You’ll probably note that in my disclaimer, I talked about consent violation, not about rape. There was an interesting survey done a while back that showed that rapists, or gray rapists, or sexually pushy characters, or whatever you’d like to call them will admit to what they do as long as it’s not called rape. They understand that they violated consent, as long as it’s not called rape. Because rape is wrong, and what they did wasn’t wrong… right?

I think (in my court of opinion) that if Julian Assange is actually guilty of the accusations against him, this is what he’s likely guilty of, him and pretty much most of Western culture: a disconnect between understanding that ignoring an ”I don’t want this” is violating consent, and understanding that technically, yes, violating, ignoring, or assuming consent where it’s not given is more often than not either rape or riding the line real close.

I don’t think that what’s being done to him is right, far from it. I’m actually one of his supporters. However, I think we need to look good and hard at these “not really rape” accusations that so many of us are okaying.

I’ve violated consent before. Did I call it rape? Of course not. Was it? Possibly not. After all, the victim stayed with me for years afterward. That’s not how a rape victim acts, right?

But did I keep going after being asked to stop? Yes. Did my partner have a safeword? Yes. Did they use it? No. But. Did I suspect something was wrong? Yes. And while like many sadists I like to flirt with that line, after that night I’m a lot better about making very clear that there is a line, and that I will respect it, especially when I’m playing games with someone who also likes to play games with consent. It’s tricky for even experienced BDSM practicioners; no wonder we as a culture are completely lost trying to sort this out.

Here’s some of what Assange is accused of:

According to press reports, Assange held one of the women down in a sexual manner.  Yes, and many women like that.  Assange started having sex while one woman was sleeping.  Yes, that too some women like.  Because people like all sorts of things- clothes being ripped off, dirty threats whispered in their ears, even somewhat violent sexual encounters.
(“Sex is dirty; geopolitics are even dirtier,” The Chronicle)

And this is where, and why, things get complicated.

As a culture we’re terrible with consent. We have shame around consent. We eroticize breaking it, or having it broken, and in the bedroom, the vast majority of us are such terrible negotiators that unfortunately often, we spend a lot of time guessing whether or not we even have consent. But even within this morass, there are guidelines.

“No means no” is simplistic, and partnersex is complicated. How do we tell a partner “No,” to one activity, during that activity, while still expressing interest in being sexual with them? Nuanced nos are tricky, but they usually work: “Please stop doing that,” “Not right now,” “Not without a condom,” etc.

Partners who like to treat consent as irrelevant love to ignore nuanced nos, by the way. How do I know this? Because I’ve been there. I’ve said “not right now” to a blowjob only to have my head pushed down. I’ve said “not without a condom” only to reach down and discover him playing “just the tip” bare. I’ve been woken up over and over having to fight off a partner because I was still too sleepy and incoherent to articulate a no.

That’s a very scary way to wake up, by the way. Sleep paralysis occurrs when the sleeper is woken out of REM. In that state, you can’t move or speak, but you’re aware. It takes time to come out of this state.

Did I stay with that partner? Yes. I didn’t believe these incidents were malicious in nature. I had made progress, believe it or not, in getting that partner to understand that yes, overriding a no is date rape, and after that, that there are some areas you do not play consent games/consent ignoring games with. Condoms, for one.

These moments of consent overriding were few and far between – but they happened, and this is something we need to be aware of, that consent violations occur within relationships all the time, and that since they’re not rape to our culture, we don’t know how to react or deal with them. When consent is violated but it’s not “rape,” we don’t often act like “typical victims;” we act confused.

It’s when you think about what happened in retrospect that you realize, “Wait, that’s why I feel so off about this… I did express that I didn’t consent, and they did keep going after having heard me, and I don’t know if it was rape, but it wasn’t right.”

(It’s completely possible that Julian Assange’s lady friends experienced something similar. It’s also completely possible that what’s occurred in his case is considerably more tangled, given the ties involved. )

I’m a fairly clear communicator, and experienced in negotiating consent before, during, and after sexual play, and I’ve still had mine overridden or ignored. If you feel your sex partner isn’t communicating clearly, or isn’t able to communicate, that’s not a green light, that’s not license to do what you want to do. Too often we act like anything short of a scream and a punch in the face “doesn’t count” as a real, unambiguous no.

Besides - speaking as a sadistic top, and as a masochistic switch: in the heat of the moment, a simple “Do you want this?” can be very erotic.

We need to expect, and demand, more enthusiastic yes-es, as well as recognize as a culture that there are gray areas of consent, and consent violations that happen in gray areas of sexuality. They’re still wrong, but there are degrees of wrong.

Maybe it’s not “rape” rape. Maybe it’s a consent violation. Maybe it was a case of taking advantage of unclear consent, or a lack of ability to deny or withdraw consent. Most of us have done this at least once. Many of us also know what it feels like to have this done to us. These types of boundary breaching can all be treated differently – and to reduce them, I think they should be.

People like all sorts of things, and for a lot of kinky people*, having to get or give consent for their freaky activities spoils their fun. That said – if you’re not sure, consent the person you’re with. Ask before you share a bed with a partner, “How do you feel about sleepy sex?” (As an insomniac, sleep is hard to come by; I have a long-standing decline policy on this.) Ask them three times before unprotected sex, “Are you sure? Do you want this?”

Watch them closely. Watch for that change from forbidden pleasure to fear – watch for freezing up, watch for a lack of responsiveness, because there is a danger zone, and we are indeed responsible for making sure that we are within the bounds of consent. And for fuck’s sake, watch for those nuanced nos.

Yes means yes.

* Particularly kinky mostly-vanilla types. Pretty much I’ve found that kinky sex-positive people will negotiate up-front, kinky people will negotiate during, and kinky mostly-vanilla people feel strange negotiating. This is why nowadays, as a responsible top, I consent the ever living crap out of people – or if I’m flirting kinky and not consenting them, I make sure they know that while I’m happy pushing their unexpressed boundaries, that if they want me to stop, all they have to do is express that, and I’ll stop. After all, I learned the hard way.

In response to “Career Lessons from Eliott Spitzer’s Call Girl, Ashley Dupre,” Sakoro writes:

The only problem with her career is that prostitutes tend to have much higher rates of depression and other mental health disorders. It sucks having to behave sexually for people you aren’t attracted to and who probably don’t respect you.

Penelope Trunk’s reply:

I am not sure it’s fair to lump depression statistics of high end prostitutes and crack-addict prostitutes and everyone in between. Not really informative. And, as a side note, lawyers have a very high rate of depression and I think if you compared lawyers and prostitutes with similar yearly incomes, the lawyers might be more depressed, on average, than the prostitutes.

I’m not saying prostitution is a great career choice, I’m just saying that it’s a complicated discussion.

And in response to the madam talking point:

Also, I want to point out that even as a supposedly self-employed business owner, I work for someone else — I mean, I have investors, and they will make a lot of money off of me (hopefully) for doing much less day-to-day work than I’m doing. And I actually feel lucky to have the investors.

So (to Matt’s point) it’s not like the issues of prostitution are all completely unique to prostitution. [emphasis mine -Ed.]

She may not be much for nude modeling but it’s still nice to see a respected mainstream female career blogger sticking up for the agency of women to choose sex work. Thanks, Penelope.

Tehran, Iran, Jan. 07 – A man was flogged in public in the town of Behshahr, northern Iran, for producing home-made pornographic videos, state media reported on Sunday.

The unnamed man was lashed 100 times in public, the daily Etemaad Melli wrote.

He had been found guilty of filming his sexual relations with married women, the report said.

Thousands of young people are flogged in Iran each year on trivial charges that include drinking alcohol, attending mixed-sex parties, and sexual misconduct. Iran’s Judiciary views flogging as the appropriate punishment for combating moral crimes, particularly among the youth. Islamic judges insist on carrying out the punishment in town squares, as “a lesson for all to see.”

“Iran man flogged in public for making home-made porn film,” Iran Focus

Oh, it gets worse. Iran’s amateur porn stars have particularly short-lived careers.

TEHRAN, Iran — An amateur porn movie could net 31 people the death penalty in Iran’s capital city. The group faces death for filming and producing an adult movie that was shot using a cellphone, said Saiid Mortazavi, the president of Tehran’s criminal court.

The group of 31 people also has been charged with sexual assault on the actress in the movie.

[...]

Iran has a track record of executing amateur adult makers. A man who made adult movies with his wife was publicly hanged in late-2005 and a female porn star was stoned to death after spending eight years in prison for performing in an adult film.

“Amateur Pornographers Face Death Penalty in Iran,” XBiz

Keep it safe and legal, folks. And remember – it wasn’t always this way.

“When I sit in the alehouse, I am a woman, and I am an exuberant young man. When I am present at a place of quarrelling, I am a woman, a perfect figure. When I sit by the gate of the tavern, I am a prostitute familiar with the penis; the friend of a man, the girlfriend of a woman.” – from a hymn to Inanna (translated)

So here’s what I want to talk about with class. This guy was all, “I would like to see sex shops zoned into a particular area.” Well that’s how it Already IS, fucker!! That’s how it’;s BEEN for decades now, and guess what, that’s where the PROBLOEMS come from! Just think for one nanosecond about the term “slumming.” That is fucked up. That implies a direct corrolation between porn/sex/dirty stuff and LOW CLASS. And let’s not forget lower class folks are presumed to be “wilder” and all that bullshit… oh and when it comes to sex shops, strip clubs, etc., eben if they DON’T want it in their neighborhood, guess who has the most effect when it comes to NIMBY (not in my back yard) bullshit? It’s not the poor!

Look I was blind to a lot of this stuff (not all of it tho) for a long time but now that I see it? I fucking see it EVERYWHERE, and it pisses me the fuck off!! Because to me it is now so fucking OBVIOUS, that it pisses me off that some people just.don’t.see it.

Okay and this is one of the main things that annoyed me about Pamela Paul’s book Pornified too. She doesn;t want porn to go away. She just wants it to go back to being something confined to the wrong side of the tracks. And she doesn’t see anything wrong with that! She just puts it out there like there’s nothing worth examining. She even used the phrase “low class stripper” a couple times and just didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.

-the fabulous/infamous Amber Rhea, under the influence of a little vodka and a lot of pissed off

(“Drunkblog RANT – classism and other shit,” Being Amber Rhea)

It’s funny – I didn’t see it either for a while, or I saw it and didn’t focus my eyes on what I was seeing.

For a lot of women sex work is a last-ditch option, something we all consider in the back of our minds when we’re growing up; we ask ourselves once or twice, if we needed the money, would we strip? Would we do porn? Turn tricks? And that fallback, that fishnet safety net, is there for every woman when times get tough.

Of course, it’s a valid emergency gig, but it’s not a decent job, let alone a respectable career choice. Once again, nice girls don’t. Well bred girls don’t. It’s beneath them – much like community college and dating outside their background.

So, yeah, it’s a class thing. Sex work is something a woman can turn to when she’s down and then slander once she’s back on her feet. In fact, she’s expected to. That’s part of the ritual of the redemption of the whore: she has to cast off her old life to be reaccepted into society.

It’s funny, the correlation between porn and lower-class neighborhoods. There’s an assumption that sex shops lower property values, so they’re restricted to less desirable areas. Interestingly enough there is no cause and effect there. According to Manhattan lawyer Herald Price Fahringer, “[New York City] did a study a couple of years ago that showed no rise in crime or decline in real property values.” (There’s been more on that issue recently, but I can’t find the link I’m thinking of; if anyone turns up some info, you’ll be duly rewarded with link love.)

Question your assumptions: porn is adult entertainment, and a working-class stiff doesn’t have half the entertainment budget a CEO does…

* For more information on the voluntary Restricted to Adults label, visit RTALabel.org.

First: Obsessive porn usage is a compulsion, not an addiction. It’s an addiction only in the same sense that any pleasurable activity is worth endlessly repeating. It’s a form of escapism and should be no more illegal than me wasting two years of my life gaming in front of a computer, or “wasting” my childhood hiding out in a library instead of socializing. Some people are just hard-wired with escapist nerd tendencies. The cure for that isn’t legislation, it’s learning how to deal with your life balance issues.

Note to my readers: Porn “addiction” can be easily cured. Start working in adult. I guarantee you, after the first year you’ll be so blasé about gangbangs that you’ll have to start looking at softcore.

Richard of DamselTheater.com demonstrates the dangers of sensationalist reporting in his MySpace blog:

After watching another news show about the dangers of porn, I thought it might be fun to put together a written documentary about the dangers of sports addiction. Although this piece is tongue-in-cheek, the references are all valid links (as of today). What this shows is how one can make a compelling case about the horrors of a subject by focusing on only what is wrong. I was initially going to put this disclaimer at the end, but was afraid of too many people not going that far to see that it’s a joke…

–sort of.

Sports addiction is a growing problem in America that dwarfs any concerns that one may have about pornography. A search for sports in Google shows that there are 772 million sports sites compared to a only 91 million porn sites [...]

“Is sports addiction better than porn addiction?,” http://blog.myspace.com/richreynolds

It’s a great argument on the subjectivity of addiction. Check it out.

At its core orgasm control and denial is about men submitting to the control a woman has over their pleasure and orgasm, letting her have her way with him even when it means she might deny him his way. It’s radical for questioning the idea that foreplay is for women (since as we all know, men aren’t interested in foreplay or being on the receiving end of a pleasurably teasing touch) and that the male orgasm is the natural culmination of sex.

Many submissive men sometimes get off on the idea that their teaser finds male orgasms messy and disgusting and sex with them a hassle. They eroticize the idea of female disinterest in their cock. It’s a form of erotic humiliation that some thrive on and it can be fun but in reality it’s not my style.

After the great feminist blowjob debate of 2006 it’s worthwhile to remember the immense amount of power and control a woman has over her partner’s orgasm… the ability to speed it up, slow it down, hold it off, make them beg, or deny it completely. It’s a rush and yes, you can feel that power on your knees with your hair held in a fist. The choice to cover your teeth or let him feel them and be reminded you have claws…

Men have a right not just to the pleasure of taking but the pleasure of surrender – perhaps the last great male taboo. Too many women still look down on their man if he shows such a sign of “weakness” as submission to her power and strength, even for a night. Too many women fear themselves, and being able to ask for – no, demand – what they really want. It’s easy to hesitate. Dominating is hard work and requires self-knowledge and self-control any student of the occult would envy.

It’s more about the tease, the art of the coquette, the temptress, the tester, than the denial. It’s very much about the possibilty of denial in its most basic form, the removal of pleasure… part of the dance of love, part of the art of increasing wanting, taking away your interest, your touch, your company.

I love directness and boldness and honesty but there’s no sense in being artless when it comes to the oldest arts of all.

There’s nothing wrong with making him beg for it. In this age of cheap and easy instant gratification pleasure delayed is all the more precious. We’ve been told for too long now just to cut to the chase, only to find out that maybe all he really wants is to be seduced “our” way. (I say this knowing full well that for huge swaths of women, “our” way is to cut straight to the chase. I’m a big fan of the “Wham Bam, Thank You Sir” approach myself at times.)

Chicks don’t get a monopoly on the either foreplay or the oh-so-willing victim role. Sensual touch just plain feels good and there’s something incredible in giving another person complete control over your orgasm. It makes the eventual – okay, possible – release that much more potent.

To a smartass tease, the game of stroke-and-release has a lot of potential for mindfucking. Modern culture assumes the male orgasm. It’s almost a right in any given sexual encounter: the man will come.

In tease and denial that assumption is blown out the window. He gets what she chooses to dish out. If he comes without her permission, she might subject him to punishment. (Of course sometimes the punishment’s half the fun, right?) I kinda like the implications this has for premature ejaculators. Ladies, we have our retraining program and the men are already lining up.

Tease and denial is a very feminist femdom slant on male/female equality and parity. Standard fare “male” sex isn’t the one true way – for either men or women. Not all guys want it fast and hard and now now now. And not all girls feel like giving it to them that way, anyway.

Some of us would rather see them beg.

To me, feminism means equal opportunity gender roles. I can play sugar mamma and he can stay home with the kids. I can wear high heels and lipstick and try to coax him into eyeliner between bouts of hardware swapping and stick fighting. I can ride him hard and fast, use him for my selfish pleasure, and he can surrender to a sweetly langorous sensual touch that may or may not end in anything at all. You choose which traits to reject or claim, whether they were labeled pink or blue.

Of course that’s tease and denial from a female dominant/male submissive perspective. There are other flavors. I think the gender role flip is most pronounced with femdom/malesub, though.

If there’s reason to draw a line between violent movies and sex movies, should we be drawing it now? If not is there anything that we shouldn’t allow others to package as entertainment? When violence, fear, implied lack of consent and sex are rolled together how do we counter accusations of fetishizing rape? How comfortable are you with the crying edge of pornography? How comfortable do you think you’ll need to be?

“Could Donkey Punches KO Porn’s First Amendment Protection?,” SugarBank

That post brought up a great discussion about industry standards, sex, and violence in porn which led to this one:

For thirty years Miller has served the porn industry well, but thinking Miller will never succeed in proving any pornography obscene is wishful thinking. A 3 minute downloadable clip on a webpage is easy to ‘take as a whole’ and is increasingly likely to show an apparently distressed women being deliberately hurt by a sexually violent man. The government are confident the public won’t view downloadable clips the same way they did movies like Deep Throat in the seventies. They also know that if one judgment goes against porn it’ll put the industry in the same position as the once unassailable tobacco industry – paying fines and under constant, successful assault (the difference being that pornographers will do serious jailtime.)

“Should Pornographers Challenge the Miller Test?,” SugarBank

(Since this is my blog and not the Sam Sugar echo chamber, I have some more thoughts on that last sentence I’ll post later tonight. Yes! A real post! Feel free to orgasm in your pants. I did.)

What’s Sam’s answer to the Miller test? Canada’s Butler test. Which is a much better solution… unless you’re not straight, or unless you’re into the kinky stuff.

The line between sex and violence and consensual BDSM can be glaringly obvious or obviously blurry depending on where you’re standing. It’s one thing to think you obviously don’t mean BDSM when you say sex and violence, and another to not specifically exclude it and realize that a lot of people do see a person hitting another person with a cane, hearing that sharp swish, the resulting stripes as violence. After all, somebody’s hitting somebody with something and somebody else is getting hurt. They’re into it, yes, but as Sam brings up in comments, there’s also the issue of whether or not a person has a right to consent to getting beaten.

I like to play rough on both sides of the whip. I’m not going to try to argue that BDSM and violence are completely different. The intent is different. The emotions are different. But BDSM is as much about hurting someone until they can’t take anymore and then hearing them beg you for more as it is tying your lover up and torturing them using only your hands and tongue. Butler doesn’t clearly exclude BDSM porn – in fact, in implementation, it’s basically considered to speficically include it as being both violent and socially harmful/degrading to women (even femdom. Yep.).

You’ll have to pry my crop out of my cold, dead hands. If we’re going to draw a firm line between sex and violence we need to know what the hell counts as sex, what counts as violence, and why we’re drawing the line there. A lot of people instinctively squick at the combination, and a lot of people are instinctively turned on by it, so call it unnatural if you like but I live to bite and be bitten, to whip and be whipped. I want that natural sexual expression protected.

Go argue/agree with him in comments. It’s less satisfying than gangland jello-wrestling him but with any luck you won’t get arrested later, either…

It’s true. At least, as regards children accessing porn.

You don’t have to approve of porn to realize the logic inherent in the following statement:

“Pornographers don’t want kids to visit their websites”

“A Pornographers Guide to Protecting Kids from Porn Online,” SugarBank

Actually Sam Sugar raises a good, glaringly obvious point: not all the underage kids accessing porn are children. The vast majority of them are horny, curious, bored teenagers. Saying “children looking at porn” is shortened to “children and porn” which is then blurred with “children in porn” and that gives you the pornography = child porn media situation we have today. The problem we’re talking about is minors accessing porn (yeah, I read my Lakoff), and some of those minors are children stumbling across it unintentionally. If my own teenage years were any indication the rest are horny teens near, at, or over the age of consent in their state of residence, but legal minors and thusly not old enough to buy porn.

Yeah – they can legally screw like bunnies, or get married and produce more horny teenagers, but they can’t legally buy porn.

That’s a good thing. There’s a lot of twisted stuff out there. (That’s also a good thing. Some of us consenting adults like it pretty freaky.) But for a while now it’s seemed to me that the perfect solution to that is to make the natural compromise: it’s okay for teens to enjoy a little softcore, but the hardcore and kinky stuff that I was reading when I was a teenager stays restricted to adults. The idea of teens formulating their ideas of sexuality on Max Hardcore or the Grey Archive is an unsettling one.

I always know I’m right when Sam agrees with me.

As a phone sex operator specializing in BDSM, I’m well aware that most perverts are formed early in life, and often in fairly normal situations. This kind of framework – culture, really – won’t prevent those destined to become kinky but it will do something to help slow the sexual arms race from starting in high school. The logical, healthy approach isn’t to say, “Just don’t – sex is dirty and you should save it for someone you love,” it’s to say “Don’t be in a rush – take your time, enjoy everything being new. There’s no hurry (so say no if you’re pressured) and it’s more fun if you savor it all.”

Sam’s post covers the situation pretty well. He points out that there’s really only one proven age verification solution: parental guidance and monitoring. The problem is, that’s the answer nobody wants.