As a kinkster, who will you be voting for this general election? POLL

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This murder in Ireland has made me rethink my sexual practices - BDSM safety V abuse

THE ISSUE OF 'PERSONAL SAFETY' IS A VERY IMPORTANT ONE WITHIN THE BDSM COMMUNITY. 

Emer O'Toole's article in the Guardian Newspaper reminded me how we must never forget personal safety, the safety of all within the BDSM community. It may be a subject we don't vocalise enough, but we should shout it out more often. Abuse is everywhere. Mental, physical, emotional. As a community, we should be taking a more pro active personal involvement towards safety. 

Below is Emer O'Toole's article, I have also linked other articles which relate directly to abuse and BDSM.

"In Dublin, Graham Dwyer, a married architect, has been convicted of the murder of Elaine O’Hara, a child care worker with whom he was engaged in a BDSM relationship. The motive was sexual gratification. O’Hara was vulnerable, suffering from mental health issues, and Dwyer exploited this, banking on the likelihood that her disappearance would be read as suicide. He hid evidence of the murder at the bottom of a reservoir. If it were not for 2013’s unusually hot, dry summer, that’s where the truth would have remained, and Dwyer would be walking free.

 A woman is dead: another victim of intimate partner violence. And treating her death with due respect should mean an examination of 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. It should mean attention to the cultural mainstreaming of BDSM.

On Valentine’s Day this year, Universal Pictures released its film adaptation of EL James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey. Back in 2012, The Guardian asked me to review the book to mark the sale of its ten-millionth copy. I kept it light – riffing on James’s infamously terrible prose and characterisation, and musing as to whether the far-away film version wouldn't leave us feeling a little less glib and little more, well, worried. The day is come, and I admit a heavier feeling. What is, at heart, the tale of an abusive relationship in which a reluctant, inexperienced and infatuated young girl is controlled and beaten by a rich sadist, is now being offered up as a sweet Valentine’s Day treat for naughty couples.

BDSM communities have been quick to distance themselves from Fifty Shades, and, indeed, from any beliefs or behaviours incompatible with informed, enthusiastic and uncoerced consent. This is because BDSM communities are often, in my experience, very politically switched-on places. However, it’s also my experience that kink communities are reluctant to acknowledge problems with the ideologies underlying their sexual practices, focusing instead on the pleasure or relationship benefits to be gained from BDSM.

I’m making this critique not as a judgmental outsider, but as someone who participates in BDSM behaviours and events and understands the excitement to be found therein. 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? And, at this point in history, when kink is becoming ubiquitous, I’m calling on all responsible, egalitarian kinksters to take a step back from personal desire and pleasure and ask similar questions.

We live in a sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist society. This gross fact informs our identities, our beliefs and our desires: it’s part of us at the most fundamental cognitive level. A prevalent theory in kink communities is that BDSM creates a sandbox or play space around impulses that have their roots in sexism or other prejudice, consensually mirroring non-consensual societal power dynamics. The sandbox allows role play that expurgates, inverts or otherwise contains hierarchical desires. It may give subs control over situations that would – in reality – make them feel powerless, or allow doms to cathartically express violent urges: in short, the sandbox gets it all out of our systems.

Except, this isn’t how human psychology functions. We do not siphon off fiction or play from our social realities. Rather, the values and norms of the fictions we consume or participate in suffuse our world views and influence our actions.

Participating in violent sports or fictions does not always make us less violent, in fact it can do the opposite. Watching aggressive pornography does not quell our desire for aggressive pornography, but, contrarily, can create a desire for increased violence. If we know and believe this about video games, movies and porn, then why do we suddenly deny it when it comes to BDSM? Perhaps it’s because it makes us feel defensive, and so, instead of 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, we shout “kink-shamer”.

In the 1970s, this issue split second wave feminism. Activists such as Robin Morgan, Alice Walker and everyone’s favourite straw-woman Andrea Dworkin wrote smart, impassioned rhetoric against BDSM. And sex-positive feminists such as Susie Bright and Candida Royalle reacted just as passionately and intelligently, with publications and erotic projects proclaiming that they’d fought long and hard for their sexual liberation, and they weren't going to be told what to do with their beds and bodies by priest, pastor or feminist sister. In 2015, at this powerful moment in feminism and with this sea-change in social attitudes towards BDSM, I believe it’s time to reopen the debate in a spirit of solidarity, openness and honesty. I believe that we owe this to vulnerable women, like Elaine O’Hara, whose submissive desires can leave them open to male aggression in the most tragic of ways."

MISTRESS LEYLA ~ BDSM

Some Notes On Safety For Meeting Online and Off

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Detecting Fakes

Every day I am confronted by friends, acquaintances and those recommended to seek Me out with questions regarding a person (or people) that they feel may be perpetrating a scam against them. I don't mean the common E-Mail scams (such as "Viagra Cheep" or "Lose 40 pounds by Summer") but the much more insidious scam involving the creation of one or more fake personalities.

The key difference between S&M and ABUSE

Consent = Is an agreed approval of what is done and/or proposed by another. Abuse = to use so as to injure or damage: MALTREAT Abuse is not negotiated Abuse is an out of control environment Abuse does not have safe words An abuser does not give a damn about the victim Abuse is always one sided Abuse is never negotiated.

I Never Called it Rape: Addressing Abuse in BDSM Communities - KinkAbuse.com


Thinking More Clearly About BDSM versus Abuse - Clarisse Thorn


What is the Difference Between BDSM and Abuse






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A 'whoops' or not. Internet surfing and the badly placed advertising.

 Firstly, I ask you..... What do you see in the web snippet below???

OK.... This is what I see: 

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TRANS-DENYING FEMINISTS (AKA “TERFS”) – TRANSPHOBIC OR JUST PLAIN WRONG?

"I had generally avoided the “debate” over trans rights and transphobia, which is characterised by plenty of heat and little light, until I debated against Julie Bindel last year on pornography at the University of Essex. There had been calls to cancel the debate, based on Bindel’s alleged transphobia (despite the debate having nothing to do with the issue), and we were inevitably met by a shouty little group of students accusing Bindel of being a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist)."

Trans-Denying Feminists (aka "TERFs") - Transphobic or Just Plain Wrong? - Sex & Censorship





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A Field Guide to Procrastinators

This comic from twenty Pixels came out a couple of weeks ago, but I'm just now getting around to sharing it with you. But that's nothing compared to how long it took 20px to actually get around to drawing it! 

Which kind of procrastinator are you? And don't try to tell us you never put off 'til tomorrow what you should do today. I am at least half of these types

SOURCE

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Uganda: ‘Toxic laws’ cause surge in homophobic hate crimes

“Repression in Uganda is increasingly state sanctioned through the use of blatantly discriminatory legislation that erodes rights guaranteed in the country’s Constitution."

Uganda: 'Toxic laws' cause surge in homophobic hate crimes

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From India and Turkey to Oxford, we live in a perpetual state of war against women

On some days I don’t need to read the news. I know it already. It is basically a list of the women and girls who are the latest to be abused and killed. If it is nearer to us – a teenager murdered and dismembered – we are saddened, while consuming every detail. The dead girl’s face will watch us for a while. And just when it feels too much, her face will soon be replaced by another.

We fixate on individual loss as we feel our way for clues that might help us escape our already dark imaginings. And in the night we wonder where our children are, and who they are with, and what they are doing; we walk ourselves through scenarios in which somehow these awful things would not happen to our children. Or to us. Or to anyone we know. This is the collective secret of motherhood. Let it be someone else’s.

Now, though, we are at one of the recurring stages in the news cycle where, unless we switch off altogether, some things become impossible to ignore – although of course they have been ignored deliberately for a long time. The abuse of young girls? Now it is Oxford – nice Oxford, where in fact a quarter of children live below the poverty line. As with Rotherham and Rochdale, the stories of ongoing abuse and rape finally emerge. If this is all about Pakistani grooming gangs, indeed let’s investigate it fully. But such gangs can operate only in an environment in which the adults who come into contact with these girls do not appear to value them or see them as children. Even when they are turning up with their crotches soaked in blood they are seen to have consented to relationships with much older men, or memorably described as “unrapeable”. Consent only exists for the right class of women.

The right class of women are certainly not to be found in Yarl’s Wood, where asylum seekers are detained. As with the child-abuse stories, all those who work with refugees have been talking about the sexual harassment and self-harming that has been going on there for a long time. This is not a sudden revelation, but now the evidence is there: Serco, the private company running the centre, may have to answer some serious questions. The abuse is systemic.

After years of silence, Turkey’s women are going into battle against oppression  ~ Elif Shafak

In Turkey, women have been out on the streets because of a rising tide of sexual and domestic violence. Since Özgecan Aslan, a 20-year-old student, was murdered after an attempted rape and her burned body found by a riverbed, women have been vocal about the rolling back of their rights by the AK party, with many of its supporters saying that the murdered woman was to blame for seeking “sexual freedom”.

In India, politicians want to ban India’s Daughter, Leslee Udwin’s important documentary about the gang rape of Jyoti Singh. In this film, one sees the attitudes of the rapists and the defence lawyers. It is hard to say which are the most disgusting. Over and over, they state that basically she deserved it for being out with her boyfriend, and that if she had not fought back she might still be alive.

The response of the Indian political class at the time of the attack was appalling, many talking about “adventurous spirit” leading to inevitable rape. Singh was flown out for medical treatment in Singapore, so horrific were her internal injuries, and when she died there her body was brought back not to her village, but cremated at night to avoid more protests. Television at the time – I was there – was suddenly full of middle-class women from Delhi also saying they did not feel safe.

So sexual autonomy and freedom from violence remain an impossibility for most of the world’s women.

In this country, we move from one abuse story to another, not wanting to make the necessary connections. Rape is now recognised as a war crime. What isn’t recognised is that we live in a perpetual state of war. Here comes the obligatory qualifier: terrible things happen to men and boys too. Not all men and boys are terrible, but we operate in a system in which half of us live in fear. According to our level of privilege, we can mute that fear or we can insulate ourselves by focussing on ever-smaller issues. Thus we have feminism as a series of lifestyle choices: can I be a feminist and wear frills/join Isis/not like the new Madonna album?

Sure, that’s easier than trying to dismantle a system that operates very well for some, the world over. When David Cameron says he is going to do something about child abuse, one wonders how he will admit its scale, or admit that the lives of working-class girls are not important to him and, even if they were, that this is beyond the scope of his rudderless government. The make-believe election we are having will always be more of a priority for those who run things.

The war against women is waged routinely and globally. Equality of the most basic kind cannot exist when a woman’s life and her words are always worth less than a man’s. But in the darkness of the night, what haunts us are not broken systems but the faces of the broken girls. So, so many. All the time.

ORIGINAL SOURCE: GUARDIAN: Suzanne Moore


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