This blog is where I explore my feelings and experiences while learning about kink and eroticism. My perspective is of a working class, intersectionalist feminist genderqueer female bodied person. I used to be a sub, but now I switch too. I like to practice ropes on myself and post pictures here, ostensibly to record my progress.
... Read more about me and this website if you like.
Last night I was at a kink event which I had organized, and someone decided to adress the group. I was fine with this but then she called me by my real name. Then she apologized. Then she did it again.
I spoke with her about this privately and she said to me that first names don’t mean much to her. I told her, maybe they don’t mean much to you but they mean something to me. Maybe in your line of work you don’t think it’s important. (Oh wait, I think she’s a student who doesn’t even have a fucking job other than modeling for BDSM books.) But I do something where my reputation is important, and where I have other battles to fight than defending my sex life. You pose nude for fetish books whereas I don’t have a single face picture online.
She told me, “It’s just I don’t know you by any other name.” This rang hollow to me. I never introduced myself by that name, I introduced myself as Spoke. She knew my real name because she was briefly fucking a friend of mine. She saw me get angry at him for using it in public, for telling her.The claim of ignorance does not stand up.
So was it intentional? Who cares. And really, what’s worse? The lack of integrity displayed by pretending to forget a limit or the carelessness with private information and boundaries of others? What a poor display of character.
Hey remember back when this website was an endless cascade of me tying myself up and posting pictures? Well that’s what most people still come here for, according to my logs. I like to think that my musings on sex and gender would be enough to hold anyone’s attention but I am nerdy that way. Well, since I have access to a camera with a remote control for a limited (soon to be concluded) time I thought I would take some sunny self bondage photos.
This post was written in my habit of being hard on myself (and others). It contains my thinking about the way I see the world, about ideas I have which are not necessarily right, and they don’t make me look that good. Its subject matter is stranger assault, so if that’s not what you can handle reading about, then skip it.
I was riding the bus home the other night, the ride was cold after a hot night of lovemaking. It’s not a long ride but it takes two buses to get my from my lover’s home to my own. I thought I was presenting pretty butch that night, with my pants low, my running shoes, and a boxy pinstripe jacket. My face was hidden in a scarf and hat which I left on in the bus. I felt good, was I maybe swaggering a bit? Getting on my second bus, I met for an instant the eyes of a man who was sitting beside me on the long seats at the back of the bus, a few feet away. I didn’t look right at him the rest of the ride but I sensed his attention was on me. I was not interested in him; he looked not quite sober. A bit drunk? A bit outside of my reality somehow? Read more…
Fuck ya indie boys showed me this picture. This guy is wearing my shirt and the vest I haven’t been able to find yet. Also he has hair I wouldn’t mind.
Just added a new blog to my list: Critical Masculinities.
(Is the name a geeky cyclist joke?)
Further evidence that I am still stuck in the Second Wave. I have never seen this thought expressed this way before, and here Stryker is talking about events in the early 90s… I typed it out to save for posterity. (I added paragraph breaks to make it easier to read on screen… this is all one paragraph in the book.)
The new “queer” version of gender espoused by de Lauretis and other like-minded feminist scholars, which de Lauretis laid out most succinctly in her essay “Technologies of Gender,” discarded the older feminist idea that gender was merely repressive—that it was only a system for holding women down, turning them into second-class citizens, exploiting their labor, and controlling their reproductive capacities.
Without denying that gender systems indeed produced systematic inequalities for women, the new queer take on gender also talked about gender’s productive power—how “woman” was also a “site” or a “location” that its occupants identified with, understood themselves through, and acted from.
The new queer feminism drew heavily from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of social power as decentralized and distributed rather than flowing from a single source—that is, that each of us has a power particular to our situation and that power is not just something vested “up there” somewhere in the law or the army or the “patriarchy.”
Queer feminism reimagined the status of “woman” not simple as a condition of victimization to be escaped from, and it reconceived gender as a network of “relations of power” that, like language, we don’t ever get outside of but always express ourselves though and work within—a situation that gives feminist women a “dual vision” and “split subjectivity.”
Sometimes womanhood is a binding-in-place that needs to be resisted and worked against, and sometimes, de Lauretis said, women want womanhood to stick to them “like a wet silk dress.”
Transgender History, by Susan Stryker (Seal Press, 2008) page 125 and 128
This is useful for me to articulate because of this weird assumption folks seem to have that my issues with my gender stem from my issues with patriarchy… I guess it has to do with the cultural idea that “feminists want to be like men.” I have never found this concept to be terribly accurate, or useful… It’s been a while since I got down with the idea that femininity can be strong and powerful, that it often is, and that the pursuit of masculinity is not the way forward for women, as a group.
Stumbling on folk musician Coyote Grace reminds me of an image of masculinity I have always loved, and the one I have been dancing around though I have forgotten about it. The archetype I am thinking of is the folk singer.
The folk singer can be radical, like me. He can be a fighter, and organizer. He feels the stories of others deeply, and collects them, as Utah Phillips said, and scatters them around wherever he goes. In fact, also as Phillips said, he has a social responsibility to do such. The stories want to move, they want to be told, and told well. He puts enormous value in the thoughtful communication of experiences, lessons, ideas and histories.
The folk singer inevitably has the tools of his trade with him, or nearby. A banjo, a guitar, a mandolin. Perhaps a drum, a harmonica. Or something more exotic.
He works, and often his music is informed by the jobs he takes to support it. The folk singer is always at work, he always has an ear open and is ready to make someone laugh or feel the possibilities of life with a story.
His clothes are work clothes: he wears a simple t shirt sometimes. Boots often. Jeans, or wool trousers, or maybe corduroy if he’s feeling luxurious. Shirts are often button-up, with collars. They might need some ironing. While the folk singers is a performer (of storytelling) like I am a performer (of gender), he does get on with his life aside from that. He might like a particular vest more than he likes his clothes to match every single day. He might want to wear that old hat more than he wants to look perfectly clean cut. But he appreciates a well-tied tie, and may keep his shirt tucked in. He wears those dorky big wireframe glasses. I don’t know what it is about string instruments that make people want to wear them, but if he wears glasses they are inevitably wire-rimmed.
The folk singer might be physically strong, through genetics, or hard labor, or dedication. He may just as likely focus all his power and agility into the muscles of his throat, his chest, his hands. The hands are rough from the use of his instruments. He touches his lovers with care, or not. He charms many with his songs and stories and uses he own guidelines to decide which offers to take. The folk singer’s vocabulary is extensive enough to say what he wants, but he is never excessive in his words. They are just the tools he uses to build his stories.
Old Man Luedecke
(Actually I’m somewhat embarrassed at putting something so silly up for public viewing but I am going to swallow my pride and do it anyway. That’s what blogs are for, as I understand it.)
Fetlife is running a contest called “Sit on Kinky Santa’s Lap”. You pick 3 things you want and then there’s a draw. Sounds like some difficult sort of math to me… But I’m sure John Baku wrote a script for it.
I changed the theme of my site (if it’s not broke… how does the rest of that go?) and I found out the new theme can auto-generate a links page. This was my links don’t have to live on the side of all the other pages, which means I can update them with more stuff than is really seemly to have on every fucking page.
I updated this page to reflect the variety of blogs and podcasts I actually follow these days.
Do you have some time to kill? Check it out! (Always available on top nav bar of the site.)
I thought I would draw out what I might look like if I transitioned to male. I thought about how I am now, and what the men in my family look like. First I drew myself with clothes on:
Then I undressed myself:
Here I am in all my beauty: a slightly dumpy, very hairy man with breasts a big bigger than someone not too fat ought to have, and a big juicy cunt.
Spokewench 