Author Archives: tacit

Assault and consent in the BDSM community

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I had planned to spend this afternoon writing about the Long Now Project, which inspires some of the most optimistic parts of me and speaks to the parts of me that are profoundly in love with the potential of the human race.

Instead, I’m going to write about something that saddens me greatly.

A short time ago, a friend of mine was sexually assaulted during a play session with a person who’s prominent in the local Portland BDSM scene. The situation was complex, as these things often are; most rapes, whether they’re within the context of BDSM or not, usually don’t involve some perpetrator springing from a dark alley onto an unsuspecting victim. Yes, it can happen that way, but more often than not the victim knows the perpetrator, as was the case here.

This situation started out as consensual play, and turned into assault when my friend’s boundaries were overrun. And what happened next makes me especially disappointed and angry.

The purpose of this post isn’t to discuss the details of what happened. The things I’m going to say hold true regardless of the exact nature of the circumstances. Instead, what I want to do is talk specifically about the BDSM community, and how it often falls short of its own stated ideals, and often plays into cultural norms about men and women even while it supposedly enshrines values of individuality, negotiation, and consent.

Cut for potentially triggering content: rape, BDSM, consent, misogyny, and victim-blaming behavior

Movie review: Cowboys & Aliens

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Okay, so I admit it. I am a tool of Hollywood. Every now and then, a movie comes out which I know I will see, despite the fact that my higher self is screaming at me in disgust and loathing for even considering the prospect.

Like the new Star Trek reboot, for example. I went to see it knowing it was going to be a travesty, and I was right. When the sequel comes out, I will see it, too, even though I know it’s going to be a disaster of a movie and I’m probably going to detest the whole shambling thing.

I saw the latest incarnation of the Indiana Jones saga adventure money machine, expecting it to be bad, and it turned out to be even worse than I could ever have dreamed. And if another one comes out, I’ll probably see it, too (and say snarky thins about it on my blog).

It was with that feeling I went to see a cheap matinee of Cowboys and Aliens.

It’s a gritty Western in which a rugged group of cowboys in a small Western town take on a rampaging group of aliens with spaceships and stuff. With a premise like that, how could it possibly go right? I mean, seriously, think Battlefield Earth for a prime example of what this idea is likely to lead to.

I was surprised.

And pleasantly so, which is a bit of a rarity. (That’s one of the downsides of being an optimist; an optimist is almost never pleasantly surprised.) The plot–there was one! I’m totally using that word non-ironically!–was surprisingly strong, and the move really was a whole lot better than it had any right to be. All it really needed was dialog, and it’d have been awesome indeed.

The film goes something like this:

COWBOY #1 wakes up in the middle of a DESERT
COWBOY #1 looks around with a STEELY GAZE
COWBOY #1: Hm.
COWBOY #1 looks at a GIZMO locked onto his WRIST with a STEELY GAZE
COWBOY #1: Hm.
COWBOY #1 hits the GIZMO with a ROCK. It FAILS to FALL OFF
COWBOY #1: Hm.
COWBOY #1 hits the GIZMO with a ROCK AGAIN. It still FAILS to FALL OFF
COWBOY #1: Hm.
Cut for spoilers; clicky to read more!

A new experiment

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I’ve been hearing about this Kickstarter thing for a while.

I’ve also been wishing that I had the capital to print some more posters for a while.

So, since the two seem like a good fit, I’ve started my very first Kickstarter project.

Before you get oo excited, no, it’s not to make a poster of the Map of Non-Monogamy, though that is something I’d quite like to do. This project is a bit different; it’s a project to make a poster version of one fo the photos I took while moving across the country to the lovely city of Portland:

This project runs for 30 days. If it’s successful, I will do more in the future. If it’s successful and the poster sells well enough, I’ll be able to do more in the future without relying on Kickstarter, which would be awesome.

So. Want a poster? Click the link!

Fragments of Frolicon: Spontaneous Drag King Shoots

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Operation Wifebeater (or, as some of us call it, Operation Drag Franklin Down To The Dungeon And Double-Team Him) was such a success that upon our return to Orlando, joreth and emanix decided that an encore was in order.

Well, of the outfits, at least. There’s only so much your humble scribe can take, after all.

In any event, I had the opportunity for a quick photo shoot outside joreth‘s house, which was quite a lot of fun, and went rather well, I think.

Yeah, you all wish you were me, I know you do.

I took quite a number of pictures, which you can click here to view.

Fragments of Frolicon: Nuclear Missile Porn

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There is a town called Cordele, Georgia. It’s a tiny town well south of Atlanta, barely a blip on the map; if you blink while you’re heading along Interstate 75, you’re apt to miss it. It has a small gas station, a couple of rail lines, a Krystal burger…

…and a nuclear missile.

The missile is behind the gas station, right in front of the Krystal. It’s an old Titan, set up just off the freeway.

People walk their dogs next to it. There’s a very proud sign in front of it, solemnly informing visitors that this site is Confederate Air Force One.

The sign offers, I think, quite an insight into why the South lost the Civil War. They never did quite get the hang of this whole “industrialization” thing.

The careful reader will notice several punctuation errors on the sign. There’s also a technical error; a callout points to the “Stage III lox tank,” but the Titan I is a two-stage missile.

The South never really did much cotton to this science and technology stuff, so it’s probably not too surprising that they get bits wrong.

We stopped on the way home from Frolicon to take pictures of the missile. It’s slowly turning into rust, but it’s still quite lovely in a strange way. Viewed up close, some parts of it almost look like art.

You’ll find quite a few bandwidth-crushing pictures under the cut. Click here to see more!

From iPhone to Android

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A few weeks back, I decided I needed to replace my aging iPhone 3G.

I got the 3G when it first came out. My roommate at the time and I spent quite a while waiting in line in front of the Apple store, only to be told when we were two places from the door that the stock for the day had been sold out. t took several more days of waiting in line before we were able to get our hands on one.

The iPhone 3G was the first smartphone I’d ever owned. I’ve been a cell phone user for quite some time, since the days of giant handsets with one-line LED displays, but I’d never owned anything even remotely approaching a smartphone before. For me, the iPhone was a game-changer. I have a notoriously bad sense of direction–it is not impossible for me to get lost just a few blocks from my home–and the GPS feature alone in the iPhone was a huge improvement in my quality of life.

Having real Web access was also a big deal. I do a lot of IT work, and the ability to get a call from a client and check the client’s Web site right there on the spot even if I’m not in front of a computer is huge.

But over the past few months, the 3G hasn’t been cutting it for me. The GPS is getting a little wonky, and the battery isn’t holding a very good charge any more, and the iOS 4.2 update made the phone feel a bit sluggish. On top of that, the amount that AT&T was charging me every month was enough to give me a nosebleed.

I spent a few weeks looking at several options: upgrading to an iPhone 4 and staying with AT&T, upgrading to an iPhone 4 and jumping to Verizon, and getting an Android phone.

Then Google announced the open hardware development kit for Android, and that significantly tilted the balance toward Android. The Google hardware kit for Android phones is based on the Arduino prototyping board, which I already have experience developing and programming for.

I went into T-Mobile and found that I could save quite a lot of money every month with a contract from them if I went to Android, so that’s what I did.

The phone I got and will be talking about here is the HTC Sensation 4G, running Android 2.3. It’s been an interesting, and at times rough, transition. I’ve been surprised by a number of things about Android, both pleasantly and unpleasantly.

But before I get into that, let me talk about what Android isn’t.

OPEN: IT’S THE NEW CLOSED

Android isn’t a religion. To hear many folks talk about it online, you’d think that the choice of cell phone operating systems was a religious or philosophical choice. Android, we’re told gravely, is “open.” The iPhone operating system is “closed.” To use Android is to celebrate freedom and democracy and other wonderful things; to use an iPhone is to toil under tyranny and totalitarian rule.

It’s hooey, of course. Android isn’t open, at least not in the way the religious folks say it is.

Oh, it’s open in the sense that the source code is available, kind of, eventually, when Google says it is. This sort of freedom isn’t really equal, though; Google decides who gets it when, and which partners get to have it first.

But the thing to remember is that from the perspective of the folks who make cell phone software, you aren’t the customer. The handset makers are the customer. Android is open–for them. You, as the person who buys the cell phone, get exactly as much freedom and openness as the handset maker lets you have.

On my HTC Sensation, for instance, the cell phone bootloader is locked down tighter than a nun’s–ahem. It was possible, if I wanted to, for me to jailbreak my iPhone. My Sensation? Nope, no can do. Not even the Cyanogen team has figured out how to root it yet.

The same is true for some other Android phones as well. Supposedly, HTC has had a change of heart and will be unlocking its phones in the future. It’s not clear whether this will apply to me; I’ve read one article online that says all HTC phones will be unlocked, and another that says only HTC phones not tied to a particular network or under contract with a particular carrier will be unlocked.

On the iPhone, the fact that I could, if I chose, jailbreak my phone never mattered to me; I never saw any good reason to. With Android, the fact that I can’t jailbreak it is kind of a bother, and that brings me to the second issue with Android.

SON OF THE REVENGE OF CRAPWARE: IT CAME FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

With Android, we’re told, there is more openness in software, too. Android programmers do not have to go through any particular approval process to get their apps on your phone. The iPhone App Store is tightly regulated; apps that Apple doesn’t like aren’t available. The Android app store is an open bazaar; anyone can make any sort of app at all.

That’s not 100% true. The carriers have coerced Google into removing apps they didn’t like from the Google app store.

More to the point, though, the openness is really more for the handset maker’s benefit than for yours. With Android, we are back to the bad old days of Windows XP and Windows Vista, where each computer maker tended to stuff their computers so full of demos and third-party software and their own support applications that the term Craplets (crap applets) was devised to describe them.

Most computer manufacturers came to their senses, eventually, and cut it out. It didn’t help that some of this crapware, like HP’s support application that they bundled onto their computers, contained security vulnerabilities that let hackers pwn HP computers.

But Android phones often come so stuffed with pre-bundled crapware that, in my case at least, nearly half the available application memory is occupied right off the bat. Worse, unlike desktop crapware, the Android crapware can’t be removed without jailbreaking the phone. I’ll talk about some of that crapware in a bit.

So my experience with Android has been interesting. In the rest of this post, I’ll run down the differences I’ve found between using an Android phone and using an iOS phone, and rate the quality of everything from the handset design to the apps to the user interface. If that sounds like your thing, click here to read more!

How to Tie a Star-Shaped Body Harness

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Note: This is part 8 of an occasional ongoing "how to" series on BDSM.

Part 1 of the series, How to Tie a Rope Harness Part I, is here.
Part 2 of the series, How to Tie a Frog Tie, is here.
Part 3 of the series, How to Tie a Shinju, is here.
Part 4 of the series, How to Make a Custom Dildo out of Ice, is here.

Part 5 of the series, How to Make a Spikey Decorative Collar, is here.
Part 6 of the series, Theory and Practice of Ginger Figging, is here.
Part 7 of the series, Rape Fantasy and Resistance Play, is here.
As you can probably figure out, most of these tutorials are really, really not work-safe.

This particular tutorial is not work-safe, photographically or in text. It shows and describes an unusual rope harness shaped like a five-pointed star. If it sounds like it’s up your alley, clicky the link!

Onward!

This Old House

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During the way back from the great Sex For Science In A Seedy Hotel In Seattle Experiment last month, zaiah and our innocent victims companions and I stopped at the ruins of an ancient house along the interstate so that I could take pictures of it.

I vowed back then to return with a model and a lot of rope.

About a week ago, zaiah, my friend Scott, and I did just that. We brought with us a friend of his, the lovely slavetopurple, and another mutual friend who’s a bondage rigger.

The house has changed rather a lot in the past month. It looks like it’s being disassembled bit by bit; structurally, it’s in significantly poorer shape than it had been. It’s also being devoured by gigantic feral blackberry bushes.

As least that’s what I’m told they are. They’re actually more like the Great Cthulhu incarnated as vegetation, with even more tentacles than he is customarily depicted as having, and totally covered in thorns.

I used a wide-angle lens to get this rather fetching shot of the interior. You can see one of the feral blackberry bushes invading what apparently used to be the kitchen, presumably in search of souls to devour. It’s a little-known fact that every time you masturbate, God puts the souls of the unbaptized underneath your stove. That’s why televangelists don’t have stoves.

Clicky for more pictures, which are definitely not safe for work unless you work in a place that's pretty laid back about these sorts of things.

The Mathematics of Sex Toys Made Tangible

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A while back, I posted a picture of a very early prototype sex toy designed to prevent its wearer from getting off.

This project is entirely separate from, and shouldn’t be confused with, the prototype sex toy that’s operated by the wearer’s brainwaves, which I’m still working on. The sex toy that is designed to keep the wearer from getting off, which I’ve started calling the “Tormentor,” is a vibrator connected to a programmable controller board that’s set up to run at random intervals with random pauses in between–perfect, in other words, for keeping whoever’s wearing it always aware of it, while not letting that person get enough stimulation to reach orgasm.

The very first proof-of-concept version was basically a bare controller board tethered to a laptop and connected to a vibrating egg. As it wasn’t exactly portable, it wasn’t able to do what I wanted, which is to be worn around while shopping or doing housework or otherwise going about one’s business.

So I started working on getting a more portable, self-contained version set up and running.

Click here for details, schematics, and pictures of the prototype being assembled

Fragments of Frolicon: Operation Wifebeater

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I first started hearing rumblings about Operation Wifebeater weeks before I headed down to Florida. Little hints, tiny suggestions of some dark and dire plan being cooked up by joreth and emanix, as vague and insubstantial as a rustling under the bed filled with implications of an unseen monster.

So on the first night of Frolicon, when emanix told me that joreth was already down in the dungeon and it was time for Operation Wifebeater to begin, I…

Hang on, let me back up a bit.

During my time in Florida pre-Frolicon, I did manage to accomplish a bit more than being abducted by emanix and modifying a MindFlex to act as a makeshift EEG. Hidden away in the suitcase I brought, tucked between the floggers and the rope and an abundance of clean socks, was a Clone-a-Willy kit. These things, in case you’ve never seen one, are do-it-yourself dildo kits designed to be used to take a casting from, and make an exact replica of, one’s penis.

joreth had given me this particular kit two (or was it three?) Frolicons past, and somehow we’d never found the time to use it. That’s not as surprising as it might sound; Frolicon can be a very busy time, and this year we were so busy we didn’t have time to schedule an orgy.

She wanted to make a point of cloning me this year, though, so the night before we were to leave for Atlanta, we set aside time to use it.

They’re actually pretty difficult to use. The mold material is fussy and extraordinarily temperature-sensitive, and I’ve experienced sexier things than sticking my you-know into a tube filled with gooey lukewarm mold material and holding it there for several minutes. Even with emanix‘s help, it was a complicated undertaking that was really only marginally successful. Nevertheless, it was successful enough, and the next morning, as we made our way north, we brought with us a replica–a bit misshapen, perhaps, but a replica nonetheless–of my willie.

Once we arrived in Atlanta, I had expected to start the debauchery with alacrity. Fate had other pans for us, however. As it turned out, the first six hours or so of our stay was spent running repeatedly to Wal-Mart and dollar stores in search of things we’d either neglected to bring with us or had deliberately not carried with us, thinking that they’d be easy to procure once we got there.

Two of those things were “a big sheet of foam core board” and “a whole bunch of pins with different-colored heads.” One of the plans I had for Frolicon was to put a poster of the Map of Human Sexuality on the motel room door with a bunch of pins, and let folks stick pins in it showing where they’d ventured.

The foam core was easy to find. The pins took three runs, two to Wal-Mart and one to a dollar store. The result ended up looking a bit like this:

We stuck it up next to the door with a handwritten color key (purple pins for things that folks had tried and liked, yellow pins for things that folks had tried and didn’t like, green pins for things that folks really wanted to try) and left it in the soft, gentle hands of Fate.

Between the late arrival and the bajillion runs to Wal-Mart to get yet another thing we’d managed not to have on hand, it ended up being quite late by the time we settled into the hotel. I stayed in emanix‘s suite as her captive, and joreth went off elsewhere to prepare.

emanix did some preparations of her own, before telling me “It’s time” and leading me down to the dungeon.

The name “Operation Wifebeater” was, as I discovered, more literal than figurative. joreth had dressed the part exactly like you might expect. I don’t know that emanix actually owns a wifebeater, but she came close, in a polka-dotted kind of way.

You can’t tell from this picture, but when I was dragged into the dungeon I soon was made aware that both of these lovely ladies were wearing strap-ons under their clothes. (How emanix managed to hide hers is a mystery still unsolved by your humble scribe.)

What followed was something out of either a B horror movie or a really interesting porn, depending on how you look at it, and gathered quite a large audience quite quickly.

Or so I’m told. I wasn’t watching. And it probably would have been impossible for me to have seen the audience anyway, given the fact that my face was buried… *ahem* Moving on…

The two of them had their way with me for a while, which was fun, and made just a bit surreal by the fact that joreth was wearing in her harness the clone of my willie we had produced the night before. I’ve heard the expression “go fuck yourself” on many occasions, of course, but I’d never seen its application in quite such a literal way before.

The rest of the con is still a bit of a blur to me.

A few bits stand out. The pet lesbians that zaiah and I had inadvertently acquired shortly after I moved to Portland, though a strange set of circumstances too complicated to go into here, were able to make it down to Atlanta of a visit, which was lovely. zaiah and I are both quite fond of them, and don’t get to see them nearly often enough.

Aren’t they cute?

emanix hosted the Frolicon Darkroom Party in the suite we were sharing the same night that the pets came down, and they helped run it for a while, which was totally awesome of them (and definitely counts as service above and beyond the call of duty).

At some point–I think it was the next afternoon–I had the opportunity to use joreth and emanix as victims lab rats test subjects for another round of EEG sexual arousal testing. The EEG setup exactly fit into a round metal tin, thoughtfully decorated with an Aperture Science logo courtesy of datan0de.

We do what we must, because we can.

For anyone who wants to see what an orgasm looks like from the perspective of Science, the complete data set from joreth‘s session is posted here, just in case you missed it.

emanix looked particularly fetching all wired up and ready to do Science.

joreth managed to squeeze in just enough time at the con to sweep up the top award in the costume contest, in her role of her alter ego, Miss Poly Manners.

There’s a corset under that dress. Yes, she looks hot in it. Yes, I have pictures.

Now, in all honesty, I’ve been going to Frolicon for years and I literally did not know that they even had a costume contest, which might say something about my priorities.

By the end of the con, the poster of the human sex map had been rather heavily used, and was bristling like a porcupine on crystal meth. I wasn’t able to figure out a way to get it home in one piece, but damn did it have a lot of pins in it. I got a crummy low-resolution picture from my cell phone, and some pictures from my real camera that turned out even less well, which is a pity…I’d love to have an accurate record of all the pins, you know, for data-mining.

Which reminds me, at some point I should rprobably do a statistical analysis of all the custom maps people make at the Web site for the map. Might be interesting.

emanix suggested making another foam core mounted poster for next year’s Frolicon, and putting it up in one of the con’s public spaces with instructions to stick pins in all the things that folks did while actually at the con, which sounds like a lot of fun to me.

The trip back from the con was almost as much fun as the con itself, but I have forms to go fill out, so I will leave you with one more picture of joreth in her wifebeater. Enjoy!