Jerry's House of Ass Beating

A photoessay for kink_bingo ramp-up! So if you ever wanted to see the inside of my toybag, proceed directly to here!

So I was annoyed at tumblr a little, and then a thousand words later, I had this rant/meta about D/s and how everyone is Doing It Wrong.

( So if you like it when I'm pedantic and somewhat bitchy, please proceed. )

If one more dude on Fetlife brings up A Billion Wicked Thoughts to me, I will shit myself.

Really now.

Here are some things I have posted elsewhere that you may have missed:

-This essay for kink_bingo all about dungeons and such

-This post for 3 Weeks for DW all about masochism and whatnot

-This post at Frenemy Cosplay about an entirely different kind of torture: making a steampunk costume from scratch. (Remember to follow Frenemy Cosplay at frenemycosplay and frenemycosplay_feed!)

Oh hey, one thing to ponder while you're furiously reading remix after remix, as well you should be:

I'm writing a follow-up to the post I did last year for Three Weeks all about submission and my interactions with it. This time, I'm doing the masochism part. So, if there are any burning questions you have that you'd like a masochist to answer, drop me a comment/send me a PM! Anon commenting is on as usual, and I won't mention you by name in the post unless you specifically want me to.

There's this universe that only exists in my head, and I wish that I could get some of it out.

I like D/s AU, right? But here's the problem- in every story with John and Rodney, one of them is a top and the other one is a sub. It changes, back and forth, but they're always one of each.

And you know what? That makes them a het couple. And you know what? As much as I like het, and I do, I like it when John and Rodney are gay. I know it is, at the heart of it, a lazy way to create conflict to drive a story, but there you have it: I like conflict in my stories.

So Rodney is a top, right? And he's sort of by the book, really, and he's never thought about another top in anything approaching a homosexual way, really he hasn't. I mean, there's a little, tiny bit of top/top porn on his hard drive, but that doesn't mean anything. He only watches it for pointers- he doesn't get much time in Atlantis to practice his technique, okay? You'd be rusty too if you spent all your time running from certain peril and tempting fate at every turn. And maybe- just maybe- he got hit on at a party once by another top and he didn't immediately refuse, but he's straight, get it? ( I think we all know where this is going. )

So, the kinky paper:

Her argument was based on Victor Turner's idea of liminal spaces and the dichotomy of structure and communitas. Basically, hierarchical, or at least dichotomous, power relations form the structure for the community, and the communitas arises in the space opened by that framework. She talked about a scene as a liminal space; the top is the facilitator and the bottom is a liminal entity. Her argument for the scene as a ritual activity followed from there; toys are like magical objects which can become contaminated (both in a purportedly biomedical sense and through things as simple as being touched by another person). Subspace (and to a lesser extent topspace, and why is subspace accepted by firefox's dictionary?) is a trance state, which she related to Turner's "powers of the weak." She also discussed neophytes, switches, and queers as liminal figures within a liminal society. Their status is in question; while their status may become crystallized, as with neophytes and people recognized as "true switches", it may remain liminal indefinitely.

There were a couple issues with it. I thought her description of queers in the community was a little... confusing, and it didn't really jive with what I've experienced. She referred to it as "an intense form of switching", and I can see what she was going for and am sure the term is used that way in the community she studied; it just isn't my experience of that term. On the whole, also, I felt she could have gone deeper. Liminality is a great framework for describing scenes, but it's also kind of obvious. But, that's a function of giving a fifteen minute talk at eight in the morning for a bunch of people who are not walking around holding leashes.

But, overall, it was a good talk. She was very sensitive to community issues and avoided essentializing language (except, of course, the essentalizing language used by the community itself). If anybody's interested, I'm happy to email the author and ask her if she wouldn't mind sending me a copy of her paper.

(And I'm afraid to ask this, but... what do you use a blood pressure cuff for in the context of a scene? Is it for what I think it's for. Because, damn.

It does not help that I am really scared of them.)

[DW only]

Pursuant to this poll, I was thinking that I would tell the story of how I went skinny dipping in a river in Belize at 2 AM, but then I realized that was pretty much the whole story: I went skinny dipping, drunk, in a river in Belize at 2 AM with a bunch of my field school crew and our professors, and it was awesome. So instead I will talk about being kinky, I suppose.

So, the thing is, I can't draw. ( What does that have to do with being kinky? )