If you go down to the woods…..

In her fictionalised essay, A Room of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf deems financial security and privacy the two vital elements in producing fiction. I hope most readers can come up with several authors who challenge the idea you need to be well off to produce great fiction. However the need for privacy is one I can recognise and sympathise with. Like many of her era she saw childbirth and the raising of children as a barrier to female success. The suicide of Judith Shakespeare caused by the realisation her pregnancy permanently trapped her. Once you become a mother there is no privacy, no escape from the demands of your offspring. This was a common view, and draws a direct line of heritage to those who saw Thatcher as a feminist icon even while her children were farmed off to a succession of nannies. Women could not be maternal and succeed. Today the idea still persists, but thankfully words like balance, compartmentalization, me time , have also entered the debate.

Should you be a BDSM fuckslut with a bag full of canes in an ikea bag (just how middle class is that) and a boxful of other toys including cuffs, dildos and butt plugs, under the bed, you have a need for privacy that goes beyond a desire for some “me” time and a few Cosmo’s. I live a life where that room with a locked door is an internal necessity, not just a  luxury. I may feel that submitting is an important aspect of me, an expression of myself as important as writing was to Woolf, but I want a balance with the things that keep me sane and grounded, my family, my friends.

 

Which, by way of a very long, and slightly pretentious introduction, (I mean critiquing Woolf in a paragraph!) brings me to those less concerned with privacy. Last week I passed a lay by marked as a picnic spot. The local I was with suggested that it was a less than idyllic beauty spot, especially after dark. It was a dogging site. Now I like outdoor sex, I like sex with strangers, so you might think I was straight down there at sunset ready to take on the world, or at least whichever truckers and assorted voyeurs were out and about. There was however one massive problem. The lay by was situated next to a row of houses. It was not discovery I feared, my objections were ethical, and go back to that need for privacy I think should be part of the make up of a healthy adult.

I cannot find it acceptable to inflict my naked body having sex on unsuspecting people, of any age, who happen to look out of their windows. Doggers will often argue that it is only prudery or narrow-mindedness that causes people to object to their activities. The idea that someone might not want to see men giving each other blowjobs, or a woman spread over the bonnet of a car being wanked over, is not apparently acceptable. They dismiss objectors as petty, or “vanilla”. I simply see them as people with different ideas of privacy, and their world has different things in their own locked room. It may seem odd to some readers but spend enough time reading swinging and dogging forums and you will end up having to defend the right of people to have indoor monogamous sex. Such people will be insulted and laughed at, and their choice derided.

Yet these same people want acceptance, they want to be mainstream. BDSM folk walk in gay pride marches, as if being kinky were the same as your sexuality. Kink makes sex better for some, but unlike homosexuality it is a choice. Doggers want dogging sites to be legalised, and insist only fuddyduddies would object to this. Now there are aspects of police policy I object too, letters sent out to any car user seen in a known dogging area to scare them being high on my list, however I respect those whose views differ to mine. you do not have a right to invade another’s privacy and if that means you cant go to a certain place to have outdoor sex, well suck it up buttercup, respect they are different to you, just as you are different to them.

This respect is at the heart of my views on what I do and privacy. This blog, as we have said before, is not a campaign. I have realised if it were I could not write for it. I do not want to have rights other than those I already have, BDSM is not, as we say, a lifestyle choice. I would like the law clarified when it came to S&M and consent. So that in private I can be who I want to be. Forcing my kink down the throats of others not only seems unattractive, but unnecessary. Respect my right to privacy and I respect yours. It’s not about reciprocity, but consistency, which all too often seems missing from discussions about sex.

 

Fifty shades of….

Book review:

We’re big fans of the Kindle. It’s becoming a stable technology, and it’s a nice device to work with. As we predicted a year ago, there’s now a huge market for Kindle porn. So here’s our first Kindle porn review.

E L James – Fifty Shades of Grey

Jackie White – Lucy Gives It Up For The Boss

E L James has become something of an internet phenomenon in the last six months. The Fifty Shades… series has been hailed as ‘mummy porn’, and fills the gap that exists for BDSM that you can read at home and not feel ashamed of reading. Even the Guardian has leapt on the bandwagon, although it’s not an elegant leap since they seem to be holding their collective nose and sniffing at the same time.

There is no such thing as BDSM porn. There’s lots of porn that involves BDSM, and there are novels that explicitly set out to tell a story of BDSM, but, once you exclude The Story of O as literature, not porn, then you have no coherent body of work that you can call BDSM porn. There again, on this blog we’ve often argued that there is nothing like a coherent body of practice that you can call BDSM, so that’s no surprise.

So what sort of book is Fifty Shades of Grey? First and foremost, if you don’t know anything about where the book came from, the characterization is paper thin and the voice of the heroine is grating, like being stuck in the window seat on  a long flight next to an American exchange student devoid of insight or curiosity. The plot has all the resilience and traction of a soap bubble; you know from the blurb what’s going to happen, and there’s no sub plot or source of tension to stop you flicking over the pages to the next fuck scene.

There is a half hearted attempt at a romance, and the device of a friend who wants to be more of a friend, but the character drifts in  and out of the plot without ever establishing that the heroine is making a choice between the wealthy, urbane Grey and the moody, inconsequential student photographer.

So if the characters are wafer thin, the plot is non-existent and the narrative voice is irritating, is it saved by the sex? Not for me.  If you like a kind of BDSM lite, safer than a low fat yogurt and interspersed with chunks of irrelevant detail (Do we need to know what car Grey drives? Or what model of glider he takes her for a flight in?) then this might well be ideal for you.  I was hugely bored, and found myself longing for the more honest and, bizarrely, more erotic frisson of a genuine shopping and fucking novel like Pat Booth’s Sparklers  - I couldn’t help feeling that S&F was the genre this novel would belong to if its author ever revised it and recognized it for what it is.

Lucy Gives It Up For The Boss, on the other hand has less pretentions, less cliches and a lot less clunky prose than Fifty Shades. It’s a classic short porn story that is no better than it ought to be, and immediately engaging and erotic as a result. Of course there’s something cultural about this; I know a lot more people who’ve worked in call centres than I do people who’ve been to American universities who’ve aspired to careers in publishing. So it’s almost inevitable that the voice at the heart of the lucy series rings bells with me, but the sex is also more believable, more immediate and more arousing.

Just as Mills and Boon specialize in romance for people who don;t like real life, so Fifty Shades is porn for people who don;t like BDSM; it’s the literary equivalent of a pair of furry handcuffs and a feather flogger form Anne Summers. Lucy’s adventures on the other hand are more like a one night stand in a council flat in the West end of Newcastle; you may not cherish the moment the morning after, but it’s far more arousing while it’s happening than the synthetic pleasures bought pre-packed.

I’ve no doubt Fifty Shades will sell a lot mroe copies than Jackie White’s books; that says much more about marketing than their relative qualities.

The more things change

In my youth I attended a meeti g or three in London’s Conway Halls. It was a favourite venue of the Communist party and their adherents. I’m pretty sure it was at Conway Hall that I watched CP activists attempt to expel a section of the Anti Apartheid movement for daring to campaign outside the South African embassy. (It was a bit more complicated than that, but the idea was very odd, that a national campaign should want to expel its members for objecting to the very thing the organisation was founded to campaign against.)

Anyway, here’s Roz Kaveney’s article from the Guardian. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Evolution?

This post  is as good as it gets.

Seriously.

I can;t think of anything additional to say.

Except…

I am as poor as a church mouse. I have had sex with three different women this month, and I have more offers. Go figure.

My name is Jemima and I am an addict.

So I was in a chatroom last night, watching a friend on cam. She was attractive, almost naked and wearing a leash, we were both enjoying ourselves, especially when she ran the chain over  various parts of her body. This wasnt her usual chat room behaviour, as a single woman on a swinging site she doesn’t need to do anything to attract male attention. However there is a back story, she had split from her Dom, and was in that state of a frustrated sub, it even has a name , subfrenzy.

Now I am not, as you may have guessed, a great fan of jargon for the sake of jargon, or more accurately to ensure exclusion of the non intitated, but subfrenzy seems a useful term. I am not the blogs extreme sports expert, but even I have been on a rollercoaster, that “oh my god I am going to die moment” followed by the “fucking hell that was amazing moment” seems common to all extreme sports, and to practitioners of BDSM.

The rush that BDSM brings would be recognised by any fan of bungee or caving, the thing I don’t know is if they too find it addictive. For that is at the heart of subfrenzy. It is used to describe a sub who has played for the first few times, and then craves more. This craving can mean they throw caution to the wind, meet people they may not have looked at twice before, or annoy their Dom with 50 emails a day begging for the next time.

Like all addictions it only matters if it impacts on your day-to-day life of course. Providing an evening’s entertainment in a sex site chat room does not stop you going to work the next day, taking your kids to school, or visiting elderly relatives. It may mean you go to bed with a smile on your face and messages in your inbox from men who can potentially   fulfill that craving within you. Because the craving is real, pro dommes are the dealers of the S&M scene. Once you experience that high it is hard to give it up, and many are willing to pay to experience it.

Submission and S&M can be addictive, they can cause us to make less than wise decisions, meeting a total stranger on a train platform and giving him a blow job was perhaps not my most sensible moment, however the rush was incredible. Unlike my friend it took a while for me to realise that the rush of submission can be achieved in sane sensible circumstances. This isnt about safe words and protocols, but being a grown up,

A good day for science

Ignore the arguments about sex, or sexuality, and read this article for what it is. Proof that the scientific method can work, and that scientists can re-consider their work, and their hypotheses, in the light of further evidence.

No doubt Robert Spitzer’s letter will be the subject of much analysis and discussion. That can only be a good thing if it’s a discussion about the science and the method, not about Robert Sitzer’s methods.  If you trust the scientific method, then it is a good day for science.

And a good day for gay men and women everywhere…

Learning and unintended consequences

I am that most accursed of things, a living room guitar player.

In my youth I was the sometime guitar player in bands so ordinary their existence barely registered on the public consciousness. So what if the rhythm section of one band had been in a band with someone who went on to have a hit single in another band?

Having been classically trained in other instruments, I stuck with standard tuning on my guitars.  It took me year to work out that Thin Lizzy sounded like that on the fast songs because their guitars were tuned in D sharp, not E.  Dogmatically I stuck to E, and couldn’t ever get Thin Lizzy songs right, or those Rolling Stones classics in whatever key Keith Richards fancied that day.

Listening to some old John Martyn tunes was part of the sea change away from standard tuning. That and the realization that many of David Gray’s best tracks featured a descant guitar, a conventional six string strung with the octave strings from a 12 string, to provide a precise, high sound accompanying the main rhythm.

Devils and Dust by Bruce Springsteen was another turning point, the realization that it only works, tonally, if you play it in a double dropped D tuning. So I retuned a spare guitar to double dropped D.

Then I realized that tuning wasn’t far from Keith Richards favourite –  five string open G tuning.  So now I have a guitar set up for five string iopen G, and songs like Tumbling Dice sound familiar, and fun.

There’s just one problem. Two actually. The unfixable one is this guitar has a curved fingerboard that makes even slide playing more difficult, but the funds to replace it are scarcer than optimistic Greek finance ministry employees right now, The second problem is somthign from the law of unintended consequences. Dropping the bottom string to make for a cleaner sound is causing a buzz on the third string at the second fret. Best guessI can make is that the lack of a bass string is twisting the neck slightly. I could put the guitar into a repairman and get the truss rod adjusted, but I’m not sure it’s worth it when I can just use a capo on the second fret or higher and eliminate the buzz.

So I’ve learned something about playing in G, and about this particular guitar. If i fix it, and make it perfect, it’s hard not to imagine what will crop up next, but it’;s sure that something will. Better to adapt and cope, you might argue.

Happiness

This blog never really had a manifesto, but from time to time, as our fully paid up navel gazer, Carter explores why we do what we do, and seeks to find messages for the blog’s authors. Here he goes again…”

“Much of our media, most of the time, is now slavishly dedicated to making people feel jealous of others, to blame others for their problems, to hate others for their actions and attitudes. The post-Internet papers have created a kind of whingeocracy in which the issues for moaning about are published each morning, and then the radio and TV stations can moan about them for the next twenty-four hours until the next lot of whinges come round. “

(Campbell, Alastair (2012-01-12). The Happy Depressive: In Pursuit of Personal and Political Happiness)

As a book to read on holiday a study of happiness by Alistair Campbell sounds like an odd selection. Actually, as he himself acknowledges, Alistair Campbell sounds like an odd man to select to author a book on happiness as well. In fact,  it’s a book I would heartily recommend to almost anyone. It’s possibly more radical than anything his his erst-while master wrote whilst leading the Labour Party.  Campbell’s analysis of what is wrong with the tabloid press in the UK is brutal, accurate and rich with insight; when he says

“They feel they have to be negative because (wrongly in my view) they believe that is what sells (they have somehow failed to notice their decline has coincided with the addiction to negativity, and blamed it on technological developments out of their control). And they feel they have to get ever more negative to make the impact.” he echoes what I feel each time I read a British tabloid, that they are appealing to an ever diminishing market segment and have missed all the other things that were once good about British tabloids.

In a very real sense this matters to the authors of a blog about sex because we have to decide if our voice should ape the voice of the tabloids, or should seek to model the behaviours we think are healthier; behavious that lead to happiness.

Surprisingly to some, Campbell’s book also provides some interesting suggestions as to how to achieve contentment or happiness, including this five a day guide to wellbeing;

Connect with the people around you

Be active

Take notice – be curious and aware of the world around you

Keep learning – try something new

Give – do something nice for a friend or a stranger

It hardly seems the most remarkable or radical a set of suggestions, but if you think about how a blog works, there are no entries for ‘get angry’ or ‘be outraged’ or ‘make a bitter attack on someone you disagree with.’ That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get upset, or want to put an opposing view out there in the world; it means doing the healthy things as well a the others.

Thinking that made me think back to the tabloid newspapers I remember from my youth. The Daily Mirror was an exceptional paper in the 60s and even  70s when I got to know it; political but not tribal, capable of carrying major investigative or opinion pieces from the likes of John Pilger or Chris Mullin, the readable but slightly overrated (especially in his own opinion) Mirror journalist who became a Labour MP of limited impact and waspish diarist.

But that Daily Mirror was also funny, and friendly; before he descended into self parody as a grumpy old man Keith Waterhosue was genuinely, satirically funny; there were cartoons that were whimsical and very English, and genuinely warm and readable columnists who shared a common view that people were, in general, decent and trustworthy.  The friendly, supportive, critical but good humoured Daily Mirror of the past is a long way from the modern day tabloids, but, as Campbell might have observed, many of the lost tabloid readers might now be getting their fix of human interest, humour and decency from supermarket tabloid magazines that have beeen one of the few growth areas in periodical publishing, filling in part the gap left by the tabloids and the death of hardy old weeklies like Titbits and Reveille.

there’s another point to be made though. Before 1979 the Sun was a cheerfully filthy newspaper. You were just as likely to find it serializing the Joy of Sex as savaging politicians over immigration, and it was cheerily anti-establishment, The notion that the Murdoch press might have a unified editorial policy was almost fantastic. These were the days when the Sun was content to publish pictures of topless sixteen year olds, possession of which would nowadays get you arrested as the kind of filthy paedophile the Murdoch press love to despise, even as the Times was lining up with those factions in English society who believed that a military coup might be preferable to five more years of Harold Wilson,

At heart there is no happiness at the heart of the British press, not even in the overwrought Islington world of the Guardianistas, and this blog is, ultimately,  only another way of making its authors happy, content and well.  It should allow us to connect with other readers, to be activists in the world of sex and politics, exploring a healthy curiosity about sex and learning from others. That doesn’t preclude being angry, or bitter, or downright furious, but to be readable, and fun, and healthy, we need to do more than just that.

Am I a Pervert?

Attempting to explain the phrase “perverting the course of justice”  made me think again on what a strange, overused word pervert is. A noun and a verb, to  some it is the greatest insult, to others a badge worn with pride. The latin root of the word is why it has such varied uses. It means to turn away, containing the idea of leaving the straight path.

Of course as Frost said for many the road less traveled, the narrow route, the path not chosen by the majority is something to aspire too. Being an individualist seems to be the mantra of the twenty first century. It only seems to be when we come to sex that deviating (another term that is thrown around ) from the mainstream is condemned.  The word is meaningless though in a society where the mainstream seems to change with every cultural fad (lipstick lesbianism anyone?)

A few months ago I discovered that something I just did, was in fact not only considered to be perverted enough to have an acronym (atm) but considered by mainstream swingers to be kinky or unhealthy or both. If people who  advertise for sex with strangers on the internet think you are a pervert does it make it true?  Or is it only kinky if you do it to be kinky.

I may have to get explicit here to explain what I mean, Those of you who follow us for the politics, anti mail rants  and feminism may wish to step out for a few moments.

So if someone is fucking my arse ( and I love anal sex) and then puts their cock in my mouth apparently that is a “dirty” “kinky” thing to do, and I am kinky for doing it. But I never knew it was a form of sex, or even a sex act with a name, I like anal, I like oral, the order in which such things happen is just about heat of the moment and going with the flow. Not literally, I will cover watersports in a different blog.

Now if I don’t know something is kinky, and not done by the mainstream, am I being kinky when I do it? I would have to argue no. Something is only boundary pushing when its one of your boundaries. This is especially relevent to BDSM. If the Domly one fucks me, then gets me to suck  his cock it is because he wants to fuck me then have his cock sucked. The acts have no greater resonance. However if he is with someone for whom being told that they will suck his cock after he pulls it out of her arse is boundary pushing, then the act is kinky. It reinforces her submission and places her in the space she wants to be in.

Is this true of all acts ? (You can come back now, btw I don’t think there is going to be any graphic sex talk). In my view yes, nothing is of itself kinky or perverted. The words only have any meaning in a personal sense. For some sex with the lights off is kinky, sex for pleasure was considered perverted by the CAtholic Church for much of its history. There are no perverts and pervettes, unless it is a badge people want to wear.

Why I get angry.

Just a quickie this evening, a kind of post script to yesterdays post. I pointed out that we need a sea change in attitude towards the victims of rape and sexual abuse. You might think I was over reacting, that in modern times women were believed, that as Andrew Brown said it is an outdated minority of dinosaurs who have such attitudes.

Look at this headline from the Daily Mail today.

Huntmaster, 67, ‘raped pretty married partygoer, 33, in car after offering her lift home from black tie ball’*

Until the words married and pretty are deemed irrelevant in cases of rape, or alleged rape as I think I should write as this case is still at court, then more young girls, women, boys and men will be ignored, disbelieved, their voices silenced by those in power who have their own fixed ideas of what rape is.

 

I promise a blog tomorrow on perversion , sex, atm , rimming and lots more fun stuff .

* no link to the actual article, it infuriates me that since the bullying forced closure of ISOSTY money goes into their coffers even when criticizing them. Feel free to google.