Quotulatiousness

August 25, 2023

Only an extreme right-wing bigot would say that “BDSM is not for four-year-olds”

Filed under: Books, Education, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Noted extreme right-wing arch-conservative Brendan O’Neill somehow seems to think that the full panoply of LGBT sexual identities are not appropriate for the pre-school set:

This may not be an accurate portrayal of the book in question, by way of Blazing Cat Fur.

BDSM is not for four-year-olds. Apparently, that’s a controversial statement these days. Only a bigot would want to protect little kids from images of old blokes in fetish gear snogging the faces off each other in public. If you think under-fives should be reading books about hungry caterpillars or tigers coming for tea, not books featuring pictures of ageing men in dog collars and studded leather underwear, you’re a queerphobe and you need to pipe down.

Truly we have reached the seventh circle of woke lunacy. This week it was reported that a mum and dad in Hull in the north of England pulled their four-year-old daughter from a pre-school after she was shown a book called Grandad’s Pride which contains illustrations of “men who are partially naked in leather bondage gear”. The pre-school’s response? According to the mum and dad, it branded them “bigots”. Yes, who else but a hateful phobe would want to stop a toddler from seeing a tattooed, half-naked, grey-bearded homosexual kissing his boyfriend?

Grandad’s Pride is written by Harry Woodgate, an award-winning children’s author who uses they / them pronouns. Of course he does. Or of course they do. Whatever. It tells the story of a girl called Milly, who is playing in her gramps’ attic one day when she happens upon an old Pride flag. She asks what it is and grandad suggests they organise their own Pride march in the village. As you do. Then come the iffy illustrations: old men in fetish gear; a “trans man” (ie, woman) with mastectomy scars under her nipples; an activist in a spiked dog collar waving a placard that says: “Break the cis-tem”. And you thought Where the Wild Things Are was scary.

You don’t have to be a prude to think this is ridiculous bordering on sinister. My view is that consenting adults should do whatever they want. Wear chafing leather trousers, pierce your cock, whip your friends in dim-lit dungeons. It’s not my cup of tea, but knock yourselves out. But it’s not for kids! No four-year-old should be looking at illustrations of a mutilated woman who now identifies as a “man” or of pensioners in leather suspenders. And it doesn’t make you Mary Whitehouse to say so. When you read to little kids, you want them to ask questions like, “Can we have a tiger over for tea?”, not: “Why does that man have stitches on his chest?”

One of the most frustrating things for freedom-lovers like me is that when we raise questions about age-inappropriate woke crap in schools, we get lumped with the religious right or PC fanatics who previously waged war on classic texts like Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (too much talk about menstruation, apparently) and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (too many utterances of the n-word). Nonsense. Of course schoolkids should read Blume and Steinbeck. Teens in particular should be expected to engage with challenging texts, even ones that contain racial epithets or girls eagerly awaiting their first period. Schools should err on the side of being open with literature, though let’s hope they don’t start stocking American Psycho or The 120 Days of Sodom.

August 24, 2023

Speaking of Just-so stories, here’s “a simple story of fetish formation”

Filed under: Health, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Alexander ventures far from shore in this extended discussion of the notion that fetish research can help us understand more about artificial intelligence:

“Cologne BDSM 07” by CSD2006 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

We try to explain AI alignment by analogy to human alignment. Evolution “created” humans. Its “goal” is for humans to spread their genes by (approximately) having as many children as possible. It couldn’t directly communicate that goal to humans – partly because it’s an abstract concept that can’t talk, and partly because for most of biological history it was working with lemurs and ape-men who couldn’t understand words anyway. Instead, it tried to give us instincts that align us with that goal. The most relevant instinct is sex: most humans want to have sex, an action that potentially results in pregnancy, childbearing, and genes being spread to the next generation. This alignment strategy succeeded well enough that humans populations remain high as of 2023.

We’ve talked before about a major failure: humans can invent contraception. Evolution’s main alignment strategy was totally unprepared for this. It made us interested in a certain type of genital friction, which was a good proxy for its goal in the ancestral environment. But once we became smarter, we got new out-of-training-distribution options available, and one of those was inventing contraception so that we could get the genital friction without the kids. This is a big part of why average-children-per-couple is declining from 8+ in eg pioneer times to ~1.5 in rich countries today, even though modern rich people have more child-rearing resources available than the pioneers.

Another major alignment failure is porn. Giving evolution a little more credit, it didn’t just make people want genital friction – if that had been the sole imperative, we would have died out as soon as someone inventing the dildo/fleshlight. People want genital friction associated with attractive people and certain emotions relating to complex relationships. But now we can take pictures of attractive people and write stories that evoke the complex emotions, while using a dildo/fleshlight/hand to provide the genital friction, and that does substitute for sex pretty well. There’s still debate over whether porn makes people less likely to go out and form real relationships, but it’s at least plausibly another factor in the rich-country fertility decline. At the very least it doesn’t scream “well-thought-out alignment strategy robust to training-vs-deployment differences”.

But these are boring examples. These are like 2015-level alignment concerns, from back when we thought the big problem was AIs seizing control of their reward centers or something. I think we might genuinely be able to avoid problems shaped like these. Unlike evolution, which had to work with lemurs, even weak GPT-level modern AIs are able to understand language and complicated concepts; we can tell them to want children instead of using genital friction as a proxy. 2023 alignment concerns are more about failed generalization – that is, about fetishes.

Evolution’s alignment problem isn’t just that humans have learned to satiate their libido in ways other than procreative sex. It’s that some humans’ libidos are fundamentally confused. For example, some men, instead of wanting to have sex with women, mostly want to spank them, or be whipped by them, or kiss their feet, or dress up in their clothes. None of these things are going to result in babies! You can’t trivially blame this on the shift from training to deployment (ie the environment of evolutionary adaptedness to the modern world) – women had feet in the ancestral environment too. This is a different kind of failure.

Here’s a simple story of fetish formation: evolution gave us genes that somehow unfold into a “sex drive” in the brain. But the genome doesn’t inherently contain concepts like “man”, “woman”, “penis”, or “vagina”. I’m not trying to make a woke point here: the genome is just a bunch of the nucleotides A, T, C, and G in various patterns, but concepts like “man” and “woman” are learned during childhood as patterns of neural connections. We assume that the nucleotides are a program telling the body to do useful things, but that has to be implemented through deterministic pathways of proteins and the brain’s neural connections are too complex to trivially influence that way (see here for more). The genome probably contains some nucleotides that are supposed to refer to the concepts “man” and “woman” once the brain gets them, but there’s are a lot of fallible proteins in between those two levels.

So the simple story of fetish formation is that the genome contains some message written in nucleotides saying “have procreative sex with adults of the opposite sex as you”, some galaxy-brained Rube Goldberg plan for translating that message into neural connections during childhood or adolescence, and sometimes the plan fails. Here are some zero-evidence just-so-story speculations for how various fetishes might form, more to give you an idea what I’m talking about than because I claim to have useful knowledge on this topic:

  • Foot fetish: On the somatosensory cortex, the area representing the feet is right next to the area representing the genitalia. If the genome includes an “address” for the genitalia, plus the instructions “have sexual urges towards this”, then getting the address slightly wrong will land you in the feet.

    • A reasonable next question would be “what’s on the other side of the genitalia, and do people also have fetishes about that one?” The answer is “the somatosensory cortex is a line with the genitalia at the far end, because God is merciful and didn’t want there to be a second thing like foot fetishes.”
    (source for cortex image)

  • Spanking: From the male point of view, penetrative PIV sex involves applying force to the bottom half of a woman, at rhythmic intervals, in a way that causes her very intense emotions and makes her make moan and scream. Spanking is exactly like this, and most kids encounter spanking at a very early age and sex only after they’re much older. If the evolutionary message is something like “find the concept that looks vaguely like this, then be into it”, spanking is the first concept like that most people will find; by the time they learn about actual sex, spanking might be a trapped prior.
  • Sadomasochism: Sex is painful for virgins, can be mildly painful even for some non-virgins, and when it’s pleasurable, it still looks a lot like pain (screams, intense emotions). Imagine you are a little boy/girl who stumbles in on your parents having sex. Your father is impaling the most sensitive part of your mother’s body, and your mother is moaning and squealing. A natural generalization might be “sex is the thing where a man causes a woman pain”.
  • Latex/rubber: Plausibly the evolutionary specification includes details about attractiveness. Attractive people (ie those you should be most interested in having babies with) should be young and healthy (characteristics associated with better pregnancy outcomes, especially in the high-risk ancestral environment). The simplest sign of youth and good health is smooth skin, so the evolutionary message might say something about preferring sex with smooth-skinned people. Latex is a superstimulus for smooth skin, and maybe if you see it at the right time, in the right situation, it can totally overwhelm the rest of the message.
  • Urine/scat: Procreative sex involves a sticky substance that comes out of the genitals, it doesn’t take much misgeneralization to get to other sticky substances that come out of the genitals or nearby regions.
  • Bondage/domination/submission: Okay, I admit I don’t have a good just-so explanation for this one. Maybe it’s more psychological – people who have been told that sex is shameful can only fully appreciate it if they feel like a victim who’s been forced into it (and so carries no guilt). And people who have been told they’re undesirable and nobody could ever really love them can only fully appreciate it if their partner is a victim who has no choice in the matter.
  • Furries: This has to be because of all the cute cartoon animals, right? But why do some people sexually imprint on them? I found this article on worshippers of the 1990s cartoon mouse Gadget helpful here. Gadget obviously has many desirable characteristics — she’s a very cute nerdy woman who sometimes ends up in damsel-in-distress situations. Maybe she is the most sexualized being that some six-year-old boys have encountered. When I watched Rescue Rangers as a six-year old, I could feel my brain trying to figure out whether to have a crush on her before deciding that no, it was too deep in latency stage. I assume most people who get their first crushes on Gadget or some other desirable cartoon character end up with their brains later generalize properly to “I like cute nerdy women in damsel-in-distress situations”, but a small minority misgeneralize to “nope, I’m only attracted to mice now, that’s where I’m going to go with this.”

Combine this with equivalent animal “fetishes” — things like beetles species where the females have red dots on their backs, and the males try to mate with anything that has a red dot — and you get a picture where evolution tries to communicate a lot of contingent features of sex in the hopes that one of them will stick, then tells you to be attracted to whatever is most associated with those features. At least for men, I think the features communicated in the genomic message are simple things like curves and thrusting and genitals and smooth skin, plus something that somehow picks out the concept of “woman” (except in 3% of the male population, where it picks out the concept of “men” instead, plus another 3% where it doesn’t pick out a sex at all).

Real procreative sex usually matches enough of features of the genomic message to be attractive to most people, but if the original triggers were associated with some contingent characteristics, the brain might misinterpret that as part of the target — for example, if it was a cartoon animal, the brain might think the target includes cartoon animals.

Other times, something that isn’t procreative sex matches the genomic message closely enough to be misinterpreted as the center of the target (eg getting whipped); usually procreative sex is somewhere in the target space, but maybe not the exact center, and a few people have such strong fetishes that procreative sex doesn’t register as erotic at all.

The process of forming the category “sexually attractive things” is just a special case of the process of forming categories at all. I discuss the formation of categories like “happiness” and “morality” in The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life. Society feeds us some labeled data about what is good or bad — for example, we might see someone commit murder on TV, and our parents tell us “No! That’s bad! Don’t do that!” (and the other TV characters hate and punish that character). Then we try to extrapolate such incidents to a broader moral system. If we’re philosophers, we might go further and try to formally describe that moral system, eg Kantianism, utilitarianism, divine command theory, natural law, etc. All of these correctly predict the training data (eg “murder is bad”) while having different opinions on out-of-distribution environments. Which one you choose is just a function of some kind of mysterious intellectual preference for how to generalize inherently ungeneralizeable things — what I previously described as “extrapolating a three-dimensional shape from its two-dimensional reinforcement-learning shadow”.

Fetishes are the same way. Here the evolutionary message provides semi-labeled data, giving people weird feelings when they see certain kinds of curvy, smooth-skinned people. Then people try to generalize that into an idea of what’s sexy. Usually their category is centered (in the sense that the category “bird” is centered around “sparrow” and not “ostrich”) around something close to procreative heterosexual sex. Other times they generalize in some very unexpected way, and are only attracted to cartoon mice. I think if we understood the laws of generalization, this would make sense. It would seem like a reasonable mistake that someone using Occam’s Razor and all the rest of the information-theoretic toolkit for generalization could make. But we don’t really understand those laws beyond faint outlines, so instead we’re reduced to YKINMKBYKIOK.

May 4, 2023

British civil servants apparently need to have training on BDSM theory and practice

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Malcolm Clark outlines the proposal to be discussed at a civil service union conference next month:

“Cologne BDSM 07” by CSD2006 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

For years, the LGBT lobby has wreaked havoc across the UK’s civil service. It has helped to turn the machinery of government into a crèche for the kind of people who can’t remember what pronouns they’re using that day. But this may have just been a taster of what’s to come. Kink, it seems, is the new frontier in identity politics. Get ready to meet the “BDSM” lobby.

Next month, at its annual conference, the biggest civil-service union, PCS, will discuss a motion calling on Whitehall to set up a network for staff who are into bondage, domination and sado-masochism (BDSM). I suppose there’s one thing to be said for this daft idea. The more time these jobsworths spend slapping each other around, the less time they’ll have to humiliate and torment members of the taxpaying public.

There are a few obvious problems with this proposed BDSM staff network. For one, its advocates have called for workplace training courses about BDSM. No, I’m not making this up. The suggested courses would explain that “mutual informed consent … is needed before erotic activity is carried out”. This is a statement of the obvious to most of us. Who says entry standards for the civil service are slipping?

You may have assumed that the priority of our civil service should be carrying out the business of government, rather than BDSM advocacy. Perhaps it should be getting on top of the fact that only three per cent of hospital trusts in England hit cancer waiting-time targets in 2022? Or the fact that 360,000 people had to wait more than 10 weeks for their passport last year?

One strange thing about this demand for training courses for kink-meisters is that it flies in the face of other recent staff demands. Across Whitehall, as in private industry, advocacy groups have long insisted that Britain’s workplaces have developed a toxic culture that does not respect sexual boundaries. Reams of new guidelines have been drawn up in response. Many of these guidelines consider asking questions about someone’s sex life to be, in itself, a form of sexual harassment. Yet now we could soon have staff networks based solely around people’s private sex lives. And what would a meeting of sexual fetishists discuss if not their sex lives? The weather?

Even twenty years ago, it was a common witticism to refer to workplace meetings as “beatings”, but this is a long way past a casual joke (that yes, is probably risky to make in most modern workplaces, as someone is bound to find offence).

While looking for an appropriate image to accompany this post, I was quickly reminded why most search engines now offer varying levels of “safe” viewing.

March 29, 2022

QotD: SJW white guilt

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you scratch a Liberal, underneath you find that they are exactly what they hate. In this case, the driving force is what they call White Guilt. The reason they believe that white people are inherently, unchangeably, and institutionally racist is because they see it in themselves, and they therefore believe it is true in everyone else (Hint: It isn’t). But they believe themselves to be better because they acknowledge it, and go through all the rigamarole to make up for it and be a good ally.

In short, reading shit like this is penance for being white. Subjecting themselves to a stream of invective about their failings for being white gives them absolution. It’s kinda like those folks in the BDSM community who seek out a black dominatrix to work out their guilty feelings, and having paid for verbal abuse and a beating, feel that they’ve done their bit for race relations, and for the liberal side of the SF community, Mistress Nora is just the ticket, and they are paying her with sales and awards for all the abuse they can stomach.

Dr. Mauser, “Message Received”, Shoplifting in the Marketplace of Ideas, 2019-01-30.

January 2, 2022

QotD: Female preference for dominant males

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In what follows, I will argue that sexual selection liberated sexual dominance from its coercive, ancestral demons. Specifically, I posit that ancestral women, when faced with the prospect of mating with a coercive and dominant man, a non-coercive and non-dominant man, or a non-coercive albeit dominant man, usually opted for the third option.

The first reason for this is the value of male dominance in competition with other males. Specifically, if a man exhibits dominance during courtship and copulation, he is signalling his ability to successfully compete with other men for social status in male hierarchies. Women are attracted to high-status men because such men are either genetically superior, have the resources necessary to invest in a woman and her children, or both. Although some degree of sexual conflict between men and women is expected, a man’s non-coercive dominance during courtship and copulation may say something about his ability to stand his ground in interactions with other men.

The second reason that women prefer dominant men is the fact that other women prefer dominant men. This is not a tautology. My high school American History teacher, Ms. Gibbs, once told us an anecdote about Benjamin Franklin. It was said that old kite-flying Ben would surround himself with average looking women at dinner parties so as to grab the attention of the more attractive ones. Whether true or not, Ben Franklin’s supposed exploits are supported by research on what makes men attractive. Specifically, women are attracted to men whom other women — especially physically attractive women — find attractive. So, if other women find dominant men attractive, it would benefit a woman to mate with a dominant man because any son born of such a union would inherit his father’s dominance and thereby help to spread his mother’s genes. This hypothesis — the so-called sexy-son hypothesis — suggests that whatever other benefits a man might accrue through his dominance, it is simply enough for women to consider it “sexy” for it to be sexually selected into the male line of our species.

Most of the time, however, traits that are preferred by members of the opposite sex communicate something important about the bearer of those traits in addition to sexiness per se. As I will elaborate in my discussion of sexual subordination, sexually selected traits are often selected by prospective sex partners because they are honest, costly signals of an individual’s genetic status. So, for example, a man who is capable of exhibiting dominance, while curbing it just enough to not come off as coercive, may be communicating something important about his physical and psychological state. Specifically, if a man is able to toe the fine line of sexual dominance (and even exhibit a certain amount of passionate aggression) without veering over into the danger-zone of coercion, he may be a good catch, indeed. The subtlety, tact, and finesse required to accomplish this should not be dismissed. As it happens, being a successful “dom” (i.e., a sexually dominant or sadistic individual in the BDSM scene) requires such subtlety, tact, and finesse. As Philip Miller and Molly Devon write in Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns:

    The ideal [dominant] controls himself, so that he might control his submissive. He will, as a stern dominant, cause tears to flow, and as lover, kiss them away … He understands that to own a woman, one must court the mind with intelligence and humor; win the spirit with compassion and warmth; and take the body with determined strength … He is the honorable sadist who uses pain to extend the bounds of pleasure, vigilant that no harm comes of the hurt.

Understanding the evolution of consensual sexual dominance is half the battle. As BDSM practitioners are never tired of saying, the “sub” (i.e., the submissive or masochistic individual in a BDSM interaction) is just as active a participant as the dom. Some further assert that the sub actually controls the scene and that it is the dom who has to read or intuit the needs, desires, fears, discomforts, and pleasures of the sub.

Gregory Gorelik, “What Sadomasochism Can Teach Us About Human Sexuality”, Quillette, 2017-04-04.

November 16, 2021

Bettie Page: The Queen of Pinup

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Biographics
Published 4 Mar 2019

Visit our companion website for more: http://biographics.org

Credits:
Host – Simon Whistler
Author – Shannon Quinn
Producer – Jennifer Da Silva
Executive Producer – Shell Harris

Business inquiries to biographics.email@gmail.com

Source/Further reading:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJhop…
https://www.pbs.org/video/history-det…
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7…
https://www.biography.com/news/bettie…
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/ric…
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomal…

Secondary Sources/Photos/Videos:

(Hey guys- You technically can’t see any of her private parts in these videos, so it’s not really porn, but I still would not call this safe for work. Your wives, co-workers, or people on public transportation may give you really dirty looks if they see these over your shoulder. You have been warned.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bettie_…

Dancing video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pndr…
The “Striporama” scenes with Bettie Page
https://youtu.be/ZDypKx8c1TM

February 14, 2021

QotD: Pauline Réage’s Story of O

Filed under: Books, France, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’m sitting on a plane and I’m feeling increasingly excited. I’m flushed. My heart rate is up, and I can’t seem to find a comfortable way to sit. My agitation isn’t caused by any nervousness about flying, nor by any fears of contracting COVID-19 during the flight. My disquiet has been triggered by the book I’m reading. The sensations it arouses almost overwhelm me. I find I have to pause every few paragraphs, close the slim volume, and rest it on my lap in order to regain some sense of personal composure. Fiction usually transports my imagination away from myself, but this book is accomplishing the opposite: I feel increasingly aware of my body as I read it, as though being immersed in fiction has drawn me into a moment of privacy with myself. It feels somehow unseemly for the public world of the airplane to intrude on my private sensations. I have to put the book down frequently in order to remind myself that it is no act of indecency for the happy family sitting down the aisle from me to be talking casually, but rather that it is my own sense of secrecy that must be reconciled to the ordinary world around me.

I am reading Story of O, a novel written in 1954 that recounts the titular character’s journey into sexual bondage, violent penetrations, beatings, whippings, burnings, chains, gags, and dungeons. Readers only familiar with the pedestrian 1975 adaption are advised not to be put off — director Just Jaeckin’s film benefits from the lovely Corinne Cléry’s beguiling performance in the title role, but his soft-focus softcore aesthetic (gauzy white linen dresses and a smooth classical guitar soundtrack) miss the tenderness, the elegance, and the literary grace of the source. Graham Greene described Story of O as a “rare thing, a pornographic book well written and without a trace of obscenity”; Brian Aldiss remarked that O makes “pornography (if that is what it is) an art”; even JK Rowling has offered praise for the book, observing that, “If you’ve read Story of O you’ve kind of read the ultimate.” But it is JG Ballard’s description of the novel as “a deeply moral homily … touched by the magic of love” that resonates most powerfully with me. O is a radical instruction in morals (the book has a clear sense of feminine virtue, for one thing), and yet this sexual morality is unlike any I can find in our contemporary expression of sexual ethics, where self-expression is valued more than self-giving.

O is the story of a woman objectified and humiliated, of a woman who submits to being violated by the countless tongues and phalluses and fingers which enter her. The novel is more sensual than suspenseful — although there is a clear narrative, it is not a story driven by plot, but rather by a series of erotic episodes (Geraldine Bedell writing for the Observer described them as written with “a hallucinatory, erotic intensity”). It is a psychologically as well as sexually penetrative story of surrender, of being mastered and of becoming enslaved, especially its first chapter which describes the elegant sexual tortures of the Chateau at Roissy, a kind of playboy mansion with fewer grottos and more dungeons.

It is here that, at the request of her lover René, O acquiesces in her complete submission. The cast of characters is sparse: O and René; Jacqueline, a young model whom O seduces, and Jacqueline’s 16-year-old sister, Natalie, a virgin eager to be initiated into the sexual rites of Roissy; Anne-Marie, an older and more ruthless mistress than are the many men at the Chateau; sundry blondes, brunettes, and redheads arranged alluringly throughout the text; and finally O’s ultimate lover, the sophisticated Sir Stephen, a kind of father-figure to René who ends up laying claim to O, flogging her, shackling her labia with an iron ring, and branding her with his initials as his slave, “a condition,” the narrator tells us, “of which O herself was proud.” As I read of the many exquisite ways O gives herself for men’s uses, I begin to wonder if the book was presenting me not with a picture of masculine sexual fantasies, but with a vision of my own.

The novel was written by the mysterious Pauline Réage, a pseudonym. In what is arguably one of the most successful literary secrets, Réage’s identity was kept hidden for decades. It wasn’t until 40 years after the novel’s publication that the then 86-year-old Dominique Aury, a respected editor and French intellectual, revealed that she was the author. It seems fitting that in a novel of sexual submission, Aury — Dominique, dominance, dominatrix — maintained such strict control over her own identity. Even Dominique Aury was not her “real” name: she was born Anne Desclos, but legally changed it in 1940. Aury’s nested names and identities are like a meta-fictitious exercise in un-making and making the self, for questions of self-identity and self-integrity lie at the heart of her novel.

Marilyn Simon, “My Own Private Chateau — Pauline Réage’s Story of O Revisited”, Quillete, 2020-10-18.

November 2, 2020

In the University of Michigan’s Sexual Health Certificate Program, “mainstream sexual health issues that affect wide swaths of the population, such as marriage, reproduction, and family life, were treated as niche topics”

Filed under: Education, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Tim Courtois explains what the University of Michigan’s Sexual Health Certificate Program is actually intended to teach:

When I signed up for the University of Michigan’s unique, year-long “Sexual Health Certificate Program” (SHCP), however, I truly did believe the experience would be both professionally and intellectually rewarding. I care about sexuality. I know that it is a fundamental component of the human search for joy and meaning. As a Michigan-based psychotherapist and licensed professional counselor, I wanted to deepen my understanding of sexuality, and become better equipped to provide care for the many clients who come to me with issues related to sexual health. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists sounded like the perfect fit for me, and the idea of becoming an AASECT-certified sex therapist appealed to me. I applied and was accepted for the 2019-2020 cohort. When I showed up, my class included participants from around the world — including Iceland, Egypt, Lebanon, and China — just as you’d expect at the kind of high-value, authoritative program that we all believed we’d signed up for.
The doubts started to creep in early, though — on day one, to be exact. Our first classroom module was titled “Sexual Attitude Reassessment.” I amused myself with the thought that this sounded like an unsettling euphemism for a brainwashing session. Sadly, that’s what it was.

It quickly became clear that the issue of sexuality — the ostensible subject — often would serve merely as a pretext for more general harangues about society, and the urgent need to remake it according to AASECT’s ideological blueprint. In a keynote lecture entitled “Why Fetishism Matters,” the speaker argued that the world we inhabit is socially constructed, and told us (with what now seems like admirable candor), “I’m not neutral. I’m here to recruit you to a particular point of view about how kink should be valued.” The same speaker said that he’d been accused of teaching students that any form of sexual behavior is acceptable as long as there is consent from all parties. “Yes, that’s exactly right,” he said. Clearly, our attitude “reassessment” was well underway.
From the get-go, the scientific content was mostly superficial, and was often undercut by claims that the very idea of truth is a harmful (and even oppressive) construct. The teaching was not so much impartial and informative as it was evangelistic. Yet it was also self-contradictory: Declarations that there are no real “correct” moral values were uttered (without irony) alongside absolutist proclamations about the correct way to understand sex — and morality.

As I learned, “Sexual Attitude Reassessment” (SAR) is an established term in the field, one that is often used to describe curriculum content that serves to educate sexual-health professionals about the wide range of sexual experiences that they may encounter among clients. The object is to ensure they won’t be shocked when such encounters occur, and to invite them to reassess their judgments and assumptions about various expressions of sexuality. These are valid and important goals. Unfortunately, the SAR in the SHCP descended into an exercise in overstimulation and desensitization — specifically, two full days of pornographic videos and interviews. At times, it felt like the famous brainwashing scene from A Clockwork Orange. There was a series of videos of people masturbating (one of which involved a strange interaction with a cat), a woman with “objectiphilia” who had a sexual attraction to her church pipe organ, various sadomasochistic acts, and a presentation on polyamory designed to make it clear that the polyamorous lifestyle is healthy, wholesome, and problem-free.

The focus on BDSM was a particular fixation throughout the program. In the SAR, we were shown videos of a woman meticulously applying genital clamps to the scrotum of a willing man, and a dominatrix teaching a class how to properly beat people while demonstrating on an eager participant. We also watched an interview with a sex-dungeon “dom” (the male equivalent of a dominatrix) who described one of his experiences: His client had instructed him, as the dom recounted it, “I want you to bind me and then beat me until I scream. And no matter how much I scream or beg you to stop, I want you to keep beating me.” The dom did as he was told, continuing the beatings through the customer’s begging and pleading, until the client went totally limp and silent, seeming to dissociate. At this point, the dom unbound the man, who then began to weep uncontrollably in the dom’s arms.

BDSM is a real and active sexual subculture, and I don’t object to its inclusion in the course materials. But I was shocked to see how much further the professors in the program took things, insisting that BDSM behaviors — up to and including the sexual “Fight Club” style of behavior described above — must be uncritically viewed as wholesome and beautiful. Students learned to sing from the same psalm book, with one memorably exclaiming “I’m so inspired by the wisdom and beauty in the BDSM community!” and insisting that the behavioral codes observed among BDSM participants can help us create a similar climate of safety and respect “in all our relationships.”

The program was focused on an agenda of “centering” the experience of minorities — in this case, sexual minorities. This meant that huge portions of time in class after class were spent focusing on BDSM, LGBTQIA+ issues, and polyamory, not to mention the obligatory discussions of oppression and privilege that were shoehorned into every discussion. Meanwhile, mainstream sexual health issues that affect wide swaths of the population, such as marriage, reproduction, and family life, were treated as niche topics. Further, while many Americans view sexuality through the prism of faith, religion hardly came up at all. And when it did, it was typically so that religious values could be denigrated. Even the few religious people in the program got the message: Whenever any made passing reference to their own observant religiosity, it was usually in a spirit of shame or penance.

In a few brief web searches to find a public domain or Creative Commons image to use for this post, I realized that web search engines offer “safe” options for a reason…

June 14, 2019

QotD: Kink-shaming

Filed under: Britain, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Paradoxically, redrawing the boundaries of what is “acceptable” and “appropriate” in order not to make anyone feel “excluded” actually has the counter-productive effect of literally excluding many groups from both social media and public platforms: ex-Muslims espousing atheism, women querying the rights of the transgendered to play them at sport, and lesbians not attracted to a penis even if it has a frock over it. A whole page of last week’s Sunday Times was entirely composed of items reflecting what I call the Perils Of Inclusivity: “Tax expert fired for saying trans women aren’t women” – “Gallery covers up art after complaints by Muslim viewers” – “Anonymous journal lets academics publish and not be damned”. All in aid of preventing hurty feelz!

And now sexual perverts (among whom, on occasion, I happily count myself) are the latest group to demand “inclusion”. Please! When I was young, we thought nothing more desirable than being An Outsider – why are the young of today so obsessed with getting a tick on the register, rather than playing hooky? There is a happy place between believing that no one should be excluded on the basis of race, sex or social class, and believing that official validation of every life choice any person freely makes are the same. Someone who likes dressing up in a gimp mask is not Rosa Parks, and I find the increasing lack of ability to differentiate between the two in some quarters highly risible at best and downright insulting at worst.

The latest snowflake flutter is “Don’t kink-shame me!”. At a Vancouver university last year, a man insisting he was an “adult baby” pestered a university nurse to change his dirty nappy and perved over his repulsed female classmates. A whistle-blowing workplace-safety director was sacked for standing up for the women. In Wolverhampton a few months back, a tattooist calling himself “Dr Evil” was charged with grievous bodily harm after slicing ears and nipples from paying customers. He was reported as having support from “the body-modification community” who set up a petition in his favour.

Perhaps the most gobsmacking illustration of how mainstream perversion has become is a photograph of a Pride march showing a gaggle of kiddies (whose parents obviously got the memo that Pride is family-friendly) staring in what looks like confused repulsion at a man in front of them who leads a group of men, crawling on all fours and dressed as dogs, on leashes. Personally, I don’t think Pride needs to be family-friendly – it’s about the very adult desire to connect your genitalia to the genitalia of the same sex, which is pretty specific. But neither is it about kinks. Considering its origins, lesbians have far more right to be there than men who pretend to be dogs at weekends. Lesbians are now routinely removed from Pride marches by police due to their insistence that lesbians don’t have penises and the hurty feelz this causes in people who believe they can and do.

I’m a broad-minded broad, so I’m not offended by these people – but I do despise them for being so wimpy that they need their kink validated by straight society. When did perverts start being ashamed to be perverts and need to be a community? “Community” used to be such a jolly word, redolent of cheery singing or a nice place to land on the Monopoly board. Now it just means a bunch of whiners whining about stuff.

Julie Burchill, “The pervert community? Oh please”, Spiked!, 2019-05-08

April 29, 2019

QotD: Prostitution

Filed under: Business, Europe, France, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I had a few patients who were prostitutes. I remember one well-dressed lady in her 40s, whose profession I asked in the course of my history-taking.

“Dominatrix,” she said.

She was obviously very good at it because she had an international clientele, including, for example, a judge in Alabama. She told me that she never went anywhere in her car without her kit, for she might receive an emergency call at any time from Hong Kong or South Africa. You might have thought that being whipped by one woman in black fishnet stockings was as good as being whipped by another, but apparently this was (and I presume still is) not so: It’s the words and gestures that go with the whipping that count as well.

This activity of hers gave her a very good living (her car was far better than mine); she was sending her daughter to private school. I admired her enterprise and thought of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Was she or the judge in Alabama to blame? Was either of them to blame at all?

Of course, she wasn’t typical of the profession, and hard cases, as they say, make bad law. But I am not at all sure that I saw the poor prostitutes in my street as merely victims, as the new French law would have them. Not everyone with their life history becomes a crack-taking prostitute. This does not mean that I did not pity them for what they had become. If we can truly sympathize only with those who have done nothing to contribute to their own fate, we shall have very restricted sympathies indeed.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Turning Tricks Into Sympathy”, Taki’s Magazine, 2016-04-09.

January 26, 2018

British sex workers create a “National Ugly Mugs” database to avoid sketchy customers

Filed under: Britain, Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Register, Iain Thomson reports on a study of professional sex workers in Britain:

A study into the effect of the internet on professional sex workers has shown the online world keeps them safer, happier in their job, and more able to weed out creepy customers.

Researchers at the universities of Leicester and Strathclyde in the UK interviewed 641 courtesans – with a roughly 80/20 per cent female to male split – and found [PDF] more than three quarters found using online channels to find and vet punters made them safer in their trade. Online forums also gave then a valuable tool in staying safe and countering loneliness or depression.

“Girls are very open because obviously we started talking about the safety from the very get-go,” Milena, 32, an independent escort providing BDSM services. “If you didn’t have that internet … everything would have been underground and everybody would be scared.”

[…]

“I’d say the worst bit of the job is constantly feeling like you’ve got to look over your shoulder,” said Jane, 40, a BDSM specialist. “Even though I’m working legally, I’m constantly worried.”

Sex workers in the UK have also set up a National Ugly Mugs database, whereby abusive punters are flagged up by their email addresses or social media handles, which 85 per cent of the respondents used. Sharing this information between themselves made is much less likely that the workers would come to harm.

Support groups for people in the business have been greatly enabled by the online world.

Prostitution is legal in the UK, but not in a brothel or via a pimp. Going online meant that 89 per cent of respondents used online communications to eliminate the need for a third party to manage their affairs, 82 per cent went online to make sure they weren’t breaking the law, and 78 per cent said it had improved the quality of their lives.

January 18, 2018

Weird lawsuit filed against Waymo engineer

Filed under: Business, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Register, Kieren McCarthy reports on the case:

The engineer at the center of a massive self-driving car lawsuit – brought by Google-stablemate Waymo against Uber – neglects his kids, is wildly disorganized, and has a large selection of bondage gear, his former nanny has sensationally alleged.

Anthony Levandowski may also be paying a Tesla techie for trade secrets, may have secretly helped set up several self-driving car startups, and at one point planned to flee across the border to Canada in an effort to avoid the legal repercussions of his actions at both Waymo and Uber, it is further claimed.

Those extraordinary allegations come in a highly unusual lawsuit [PDF] filed earlier this month by his ex-nanny Erika Wong, who worked for Waymo’s former star engineer for six months, from December 2016 to June 2017.

Wong’s lawsuit identifies no less than 41 causes of action – ranging from alleged health and safety code violations to emotional distress – and asks for a mind-bogglingly $6m in recompense. Levandowski’s lawyer said the lawsuit is a “work of fiction.”

Not safe for work bits below the fold:

(more…)

March 5, 2017

QotD: “Call it Fifty Shades of Orange“

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The sequel to that stupid mommy porn bondage movie is now in theaters, giving naughty thrills to bored housewives whose liberal husbands can’t cut it manwise, but the real festival of S&M was in the White House as President Trump unleashed his iron discipline on the media. Call it Fifty Shades of Orange.

It wasn’t a press conference – it was a kinky dungeon session where masochistic journalists eagerly sought out the delicious pain Master T was dealing. Hack after hack stepped up, tried to play “gotcha.” and ended up whimpering in the fetal position. The best part was CNN’s Jim Acosta, fresh from whining about how conservative outlets now get to ask questions too, basically handing Trump the cat-o-nine tails. Dude, next time keep from talking yourself into more public humiliation by biting down on the ball gag.

The media’s safe word is “Objectivity,” but none of them uttered it.

The wonderful thing about Trump – and the thing that sets the Fredocons and wusspublicans fussing – is that he gives exactly zero damns about the media’s inflated and ridiculous self-image. He doesn’t pay lip service to their lie that they are anything but what Instapundit calls “Democratic Party operatives with bylines.” Trump called them the “the enemy of the American People,” to which normals responded with “Yeah, sounds about right.”

Kurt Schlicter, “President Trump Has Been Far Too Nice To The Mainstream Media”, Townhall.com, 2017-02-20.

February 20, 2017

“For many years, I DJed BDSM parties, Fetish events, and the like … To quote Blade Runner, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe”

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At Instapundit, Sarah Hoyt linked to this post on “the lost children of the west“:

In the manosphere, the various hodgepodge collection of sites emphasizing a return to masculinity for men, I encountered a comment some years ago which stuck with me. In it, a man who had been banging a number of women lamented that every woman he encountered was a Cenobite, one of Clive Barker’s seekers of pain through pleasure. They would say “choke me until I pass out, hit me, spank me until I bleed, cut me…” They would demand ever-greater excesses, because they were unable to feel pleasure if it did not include pain. He didn’t care — all he wanted was to get laid, so he’d do whatever they asked of him — but he didn’t understand why women were this way, or why he could find so few who weren’t like this. He seemed to have a sense that things were not always this way.

In my DJ career, I have spent a great deal of time in communities and scenes that normal folks would regard as underground. For many years, I DJed BDSM parties, Fetish events, and the like. I’ve DJed warehouses and clubs with no names, buried in the wreckage of abandoned industrial parks. The marketplace of sex is one which I know exceedingly well. I’ve been DJing these scenes for the better part of 20 years.

To quote Blade Runner, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

As that commenter lamented, so I’ve seen first-hand. These SJWs, the radical feminists who spend their lives fighting the Patriarchy? They come to my clubs to be beaten senseless on crosses, chained to them by men dressed in uniforms very reminiscent of the Nazis. Yes, it’s a thing, as anybody who has ever been to a Goth club can attest. They demand to be tied up, burned, bruised, and battered.

Go on social media, and you will see SJWs telling us that Nazis are everywhere, that they are evil, and foul, and legion. They are in the White House, they are on Youtube, they are on Twitter, they are in Video Games. Nazis, everywhere. And so they march out into the streets, the Black Bloc, Antifascists engaging in what Tom Kratman calls a bit of political theater (not unlike Fascists once did).

But at the end of a long week of fighting the cisnormative heteropatriarchy, they come to be beaten by men dressed as Nazis, to the gritty beats of loud Industrial music in the depths of an Industrial park.

January 31, 2017

“It’s been slowly feeling like the death of San Francisco”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The end of an era in San Francisco:

San Francisco Armory which, at its height, was making as many as 100 films a month. Photograph: Courtesy of San Francisco Armory

A handful of leather straps, sex toys and other bondage equipment were scattered throughout the mostly empty studios of Kink.com on a recent Thursday. Peter Acworth, founder and CEO of the BDSM porn empire, walked through the dark basement corridors of the San Francisco Armory, recounting how his company used to make as many as 100 films a month.

But in February, Kink actors will do their final shoot at the historic castle-like building that has become a world-famous destination for tourists and porn connoisseurs. As Acworth described Kink’s early days, staff upstairs prepared for a lavish party for Airbnb – the kind of corporate tech event that some fear could take over the Armory once porn is out the door.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Lorelei Lee, a longtime Kink performer. “To lose this in a city that is losing resources for artists and queers and sex workers in such a huge way is sad.”

The Kink.com studio is the latest uniquely San Francisco institution to shutter in the rapidly gentrifying city, which in recent years has become exceedingly unaffordable and culturally homogeneous amid a huge technology boom. Combined with the financial turmoil in the porn industry, Kink’s business model has become unsustainable, leading Acworth to cease all production in the Armory.

Although Kink.com will maintain Armory offices and continue to provide content, some San Francisco performers are lamenting the closure of a porn studio that elevated the profile of fetish entertainment and BDSM and provided stable jobs and a safe workplace for LGBT people and sex workers.

Acworth, who is from the UK, launched the company in 1997 out of a grad school dorm room. In 2006, he purchased the 200,000 sq ft Armory, which is a 1914 reproduction of a medieval castle.

The national landmark became the headquarters for his growing network of BDSM and fetish subscriptions sites, including an interactive live page and a news site, and has housed public tours, shows, workshops and other porn events.

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