchangeable. It was, albeit unintentionally, gender essentialist.

Naturally, the instructor accused me of tilting at windmills. Not their words, but that was the crux of their response. [Read more…]

Hello!

Hello, JP here.  I comment from time to time at Pharyngula.  I’ll be posting here on a regular basis, I hope weekly, as grad student life allows.  (I’m in the Slavic department at the University of Michigan, getting a Ph.D.  I study late-twentieth century Russian and Polish poetry, primarily female authors, to put it in a very short nutshell.)

I’m interested in issues of race, social justice, and immigration.

Here are a few things that have been on my mind lately:

If you don’t already, please consider boycotting Driscoll’s, one of the largest providers of grocery store strawberries (and some other berries) in the US.  They have an atrocious labor record.  From the linked article:

Many of the San Quintin protesters are indigenous people from some of Mexico’s poorest states, like Oaxaca and Guerrero. Indigenous people make up more than half of Mexico’s agricultural workers.

The striking pickers initially wanted wages increased to 300 pesos a day, then lowered the demand to 200 pesos, about $13. Most of them earned $7 to $8 a day before the strike.

Protests turned acrimonious when demonstrators threw rocks at government vehicles and police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, reported the Los Angeles Times. Workers also blocked 56 miles of the Trans-Peninsular Highway. By April, the strike had effectively ended after growers signed agreements raising wages 15 percent—far less than the pickers demanded.

The water situation in Flint is still, to put it very mildly, a mess.  In a just world, “Governer” Rick Snyder would be facing immediate criminal charges, but we’ll see.  Michigan politics, as far as I can see, are rotten to the core.  Here is an article listing places you can send donations.  Every little bit helps.

In the next week or so, I hope to have a post detailing the current situation of the Roma in Europe, which is not good, and hasn’t been for a very long time.

Until next time, take care, and keep on truckin’.

Whelp, I’ve been dumped. Twice. At once.

So I introduced myself as being in a poly-v-kinda-triad in my first post. Now I’ve got good news and bad news.

Bad news first: I guess I’m single now. They both dumped me.

But I guess the silver lining is that I suddenly have a lot more time for blogging! And poly is more of an orientation so it’s not like I can’t write about it just because I’m flying solo.

Anyway, I spent most of last week planning material so there will be stuff coming out soon.

See you again in a few days lovelies, I hope you’re all doing well.

-Shiv, slightly nauseous, definitely broken hearted.

 

 

New Car Smell

Hello interwebs!

I just finished my tour of the FreeThoughtBlogs lair tower, and boy, my cage office has a fantastic new car smell!

My name’s Siobhan, and this is my introductory post for what will become my blog about the intersection between atheist-kinky-poly-sexworker-trans! We’ll call it “Against the Grain” for now. For those not in the know: New Frontiers is a shared blog and I will not be the only author on this page. “Against the Grain” is simply the working title for my specific project. My posts on this blog will be tagged with AtG to mark them separately from the other participants.

You’ll notice one of the major differences between me and some of the regulars you’re used to at FreeThoughtBlogs: I’m not a former Christian–I had/have much more exposure to New Age woo.

Don’t get me wrong, the Abrahamic religions are mouthy motherfuckers and I’ll get the occasional potshot in too, BUT there’s no shortage of atheists doing that in detail. My specialty within skepticism is going to be exploring woo and the sub-cultures that arise around it, from someone who was and is immersed in it. Minority religions such as paganism/wicca are also occasional subjects of my analysis.

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