Your silence will not protect you: Donna M. Hughes, CAT, and KinkForAll

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:25:13 GMT

In March 2010, Margaret Brooks and Donna M. Hughes, activists for Citizens Against Trafficking, [0] wrote a bulletin supposedly about KinkForAll Providence called "Events for Kinky Sex and Sadomasochists Open To Children." I don't recommend clicking that link if you are at work, because it has some just-barely-censored graphic images in it. [1] The bulletin is basically "Open Season On Maymay Day: The Document," Maymay being one of the organizers of KinkForAll and an author-activist for sexual freedom in general. This bulletin was distributed pretty widely online, including on some Salvation Army mailing lists, and led to a number of bloggers writing about Maymay in, well, the sort of way you'd expect from the fringes of the Internet. You can read his take on the whole thing at his blog behind this link, and I recommend you do (although it's also not worksafe), but I want to look at a different angle: What does this mean for those of us who make information about our controversial identities available on the Internet?

I'm going to assume for the moment that Brooks and Hughes are intelligent people, and not crazy [2]; hold nuanced opinions, not caricatures; and are trying to effect positive change, not hurt people. I assume they expected both sympathetic and unsympathetic readers and crafted their document so as to be as persuasive as possible to those readers. While I disagree with Maymay about some of his opinions regarding KinkForAll --- in particular, I don't think it's reasonable for even the most precocious nine-year-old to be there, if only due to the wider culture surrounding us --- in general, I'm not going to read their bulletin, and say "Oh man, that's terrible! I should try to make sure that they don't have that conference again!" Here's what I think I'm supposed to take away from it, and in any event, what I did: If I try to speak up about these things, they're going to defame me in this fashion, too.

Here's why:

Despite the stated goals of the organization, "prostitution," "trade," and "trafficking" don't appear in the article at all.
Despite being a group of people presumably against the display of pornography, they provide multiple compromising photos of Maymay for the viewer's presumably disgusted reactions. They also cite a number of personal blog posts of Maymay's about his sexuality, and provide links so that the reader may go and probe further into this matter.
The article is written to make it sound like "anything can happen at KinkForAll" and there were explicit sexual activities going on, even though the KFA website explicitly says: "KinkForAll is an informational space. Personal, explicit sexual activities as a form of private play is not permitted. In other words, KinkForAll is a place to talk with one another, not play with one another."
The citations in the article are to the blogs of various attenders and presenters, and to the actual mailing list threads used for planning and discussing the event, including reading of some fairly nitty-gritty planning threads with little to no prurient content.
The article's title and main focus are about the possibility that KinkForAll would expose children to pornography, and the allegation that the goal of KinkForAll is to enable the sexual abuse of children.

Overall the document sends this message: They are reading the material we post on the Internet, and are happy to take it out of context to make us look like pedophiles. (or other way-fringe outsider groups) Why pedophiles? Well, here's a diagram from a paper by Gayle Rubin:

I think that since 1984 some things have changed with regard to this diagram --- in particular, sex workers and kink practitioners have pushed hard to get into the "Major area of contest" bucket, with some success, particularly in major urban areas. By correlating the discussion and practice of kink with cross-generational sexual relations, the taboos on which have stuck despite a general shift of the boundaries here [4], I believe Citizens Against Trafficking are trying to push sex work and kink back over the far right wall.

Demonizing KFA participants and BDSM is a major theme for three of their next four bulletins --- the first a letter written to the Brown administration implying that events like KinkForAll will turn Brown into a terrible place for children and women, attempting to tie BDSM in with domestic abuse: "How can parents be expected to send their children to Brown’s pre-College and SPARK summer programs ... where someone speaking from a podium in Wilson Hall is allowed to tell women they must be subservient to the men who hit them?" The second one, "BDSM: A Case of Human Trafficking," details a case of a woman who wanted to leave a BDSM relationship and an abusive partner who attempted to prevent her from doing so. The details of the case are tremendously disturbing and I think it's important to have tough conversations about the ways that BDSM practice allows abusers room to flourish; I think CAT's done something very good here by providing resources in this document for people who are in abusive BDSM situations. The details of this article actually explain the ways that this was different from a consensual BDSM relationship as it should [5] be practiced: lack of safewords, no limits, involving non-consenting participants. But the title, introduction, and rhetorical flourishes all suggest that BDSM is either a precursor to or a variant of trafficking. Which, no.

The last of the three begins and ends with local Rhode Island connections (oddly missing from the BDSM: A Case of Human Trafficking essay where it's present in most of the bulletins on the site). Entitled "Sexual Abuse of Animals: Crime and Fantasy," it begins by very briefly mentioning a bestiality conviction in Rhode Island, and introduces the topic of the full essay as follows: "...[T]here is a growing underground movement to normalize the sexual abuse of animals. Furthermore, sexually violent and abusive ideas like this [emphasis mine] are being introduced to young people in Rhode Island under the guise of sex education." I suspect that where CAT and I differ is on which ideas are abusive. (I'm not 100% convinced an idea can be abusive.) I agree with pretty much everything they have to say about bestiality but I disagree strongly that the same logic should be applied to BDSM and other consensual inter-adult activities. [6] I also wish they had called more attention to the animals being trafficked in in these cases, and how this parallels violence against women, but I'll leave delving into that into someone more political-vegan than me.

The second half of the piece starts as follows: "Citizens Against Trafficking (CAT) first became aware of Spink [a man in WA recently arrested for sexually trafficking in animals] and his bestiality activities while researching the KinkforAll event that was held at Brown University in February." Apparently Spink contacted Maymay via Twitter and wanted to present remotely at the conference; Maymay demurred on technical grounds. [7] CAT writes: "Even though bestiality is illegal in both Rhode Island and Washington state, this conversation indicates that [Maymay] would have broadcast Spink’s bestiality presentation live at Brown’s KinkforAll if remote transmission had been available. This “near-miss” highlights the risks that events such as KinkforAll present to the Rhode Island community." Discussion of bestiality isn't illegal, of course, but CAT would go even farther:

Strong laws and vigilant enforcement will continue to be necessary to protect animals from the vicious crime of bestiality. Society should not accept bestiality as a new “sexual orientation” as its proponents are seeking, nor should university administrators give so-called sex educators a venue to teach people to fantasize about engaging in bestiality.
The examples in this Bulletin show how bestiality causes risk and harm to people and animals. Every deviant sex act started with a sexual fantasy. Encouraging young people to develop bestiality fantasies is truly monstrous and morally corrupt.

Now, I'm not so sure I would have been comfortable at an event where I was encouraged to develop fantasies about "incest, rape, and bestiality." (CAT cited this blog post, which has some interesting conversations). And I wasn't at this event, so I don't feel I can speak so authoritatively about it; maybe it did, and if so that's pretty twitchy. But I suspect --- from what I know of sex education and having attended similar events --- that what [the presenter] wanted to get across was that if you already have fantasies about wrong and taboo things, there are ways to engage with them other than repressing them or enacting them, and some people find those other ways to engage much healthier than either of the former. Rape fantasies are probably the most common place this comes up. Here's a quote I found in a recent journal article: "One study (Hunt, 1974) yielded an unusually low prevalence: 19% of the women who had masturbated reported having rape fantasies during masturbation." I guess you could make the argument that this action is fundamentally patriarchy-poisoned, but if an unusually low 19% of women were doing this in 1974, perhaps it was because they found it a more productive way to work through the difficulties of unsavory fantasies than enacting them or repressing them?

In suggesting that bestiality might be "a new sexual orientation" and that this should be fought off, CAT recognizes the identity political techniques being used to try to push BDSM, non-monogamy, and other sexual practices into the mainstream: coalescing into groups, advocating in those groups, using similar terminology to queer activism, and attempting to normalize the previously forbidden behavior. They understand what activists are doing --- something similar to the normalizing techniques used by many queer activists --- and know how to combat that action discursively. It's a shame that both anti-gay and anti-kink activists can't do better than "It will lead to bestiality!," really, but it works.

So what's the upshot for us? What CAT has done here is this: They've selected targets on the basis of a particular sexuality event, they've done diligent research into those targets, and they've continually attacked their actions in the public sphere, sending their bulletins out to other organizations. They didn't necessarily choose the most "loathsome," largest, or most overtly sexual things to attack; in fact, in targeting KinkForAll and Brown's SHEEC, they chose events where people in street clothes discussed sexuality (often in an academic context) rather than events where anyone was even having sex, let alone being exploited. When they targeted people, they published personal information, revealing photographs, and semi-private correspondence from those people. This is not just something that someone could do, this is something that they did do, and that they could do to you, if they decide that your speech --- not your actual sexual practices, but your speech about what they might or might not be --- is dangerous.

You're not safe if you use a pseudonym, not if you also attend events in person or don't also use an anonymizer or don't also keep that pseudonym from appearing in your social network. [8] You're not safe if you put your content on a site like Fetlife, because what's to stop someone from CAT or another organization from getting a Fetlife account? You're not safe if you count on no one going to look at old mailing list archives or tweets you sent at two in the morning three months ago. If you've put it on the Internet, and you make yourself a target for oppressive organizations by engaging in advocacy or activism, you risk it appearing, next to your full name, in widely-distributed print. This doesn't mean you shouldn't put content behind a pseudonym or registration wall ever --- your boss or your coworkers or your parents aren't going to go to that trouble, and if they do, they deserve what they get. [9] You do need to be aware, because this doesn't just happen to people with weird sex lives --- this can happen to you for being queer, or trans, or... But if we all talked about this stuff, outing us wouldn't do very much good, would it?

Your silence will not protect you. Your pseudonym won't either.

( Ten! Ten footnotes! Ah-hah-hah! )

EDIT: For the LJ readers especially, there are some very interesting comments by Maymay on the Dreamwidth version, and I encourage you to check them out.

comments

my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

Your silence will not protect you: Donna M. Hughes, CAT, and KinkForAll