[Trigger Warning for the whole series, as it deals with rape and abuse. This part, however, contains less in the way of graphic descriptions of abuse than previous parts.]
This is the last part. If you’ve read this far, thanks for staying with me.
The title’s a Leonard Cohen reference. If that’s trite, then I’m okay with trite. But here’s the lyric that I’m really thinking of, from Beginning of a Great Adventure, from Lou Reed’s Reagan-era album New York: “It might be fun to have a kid I could pass something on to/ something better than rage, pain, anger and hurt.” He put that album out when I was in high school, and now there are folks in the TNG groups who were not born then. Some of these people are twenty years younger than me, that’s a whole generation. Some of my kinkster friends, I’m almost old enough to be their dad, for me that just sort of changes how I look at it.
I don’t need the public scene for me. I don’t need the orgs and the parties. The cops are not going to come knocking on my door and look for a singletail or check my wife’s body for bruises. Where and how I live, with the class and race and other privileges that go with it and all that, you can tell me to worry all you want, but I won’t. I tell doctors about my kinks if I need to for complete medical treatment, and I just expect them to act like a professional about it, even if I have no idea if they’re kink-friendly: they’re more afraid of me than I am of them. (They’re right to be.) So … it’s not for me. I can close my doors and play with my spouse the way I like to play and the chances that the outside world will be able to influence that are really small.
People are being raped, and groped and fondled without consent, being coerced and pressured to do things they don’t want to do at clubs and parties, and it’s not me and it’s not my spouse. But I care that it happens. I could shut my door and play the way I like and ignore all that, but that’s what entitled privileged douches do with their privilege when they don’t care about justice. That’s “I got mine, Jack.” That’s not the right thing to do. I try to tell my kids to do the right thing, even if it’s hard, so I need to expect that of myself or I’m not much of an example. The right thing is to speak when something wrong is going on and to raise my voice until I can’t raise it any more, or until speaking up makes a difference.
It’s not very hopeful to catalogue the problems — useful, but not hopeful, and I’d rather say something about what we can do, with what we have, where we are.
Self-Defense For Bottoms: Defensive Negotiation
I said that miscommunications really happen. Anything that reduces that makes the deliberate violation of boundaries stand out more. I said in Mythcommunications that the lesson was that:
Clear communication of “no” isn’t primarily going to avoid miscommunication — rather, it’s a meta-message. Clear communication against the undercurrent that “no” is rude and should be softened is a sign of the willingness to fight, to yell, to report.
This idea, in my view, ports handily to a BDSM context, even though I think that actual miscommunication is much more common in BDSM. Clear communication avoids actual miscommunication, and also deters abusers by letting them know that a target will make it comparatively harder to get away with calling a deliberate violation a miscommunication.
(I’ll note, as an aside, that the general social disfavoring of “no” that conversational analysis, among other disciplines, identifies is a lot like the way safewords are treated. Many bottoms, particularly subs and particularly women feel a lot of pressure not to safeword: as if it’s a rejection, as if it’s a disappointment, as if it’s selfish.)
Hard limits and safewords in writing. Some people negotiate forever by email or PM or whatever, and some meet at a party and decide to play. But there are a few items that are really important, that are usually the subject of negotitation and are repeatedly the subject of boundary violations. These can be covered in an email, a PM or a text message and they can be covered fast. Once they’re in writing, there’s a record and that reduces any uncertainty about what was said. It’s not a complete solution, but it is a deterrent.
The two most frequent boundary violations I hear are (1) penetration and (2) safer sex practices. Clear, hard limits not to be renegotiated in scene can be set forth by text message even in a two minute negotiation before a public scene between strangers. Remember in Part 1, the story about Jay Wiseman and the rope bottom who kept negotiating for no sexual touching and kept getting raped? Remember Mollena Williams in Part 2? Those perpetrators would have wanted to do those things no matter what was said or written –would have wanted to, but would they have done them? In one of the blind items in Part 3, where the top punched the bottom in anger, the contract said no play in anger, and he took the trouble to get rid of it. I’m thinking of a simple text that says, “NO penile penetration, safeword is RED, not to be renegotiated” or “safeword is red, piv with condom only, no anal penetration.” There are other items that may be critical and people should always learn to negotiate for what they need: I’m not talking about negotiation best practices. I’m talking about deterence: putting in writing the boundaries that are commonly violated so as make a record that could cause trouble for an abuser later.
We can’t set these things up as mandatory practices for bottoms because they’ll just be absorbed into the existing BDSM victim-blaming canon: self-defense training is good, after the fact a failure to take some possible precaution no more absolves an abuser than failure to lock a car excuses auto theft, and I’ve never seen anyone get victim-blamed for forgetting to lock a car door.
Self-Improvement for Tops: To Err Is Human, To Get Defensive Is Counterproductive
Aftercare isn’t only the part that looks after the bottom’s emotional needs. On my account, properly understood, aftercare has three components: the bottom’s emotional needs, the top’s emotional needs, and post-scene learning. Some folks don’t need a lot of aftercare for their emotional needs. Some tops don’t really get top drop, some bottoms don’t need or even want a lot of looking after, but there’s always room to learn something. One dominant I know always asks her bottoms, “Was there anything I did that you were not comfortable with?” and “Was there anything I did that you wish I hadn’t done?” This tends to work better after the initial rush of hormones and emotions from play has a chance to settle down, and lots of people do following-day check-ins, especially after big scenes.
There are two things to be accomplished here. The first is for the tops themselves. I top too, and with just one partner for over a decade. You know what? I am still learning. We push, we talk, we learn, we try things. I make mistakes! Yes, I do! And we talk about them. Technical errors, miscommunications, and even landmines, as I discussed in Part 5. Ignoring these things or pretending they don’t need to be discussed doesn’t do anyone any good.
Talking about the things that went wrong helps the top. We learn from our mistakes only when we know what they are. We may think that all the perceptions we have in the course of a scene are accurate. Well, every litigator I know will tell you that when you take a deposition and then read the transcript, the record you made is different from the record you think you made. And folks I know in medicine tell me that doctors who think they know everything from image tests are often surprised by autopsies and pathology results which show that you really can’t see everything from a scan. We don’t have perfect information, and cross-checking our perceptions of another person’s reactions and state of mind is an invaluable, irreplaceable process.
Talking about things that went wrong helps the bottom. If something went wrong and it wasn’t a deliberate violation, the best way to clear the air is for the bottom to say what happened and be heard, and not get shut down. When the harm in not intentional, that’s often enough. When the harm is not intentional, that is the first act and sine qua non of amends.
Talking about what went wrong, finally, helps the culture. What we need to do is separate the predators from the underbrush they operate in, the climate that grants the SL-Op, to put them in a position where their deliberate behavior is not easily disguised as something else. Hiding mistakes and denying them makes the mess-up look like the deliberate wrong, and the one who erred act like the abuser. We all need those who make mistakes to act like people who care and don’t want to make mistakes again, so that those who keep on and keep on violating limits look like exactly what they are.
We all need it to become unacceptable and aberrant to get defensive, deny, blame and shut down when our mistakes are pointed out. If a bottom says, “when I was in subspace and you were calling me names, we hadn’t talked about that and it was really icky for me,” for example, it has to be unacceptable to say, “I’m not a mindreader! You should have told me!” How about, “Sorry. I didn’t realize. I messed up. Won’t happen again.” The bottom may not have even known how it would feel; we don’t all know our limits and triggers until we stumble on them. Those are the landmines. The bottom can learn from the experience, about theirself and their limits, but the top can, too. Acting like all communication failures are solely or principally the bottom’s fault is counterproductive, first because it shuts down the conversation, but second because that’s how the abusers act; and the abusers have more SL-Op if more people act like they do.
I’m not saying this because I think it will make abusers better people. It won’t. They do what they do on purpose and they can’t be fixed, only deterred. I’m saying what I think tops can do to look less like abusers, to create an environment where abuse looks aberrant and abusers stand out, so they can be dealt with.
What the Rest Of Us Can Do:
Talk About Ethics, Expect Ethics
Doing things to people that they don’t consent to is wrong. We all need to stop pretending that it’s rude to say that. Violating limits isn’t cute or funny or edgy. Joking about violating limits isn’t cute or funny or edgy.[1] Kate Harding, speaking in a vanilla context, said something that I think is very true in this context also:
But please listen, and please trust me on this one: you have probably, at some point in your life, engaged in that kind of talk with a man who really, truly hates women–to the extent of having beaten and/or raped at least one. And you probably didn’t know which one he was.
And that guy? Thought you were on his side.
Bold in original. I talked in Part 2 about the “that guy,” the “stranger in the bushes” of the BDSM community. That guy is around, on the web and the fringes, and sometimes even at the core of our communities. If you joke, “hey, I know she said no X, but we should totally X!”, that guy loves your joke. He thinks it’s awesome that you said it, because he totally wants to do that. And while you know that you absolutely may not do that …that guy doesn’t. And now he thinks you’re on his side.
Zero Tolerance for Impairment
If you can’t do BDSM without getting a buzz on, you shouldn’t be doing BDSM. Call me puritan, I don’t give a shit. It’s a recipe for disaster and a way for abusers to use drugs and alcohol to incapacitate potential partners or excuse their violations. We just have to stop putting up with people who want to play impaired.
Listen.
I said it in Meet The Predators, and it’s still true in this specific context:
If we refuse to listen, he can continue to pretend that the rapist is some guy in the parking lot late at night, when it’s actually him, in our friends’ bedrooms half an hour after last call. If we let that happen, we’re part of the problem.
The rapists can’t be your friends, and if you are loyal to them even when faced with the evidence of what they do, you are complicit.
The only way we can really change what goes on is to change the culture, to eliminate the dynamics that allow the abusers to blend in and make their conduct look normal. We need to create environments where the abusers stick out like a sore thumb. It’s not easy to say I fucked up. It’s uncomfortable. It’s easier not to take responsibility. That’s how children deal with it: they blame the dog, their sibling, or pretend they don’t know. Grown ups take responsibility. I just don’t think there’s any serious downside to admitting to mistakes, owning bad judgments. The harm is done; acting grown up about it can only help the healing.
I hear a lot of people who top saying that they’re afraid of the conversation that has started, that they are afraid someone will name them for having done something wrong. I understand that. I don’t like being criticized either. But there’s a huge difference between being criticized for fucking up and blowing a boundary, and being criticized for deliberately blowing a boundary. The first is just ordinary human fallibility, and the second is evil. I do not believe that there’s any reason to think that people are going to be shunned if they fuck up and own it. Shit, all the people I know who have made serious fuck-ups doing BDSM, if they’ve owned up to it, they’re good with the person on the receiving end. (It’s a lot like doctors in malpractice suits: the statistics show that doctors who admit mistakes tend not to get sued, even for serious mistakes, while those who act like assholes and try to shut down the discussion do tend to get sued.) There may be a few exceptions, but as a general proposition, there’s every reason from human experience to believe that saying, “I messed up” is not only the right thing, but the smart thing.
And what we end up with is an environment where people don’t try to sweep the past under the carpet, where a top can say, “yeah, that went really wrong, zie went nonverbal on me and I didn’t realize how deep zie was.” If we can all just say, “yeah, that happened to me once,” we have an environment that the predators can’t really operate in, because when three people say, “yeah, ze did that to me, too …” the game is up. People who admit mistakes and learn from mistakes tend not to repeat them. People who tend to repeat the same mistake … well, usually it’s not a mistake.
And as we create the freedom to air this stuff, we come to the hardest part. We have to start to listen to what the issues are and decide how to treat the people who keep having the issues. Nobody is going to show up with a score sheet or bingo card and make it easy, we’re just going to have to pay attention and think about who is acting in good faith and who isn’t. If we really want to make excuses for our friends, we always can. We can explain away an infinite number of fuck-ups and blowups and badly handled scenes if we’re determined to exonerate. When our friends fuck up, we need to expect them to act consistently with good faith. If they don’t, we need to be willing to change our understanding about their good faith.
If you decide that your friends can’t possibly be abusers, you’re part of the problem. If you decide that anyone who is an abuser can’t possibly be your friend, you’re part of the solution. It is up to you whether you want to listen to the survivors and expect better from tops, or whether you want to pretend that you “don’t do drama.”
[1] It may be terror play, but terror play is the kind of thing that you negotiate first. We all know, if we’re half-way competent, that terror play could do permanent damage to some people, and none of us would do that without making a solid effort to ascertain whether the bottom has a significant history that would make it unsafe, or limits that preclude it. Right? Otherwise, we’d be abusive or incompetent, right?
What A Witch Hunt Actually Is
Lately, when I’ve suggested that rape survivors should have places to say, “so and so raped me,” and to name the name of the assailant, some people have used the phrase “witch hunt.” This is offensive, and it is a poor metaphor. I’ll tell you why: there are three components of a witch hunt, in historical practice, that do not fit an environment of public transparency.
(1) It’s all made up.
(2) Confessions are extracted by torture.
(3) The result is execution.
Let’s look at a historical case, the North Berwick Witch Trials. James VI, who later succeeded Queen Elizabeth as James I of England but who was then the Scottish king, sailed to Denmark to marry. The weather was bad — really bad, and the fleet had to shelter in Norway and wait it out. The Danish admiral blamed witchcraft, and there were witch hunts in both Denmark and Scotland.
More than a hundred suspected witches were rounded up. One of them, Agnes Sampson, was personally questioned under torture by the King. She was kept without sleep for prolonged periods and tormented with a device called a “witch’s bridle,” which forces metal spikes into the cheeks and tongue.
Sampson confessed to over fifty counts, and was strangled, then burned. There were more than seventy people implicated, I don’t know how many executed. Estimates I’ve seen of European witch hunts put the total number of those executed over thirty thousand for the core period of witch hunts, from the mid-1400s to the mid-1700s.
First, neither Agnes Sampson, nor any of the dozens of indicted coconspirators, cause the storms that forced the King’s ship into a Norwegian harbor. Storms are not the result of black magic; there were no “real witches” to find.
You can’t say that about rapists, and you can’t say that about rape. Or, you can say it, but it’s ridiculous, and you won’t be saying it here. The problem of rape in BDSM communities is not a natural phenomena like weather top which we simply assign a blameworthy cause. It is a problem of bad actors doing bad things.
Second, I have yet to see anyone advocate the procuring of rapists’ confessions by physical torture. In fact, my position is that all physical torment should be entirely consensual and the recipient’s limits respected. I think I’ve been quite clear on that.
Third, I have yet to see anyone advocate execution as a punishment for rape in BDSM communities. I have not seen that, and I have not taken that position. I am not the government, I don’t have the power or the inclination to sentence people to lethal injection or electrocution or to be hanged by the neck until dead.
When people talk about the consequences of someone saying, “so and so raped me,” let’s be realistic. They’re not going to go to prison, except in the most unusual circumstances, for the reasons I covered at length in There’s A War On Part 4: Just Us. Realistically, what might happen is that some party promoters will decide that person is not welcome and some people they know may decide they don’t want to be friendly with that person anymore. And my observation is that even that is usually only a very partial effect.
So that’s nothing at all like confession under torture followed by burning at the stake.
(Anyone planning to deploy the term “lynching” outside its historical context will be banned for racism. You have been warned.)
This use of “witch hunt” to describe a process of social transparency is misplaced. At best, it represents a failure to think though the meaning of the rather shopworn phrase. At worst, it is a conscious rhetorical attack, trying to enlist the image of broken limbs and burned corpses to churn up sympathy for the wrong side. It’s bullshit, and I plan on liberally linking this post when people say “witch hunt.”
There’s A War On Part 6: Anti-Sunshine League
[Trigger Warning for the whole series, as it deals with rape and abuse. This part, however, contains less in the way of graphic descriptions of abuse than previous parts.]
Justice Brandeis said that sunlight is the best of disinfectants. We’ve talked about abusers and how they derive their Social License to Operate by using the cover of other dynamics: the miscommunications; the secrecy; the geek social fallacies; and so forth. They can’t operate in the open in the harsh light of day. If people are free to talk about their experiences without intimidation or ostracism, if they are as free to say, “I had a bad experience with so-and-so, ze ignored my hard limit” as they are to say “I had a really good experience with zir,” then the predators can’t operate. In a transparent environment, people would have to own and learn from their mistakes; those who were not really making mistakes would become apparent really fast. They’d get shut down and shut out and maybe even prosecuted right away.
Who could be against that?
The single largest online organ in the BDSM universe is against that: Fetlife. The Borg that is taking over all online BDSM discourse has a TOU (Terms of Use) that flat-out helps the abusers. There have been suggestions to change it through formal channels. They’ve gone nowhere.
CeCe McDonald Trial Begins
[Update: There has apparently been a plea, Manslaughter 2 with a recommendation of 41 months. I don't know much more than that, but it sounds like she was terrified into taking a plea that amounts to an injustice. I'll rethink that if I learn facts that would actually change that.]
Some folks are already following the story. Others might vaguely recognize the name; for example some folks read about it here. (Warning about the comments … if you don’t want to see people making excuses for the dead neo-nazi, don’t read them.) For those unfamiliar, here’s the capsule:
Cece McDonald is a trans woman. She was walking with friends past a bar, when an older white man provoked a verbal altercation. When Cece McDonald turned around to stand up to him, his friends turned it into a physical altercation. Cece fought back. She ended up with a bad cut on her face, and Dean Schmitz ended up dead.
Many in this country were outraged by local authorities’ refusal to charge the man who killed Trayvon Martin, when the self-defense claim seemed at best highly dubious. Yet the local prosecutor in Hennepin County, Minnesota, decided to charge McDonald despite a far more credible claim of self-defense. How credible? Schmitz had a swastika tattoo on his chest, a domestic violence record, and was on cocaine, methamphetamine and alcohol at the time of his death. A drugged up, violent white supremacist started hurling insults at a black trans woman, and he died in the ensuing fracas … and the prosecutor doubts that she acted in self-defense?
Rulings were expected this morning on the issue of the admissibility of the swastika, and on whether McDonald could present an expert to testify to the climate of violence that trans people face.
In Florida (where the law is different), George Zimmerman’s supporters assert that he can provoke a confrontation and “stand his ground” by shooting (I credit almost nothing of his story). In Minnesota, where a black trans woman stood her ground when words were hurled, then held her ground when others threw punches and finally used deadly force, the prosecution is trying to convict her.
And as Cece McDonald goes on trial, people in Oakland mourn for another trans woman killed. [update: three, very recently, in fact.]
Support page here.
Coverage of the trial here.
h/t Asher Bauer
There’s A War On Part 5: Wallowing In The SL-Op
[Trigger Warning for the whole series, as it deals with rape and abuse. This part, however, contains less in the way of graphic descriptions of abuse than previous parts.]
In the previous parts, I talked about what I call the “Social License to Operate,” and since I’ll now talk about it a lot, I’m going to abbreviate it “SL-Op.” I repurposed the term from extractive industries like mining and oil, where it expresses the concept that aside from whatever formal regulations govern their operations, they have to maintain enough goodwill that forces are not mobilized to shut them down. Which is not far from what I mean in the rape and abuse context. Law and regulation and social structures are all dynamic systems through which power is exercised, and how exactly it is exercised is a social phenomenon. If there is sufficient desire to make something stop, usually a society can manage to change the law of the interpretation of the law to at least make it much rarer and more difficult. Conversely if there is widespread support of acquiescence, legislators and law enforcement will find that they are swimming against the tide to deploy effective measures against it. In the mainstream of American society, and I can say the same at least for the UK, you can look at the infrequency with which acquaintance rape is successfully prosecuted and punished and simply say that it is not really illegal; not in the thoroughgoing sense where the society collaborates in deploying power against it. It’s nominally illegal, certain kinds of rape are illegal, in the sense that they are often successfully prosecuted, but the most common kinds of rapes, those committed using intoxicants and no overt force, by a man against a woman he knows, are punished at such low rates that a would-be rapist is safe in concluding that if he follows the usual protocol of repeat rapists he is likely to go unpunished.
So how does this interact with the problems particular to rape and abuse within BDSM communities? We have several dynamics that operate socially to allow rapists and abusers to go unpunished. Some of these mirror dynamics in the mainstream and some don’t. This is my incomplete list: Read more…
There’s A War On Part 4: Just Us
[Trigger Warning for the whole series, it is all about rape and abuse in BDSM communities. This post deals with the criminal justice system and its systematic inability effectively to deal with rape and sexual abuse in general, and in a BDSM context specifically.]
When issues of abuse in BDSM communities come up, the farther one is from progressive, anti-oppression commitments, the more likely it is that lots of people will assert, essentially, “police report or it didn’t happen.” The more anti-oppression the crowd, the more likely that anyone raising the justice system as a solution will be greeted with a slew of stories about how bad cops and the system are and how many people just cannot go that route. On the criminal justice system as it applies to rape and abuse, feminists are kind of all over the map. Even folks who acknowledge that the overall function of the criminal justice system in the US particularly is to maintain a prison state and impose social control on poor people, people of color and other disempowered demongraphics often want the criminal justice system to function to punish abusers. Good alternatives are hard to come by, after all: barring vigilante justice there isn’t much that can be done to punish rapists and abusers without some criminal justice system, and vigilante justice is a question of whose friends are scarier.
Given what we know from Predator Theory, that the lion’s share of the problem is the repeat offenders, it’s tempting to say that the solution is to catch them and jail them — so tempting, in fact, that I won’t say that’s wrong. Just that we’re not in a place where we have a system that can do that fairly for lots of people. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about some of the ways the criminal justice system fails to do that job. The circumstances are, I think, pretty compelling, and what they amount to in my view is this: it can’t be counted on as a thoroughgoing solution, and thinking people either need to write it off entirely (I’m unwilling to do that) or to talk seriously about how it is broken and how to fix it.
There’s A War On Part 3: A Fungus Among Us
[Trigger warning for the whole topic. I'm talking about rape and abuse in the BDSM community. This post specifically contains narratives of rape and abuse. ]
I said in the last section that when the predators manipulate their way into central positions in BDSM communities, they are unstoppable. We have to talk about this, and this is the uncomfortable part. Predator Theory, backed by empirical research, tells us that the bad actors, the repeat, deliberate, serial abusers, are less than 10% of the general population (depending on the population; the research is sketchy, but 4% or 8% depending on whether one looks at Lisak’s college sample or McWhorter’s Navy sample). Four out of a hundred, one out of twenty-five: someone we know. Someone we’re friends with. Someone we trust. Someone who is friends with our friends. It may be worse in BDSM communities, nobody has any numbers. Pedophiles try to become priests, teachers, coaches, run camps: places where their access to targets will be easy, where they can select and groom targets. Given the way BDSM communities offer access to targets and unwittingly or even recklessly provide cover for abusive conduct, why wouldn’t predators who want adult victims gravitate toward BDSM communities? Anyone who thinks that can’t be true is in denial.
The first step is admitting we have a problem. And we do have a problem. I’ll skip to the end: there’s no shortage of stories that start “I was abused” and end “when I tried to say something the community closed ranks around the abuser and I was frozen out.” It’s happened to friends of mine. It’s happened in communities where people insist that the community isn’t like that. And almost always, you have to actually know the participants to know what happened because nobody talks about it. It’s all secret, there’s no sunlight and no transparency. You, you out there on the internet, can search blogs until you’re blue in the face for a record of some of these stories, or some indication that you shouldn’t play with some of these people, and you’ll never find it. Even when “everybody knows,” the “everybody” is very narrow.
Here is a classic example; a pretty typical story that was left in comments to Charlie Glickman’s blog post on BDSM and rape [TW specifically not so much for the violation but for the community shut-down, but if you can, I encourage you to read this and not just TL;DR skim it]:
jaclynfriedman
Thomas
javacia
Cara
ljacobsriggs
perrybc
staceymayfowles
jillfilipovic
toniamato
eroticundulation
kimberlyspringer
jessicavalenti
Cedar
marikopassion
