Preaching to the Perverted: How Did I Miss This Film?!

Last night I watched the fantastic British comedy film Preaching to the Perverted (1997), of which I had been blissfully unaware until a brilliant lady in the kink community recommended it to me. 

My first reaction was "HOW did I miss this? This film includes EVERYTHING I wrote Thinking Kink about, and yet I didn't know about it til now!" My second was to laugh, hoot, snort, raise eyebrows and repeatedly think how accurate and incisive this colourful, anarchic film is.

Here's what I liked in particular:

1) It quickly moves beyond the obvious tropes

In the first five minutes, when the House of Thwax is being accused of spreading filth and feminists are condemning it as exploitative of the female form, Ricky Tomlinson's character pipes up and points out he's seen "more men's hairy arses" in the secret film from inside a kink club, than any naked female bodies. And he's spot on. If you step inside any BDSM event, you will see bodies of ALL shapes, sizes, genders and ages. Yes, the scene is agonizingly white and could do a lot more to be ethnically diverse. But it has no rules on who's allowed to take their clothes off and parade around for others. Which is great, because it means we see plenty of old, male, chunky, skinny, hairy, wobbly and generally real-looking bodies in the kink scene. It really is time pop culture caught up to this, instead of opting to show rail thin white females in black PVC every time kink is mentioned.

"Gentle Face" by istoletheTV, via Creative Commons

2) It's very, VERY British

The majority of pop culture artefacts I looked at in Thinking Kink are from America, because that's from where the majority of our mainstream TV shows, movies and music originates. This is slowly changing, but British movies, TV shows and art are still lagging behind when it comes to global recognition--with some notable exceptions such as Dr Who and Sherlock, but they have the weight of the mighty BBC behind them. So it was incredibly refreshing to see a British-made film full of actual British actors running around grimy streets and stately homes in THIS COUNTRY. A lot of kinks are very specific to Britain: caning and spanking have strong connections to the disciplinarian boarding schools of yesteryear, as do the corresponding schoolboy/girl fantasies. The idea of a buttoned-up, repressed people who secretly love to wear stockings and bend people over desks is also extremely British, and is explored heartily in the film.

3) It nails the hypocrisy behind British laws

As someone who has just written 75,000 words on the insane state of Britain's obscenity law, it was fantastic to watch a film that points out how much of an ass our laws still are when they try to prevent consenting adults seeking pleasure. In this film, the kinksters, freaks, pervs and dominatrices are pitted against the government, the police and a press eager to humiliate people for a headline. Obviously the real situation is much more nuanced, as the protagonist Peter discovers, but when the law comes for you and your sexual freedom, you have to decide what you care about more - money and public image, or personal integrity. Preaching to the Perverted nails this perfectly.

4) It shows the value of group living

The House of Thwax comprises a huge warehouse/living space where a lead dominatrix is served by a houseful of slaves. It's the kind of efficient, clean and well-ordered set-up that most of us can only dream of enjoying at home or work, but because everyone knows their role, it functions smoothly. That's not to say there aren't malcontents, complaints, misplaced affections and a fair bit of topping from the bottom, but that's life and that's human beings; this film does a great job of showing that even 24/7 kink has its limits. However, when a baby is brought into the equation, everyone in the house takes turns to look after it, rather than the responsibility all falling on to the knackered mother's shoulders. Yes, the baby is being walked around a house full of chains, crosses and spanking benches, but it's receiving love and attention from multiple caring adults who clearly adore it. Why isn't this kind of parenting shown to us more often?!

5) It emphasises consent and safety

Naive and young protagonist Peter enters the kink world undercover and soon ends up out of his comfort zone, clad in PVC and getting his nipples pierced in order to blend in. However, he is regularly asked what he does and doesn't want to do, and when he says he is afraid of pain, his mistress respects this. When he says he is a virgin, she also respects this. She regularly tells him he is free to leave or say no if he does not want to participate. Although this should be bleeding obvious to both kinksters and vanilla folk, there clearly is a problem with how pop culture and wider Western society understand consent. It's rarely shown as an ongoing conversation that involves regular check-ins. We're still struggling to get to the point where all men believe no means no, rather than "try harder because women play games, you see", let alone the point where sexual partners are seeking active, enthusiastic consent from women ("yes means yes" and anything else should be seen as no). So it's mighty important for films, books, music videos, and any other art depicting kink to keep emphasising: YOU DON'T JUST GRAB SOMEONE AND START WHIPPING THEM. YOU ASK. AND ASK. AND ASK. AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN. AND YOU RESPECT WHATEVER THEY TELL YOU, OR YOU ARE AN ABUSER AND A CRIMINAL.

6) It shows a variety of genders in a variety of roles

Images of submissive men, beautiful male bodies naked, chained, roped, guys being humiliated and strong women whose bodies aren't served up for the male gaze are still far too often absent from pop culture portrayals of BDSM. Not so in this film! The House of Thwax is decorated by chained, muscular male subs, the kink parties have plenty of older, saggy male flesh on show (much like your average real BDSM play party!), and apart from the mistress herself and her shaven-headed female slave, we see very few female bodies throughout the film. We also see plenty of young Peter in compromising positions, which makes a refreshing change from filmmakers' persistent belief that 'sexy' only means 'what straight men find arousing.'

7) It's just bloody funny

Lines such as "Stop electrocuting Peter! We were wrong to leave him in the road," had me hooting and snorting throughout. This is a film that doesn't take itself too seriously, and recognises that a sense of humour is essential to survival in the BDSM world. Sometimes you'll spill the poppers, knot the rope wrongly, trip over the spanking bench or end up look at a ball sack covered in clothes pegs when you really didn't want to see it. You have to be able to laugh, first of all at yourself, but also generally at this crazy community where we gather together to humiliate and beat each other, and then have a cup of tea and chat about it afterwards. Preaching to the Perverted shows that BDSM players are regular folk with jobs, lives and bills to pay, but they simply get their kicks from playing on the edge; not unlike anyone who does extreme sports, or--as someone points out in the opening scenes--boxing, a pursuit from which no law or government has ever tried to save men.

So what are you waiting for? You can buy the remastered version of the film here. Watch and enjoy!

Abuse in BDSM and why people need to stop blaming That Book for it

Perhaps it's a refreshing testament to free speech that I spend a lot of my professional life defending a book I don't even like. I spent 8 weeks writing a blog series about BDSM, feminism and pop culture precisely because I was tired of people using the popularity of said book as an excuse to come out with all manner of ill-informed speculations about people, especially women, who practice kink, or even just like to read books about it. Two years later, it seemed that wasn't enough and I ended up writing a whole book on the subject. The book I so often end up defending has become so ubiquitous in the pop culture discussion of BDSM that I refused to even name it in my work, less it become a distracting albatross, and just referred to it as that book (or that trilogy). You don't need to me to say the name. You know what I'm talking about. And you know that because it seems the blame for every ill of our culture -- domestic violence and rape and apologism/glamourisation of them, coercive relationships in and outside of the BDSM community, unrealistic expectations about sex, relationships that echo patriarchal structures too closely for our comfort -- gets laid at the feet of it.

So I was a bit disappointed to see this post, shared by the excellent Whores of Yore Twitter account, and then the Twitter conversation surrounding it, immediately linking that book to abuse within BDSM. Now, the post itself is an important and brave piece written by someone who got themselves out of a terribly abusive relationship and is reflecting on the awful treatment they put up with. It identifies correctly that adding a kinky relationship to the mix when domestic abuse is already so underreported muddies the waters even further, because there are already enough myths in the vanilla world that women "provoke" or "exaggerate" abuse, that if you've ever voluntarily asked your partner to hurt you, you stand very little chance of the police or a jury being able to distinguish between that and non-consensual abuse.

So I don't want to detract from the act of bravery inherent in 'Bee''s piece; she has shared what sounds like a deeply traumatic experience and hopefully, writing about it will be part of a healing process for her. It will also hopefully give others the strength to identify and reject kink in abusive relationships. And it does raise the complicated and at present unanswerable questions of how we can deal with abuse that flies under the radar of BDSM when our society remains crap enough at dealing with abuse in the vanilla mainstream, never mind in less respected or understood subcultures.

But, it feels like there is also a lot of context and illustration missing from the piece, and instead 'Bee' just goes straight for the far-too-simplistic option of "blame that book." She writes 

I don't think it's unfair to summarise that the largely women following of FSOG were sold the excitement of being "owned" by a handsome Dominant lover.

Mmm...I do think it's unfair, actually, if you're making the unjustified leap from the popularity of a book to presuming you know anything about the readers' lifestyle choices. Whether that book sold women an unrealistic picture of BDSM, an unrealistic picture of (heterosexual) relationships per se, or just gave them some quality masturbation material, we'll never know - not without asking the millions of them who bought and enjoyed it. Pride and Prejudice romanticises submitting to a relationship with a man who has previously been rude and dismissive towards you, who has told you he's ashamed of you and your family, has deliberately meddled in your sister's relationship to destroy it, and will financially own and control you for the rest of your life. Yet that's considered a 'great romance', loved again by millions of women. Funnily enough, in a world where we treat women like adults, those who really believe in feminism tend to avoid policing women's reading choices because we don't assume that they are so stupid they can't distinguish between fiction and reality.

And as 'Bee' herself goes on to point out, she was no wide-eyed novice in the kink world anyway.

I've never classed myself as a submissive. Yes, I enjoyed my men to take control but I was no novice in the world of kink and BDSM. I was very comfortable with my sexuality and my wants and needs.

So why would she, and other Twitter commenters, insult other women by implying that they must all be naive enough to interpret that book as a how-to manual for BDSM relationships, or not recognise the problematic aspects of it? As someone who has spent way too much time answering back to the furious criticisms of women who accuse me of defending the glamourisation of abuse every time I even dare to suggest that book isn't the cause of all misogyny, I can tell you, plenty of women recognise the problems inherent in the relationship depicted (and I think it cannot be said enough that most of them have very little to do with kink).

Yes, it's important to talk about abuse in the kink community. Really important. I dedicate a whole chapter in my book to safe words, and examine the harrowing stories of women who had their safe words violated in BDSM exchanges. Both these articles I've linked to pre-date the publication of that book, as will - sadly - countless other people's stories of awful, shit-stain excuse for human beings who used kink as a cover for their abusive practices. Look at Jian Ghomeshi. His (alleged) abuses of partners under the guise of "But I'm kinky!!" date back to a decade before anyone had even heard the name C*******n G**y. But you know what effect that book had on conversations about abuse within kink? It gave them a huge signal boost. It gave me a chance to publicise them, first in the Thinking Kink blog series, then in my book about it. It resulted in someone actually coming forward on my blog post about safe words to comment that my piece had helped them realised that their experience of having their safe word violated was abuse, and was not their fault. That book also helped a lot of people simply come out as kinky, an act of enablement whose importance cannot be underestimated in a world where there is still so much shame and mental violence enacted upon those who deviate from sexual norms. Lord knows that book has given me a safe, relatively unthreatening shorthand to mention when vanilla folk ask me what I write about. Hey, I could even tell my mum I'd been to a BDSM club just by saying, "You know F***y S****s? It's that sort of place," and she barely batted an eyelid (my mum is pretty unflappable anyway, but you see my point.) And I do feel like a lot of the reason it gets so much shit flung at it when there are way heavier, darker depictions of kink in pop culture that get a pass is because at its core, it's just a trashy novel.

As I wrote in my review of the film last year:

I can’t help but feel that some of the outrage over [that book] is both selective and elitist. [That book] faces the same kind of criticism that’s lobbed at romance in general: “Oh, look at those uneducated women and their trashy reads! Bless them for not knowing that classier books exist!” I wonder if many critics care less about misrepresentations of kink in the book and more about saving the undiscerning masses from themselves.

Because why else would people say things like this about it

@XO_BB_XO @WhoresofYore FSOG takes a relationship EXACTLY LIKE THIS but sells it as romance. It is dangerous.

— Merry Fran-mas (@LollyWheeks) December 21, 2016

 while ignoring, say, Secretary, a film often hailed as a much better representation of kink, yet which shows a boss harassing and intimidating a vulnerable subordinate, not using safewords, and not negotiating a kink scene or getting consent beforehand? Or The Story of O, in which a young woman submits to gangbangs, anal stretching, labia piercing, and iron manacles being permanently welded to her body, just out of love for her partner who abandons her at a palace for various anonymous men to abuse her? Both have been around a lot longer and have many fans in the kinky world. They have not been accused of romanticising abuse, or showing people how to do kink "wrong," even though both have massively problematic areas in which consent, respect or level playing field on which the woman makes the decision to submit are not at all clear. 

So the outrage aimed at that book feels very arbitrary, and ill-reserached. It also implies we consider some people too uneducated or easily led to distinguish between fiction and real-life (and I can't help but feel there are strong links there to some serious snobbery regarding social class and level of education). It's also overly simplistic; that book is not without merit. It doesn't get everything about kink wrong. Yes, it bears about as much resemblance to real BDSM as the movie Whip It does to real roller derby (as a derby skater I can confirm that movie is SO inaccurate it's not even funny), but funnily enough no one turns up to a roller derby bout thinking they can give a fellow player a bloody nose just because they saw it done to Drew Barrymore on DVD. The point is, something can be a signpost to something you're interested in (which chances are, you were already interested in before you came across this particular book/film/whatever) without being taken as a rulebook. Thinking women incapable of making the distinction is as patronising as the narratives that fail to distinguish between independent sex workers and trafficked women, that presume female sexuality is naturally softer, gentler and more moral and that therefore women could never like nasty filthy things like porn or BDSM (both my personal experiences and my research indicate a giant HA! to that notion). And you know what those narratives run dangerously close to reinforcing? Every sexist trope out there about women being stupid, weak and incapable of autonomy. I don't doubt that anyone wanting to protect women from abuse in BDSM considers themselves a feminist; but this ain't the way to further female freedom.

Wanting to push the conversation about BDSM and abuse is admirable. It should be happening. I'm pleased to report that I've never experienced violations of consent from any of my BDSM play partners (all of whom have been cis men and have unfailingly respected safe words, hard limits, the need for prior negotiation, communication, active ongoing consent and the need for aftercare), but that doesn't mean I haven't experienced kinksters who bring shitty sexism and misogyny into the scene. I write in my book about being touched without my consent on three different occasions, one by the event organiser who had written the goddamn rules which said "no touching without consent" stuck to the wall of the bar. I write about the self-proclaimed 'misogynist' who thought he was so hilarious and edgy by constantly referring to women as 'cunts' in person and in his online profile, excused his behaviour on the grounds that "I'm a sadist," and interrupted a rope scene to shout "kick her in cunt!" about the woman being tied up. I write about seeing people jumping to criticise or ostracise the person who complained about someone caning her feet without consent while she was suspended at a play party. As Cliff Pervocracy writes "The kink community talks big about consent, but they also talk big about not having "drama." It's a theme that would sadly recur across my research for Thinking Kink. But the fact it was being talked about, and there was pushback against it, was enough to give me hope.

And part of the reason those conversations can happen is that book. Remember that next time you're tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Books don't cause abuse any more than short skirts cause rape. Don't let abusers off the hook by not focusing on their actions and instead shaming women for their reading choices. Rather, as these tweeter points out, remember the real enemies:

@XO_BB_XO @LollyWheeks @IndigoAugust the next president thinks it's ok to grab women by the pussy without their permission, now that's harm.

— R2D2awillow (@rawillow2202) December 21, 2016

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Subversive or Complicit? The Female Dominant in Popular Culture (Extract from "Thinking Kink")

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BDSM and feminism: Kink-shaming and victim-blaming

Defending BDSM is a fraught process for feminists. On the one hand, you have misogynists and rape apologists telling you that women are just 'asking' to be assaulted, coerced, violated, beaten and raped, an insidious culture that makes any woman who enjoys consensual kink feel like she is a traitor all female victims of violence. On the other, you have (some) feminists telling you that while they support your right to choose whatever sexual practices you find pleasurable, if you like BDSM (especially as a submissive/masochist) it's probably just due to toxic patriarchal social conditioning and you should probably "work to change that" (genuine quote from a feminist discussing BDSM).

Then you have stories like the awful Jian Ghomeshi allegations that continue to emerge, whereby an alleged abuser is trying to mitigate the charges against him by claiming they took place under the umbrella of consensual kink. His accusers say differently. Rape apologists say "well, it's their word against his." Feminists say #IBelieverHer but suspect that these women are merely going to be dragged through the mill of being disbelieved, scrutinised and publicly attacked and possibly not see any justice at the end of it, because we know that's what happens to the majority of sexual assault victims. Radical feminists say What do you expect? and That's what happens when you say BDSM is OK, it becomes a cover for assault. Of course, there are quite a few radfems out there who believe that all BDSM is assault anyway, and that any woman who claims she consents to it is just brainwashed by the patriarchy into believing she actually wants to participate in this activity. 

This is where I encounter a particular logic fail with feminist criticism of BDSM. Does it not seem paradoxical to anyone else to be part of a movement that fights for women's right to be seen as full, autonomous, intelligent beings with agency while claiming that women who make sexual choices you don't agree with are too stupid to know what they're doing? As Margaret Hunt writes in her excellent "Report on a Conference on Feminism, Sexuality and Power: The Elect Clash with the Perverse," "leaps of logic like these only make sense if one really believes that adult women who choose to be the bottom in an S/M exchange are equivalent to children, while their tops are equivalent to pathological murderers." Yet it's not just the obvious corners of anti-sex work, anti-pornography, radical feminism that such viewpoints emerge. I was seriously disappointed to read this recent article by Emer O' Toole "This murder in Ireland has made me rethink my sexual practices," (The Guardian, 31st March 2015) where O' Toole claims that, despite having happily participated in BDSM previously, she now finds it difficult to reconcile with the fact a woman was murdered by a man she was in a BDSM relationship with. The tagline is "I wonder if we can continue to deny any links between kinky sex and wider societal abuse of women," the accompanying picture is a still from F**** S**** o* G*** and the caption to that claims that in that movie "a reluctant, inexperienced and infatuated young girl is controlled and beaten by a rich sadist" - read here to see why I believe that's a total mischaracterisation of that particular storyline.

From the outset of O' Toole's piece I got the sense that this was going to be yet another anti-kink article, this time more cleverly concealed than the usual feminist condemnation by the fact the author claims she is a BDSM practitioner. Sadly, I wasn't wrong. She starts by demanding that we examine "the social context that allowed a man to convince a woman that his sexual desire to stab and kill her was within the bounds of the acceptable," as if it's somehow a foregone conclusion that "social context" was what drove Graham Dwyer to murder his partner. This is followed by an epistemic leap so vast it requires a parachute to accompany it, when O' Toole says that this means we also need to pay "attention to the cultural mainstreaming of BDSM."

I probably should have stopped reading there, because my responses were already descending into teenage grunts. My response to that particular sentence was Why? and Says who? After the Columbine killings, hysterical hand-wringers told us to look to Marilyn Manson and violent films/video games for the source of the senseless violence that two 15 year-olds visited upon their classmates and teachers. Anyone with half a brain said no, I will not resort to such blind, simplistic scapegoating. Music doesn't kill people, video games don't kill people. And consensual play with ropes, floggers, gags and cuffs doesn't cause the rape and murder of women, Whenever we blame anything but the rapist for the rape, the murderer for the murder, we shift responsibility from the criminal and to something else (sadly, as happens far too often in the case of sexual assault, we shift it on to the victim). If you're a feminist, you know that short skirts, drinking and flirting don't cause rape. So why are you suddenly training your sights on PVC outfits and erotic power play and claiming that they are responsible for domestic violence and murder?

Partly because it's an interesting and trendy thing to be talking about, I guess, in light of *that film* and *that book*'s popularity, otherwise I doubt The Guardian would have commissioned O' Toole's piece, But her supposedly kink-friendly feminism is just woman-shaming and kink-shaming in a leather disguise. She says "I’m making this critique not as a kink-shamer, but as a challenge to myself: what are my reasons and justifications for inviting or accepting male sexual violence?" Again, the teenager in me responds WHO CARES? Not because I'm being rude or dismissive, but because funnily enough, as a feminist, I don't think we should be asking women to put a disproportionate amount of weight and stress upon themselves by interrogating their desires any more than anyone else does in this society. Why is it always on us as women to analyse ourselves, to scrutinise ourselves, and, according to the great Radical Feminist Handbook of How Acceptable Egalitarian Sex should be done, probably find ourselves wanting? Wherefore the privilege of the unexamined life, the unapologised-for libido? Isn't that something men enjoy? So why are we demanding that women give that up and instead flagellate ourselves (pun so very intended) for the things that give us pleasure in this so-often thankless and joyless life?

Citing one study about self-proclaimed porn addicts as evidence that porn creates a desire for violence (if you read the article, it actually only states that people who are predisposed to already enjoy looking at violent porn tend to seek it out - shocker), O' Toole accepts on one hand that kink gives people a safe space to enjoy desires that are not acceptable to release in everyday life, but then demands that we never forget that a racist, sexist, transphobic, ableist society is still sitting in the kink club with us. Does she really think that any one, apart from those in the most privileged social groups, can ever forget that fact? So why is she asking that we continue to beat ourselves over the head with guilt about the fact our BDSM practices may resemble sexist, racist, transphobic or ableist violence (I remember reading about a disabled man who liked to be called 'cripple' and dragged out of his chair and abused during kink scenes - his play may shock me and many people, but that itself is not reason enough for me to tell him he should not be doing it). What reason is there, apart from the fact that this one horrible murder has clearly made O' Toole feel guilty about her own sexual practices, to demand that we start "conscientiously examining a) the social conditions that have led to our fetishisation of female pain and submission, and b) the ways in which our sexual practices strengthen and reinforce those social conditions?" These very statements imply to me that despite claiming to be a BDSM practitioner, O'Toole has not thought very long or hard about kink or feminism. She assumes there must be a social basis for the desires of any woman who enjoys pain or submission, yet that assumption pretty much at one fell swoop disregards all female sexual agency, the existence of female switches and male submissives, and women who feel their submissive desires exist in spite of, not because of, their upbringing (quote Mollena Williams: "I was taught that being strong was the first thing you had to be, especially ... as a black woman. To be submissive, to be obedient, was NOT acceptable.")  There is also, of course, the underlying assumption that O' Toole's own viewpoint is objective and neutral, rather than coloured, as everyone's must be, by their own experiences and background. As Margaret Hunt writes, in a statement that could be applied to every radical feminist condemnation of women's sexual practices, "The argument that there is no free choice in the world is never all-inclusive. It always admits the existence of a small group which is morally superior to the corrupt mass." And that is where the logic fail happens. If O' Toole believes we are all so easily brainwashed, then how come she has magically managed to avoid the same fate as the rest of us? What exactly is it about her that makes her qualified to say that women's choice to participate in BDSM is somehow linked to, possibly even partially responsible for, one terrible murder? 

If we really want to look at things that have left women likely to be murdered by partners, we could look at: cuts to domestic violence services, slow legal machinery that mean getting injunctions and getting a violent partner removed from the family home could take days or even weeks (now thankfully much improved), victim-blaming narratives ("Why didn't she leave?" "She must have provoked him") and a culture of silence around domestic violence - the very term implies a "private matter" or "just a domestic," a language that seriously needs to change. BDSM did not kill Elaine O' Hara, and I take massive offence at O' Toole's last statement, that O' Hara's "submissive desires left her vulnerable to male aggression in the most tragic way possible." The only thing Elaine O'Hara's submissive desires left her open to, it would seem, was having her sexual preferences blamed for her death rather than her murdering partner. I'll say it again - if you wouldn't blame a short skirt for rape, then don't blame BDSM for a murder. BLAME THE MURDERER. O' Toole is criticising BDSM for somehow making it easier for abuse to go undetected - even though plenty of abuse goes undetected, excused or apologised for in the vanilla world - yet she is playing by the same rulebook of rape apologists by implying that Elaine O'Hara "left herself open" to getting murdered just because she was a submissive.

This is pretty disgusting. It's also ignorant - it disregards the many lengths submissives and masochists go to to protect themselves, precautions that many vanilla people don't bother to take when meeting someone for a date (arranging a 'check-in' call with a friend, letting someone know the name, online username, address of the person you're meeting), it assumes that "submissive as part of kink" = "weak in everyday life" (and anyone making that assumption will get a big, rude shock when they meet some actual subs) and, as I've pointed out above, it presumes that there are things women can and should be doing to protect themselves from male violence. But what could Elaine O' Hara have done? Not been married to this man? Right, well, perhaps it's marriage we should be protesting against, not BDSM. But then she might still have met this man, or dated him, or worked with him, or just walked past him one night in the street. And he still might have violently murdered her. So the best she could do is move to a remote island with no men on, right? Funnily enough, no one ever suggests that. Because that would be silly, that would be extreme. But saying that enjoying a spanking from your partner means you contributed to your own murder? That's fine to say. Even from someone who claims to be feminist, who claims to be pro-kink.

So, no, I'm not going to accept that I am obliged to examine my sexual practices and consider how they contribute to a society that blames rape and murder victims for their own violations, because I think the only thing which contributes to such a society is the belief that it's always down to women to change, behave differently and re-wire ourselves, because that belief is predicated on the mistaken idea that there's anything we can do to avoid violation, and that belief in turn - however well-meant - comes from a solid landscape of victim-blaming. So I let (read: asked) a guy pull my hair, put his hand round my throat, slam me against a wall - so the fuck what? Does it make feminists like O'Toole feel better if they know that this took place with my full consent and enthusiastic desire, while in my own home, wearing clothes of my own choice, that the wall I got slammed against belongs to me, and I paid for it with my own money, that the guy and I laughed and chatted and drank Um Bongo before and after it took place? Does it help if I add that I've never experienced any coercive sexual behaviour from any of the men I've practised BDSM with, whereas I know plenty of women who've experienced the same in vanilla relationships? Do you know, I don't care if it does - because I shouldn't be obliged to state these things just to make my preferences sound 'acceptable' to the feminist anti-kink police. Because what I do in my sex life, however unpalatable or odd it may seem to others, is not hurting anyone, and is bringing me freedom and pleasure. Fuck anyone who tries to shame me for that by using a woman's horrific death as their excuse.

***To read more essays on BDSM, feminism and pop culture, check out my new book "Thinking Kink," which is now out in the US and the UK.***

Thinking Kink: The Book! Coming Soon

Update 1/5/15: US readers can NOW BUY "Thinking Kink..." here or here! UK readers can reserve their copy here.

I'm thrilled to be able to announce that I will be publishing my next book with McFarland Publishers in 2015. The title has been confirmed as "Thinking Kink: The Collision of BDSM, Feminism and Popular Culture" and the book is based on the "Thinking Kink" blog series that I wrote for Bitch magazine back in 2012.

While it will refer to the blog series and the discussions it spawned, the book is all new material and aims to explore the issues raised by the intersection of kink, popular culture and feminism: three concepts which collided heavily when certain cultural commentators interpreted the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey as evidence that feminism had somehow failed.

Looking at examples of popular culture ranging from episodes of "Friends" to The Story of O, from the lyrics of Alice Cooper to the writings of the Marquis de Sade, and from "The Trailer Park Boys" to "Orange is The New Black", the book  takes on the different tropes that kink is often reduced to, how these are represented in books, TV shows, music and the film industry, and the resulting issues raised for feminists.

Chapter list (provisionally titled):

• Subversive or Complicit? The Female Dominant 
• Brave or Pathetic? Masculinity’s Troubled Relationship with the Male Submissive
• Who’s Vanilla, Who’s Edgy and Why It Matters: The Mainstreaming of Kink 
• Billionaires, Bullies and Lost Boys: The Male Dominant 
• Safe Words: BDSM and the Concept of Consent 
• A Heavy Load to Bear: Feminism and the Submissive Female 
• Dykes, Daddies and Drag Queens: How BDSM and LGBT people are Portrayed 
• Consumerism, Switches and Abuse: Different Faces of BDSM
• Blinding Whiteness? Race and BDSM

I will publicise the release date as soon as I have it, and am looking forward to sharing my latest work with you!

Navigating Kink While Feminist: My Presentation from PCA/ACA 2014

I've just spent a wonderful week in Chicago at the American Popular Culture Association's 44th Annual conference. There I was lucky enough to present in a BDSM/Fetish Studies Panel, where I talked about my adventures in kink, feminism and pop culture, three topics I researched in depth when writing my 2012 'Thinking Kink' blog series for Bitch magazine.

My presentation was received very well and I had some fantastic fellow presenters. I also had the honour of seeing my paper being the first to sell out on the 'Scholar Exchange' table, and as a result I promised I would upload my presentation for those who missed out.

 

Here is the text of my speech:

 

And here are the accompanying Powerpoint slides:
 

Feel free to share, but please ensure the work is properly attributed, please do not remove the copyright notice, and do not alter it in any way .

Happy reading and thank you to everyone who took an interest in my work!

Thinking Kink: Is Britney's 'Work Bitch' Video Just More 'Kink-Jacking'?

When I wrote the ‘Thinking Kink’ blog series for Bitch Magazine back in summer 2012, I found myself talking a lot about how "'vanilla' entertainers hijack BDSM imagery to make a quick buck”. Whether it was 30 Seconds to Mars’s Hurricane video implying that there's so much vanilla sex in music videos that only kink can make a video 'edgy' now, or Rihanna’s much-mentioned ‘S & M’ video, it was clear that one thing myself and some amongst the kink community are mighty tired of is a phenomenon I like to call ‘kink-jacking’. As Cliff Pervocracy put it, “The process of discovering you’re kinky…is long and difficult. I hate to see a vanilla entertainer reduce that to some black vinyl and dog chains”.

At first glance, I do feel that’s exactly what Britney Spears is doing in her latest video, ‘Work Bitch’. Slim, long-haired cisgendered women in PVC leotards, eye masks and spike heels? Check. Plenty of girl-on-girl dominating so that no man has to feel threatened and can instead just enjoy the faux-lesbian spectacle put on solely for him? Check. The commercialisation of kink in the form of the inexplicable Pill-speaker bit gag? Check. (Oh, and seriously, what the F is with the inexplicable fake British accent?!)

However, I’m aware of the need to not enact the same kind of presumptuous condemnation that people foisted upon Rihanna for daring to toy with imagery of violent sexual practices when she herself had been a victim of domestic abuse, or perpetuate the patronising idea that women in music videos have no control of their image. Rather than reading the imperative ‘You better get to work, bitch’ as internalised misogyny, we could read it as being declared in the same camp, arch style as RuPaul said it in her ‘Supermodel’ video. Rather than assume that the women of color Britney leads on leashes in her video are unwitting victims of dubious racial tropes, we could remind ourselves that Ciara chose to replicate this image herself in the ‘Love Sex Magic’ video.  While assuming that Britney herself must be nothing more than a marketing man’s plaything, we often forget that it was she who had the idea for the schoolgirl outfit in her very first music video, and therefore may have had more input into her heavily sexualised image than we care to remember.

That said, it remains depressing that the dominant model of sexiness (premised around being slim, white, long-haired, scantily-clad and subject to the male gaze), is still the only thing artists or their teams can think of to resort to when they need to be ‘edgy’. When the most rebellious thing a female artist can do is to remain fully clothed (watch Lorde’s 'Royals' video and try to name another current pop video where a fully clothed woman sings alongside shots of scantily clad men – I guarantee you’ll struggle), you do wonder why the need to ‘express oneself’ always comes down to the need to writhe, pant and pout. Britney’s done so much of the latter in her videos that it stands to reason she would eventually run out of tricks and need to do something new – enter the whips and chains. Yet the way it’s framed doesn’t feel edgy or subversive, it actually feels entirely safe. No men are depicted as submissive in the video, so male dominance isn’t challenged in any way. Instead, a privileged white woman spanks and disciplines her presumably less well-paid dancers.

Now, we might be equally unhappy were Britney portrayed as the submissive in the video,  and maybe that's because we're already tired of the perpetually submissive act from a woman who sang 'I Was Born To Make You Happy'. And maybe that's unfair, because feminism's all about choice, right? - even if that choice is to wear little, say even less and do whatever's going to sell records. But really, why is it so much to ask to see a slightly more nuanced depiction of kink, such as that seen in Madonna’s Human Nature video, where she constantly switches between dominant and submissive roles within a group of men and women. As BDSM educator and feminist porn director Tristan Taormino puts it - "Images of dominance and submission are not anti-feminist in and of themselves, but one of the reasons feminists critique them is because consent is not always explicit and because of the repetition of men dominating women, making it the main type of power exchange we see in [the] mainstream. . ." In a world where female power still feels so precarious, the repeated glorifying of female submission gets very tiresome very quickly, even to those - such as this very author - who enjoy and practice it.

As for the Pill speaker bit-gag, well. The audacious product placement aside, kinksters who get off on being human furniture or treating others as such, might find that particular idea very hot – being turned into a human stereo is not a particularly outrageous idea for many whose kinks include being treated as an object. But the commercialisation of kink does just seem to be another way of wresting it away from those for whom this is a major lifestyle choice - one which has often cost them a great deal to follow - and putting it in the hands of marketing men. Being full-on kinky can be bloody expensive - have you seen the price of a latex outfit, a spanking bench or a fucking machine?! And those who have a vested interest in making us feel that our lifestyles are not sufficiently shiny or sexy will do all they can to try and make us buy more things, as anyone who has walked into Ann Summers and see their 'Shades of Grey' bondage range can attest to. To be blunt, if you really want to gag someone, you can do it without spending a penny (why not use their own underwear?!), and was this bit gag included to actually advance knowledge of kink, or just to objectify the woman wearing it and do some free advertising at the same time? I think you can guess.

Ultimately, I guess Britney is doing what she can within the very narrow parameters she has been provided, and fair play to her. I'm sure she and her dancers peeled off all the PVC with relief after a hot day writhing around in the desert, and probably went home and put their tracksuit bottoms on, kinky sex being the last thing on their minds. Meanwhile, kinky people all over the world played happily in private or semi-public, displaying body shapes, races and gender identities from all across the spectrum, wearing outfits ranging from jeans and trainers to steel-boned corsets to nothing but clingfilm, and experimenting with power dynamics crossing every boundary imaginable. And that's how you can tell when kink-jacking, rather than a genuine and considered tribute to BDSM, is taking place - it's when none of that beautiful variety is represented.

Enjoyed Thinking Kink? You'll Love This...

I'd like to give a shout out to BDSM educator and author Mollena Williams, whose new book Playing Well With Others (co-authored with Lee Harrington) is out now*. Mollena and Lee will soon be embarking on a cross-USA whistlestop tour of classes, demos and book signings - dates can be found here.

Mollena is "a NYC born and raised writer, actress, BDSM Educator, Storyteller and an Award-Winning Executive Pervert" whose impressive writing credits and work for the kink community are so vast I'm unable to summarise them all!

Mo kindly agreed to be interviewed for my Bitch blog series 'Thinking Kink', which looked at BDSM, feminism and pop culture. Her input was invaluable across the entire series, but her thoughts were particularly helpful in these pieces on female submissives and racialized kinky imagery.

Whether you're full-on kinky, merely curious or happily non-pervy, I would thoroughly recommend getting your hands on Mo's book, and I wish her and Lee all the best with this new venture.

Order your copy here now!

All of my Thinking Kink posts for Bitch

In case you missed any of them, here are all 24 of my 'Thinking Kink' posts on BDSM and pop culture, which I wrote during an 8 week guest blog series for for Bitch.

• Welcome to a Blog on BDSM, Feminism and Pop Culture 
• Debunking BDSM Myths 
• Did Sex and the City Get BDSM Right? 
• The Female Dominant in Pop Culture 
• Belle De Jour and the Professional Domme 
• Masculinity and Submission 
• The Appeal of the Submissive Male 
• Swinging Both Ways (Christian Grey Included) 
• Did Jared Leto and 30 Seconds to Mars Do BDSM Better? 
• Does Female Submission Mean Oppression? 
• No, Female Submission Doesn't Mean Oppression 
• Secretary and the Female Submissive 
• Is Vanilla Sex Boring? Who Gets to Decide? 
• Safewords 
• Lesbian BDSM and the Male Gaze 
• Is BDSM Therapy "A Dangerous Method"? 
• Moving Beyond Abuse with BDSM 
• Some Like it Rough 
• A Visit to the Sex Toy Store 
• The Politics of BDSM Fashion 
• Gay S&M in Pop Music, Then and Now 
• Playing With Race in BDSM 
• The Right to Play With Race  
• The Final (Leather-Clad) Curtain

** Like the Thinking Kink blog? You'll love Thinking Kink the book! NOW AVAILABLE in the US and the UK!**

What I've Been Writing

Polish magazine Forum translated two of my Thinking Kink pieces - it's quite lovely seeing my name surrounded by another language!

My latest post for Women's Views on News is on a new film showing the reality of endemic street harassment in Brussels.

My latest posts for my Bitch blog series - which sob, is in it's last week! - look at both sides of the argument about using racialised imagery in BDSM.

What I'm Reading

The Independent discovers that, apart from on the Titanic where it was carried out under Captain's orders, the myth of 'women and children first' in maritime disasters is actually hogwash.

Three Russian women known as 'Pussy Riot' face 7 years in jail for disrupting a Church service to sing a protest song. Wow, in this country we give our rioters 6 months, if that, and they usually have to have damaged or stolen something to merit jail time. Campaign to Free Pussy Riot here.

Olympic weightlifter Zoe Smith lays the smack down on tedious sexists who hate on female athletes because they feel "emasculated by the fact that we aren’t weak and feeble."

Matrix Director Larry Wachowski comes out as transgender, and is transitioning to become Lana Wachowski.

And after all that, I'm still Thinking Kink for Bitch, with my latest posts on how the media depicts rough sex, and whether it's possible to shop for BDSM products without dying of embarrassment.

Remember The Compliments You Receive, Forget The Insults

...as the saying goes. So, since I've had so many lovely compliments from commenters on my blog series over at Bitch, I'm going to do some shameless massaging of my ego and reproduce some of them here.

"This post is awesome."

"Loving this series."

"Thanks for speaking to this. I feel less alone and less ashamed with every relatable post."

"This is such a great series, and this post is great as well."

"I really love your analysis here"

"Thank you so much for addressing this issue....Nailed this."

"I'm very happy that you treat this topic so well. Thank you!"

I'll write something of more substance when I'm not (metaphorically) immersed in BDSM, but suffice to say I'm enjoying doing the blog series IMMENSELY and getting such lovely encouragement (along with the odd 'The author clearly has no experience of BDSM!' comments - snarf, if only they knew) just makes it even more satisfying to write.