Smart Perverts: Selina Raven

During my last few weeks living in San Francisco in September, 2002, I worked briefly at a now-defunct adult newsweekly called The Spectator. Despite what anyone tells you, working with porn gets as boring as any other job really quickly. Mainly I was working reception. I took phone calls, did Excel spreadsheets, sent packages, and took ad payments from the Oakland pimps and call girls who advertised in the paper.

One of the other people who worked at Spectator at the same time as me was Selina Raven, a local domina who was making a little pin money doing similar admin tasks as myself. As soon as I met her, I knew two things: first, that she was seven different kinds of hot, and second, that she was really fucking smart. The two things are not unrelated.

There’s several galleries of Selina at her web page, but to get a tour of her brain, I recommend listening to the two-part interview conducted by Nova and Atticus on the Fetish Flame podcast. I especially recommend this interview to people who are just getting interested in kink and fetish play. Selina talks about how she got into kink, back in the days before there was an Internets; the three parts of the term “BDSM” (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, and Sadism and Masochism) and how they differ from each other; and the two main competing philosophies of kink, SSC (Safe, Sane, and Consensual) and RACK (Risk Aware Consensual Kink). I think the interview is especially notable for the latter point, because if you get into the kink community, you’re gonna hear a lot about these two. Just about every major mailing list or organization periodically explode into very long and very polarized debates about the distinctions between the two, and which is more appropriate for the community to promote. Usually these debates get very tiring very fast and produce a lot more heat than light. Selina explains the two in a very neutral, intelligent way that’s very rare considering the volatility of the topic. My own reaction to the RACK side of the controversy is somewhat like my reaction to pro-gun people from the NRA: I’d be a lot more sympathetic to their arguments if so many of them didn’t give the impression that they shouldn’t be trusted with anything sharper than a rubber ball.

In contrast, I’m glad to have smart and ethical people like Selina in the community, and even gladder that I’ve gotten to know so many of them. Listen to the podcast and see what I’m talking about.

Fetish Flame Interview: Part One Part Two

You Can’t Fool All the People All the Time….

A little footnote to my previous rant about the government’s expansion of abstinence-only education: although the people making the policies may be idiots and prudes (not necessarily in that order), the American people are not. According to a study recently done by the University of Pennsylvania, 80.4 percent of American adults prefer a balanced “abstinence-plus” approach to sex education. Also, according to the study:

• 91.6 percent of liberals, 86.4 percent of moderates, and 70 percent of conservatives support comprehensive (abstinence-plus) programs, while 19 percent of conservatives, 5.3 percent of moderates, and 3.7 percent of liberals oppose such programs.
• 47 percent of conservatives support abstinence-only programs, while 67 percent of liberals, 50.4 percent of moderates, and 39.9 percent of conservatives oppose this approach to sex education.
• 37.5 percent of conservatives, 13.4 percent of moderates, and 9.1 percent of liberals oppose condom instruction, while 51.2 percent of conservatives support it.
• Among all respondents, 57 percent disagree that condom instruction encourages teens to have sex.
• Of the respondents who never attend religious services: 87.4 percent support comprehensive sex education and 57.9 percent oppose abstinence-only programs.
• Among those who attend religious services more than once a week: 60.3 percent support abstinence-only programs; 60.3 percent support abstinence-plus programs; 52.6 percent oppose and 37.9 percent support condom instruction; 31.3 percent oppose abstinence-only instruction.

In short, Americans aren’t as easily fooled as the puritan bureaucrats would want us to be. I’m cautiously optimistic about the election results, but hopefully, between statistics like these and the backlash against the Republicans, the government will have to stop pretending that sex is something that you can just sweep under the rug.

More good news: congratulations to the people of Spokane, Washington, who ousted Brad Benson, the Republican State Senator who claimed earlier this year that Planned Parenthood deliberately distributes condoms with an 80% failure rate because “they have an interest in the follow-up product.“

The Elections in a Nutshell

From Bitch | Lab:

Overheard: “I’m so excited to put in office a bunch of people who will sell out labor instead of spend all day dreaming up new ways to cut our throats!”

Fear and Loathing and Fucking

No matter how cynical I get, no matter how many nauseating things that I see perpetrated in the name of morality and decency, it seems that there’s always some fucktard out there whose mission in life is to show me that there’s always just a little farther they can take things.

In short, although I didn’t think that I could be shocked anymore, I am once again appalled at the fear and hatred of sexuality that those in charge of our country harbor in their hearts. Hatred of the naughty bits has been an aggressive part of the Republican party’s agenda at least since Reagan’s malign neglect of the AIDS crisis, allowing thousands to die because they were a bunch of sinful faggots and junkies while simultaneously casting abortion as a luxury item for murderous sluts who would rather kill a baby than lose their girlish figures.

The Right Was Right

Now that we’ve taken over the House and maybe the Senate, it’s time for us Lefties to come clean and admit our Evil Agenda.

Tom Waits Interview

One of my few musical gods gives a rare interview in The Observer.  Waits’s music has been the background to most of my life, ever since I heard Small Change in high school.  My inner cynic and my inner romantic feel equally at home in Waits’s songs, a minor miracle in itself.

Doin’ It With the Dinos

Every so often, after 13+ years spent browsing all the finest obscene materials that the Internet can deliver, from ASCII pr0n to Usenet stories to downloading full feature films via the wonder of torrents, I get jaded. Or maybe arrogant would be a better word for it.  In short, I start to think that I've seen it all.

Fortunately for my sense of humility, it's at times like this that karma comes along and hits me with something like this.  Of all the things that I've masturbated to (and they have been varied and plentiful), I can safely say that a woman doing three pterodactyls never once crossed my mind.

Mark Foley: Predator or Sleaze?

Probably the greatest irony of the Mark Foley affair is one that gets little attention: if Foley had just had the nerve to act on his urges and cornhole a few of those pretty young pages in the Congressional cloakroom, he'd be free and clear — legally anyway. (The Repubs would still eat him alive for daring to be a public homo, but that's a whole other can of worms.)  In the District of Columbia, the age of consent is 16; but Foley is getting nailed under the Adam Walsh Chid Protection Act, which he himself toiled to make into Federal Law and which makes it illegal to solicit sex from a minor (under 18) via the Internet.  In other words, in D.C. you can fuck the pages — just don't have Internet sex with them.

There's plenty of room for schadenfreude here, and I for one plan to take mine in extra-large helpings.  The Republicans and conservative Democrats have made themselves both rich and powerful by plundering the American public's fear of sex, and many people who just wanted to be left alone have paid the price.

But we're facing a severe crisis in the fate of our Republic now, and I'm appalled that of all the things that have happened in the last six years, this is the thing that seems to stick.  People are finally paying attention to the moral rot inside the Republican party, and why?

Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV

"Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV," by the Asylum Street Spankers.  (Thanks to Adam for spotting this.)

 

Jesus loves you…

but He absolutely adores atheists. Why? Because they're the only people who don't ask Him to take sides in a war, particularly a war based on religious beliefs. Do you want to know who is His favorite atheist? Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. Too tired at the end of your 12-hour day as a corporate lackey to read anything more than a catalog? Then go to the website of The Sun Magazine to read an excerpt from Bethany Saltman's interview with Harris. If you're too tired to click on the link, allow me to give you an example of why you should read this interview. In answer to Saltman's question, Isn't religion a natural outgrowth of human nature? Harris gives this reply:

It almost certainly is. But everything we do is a natural outgrowth of human nature. Genocide is. Rape is. No one would ever think that this makes genocide or rape a necessary feature of a civilized society. Even if you had a detailed story about the essential purpose religion has served for the past fifty thousand years, even if you could prove that humanity would not have survived without believing in a creator God, that would not mean that it's a good idea to believe in a creator God now, in the twenty-first-century world that has been shattered into separate moral communities on the basis of religious ideas.

Sy Safransky, editor of The Sun Magazine will even allow you to get a free trial copy of the magazine, just in case you feel as though you cannot give up those Grande Mocha Frappucino's to pay for the subscription. (Maybe next week?) Or, while getting that daily dose of caffeine and sugar, you can visit Sam Harris at his website www.samharris.org.