Amer-al Qaeda

With apologies for my absence, I offer this forthright observation by Paul Krugman from this morning's NYTimes on the culture wars. As is abundantly clear to anyone in our United States, when cultural conservatives are out of power, the culture war becomes a shooting war. This has, quite naturally, got me thinking about my own little sub-corner of the larger culture.

At its most expressive, SM is a peak experience of self-responsibility, something grievance-minded individuals abhor, notwithstanding their contradictory rhetorical posturing. The having of grievances or the blaming of others for unhappiness is definitionally a repudiation of responsibility. The taking of action, the assumption of risks that attend such actions, and the constitutional strength to abide the outcomes of having taken the risk, without deflecting any part of it, is the operant principle of SM, morally and practically. It is also the definition of responsibility. SM is a context within which grievance does not function, for causality is unmediated and apparent to its participants. Thus the top who does not check and test the reliability of a club's suspension points cannot blame the club if they fail. Anyone for whom a scene fails is implicate in its failure for having freely consented to it; both top and bottom share responsibility.

When we feel upset and assign blame outside ourselves this I call personal irresponsibility. That right-wing fanatics should emerge now to terrorize their fellow citizens is indicative of not only their lack of common cause with the basic tenets of democracy which brought progressive voices to the executive and legislative branches of government and legitimized them, but it also betrays an understanding of the nature of action that begins and ends somewhere other than within. The "terrorist" is not a self-responsible actor; he or she nominates some conveniently external factor (political view, lifestyle, race, God-name, etc.) to inform their grievance, and then appeals to external authorities to legitimize prejudicial action, with the actions thereafter generally focused against an objectified form of the grievance, i.e., the target to be terrorized and/or purged. The pointedly amoral version of such terrorism calculatedly appropriates the mantle of free speech (or "common sense" or "spin-free") as the Trojan Horse by which it breeches the wall of personal responsibility.

The traditional fulminate to such action is religion, which advances its claims and power on the supposition of exteriority, individuation and otherness. Its value system is essentially negative in that some seminal lapse is its ontological starting point, and often the capricious enmity of non-immanent forces require appeasement (if it's God) or defeat (if it's the heathen infidel). Lapsarianism is a principle of resistance and victimization; cowardice articulated as salvation to a fevered, often homicidal, degree. In this regard, the supposition of exteriority in the context of religious belief may be viewed as a conventionalized form of insanity.

What little harm the principle of SM may be said to visit upon the world is mostly self-contained, meaning practitioners and believers hurt themselves (but take responsibility for doing it). As extreme as their proclivities might be they do not show up in public places and indiscriminately seek to harm others. Anyone who does is something other than a sado-masochist, and is doing something other than SM. Sado-masochists are, in other words, functional members of society, making their lives, enjoying their liberty, providing for their happiness.

People who do show up at churches to kill doctors, invade museums to slaughter Jews, erase hundreds by detonating truck bombs near government installations, or who use torture to gain an advantage over their presumed enemies, are not unlike an infection for which our body politic has yet to evolve antibodies, a social pathogen, with about as much regard for their fellow man as swine flu.

Religion pimps righteousness, while taking life, trampling liberty, and indulging grievance. Faith believes in one's fellow as one believes in oneself, and responsibly abides the entailments of so doing.

Angelic Bitchslap

I write a lot here about the spiritual and practical effects of embracing uncertainty, doubt, displacement and, ultimately, change. I like to think that often enough I remember to link my ruminations through the ungentle art of bondage and its related practices. This one is going to be a stretch.

I look out my living room window as I write this entry and see a decrepit oil tanker loudly blurting diesel fumes into the air as it delivers another 40,000 gallons of soon-to-be greenhouse gases into the bunker beneath my building in Brooklyn. It will lumber around the corner onto the main commercial drag in my neighborhood and crumble a few more centimeters of salt-crusted tarmac from the hundreds of potholes it hits as it coughs its way back to the oil terminal along Gowanus Canal.

However it arrives, the day is coming when this little transaction will cease. Even so, with the snow on the ground and the wind chill approaching zero, I'm glad for a warm apartment and that the toddler running around over my head can at least do so in stocking feet. As I watch the delivery conclude, the hose is coiled back to its ready position and a few obsidian drops mark the snow and the event... and the need. The truck lurches away in crescendo of ground gears and a cloud of blue smoke.

Made of fungible stuff, these carbon traces - the oil on the snow, the blue fumes - may come from Saudi Arabia, from the North Sea, from Texas, from Venezuela or from any several of the thousands of corners of earth being ruined by the habit of consumption, war and resistance to change.

Today, around noon, we will watch as our last, desperate, generations-long bitchiness about progress sings its nunc dimittis, having delivered fully on the pestilential promise of its creed. The revelation of our folly was so sudden and catastrophic, in our freshly home-made straits we have already begun to sigh with relief at the mere promise of remedy, of a shift. The long captivity to which we consented began in a spasm of self-loathing following the banishing of institutional prejudice with the triumph of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and was tempered by the schism of Vietnam. We have been having something like Robert Frost's "lover's quarrel" ever since.

No one ever tells you that the "better angels" of which Lincoln and now Barack Obama have spoken so eloquently can reveal to a culture and a people just how hateful and venal they have been. In the venal acts of 9/11/01 we had an opportunity to heed the angels' call - the manner of our better angels is not necessarily kind, but it encourages us to be more so, and their point is that we not make war upon ourselves. That devastatingly obvious opportunity was squandered and the acid bath of the last eight years was, in a way, just the last swing of the pendulum before it finally lost its moorings. We totally ran the clock down, broke it, maybe because it needed breaking, but also maybe because our collective soul needed just this much uncoiling, just this much and nothing less.

The utter loss of institutional and personal certainty, of anything like "homeland security," and the certainty of the change that will ensue is the same opportunity, only more obvious, less dispensable. It still boggles my mind that we dispensed the call of 9/11 with comic bromides like shopping is patriotic, but if, in the the end, we were engineering a shovel-ready shit-storm such as we're now experiencing, all for the sake of a fresh appreciation of the excellence of our Constitutional principles, then leveraging pliant national moods during national tragedies is just one abuse among a multitude we consented to.

Today we close the old book, the book of reaction and victimization, right to left and left to right, and we step up upon its terrible lessons to our prosperity and our posterity, to look homeward to where we grew up before, and to where we are to grow up yet again. It's the way we do it here.

Congratulations to Barack Obama and to our United States.

Meeting With BS, Part 5

Props go to M. Yu at The Jade Gate for breaking the news of Barbara Bell and Anna Lorentzon's documentary on the Insex phenomenon, Graphic Sexual Horror.

In previous postings on this subject I have been circumspect regarding Barbara's identity and especially that of Insex's resident mad creative, pd, or Brent Scott (BS). With the release of GSH I can relax. Better still, I can share more openly.



When I returned to NYC after sojourning here and there I fell upon the notes I'd made about meeting Brent and my impressions of his peculiar genius, much of which comprise my extant ramblings here on the subject. In them were particulars on the TransHudson Gallery and its proprietor in 1995, whom I don't believe is mentioned in the GSH film, and is certainly not (yet) on the GSH website, so I'll refer to him simply as J. A little filtering in Google netted me a small number of contacts to dial up.

On the second try I landed the very person I'd been seeking, who in reply was polite and quite clear that he had been the one to book Brent at the gallery. He remembered the show as short-lived but utterly fascinating and almost certainly doomed to failure owing to the bombast of its artistic intent and the expense of mounting it. He noted to me several pieces of memorabilia in his possession, and would be happy to show any and all.

We met shortly thereafter and I spent a very pleasant afternoon comparing notes and discovering a fellow patron of the arts, one whose constitutional inclinations diverged sharply from the Brent Scott vision, but who nonetheless recognized profound talent when it landed in front of him. J. spent a ramshackle career from the 70s to the 90s as an impressario, bon vivant and, from the looks of his home decor, a groovy dresser.

I came away from that meeting with not only a better appreciation of Brent Scott before the fall, but pleased to have made the acquaintance of a fellow dilettante, a non-artist with an gnawing, insatiable need to be mixed up with the creative moment. J. sent me along with a stack of aging VHS tapes (including Brent's personal document of man.INFESTation), a copy of the show poster (posted previously) and other records of the event, all of which pointed to Brent's aspirations being not at all dissimilar at the time of man.INFESTation to those of all artists I have known.

Owing to the sloppily laid plans of various reactionary authorities, the creative history of Brent Scott is inscribed as a short, intense record of revolutions, against respectable bourgeois propriety right up the demonization scale to, literally, imputations of terrorism. In 2005, as you'll learn when you see GSH, Insex was forced to close under threat of prosecution for violations of the Patriot Act, namely suspicion of bagging money for terrorist organizations. Thus did Insex become a casualty of our era's cheif mania: Cynical political manipulation. Brent may not have been sentenced to drink the hemlock, but I don't think the parallels between his case and that of the great ancient corruptor of youth are at all lost on him:

"If you won't allow me to teach your children, then I will corrupt them."

Brent Scott, riffing on Socrates

In matters cultural it is in the nature of governments to work at 180 degrees to the foregone conclusions of any great cultural shift. Government is always last to lead. In 1995 it was possible, if one was looking closely, to visit the future of porn, and possibly of art, in the short-lived gallery career of rejected academic Brent Scott. Within the ten year history of Insex, from its formative moment to its manufactured demise, sex would become exponentially more defused throughout culture and sadomasochistic signifiers would begin infiltrating the popular consciousness. When most BDSM was still the provenance of Farmer's Daughter BBS, through the then-experimental Vivo player Insex loosened the stopper from the full-motion dike and inaugurated the end of the passive era in media, as well as affording a first look at fearlessly expansive, deeply disturbing and displacing forms of play known previously to very few.

While I have in my own life and play gone to very few of the precincts regularly visited by Brent Scott at Insex, I'm indebted to the appaling grandeur and devastating sweep of his vision, and to his ultimate faith in the fortitude of the women (and later the men) with whom he worked. Over the years I've met many of those models and to a one they recall their visits (often multiple) to Insex as the hardest and most rewarding bondage modeling gigs they'd ever landed. When I visited, when Insex was young, the world of hard-core questers, pain-sluts and contortionists was beating a path to Big Worm Productions. The payoff for performing may indeed have scaled according to depth of ability and/or consent, but there was always an out, a safeword, so in the final analysis the bottom reserved control and the deprivations suffered were ultimately elective.

Incentivizing with bonuses to get better performance, all for the sake of selling...what? Mortgage derivatives? Credit swaps? Economy busting, life-ruining, reputation raping, history changing swindles?

No... just sex.

Seems quaint in light of the scorched earth the partisans of righteousness were engineering while they drew their long knives on Insex, habeas corpus, the Geneva Convention and The Constitution. Reactions to art have always given a clear warning that human rights are in the cross-hairs, and I don't think it overreaching to consider for a moment the history of any art labeled "degenerate" by politicians - as it was by the Nazis (the Entartete Kunst and Entartete Musik exhibitions of 1937), or, more recently in my own fair city, the pogrom against degenerate art and the NEA staged by then-mayor and former Presidential candidate Rudolf Guliani along with the right-wing minion of representatives Jesse Helms and Al D'Amato.

I bring this last example up for those who think that I am perhaps overreaching for comparing the shuttering of Insex to government demagoguery against art - the anti-NEA cabal of the late 1980s is now well understood to have been an opening salvo in the anti-gay, anti-sex war on culture by the religious right. As Insex succumbed in 2005, the economic, cultural and political carnage of the Bush occupation forces was becoming apparent; remember Terri Schiavo, privatizing Social Security, New Orleans, Tom DeLay, "Duke" Cunningham, Harriet Miers, warrantless wiretaps, etc., etc.

When the moralists and the clean-living get vocal, sensible folks watch their rights and their wallets, the latter of which I'll be opening as soon as Graphic Sexual Horror screens in New York.

Non-Zero Sum

Every now and again I can't resist giving props here to the flashes of genius that are erupting all the time all over the web, only a very small percentage I get to see, and an even smaller percentage of which apply to the focus of RSE. This post is, I think, a laudable read on the first of Sarah Palin's campaign vexations, but more importantly on the sex/culture wars. That such a sophisticated, articulate and accessible analysis should emerge from the domain of art doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

Is it possible that the last salvo has been fired, the last petard hoisted, the tsk tsk'd and we can all go about our business?

Preaching to the Prejudiced

I wrote the following response to my sociologist acquaintance (with whom I spent many months in correspondence providing my perspective on BDSM) from Berlin where I spend a fair amount of time and which I know as well as any city other than my own. I pay attention to the rope scene in Berlin, and will also allow here that it has changed for the better in the couple of years that have passed since this element of the longer exchange was dispatched. Still, I think the cultural and anthropological points might still have some currency.

Here are some questions related to misconceptions others have of BDSM:

1. What are the misconceptions that you believe others (vanilla folk) have regarding the BDSM community?

2. Do you ever attempt to clarify misconceptions? If so, can you give some examples of when you've had or ceased the opportunity to do so.

Also, Frau Doktor B., apropos deine Frage interesert es mich sehr im Moment in Berlin zu sein, weil heir das Perspektiv ueber BDSM volkommen anders ist. Von welche seite des Atlantiks solle ich mal antworten?

(It's interesting to be addressing your question from Berlin, Dr. B., because attitudes toward BDSM are rather different here. From which side of the Atlantic would you like your answer?)

There are vanilla folk on both sides, of course. I find that in Germany people are generally equally as disinclined to be personally interested in BDSM as their American brethren, but more inclined to shrug casually and say "Eh, it does nothing for me." At home (and especially outside NYC) there is much more likely to be a judgment of some sort leveled. I'm not at all surprised by this, nor really even bothered - the difference is consistent with the distinction between the moral and cultural relativism that is pervasive in Europe and the moral absolutism that characterizes the history of American thought. Just the same, it's fun to point out to a people here of conservative bent that it was the Germans who first fetishized leather. ("Echt? Ja, das kann sein...")

If I come out to someone in the US (or, as is actually more often the case, play devil's advocate), it's easy to observe whether the idea of BDSM shows up in my companion's right or their wrong column. The latter predominates, perhaps due to simple lack of experience or exposure, but predominate it does and there is seldom even the hint of moral ambiguity. Once BDSM has been positioned as wrong, the absolutist imperative demands that the prejudice itself be made correct, so some story has to be contrived in order to settle the issue - it takes some thought to be right about making things be wrong. In the case of conventional, media-conditioned middle class values, this story shows up as something like a Hannibal Lecter characterization: intelligent, cunning, inscrutable, wine drinker, knows which fork to use, probably homicidal.

In my experience of more youthful, less proprietary narratives, the leather-daddy archetype shows up, early and often along with presumptions about orientation (i.e., if I'm kinky I must be gay too. Between the ages of 20 and my early 30s I was pegged for gay a lot by both straight and gay people (regardless of their knowledge of my marital and/or pervert status). In my 40s I seem to have taken on a patina of straightness). In this story I am made less wrong than I am willfully (and excitedly) misunderstood, but the project of laying to rest the misguided preconception is comparatively easy.

In the argot of establishment feminism there is usually reference to reductivist conflict-theoretical constructs having to do with objectification and patriarchy (which, curiously, if I were in fact a gay leather daddy, as others have assumed me to be, would not apply. In this case it is my essential straightness which motivates the feminist case against my being a top). Both objectification and patriarchy are absolute wrongs in the feminist Weltanschuung, of course. I've had more than a few exchanges with the scrupulously politically correct around the problem of female bottoms for whom objectification is very gratifying (see the previous post - ed.). In the end, those bottoms must be made wrong by dint of either patriarchically-induced poor self esteem or by having succumbed to my presumably over-developed powers of seduction.

The last case is perhaps the most sporting, for it's quite a lot of fun to point out opponents' faulty logic and that they are assigning to female bottoms very little intrinsic power, which I then am at liberty to observe is not merely condescending, but politically opportunistic (since the same thinking does not apply to gay male bottoms). It is only in these sorts of instances that I make it a point to correct perceptions, for I find the victim mentality of establishment feminism more than a little problematic and being a target of its prejudice allows me to indulge a bit of opportunism myself. Having made the observation that my opponent's case is predicated largely on presumptions of powerlessness inherent to the (female) bottom's situation, I point out that the efficacy of BDSM and what distinguishes it from, for example, governmental torture, proceeds from the fact of the bottom's power and its equivalence to that of the top's. The matter of gender and its presentments are utterly academic, and there are no victors nor vanquished. A good scene is a simple "win-win", which, being non-zero-sum, flies in the face of Marxist conflict theory and its elaboration along the gender vector. Then there's queer BDSM, which punctures gender-based analyses QED, but for the politically convinced the fun in that fact is elusive.

I should note my sympathy to the feminist project generally, and especially economically. My antipathy toward reflexive grievance and/or identity based political maneuvering extends well beyond the establishment feminist camp to all segregationist movements that require division to legitimize their claims. My personal Weltanschauung is additive rather than divisive.

More recently, I have been a little more casual about being out, and have had far more compelling exchanges about peoples' reactions to my admissions than about the fact of my interest in BDSM. I would admit to practicing misdirection if I were unwilling to answer any question an interlocutor might have about my interest, but their disquiet about my sexuality ends up often being more interesting for both of us. Notwithstanding, I'm aware that my not taking a defensive stance about my sexuality goes a long way toward shifting a discussion in the direction of the real tension, that being the judgement passed on BDSM.

(Cartoon courtesy of Dave Annis at rope-bondage.com)

Comity vs. Demagoguery

A canny contextualization of the Eliot Spitzer fracas appears in this morning's New York Observer. I was moved to make the following riposte:

Calculating political ledger balances and earnest pieties about children and families miss, I think, an important point - that in 21st c. America a toxic synthesis of legalism and puritanism has been weaponized, and even its engineers cannot contain its effects.

My heart does not bleed for Spitzer, Vitter, Gingrich, Haggard, Clinton, Baker, Foley, Swaggert, Chenoweth, Schlessinger and all the other zealots and demagogues who have been water-boarded in their own War on Nature. For the rest of us just being left unmolested by self-righteous busybodies and eagerly metastasizing bureaucracies to interact simply, peacefully and prosperously as a common weal has become the new political ideal.

As it is most of the worst offenders walk or ride out the du jour factor in scandals.