my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

Postfurries, Twitter, and "After Dark"

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:11:00 GMT

So, a bunch of my friends are postfurries [0], and I follow a number of them on Twitter, which I vacillate between finding enjoyable and finding really frustrating because I can't express nuance well in 140 characters. Often they talk about stuff like anyone else talks about on twitter --- what they had for dinner that evening, they missed the bus and it's the worst thing that ever happened to them in the history of ever, oh look here's an article from a blog about social justice issues. Sometimes they talk about furry things, surprise surprise, and sometimes those furry things are sexual. (To forestall the "oh my god furry is all about sex!" "no it's not it's pure and clean like snow!" argument, I will suggest that furry is as much about sex as any other fringe artistic/identity movement. There might be more porn?)

I can't speak for anyone else, and I'm not sure who would be comfortable being quoted here, so I won't quote anyone and will talk only about my opinions and experience. Personally, I don't mind when my friends post NSFW links. Sometimes, like when I'm at work, I don't click them. Sometimes, I do! And which are which is a private matter held in trust between me, my browser history, my ISP, anyone logging the transaction, the hosting server... Okay maybe it's not so private. But as long as these images are labeled as NSFW, I don't mind if someone tweets a hundred of them, because if I am going to put up with one group of friends tweeting live updates to sports games I don't much care about, I can deal with another group of friends tweeting links to pornography. [1] It's just how it goes with Twitter; a lot of the content is not interesting to me personally, because it's not directed at me personally. I'm fine with that.

What some folks do that really does bother me, personally, is scene on Twitter. I'm not talking like that senator who sent pictures of his junk to random Twitter accounts --- that's more like twitter sexting or something. (Also if you enjoy anti-gay lawmakers being taken down for soliciting gay sex, this article is beyond gold.) This is... well, if you've heard of "cybersex" or "tinysex" or "typefucking," more like that. In 140-character bursts. (Text-based roleplaying where the action is sexual, basically.) Because the folks who I see do this on Twitter are postfurries, what counts as sex or sexual is very... metaphorical, and technologized, and often not genital-focused at all, which is interesting in its own right but not what I'm focusing on here. It's still pretty clearly intimate play, and happening over a broadcast medium, with a variety of interested and disinterested parties watching. And it's being broadcast to me, and I really don't want to see it. Not because I'm not into those things (sometimes true, but not always), or because I think they're disgusting (they're not, even if they're non-normative), or even because I'm at work (although sometimes I am and that's a fair bit more jarring). It's because I did not consent to being part of those folks' sexual practice.

A number of postfurries are taking on "After Dark" twitter accounts as a way to deal with some of these issues, and other issues (some folks aren't comfortable with the NSFW links either); I know I'm not the only person who's complained, and I don't recall actually complaining publically, just mentioning to a couple of folks that it made me uncomfortable. I've seen other people, not just postfurries, take on "after dark" accounts --- pseudonymized and generally locked --- to talk about things like drug use, hating their jobs, and so on. I follow a couple, although not as many as have invited me to follow them. It's a clever workaround to the fact that Twitter doesn't have friends groups and filtering like Dreamwidth or LiveJournal (or even Facebook) do, although it requires multiple accounts and if you don't have the multiple accounts (my twitter identity is tightly coupled to my real name) it means your potential employers will see you being followed by/following folks like the hypothetical "WolfFuckerTMI" as opposed to just, I dunno, "WolfDude827." Which, eh. I don't worry much about that, but it would be very reasonable for other folks to do so.

I don't have a better solution unfortunately. I like the idea of tagging content based on what it's about and then letting both writer and reader filter it, but that's heavyweight and subjective. Multiple accounts, with a good interface, isn't a bad solution. But I don't actually like sex and sexuality being ghettoized into "after dark" land, or pseudonymity, even though I sometimes make that choice because of the society I'm enmeshed in. [2] While I feel pretty strongly about the consent issue --- I wouldn't want to walk into a party and see those folks doing those things they are roleplaying unless I knew ahead of time that was the kind of party I was going to and felt comfortable attending, why is it magically okay online --- I also feel pretty strongly that people should be able to do those things, and that they shouldn't have to hide that they are doing it. I'm not sure how to balance the need for boundaries with the social/political desire to make sexuality one of many things we talk about. And this is leaving aside the problem where discussion of sexuality is kept under wraps specifically by the discussion of sexuality --- language binds itself and more and more words lead to less and less change. Am I just part of that problem here? I hope not, but maybe.

How do y'all manage these boundaries, both as readers and as content producers? And how do I manage having opinions about the behavior of my group/community/whatever, and working to change that behavior, while also studying it academically? I know some academic-side answers that I need to research more (in particular, performance ethnography), but I'm curious about non-academic answers, too.

[0] Take your pick of links explaining what postfurry is. Or make up your own definition! I'm going to have to eventually.

[1] And not all NSFW links are porn! Some of them are about sexual health, some of them are activism, and so on. In this case, though, it's usually porn. :P

[2] And should have the right to make that choice! If you're not angry enough at Google over the G+ no-pseudonyms bullshit yet, you should also keep in mind that they'll ban you for anything sexually explicit, too! Fun times all around, without the fun.

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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.

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