Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

Exposing corruption requires the ability to see patterns

16 Mar 2015 at 00:28

maymay

There’s an interesting discussion happening over on the rolequeer blog called “Decolonizing Kink?” in which a few folks who are sick and tired of the overt racism and other bigotry teeming from within the rotten core of the BDSM and fetish “community” are talking about what, if anything, can be done about it.

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt recall that this isn’t actually a new topic of conversation at all. For those of us whose eyes, ears, and other senses are attuned to this sort of thing, there are reports of utterly grotesque, racist, sexist, homophobic, rape apologist, and ableist behaviors—to name just a few systemic issues—emanating from the very heart of the so-called “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” BDSM Scene. Off the top of my head alone, I can recall:

A fetish club in Richmond, VA called Fallout thought it would be a good idea to write “nigger” on their club walls for a post-apocalypse themed party. (Pro-tip: it is never a good idea to use racial slurs as party decorations.)
That time when FetLife founder JohnBaku made a “Big Black Cock” joke, and some of the resulting discussion on FetLife (note how the link is not actually to FetLife, for reasons that will become clear as you read on).
BDSM Scene “plantation retreats,” which is awkwardly defended in public by a Black woman named Mollena Williams, who’s basically the Eric Holder of the BDSM Scene and recites party-line No True Scotsman bullshit like “BDSM is not abuse” on cue with the best white supremacists. (Plantation Retreats are not just an American BDSM thing, because BDSM is a globalized and industrial societal infrastructure, so they exist in the United Kingdom, as well.)
That time when the BDSM community told sexual assault victims it’s all their fault, which it turns out is not unusual.
That time when a Portland leather bar was forced to cancel a Blackface performance. (Pro-tip: Never book Blackface performers.)
That time when a nationally renowned BDSM educator named Mark Yu raped a play partner, she posted about it on FetLife, got censored by FetLife’s “no naming abusers” policy, which encouraged numerous other women to come forward, and they were all censored, too, and then Franklin Veaux blogged about it. What happened to Mark Yu? He was invited to present at a national BDSM conference the next year, ’cause, y’know, serial rape? No biggie.
“White Trash Luau” themed fetish party with prizes for the whitest-skinned contestant? Seriously, you can’t make this shit up.

Now, if you’re surprised by how many incidents I’ve just listed (and I didn’t even try to name any of the recent FetLife-involved murders!), there are two likely explanations. First, you’re not really paying attention, and you probably should be. But second, even if you are paying attention, it’s not actually easy to find out about these incidents, much less to actually remember all of them, even if you’ve been around as long as I have. And that’s no accident: the bad publicity incidents like these generate (and these incidents happen so routinely, and have been happening for so long, they’re like clockwork—here’s another example from 2009) are actively suppressed and spin-controlled by both BDSM public relations/lobbying groups like the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (aka. the NCSF, whose executive director was once employed by FetLife.com as their Community Manager) as well as BDSM Scene organizations and institutions themselves. This includes FetLife.

In fact, the design of FetLife.com is itself built from the ground-up to be a form of damage control for bad PR. FetLife’s interface makes it very hard to search for historical information on the site, and this is intentional. FetLife also effectively repels the web indexing robots of Google and other search engines, making it difficult to retrieve or archive information from within FetLife’s walls, and this is intentional. When information about activities that happen inside FetLife are exposed to the outside world, FetLife’s army of volunteers strictly police external websites with illegal Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices (I know—I’ve personally fought almost a dozen of these legal threats from FetLife’s “carebears”), and this is intentional. (Need some examples? Try here, here, or here, again, just off the top of my head.)

Why would FetLife be so committed to quashing discussion about these incidents? Because without evidence of a pattern, the white supremacist narrative of “isolated incidents” is plausible. You can’t say that “the BDSM Scene has a racism problem” with much conviction unless you can also see the discrete instances in which racism or another form of bigotry was institutionally, even violently protected time after time after time, year after year after year, again and again and again.

You need a pattern. To establish a pattern. You need data. If FetLife can prevent historical data from being widely available, no one can establish a pattern of bad behavior. And, of course, this kind of “forced forgetfulness” is intentional. As I wrote the other day, “the right to be forgotten” is abusive:

The erasure of history is a defining element of oppressive practices on the macro-scale of history, but also on the micro-scale of interpersonal interaction. Men who beat their wives rely on the fact that their ex-wives do not warn their new brides that they are abusive assholes. Serial rapists rely on the fact that their victims will not have the benefit of communication with their former victims in order to perpetrate multiple assaults. The idea that we should give anyone the power to enforce a kind of “forgetting” on other people is such a terrible idea that the only reason it gains favor is either the shortsightedness or the intentional sociopathy of its proponents.

Quite a few years ago, when I was much younger and still naively believed the BDSM subculture deserved any respect, I saw the writing on the wall and wrote an essay titled “FetLife Considered Harmful,” in which I argued that this subculture’s digital poster boy, FetLife.com, was “the worst of both worlds” with respect to both online and face-to-face community. Working with some collaborators, I developed a number of software tools to help people use FetLife in a safer and more personally empowered way, perhaps the most famous of which is the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife. But another tool was called FetLife Export, and it makes a wholesale copy of a FetLife account’s activity.

Using FetLife Export, you can make a complete, searchable snapshot of your own or any other FetLife user’s entire account activity with just a few clicks. The tool is very similar to wget in that it makes an archive of web pages, but in this case the archive is specific to a given FetLife user’s postings, “likes/loves,” comments in group discussions, wall-to-wall conversations, and other FetLife-specific features. This is handy because it means that when you see someone make a racist or sexist remark on a FetLife thread, you can download a copy of their entire FetLife history in one fell swoop—everything they’ve ever said in public view on FetLife—and then retroactively search their past postings for other, similar or related remarks.

What they might once claim is an “isolated incident” will seem very, very different in the light of a complete historical log of their behavior on FetLife.

I’ve been using this tool regularly since it was first released. If you wonder how I can be so “plugged in” to what’s going on in the BDSM Scene, how I can so quickly connect the dots between who-knows-who, it’s partially because I make and use these archives to find patterns that you can only see when you surveil the entire BDSM Scene in near-real time. It’s an invaluable tool for anyone doing systemic analysis, muckraking, or investigative reporting about the BDSM Scene.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use the FetLife Exporter yourself, read my short tutorial guide, “HowTo: Download a complete copy of any FetLife user’s posts, pictures, comments, and other activity using the FetLife Export wizard,” which explains how to use and how to install the tool on your own computer. If you have trouble getting it working and would like to, feel free to contact me directly (whether publicly, privately, or however you prefer) and I’ll be happy to walk you through it.

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HowTo: Download a complete copy of any FetLife user’s posts, pictures, comments, and other activity using the FetLife Export wizard

16 Mar 2015 at 00:07

maymay

Technology

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Quite a few years ago, when I was much younger and still naively believed the BDSM, fetish, and leather subcultures deserved any respect, I saw the writing on the wall and wrote an essay titled “FetLife Considered Harmful,” in which I argued that this subculture’s digital poster boy, FetLife.com, was “the worst of both worlds” with respect to both online and face-to-face community. Working with a number of collaborators, I developed a number of software tools to help people use FetLife in a safer and more personally empowered way, perhaps the most famous of which is the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife. But another tool was called FetLife Export, and it makes a wholesale copy of a FetLife account’s activity.

Using FetLife Export, you can make a complete, searchable snapshot of your own or any other FetLife user’s entire account activity with just a few clicks. The tool is very similar to wget in that it makes an archive of web pages, but in this case the archive is specific to a given FetLife user’s postings, likes, comments in group discussions, wall-to-wall conversations, and other FetLife-specific features. This is handy because it means that when you see someone make a racist or sexist remark on a FetLife thread, you can download a copy of their entire FetLife history in one fell swoop—everything they’ve ever said in public view on FetLife—and then retroactively search their past postings for other, similar or related remarks.

What they might once claim is an “isolated incident” will seem very, very different in the light of a complete historical log of their behavior on FetLife.

In this brief guide, you’ll learn how to install and use the FetLife Export tool on your own computer, and you’ll walk through a sample invocation with the help of a simple, text-based wizard.

What is FetLife Export?

At its core, FetLife Export is a very simple perl script that asks for a FetLife username and password, then logs into FetLife using that account and downloads the activity of whatever account you tell it to get. It can download your own account’s activity, in which case it also archives private messages, and it can also download other people’s activity. To do this, it simply reads the target account’s activity feed and follows all the links. So if the target user has “liked” (in FetLife jargon, “loved”) a different user’s picture, that other user’s picture and all the comments on that picture get downloaded, too.

Installing FetLife Export

Since FetLife Export is a perl script, it can be used on any computer that has perl, including Mac OS X, Linux, and Microsoft Windows. The first two systems come with a suitable perl out of the box, but Windows users will probably need to install perl themselves if they haven’t already.

In addition to perl itself, the FetLife Export script uses a number of functions provided by other perl scripts, called perl modules, that your computer may or may not already have. The FetLife Export README file explains:

Most systems will have the modules you need. However, if you experience errors running fetlife-export.pl, you may also want to install all the required components yourself. To do this, run the following commands after you’ve installed your Perl:
cpan App::cpanminus
cpanm WWW::Mechanize
cpanm HTML::TreeBuilder
cpanm String::Escape
cpanm Unicode::Escape
cpanm LWP::Protocol::socks # Optional. Only needed if you'll use a SOCKS proxy.

That’s a bit terse, so head on over to the “Installing Perl Modules” guide on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) website for more detailed instructions. The general idea is that if you try to run the tool but get an error that starts with something like this…

Can't locate WWW/Mechanize.pm in @INC

then you probably need to install one or more of the listed modules. In this example, the module that’s missing is the WWW::Mechanize one, so you should run the command cpanm WWW::Mechanize at your command prompt. Similarly, if you get an error that looks like this:

Can't locate Term/ReadLine.pm in @INC

The solution would be to install the Term::ReadLine module with a command such as cpanm Term::ReadLine.

If you’re having more trouble getting it installed than you know how to handle, feel free to contact me (publicly, privately, however you prefer).¹

Walkthrough: Use the FetLife Export Wizard on Mac OS X

If you have a Mac, you can use the FetLife Export tool after it’s installed simply by double-clicking on the fetlife-export.command file that comes with the software (download the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle by clicking on the “.zip” link for the latest version). Opening the .command file will launch a Terminal window that looks like the following screenshot, and begin walking you through a series of question-and-answer steps to help you make an archive of a user’s FetLife history:

FETLIFE EXPORT WIZARD
This software is released to the public domain. Fuck copyright.

Make a copy of your own or any other user's FetLife account.

You will need a FetLife account to use this tool. If you don't
have a FetLife account, you can easily create one at this page:

https://FetLife.com/signup

Creating a FetLife account is free and does not require a valid
email address or other personally identifying information. For
maximum security, create an account while using the Tor Browser.

https://torproject.org/

Type your FetLife username, then press return: SockPuppet

This first prompt asks you for the username of the FetLife user that the tool logs in as. This can be any account for which you can successfully log in to FetLife.com. If you don’t want to log in as your primary account, you can always create a secondary, secret account (a “sockpuppet”) that you use solely for the purpose of sleuthing around the site. If you want to make extra sure an account you create can’t be traced back to you, consider using the Tor Browser to register that account rather than your regular Web browser.

After you type your username, press return to continue to the next prompt:

Type the name of a folder to save to, or leave blank to use the default shown.
If this folder does not exist, it will be created.
Save to folder [/Users/maymay/Desktop/fetlife-export]: my-fetlife-archive

This next prompt is asking you for the name of a folder to save the archive in. It suggests the folder from which you run the tool, by default, but you can type whatever name you want here. In the example above, I’ve typed my-fetlife-archive, so the exporter will create a folder called “my-fetlife-archive” inside the “fetlife-export” folder on my Desktop, because that’s the same folder where the exporter program is on my hard drive.

Once you’ve chosen a name for the folder of your new archive, press return again to continue to the next prompt:

Type the ID number of the export target. For example, if you want to
create a copy of JohnBaku's entire FetLife history, type: 1
Leave blank to automatically detect and use SockPuppet's ID number.
Export target's user ID:

Now the exporter wizard is asking for the FetLife ID number of the user whose activity you want to download. The ID number is the last part of the URL in the profile of a FetLife user. So, for example, the profile URL for JohnBaku’s FetLife account is https://fetlife.com/users/1, so his user’s ID number is 1. If you want to download your own FetLife history (perhaps to make a backup of your account, or to keep a local copy so you can more easily search it, as I do) then you can leave this blank and just press return immediately, in which case the exporter will automatically detect and use the ID number of the account you’re logging in with. That’s what I did, in the example above.

The next prompt asks whether you want to use a proxy. We discussed proxies in detail when we learned how to use BitTorrent.

Use a proxy? (Leave blank to make a direct connection.)
If you want to use a proxy, enter the proxy's URL here. For example,
to make use of a default Tor Browser, type: socks://localhost:9150
Proxy URL: socks://localhost:9150

You can leave this blank to make a direct connection from your computer to FetLife.com, same as you do when you log in to FetLife normally. But if you want to make sure that no one can figure out that you’re the one making a copy of whatever it is you’re copying, then I strongly suggest downloading and running the Tor Browser and then entering its proxy address here, which is socks://localhost:9150, as shown in the example. As before, press return to move on to the next prompt:

fetlife-export.pl will now run with these parameters:
fetlife-export.pl --proxy=socks://localhost:9150 SockPuppet /Users/maymay/Desktop/fetlife-export/my-fetlife-archive

When prompted next, enter the password for SockPuppet.
Password:

The wizard shows you the full command line whose arguments it asked for, in case you want to run the command again without its help, and then prompts you to enter the password associated with your account. This is functionally identical to typing the password directly into FetLife’s log in form on its website, except that what you type won’t show up as bullets or stars, so be careful to enter it correctly. When you’ve entered your password, press return a final time to run the exporter itself.

You’ll see text appear in stages that, when finished, will look something like the following:

userID: 163357709
Loading profile: .
Loading conversations: . 8 conversations found.
Loading wall: . 5 wall-to-walls found.
Loading activity feed: ........................... 842 statuses found.
 78 pictures found.
 19 writings found.
 249 group threads found.
Downloading 842 statuses...
Downloading 78 pictures...
Downloading 19 writings...
Downloading 249 group posts...

logout
[Process completed]

When the exporter is done, you’ll see a folder of the name you specified, inside of which is another folder called fetlife, and inside that one will be a complete exported archive of the user’s FetLife account:

The archive contains any public images the target user uploaded to FetLife, along with all public posts they’ve made, all saved as HTML.² Since the downloaded archive is just a bunch of HTML files, you can use your computer’s built-in search tools (Mac OS X’s Spotlight or Windows Search, for example), to find posts and comments with any given phrase in a matter of seconds.

Additional, advanced FetLife data mining tools

While the above exporter software is useful for a lot of reasons—it helps FetLife users keep backups of their account data, saves their FetLife content in a portable, HTML format, and more—there’s another, additional tool that might interest you if you do any serious investigative work amongst the (obscenely corrupt) BDSM Scene, called FetLife Maltego.

This tool is a plug-in for Maltego, an application designed to automate the process of collecting information about people from public sources such as their social media profiles, domain name registrations, email addresses, phone numbers, mutual friend connections, public records databases, and more. Both Maltego itself and the FetLife Maltego plug-in (called a local transform) are beyond the scope of this guide, but there are some good Maltego beginner guides and Maltego Tutorial videos out there.

Happy muckraking! :)

One of the things this project is still missing is a simple packaged executable, such as a pp packed one, so if you want to help improve this process, the maintainers welcome patches via GitHub. [↩]
Comments in the HTML file also record the original URL that the page was created from, in case you want to give someone the live link on FetLife.com, if it still exists. [↩]

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Invasion of the Spicy Vanillas

27 Feb 2015 at 17:49

maymay

Community, Politics of sex, Stupid dominants

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rolequeer:

themerrymisnomer:

rolequeer:

themerrymisnomer:

rolequeer:

I am dying with laughter.

Wasteland, Europe’s biggest fetish party that advertises as ‘the wildest party on earth’ halted the sale of tickets for their 2015 party to keep out ‘housewives in jeans who read Fifty Shades of Grey’.

Their public statement that their party is about ‘a lifestyle’ that involved ‘a lot more than a bit of tying each other up’ is dripping with elitism and their entire panic about too many vanilla’s at their precious party is cracking me up.

INVASION OF THE SPICY VANILLAS!

damn…

And where’s the fet community crying out saying that this book is an opportunity to teach people about the “lifestyle” and get records straight about why it isn’t BDSM and blah blah blah blah

Like why do these folks think what they do is otherworldly or something like what you are doing isn’t divine calm down lol

Is it any wonder after how much they resisted things like KinkforAll?

I’m convinced a lot of ‘concerned’ BDSMers talking about fifty shades are not actually worried about hordes of housewives in jeans coming to their kink parties and getting in way over their heads and geting hurt. They’re worried about hordes of housewives in jeans coming to their kink parties and having a good time, sticking around and making the place uncool.

They’re worried because those who are comfortable being uncool won’t hesitate to call bullshit on creepy community leaders and the glorification of going more ‘hard core’. And let’s face it, a fifty year old mom would step in and interrupt a man grabbing a teenage girl by the collar without her permission, and she’d go Molly Weasley on his ass.

They’re worried about hordes of housewives in jeans exposing what they’ve always tried to keep secret: that tons of people are kinky in tons of ways, that BDSM isn’t anywhere near the most ‘deviant’ kink out there and is really just an uncreative repackaging of oppressive systems as fetish, and Molly Weasley is not impressed by their so called ‘extreme’ sex.

yooooo I feel like I gotta say “TEN POINTS FOR GRIFFYNDORRRRR” just for that takedown!!

Okay okay while we’re talking about Harry Potter metaphors, consider this one as well?

I saw this post a while back about how little difference there is between jock culture and geek/gamer-dude culture. Mostly that guys who feel unwelcome in mainstream hyper-masculine communities and society at lasrge recreate similar dynamics but suited to their obsessions or desires. I’d liken it to the reasons why puritans wanted to come here for “religious freedom” but look at why they were “persecuted” and look at us now….

Anyways, your comment reminded me of a good point the HP fandom made about Snape and his reasons for disliking Harry, which were less about his emotional vulnerability, his proximity to his mother Lily or that he’s his father’s son and more that Snape didn’t understand why Lily would fall for a jerk like James instead of a sullen jerk like himself and Harry is just a constant reminder of THAT.

Back to moms in jeans, these people feel less threatened by the fact that their pro-hardcore spaces will supplanted by non-commital spicy vanilla people and more that decent people will infiltrate the scene and make it accessible, MORE mainstream, and palatable to the type of people BDSM-ers abhor.

Like all pro-abuser dynamics aside, these people are huffing and puffing because the people who “rejected” them in some past incarnation or expression now want to see what they get up to and they’re reacting like a teenager who finds out that their parents listened to the same rebellious shit that they thought is one-of-a-kind and avant garde.

Fucking foolish.

Not sure if the same dynamic apply here, but seems like a reasonably close match.

Hahaha! That is fucking classic. :)

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Boiled frogs can’t censor Blog Nine and Three-Quarters

27 Feb 2015 at 01:07

maymay

Communication, Community, Technology, Writing and blogging

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This image is a Tumblr message I received recently and it’s indicative of a problem whose scope I want more people to understand. Here’s the message:

fishingforanvils:

Thanks for having your own domain name – it helps me get past the school’s proxy servers and read up about rolequeer theory unobstructed!

This is particularly timely because, as you know, my Tumblr, my Twitter, my Facebook, and even my personal sites have been “down” for quite a while. Some of you correctly guessed that this was intentional on my part.

Corporate-owned social media like Tumblr is increasingly censored, increasingly inaccessible to marginalized populations, increasingly hostile to people of color, increasingly greedy, and unethical. This is happening on two fronts:

The company’s direct actions, like failing to offer us ways to export our content portably, and censoring overtly political topics or even censoring the mere perception of controversy, etcetera, and
the company’s direct inactions, such as Twitter’s notorious unwillingness to provide meaningful community-driven mechanisms for users to protect themselves from abusive and bullying behaviors, Tumblr’s consistent takedowns of posts that warn other users about sexually predatory users (rapists), and so on. Disturbingly, Tumblr has proven equally bad as FetLife in this regard.

So, I’ll no longer be using corporate-owned social networks. I am not a frog to boil. I can’t, in good conscience, continue to support abusive social media platforms—companies whose fundamental business model is surveillance—with my constant participation, nor can I encourage friends who want to connect with me to do so using software that compromises their privacy, safety, and control over their own data. I’m far from the first, and certainly not the only one, saying goodbye like this. Plus, this just isn’t a good place to get important work accomplished.

Furthermore, the centralization of content into these corporate-owned “services” makes it way too easy for your access to information—any information!—to be controlled by outside parties. The person who wrote to me above, for example, presumably goes to a school whose Internet connection blocks access to any site with “tumblr.com” in the URL. It’s only because my Tumblr content is also accessible through a custom domain name (a domain name that I personally control) can this young queer person with an interest in rolequeer theory access information about it. This is why the decentralization and proliferation of information you value is vital to continued open discussion on the web. And because the Internet is often the only place youth and other marginalized and isolated folks can find information about others like themselves, that open discussion is vital to the survival of our communities.

Over the weeks since I took my online presence down, I’ve started receiving emails alternately asking if I’m okay (I am, and thank you so much for your shared concern, that was really heartwarming) and also if there is some way to reference my writing elsewhere. “I want to link my friend to this article you wrote, but when I tried to find it I noticed your site was down!” Even people on Tumblr, who ironically have the convenient option of copying my entire posts in one click using Tumblr’s “reblog” feature, expressed this frustration.

Again, this illustrates the point I’ve been trying to impress upon people for a long time: single, centralized resources are a vulnerability and we must never rely on any one thing. As I wrote in my “republishing policy” many years ago:

You do not need permission to copy and redistribute my work and, if you still feel you do, you now have it

[…] One of the prerequisites necessary to transfer ideas from one individual to another is exposure; if you never read this blog post, there is no possibility that the idea I’m writing about will make it into your mind. As a result, I’m frequently flattered by requests from group blogging initiatives to join them. However, I am also perpetually confused by these requests.

My response to such requests is always the same: “My blog is expressly CC BY-NC-ND licensed, and offers full-text RSS feeds; if you ever see something you want to cross-post to your non-commercial blog, don’t ask me, just cross-post it, even in full, without alteration, and include a link back to the original post on my blog.” Cross-posting my content in this way is not just the Internet equivalent of “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” your cross-post also functions as a distributed backup copy and even a censorship circumvention node for me.

So, for the love of good and worthwhile ideas, do not hesitate to copy my content and republish it elsewhere. In fact, as long as you are careful not to decontextualize it and you include proper attribution, I’d far prefer you cross-posted my writing than asked me to write something similar from scratch. In the former, you’re rewarding my ideas (you are not stealing), and in the latter, you’re forcing me to reinvent wheels.

The takeaway is this: if you find something of mine important enough to share with someone else, please consider doing something more than sending a link. If you have a blog, host a copy of the post yourself, then send your friend the link to your blog. If all you have is a Facebook account, copy-and-paste the article into a post or message of your own. Not only is this okay with me, it is important to me, and it should be important to you, too. If you care about youth, if you care about education, if you care about rolequeers, if you care about free access to knowledge, then making copies—literally just making a copy—is one of the most immediate things you can do to support those causes.

I know this doesn’t feel like you’re “doing a lot,” but as the message from fishingforanvils makes clear, you actually really are making a huge difference. The more copies of a thing there are, the harder it is for censors to block. It’s that simple. The mere fact that there has long been and continues to be a remarkably violent and forceful effort on the part of authority figures of all stripes to make us feel guilty about our natural inclination to copy and share that which we find valuable (they say we are “stealing” or “plagiarizing” if we do these things) should be enough proof that this is a powerful act of resistance against both domination and indoctrination.

I’ll be around for a while longer, but I won’t be around forever. I know many people use my websites as an archive or a repository, but keeping a website up does require some work and, in my case, quite a big percentage of my income. I pay on the order of $20 to $40 a month for my private server, which is relatively expensive because of the sheer number of hits my posts get, especially when I post something controversial and viral like Consent as a Felt Sense. And if that monthly expense seems like pocket change to you, remember that all of my income (a full 100%) is donations, and I use that income primarily for food.

So I’m going to be shifting my online presence around over the next couple of months. For now, I’m still going to participate in corporate-backed “social” media only for events like this weekend’s Take Root Reproductive Justice Conference. See, for instance, the artifacts of my #TakeRoot15 Tweet-stream from the event:

Yes! MT @maymaymx: Merrit: if UR activism doesnt physically & spiritually change UR life you may need to rethink your approach. #TakeRoot15

— RCRC (@RCRChoice) February 21, 2015

However, my archives in those spaces will no longer remain available for long.

Let me repeat that: while I am still “on Tumblr” and so on for now, my archives will not remain available for very long. If you find something of mine useful, you will need to make a copy of it and host it yourself. You can ask one another for help doing this. See, for example, how rolequeer.tumblr.com has been doing it.

I’m going to continue working on the things I care about, but you should no longer expect me to be in any online space controlled by a corporation. Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google Plus, and so on are extremely dangerous monopolies. I’m jumping ship. Alternatives do exist. I’m already there, and I’m not looking back.

Finally, many people assumed that the disappearance of my web presence was my way of “taking a break from the hate.” While the never-ending torrent of hate from the self-professed “anti-rolequeers” and others has certainly been tiring, my sudden departure from the Internet is not all that it appears. The reality is that my blogs are not “down.” The errors you see when you just punch in my web address in your browser or follow a link from Google are not happening because my blogs “broke.” The errors are intentional; my blogs have simply become invisible to some while still being easily accessible to others.

I am still writing. I am still blogging. I am still coding. I am still watching. And I am incorporating everything I learn into generating new work. Think of my web presence like Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley; so hidden from Muggles that they don’t even know what they’re missing, but if you know which brick to tap, a whole world of exciting new things awaits you…. If you ask in the right way, I might even give you the key. ;)

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US officials’ justification for torture and sadomasochists’ justification for BDSM are reflected in each other

20 Dec 2014 at 14:45

maymay

Politics of sex, Torture and abuse

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Let’s briefly look at two comparisons of the US government’s justifications for its torture program and the way sadomasochistic subcultural rhetoric about BDSM practices are discussed.

Comparison 1: “How far is too far?”

Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the books, “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror,” as well as “Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation,” provides the necessary background for the issue of government-run torture programs:

The psychologists [employed by the military] are critical, but theyâ€™re critical because psychological torture is, in effect, enshrined within U.S. law. When the United States finally ratified the U.N. Convention Against Torture in 1994, we did so subject to certain qualifications, known in diplomatic parlance as “reservations.” And basically, the four reservations that we introduced modified our approval, our ratification of that convention, everything in it except: We redefined the U.N. definition of what torture wasâ€”extreme painâ€”and we called it “prolonged mental harm,” that for an act to rise to the level of torture, it had to become, in U.S. parlance, in those reservations, prolonged mental harm.

Now, those three words are critical. First of all, “mental.” That meant that the United States was effectively splitting the U.N. convention down the middle. The convention barred both physical and psychological torture. We were saying, “We accept the ban on physical torture, but weâ€™re exempting the ban on psychological torture. And we are qualifying that ban because in order for an act to rise to the level of torture, of psychological torture, it has to inflict prolonged mental harm upon the victim.”

Now, what is “prolonged”? How long is “prolonged”? Thatâ€™s not defined. Itâ€™s a huge loophole. And what constitutes “harm”? Thatâ€™s another huge loophole. And that, of course, opened the door for that notorious memo by the Office of Legal Counsel, its leader then Jay Bybee, to say that for something to rise to the level of harm, the pain must be sufficient or equivalent to organ failure. In other words, torture, psychological torture up to but not including death, is legally acceptable in U.S. law.

(Emphasis mine.)

Meanwhile, even the most casual Google search about BDSM will reveal copious writings about “the difference between hurt and harm.” Here are just a sample.

From “A Submissive’s Journey,” quoting cishet BDSM figurehead Jay Wiseman:

Jay Wiseman recently published a definition of hurt vs. harm that has been kicking around local BDSM circles for many years. [â€¦]Â Generally, if the person who has been permanently marked actively consented to the mark, it isn’t considered harm. If the person wasn’t expecting to be permanently marked or scarred and it’s done to them anyways, it’s generally considered to be harm.

From Letherati, a popular Gay Leather online portal:

hurt and harm are different: hurt is temporary, but harm is lasting â€” whether itâ€™s physical, like loss of a limb or function; psychological, like PTSD or reduced self-esteem; or spiritual, such as despair. What makes avoiding harm suitable as the master principle for BDSM (though not of all ethics) is precisely that it doesnâ€™t prescribe what people should find pleasurable or conducive to their happiness. Whatever your turn-ons and sources of satisfaction â€” and everyoneâ€™s are different â€” harm is lasting damage that diminishes your ability to enjoy life or pursue happiness. In other words, the principle of avoiding harm helps us decide how far is too far to go with a clean conscience in BDSM play or relationships.

Does this mean that things like degradation, objectification, or dehumanization have no place in ethical BDSM? Not necessarily: making someone physically, mentally, or spiritually less than before can be okay â€” and may even, paradoxically, empower the â€œvictimâ€ â€” when itâ€™s a temporary, reversible effect.

(Emphasis in original.)

In both contexts, there is a strong focus on discerning “how far is too far” with respect to damage caused. If any questions are raised, the questions in both contexts are ones arising from a legalistic foundation for consent. These questions sound like, “What counts as ‘torture,’ or ‘harm’?”, “Under what circumstances is it acceptable to torture or harm someone?”, and “In the case of a dispute, what evidence is needed to prove that damage rose to the level of torture or harm?”

In neither context do the torturers or consensual hurt-enjoyers(??) deny that there is, in fact, physical or psychological or both kinds of damage being caused. The denials only come later, once objections are raised. For now, they just want to lawyer about whether the damage was “legitimate” torture or abuse.

Comparison 2: “That is not who we are.”

Of course, for obvious reasons, there have been numerous objections raised against torture as well as BDSM from many different sources. In both contexts, I think it’s safe to say that the most convincing arguments against each practice have come from the people who have intimate knowledge of them. In the case of the torture program, this means victims who have survived being tortured, as well as government and military employees who participated in but have since spoken out against the torture program. In the case of BDSM, this means BDSM’ers themselves, and especially Submissives or bottoms, who are the practitioners most often on the receiving end of physical and psychological trauma and abuse.

How do torturers react when they are confronted by such objections? Here’s what Dick Cheney said during his interview last Sunday on NBC’s Meet The Press:

CHUCK TODD [INTERVIEWER]: Let me go to Gul Rahman. He was chained to the wall of his cell, doused with water, froze to death in C.I.A. custody. And it turned out it was a case of mistaken identity.

DICK CHENEY: –right. But the problem I had is with the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield. […] I’m more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.

CHUCK TODD: 25% of the detainees though, 25% turned out to be innocent. They were released.

DICK CHENEY: Where are you going to draw the line, Chuck? How are– […]

CHUCK TODD: Is that too high? You’re okay with that margin for error?

DICK CHENEY: I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.

There’s a few different threads to unpack here, but for now let’s focus simply on the repeated invocations of the “bad guys” versus “good guys” (binary/black and white, etc.) worldview, a common refrain in the tactic of political melodrama.

Following on from this are the statements by James Mitchell, one of two key psychologists who devised the torture program, in a recent VICE News interview:

To me, it seems completely insensible that slapping KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] is bad, but sending a Hellfire missile into a familyâ€™s picnic and killing all the children and, you know, killing Granny and killing everyone is OK, for a lot of reasons. One of the reasons is: What about that collateral loss of life? And the other is, is that if you kill them, you canâ€™t question them.

[â€¦]

Itâ€™s a lot more humane, even if you are going to subject them to harsh techniques, to question them while they are still alive, than it is to kill them and their children and their neighbors with a drone.

This is a rather revealing statement, both considering that, contrary to his description of it, drone warfare is supposedly “surgically precise,” and that “slapping” is not a description of what people are upset about happening to Kalid Sheikh Mohammed. Regardless, Cheney’s themes are replicated here. But Mitchell takes Cheney’s absurd logic one step further; Mitchell asserts it’s better (“more humane”) to torture people than to kill them.

Now that’s just sadistic, isn’t it?

And how do BDSM’ers and their enablers talk about “What It Is That We Do”? It’s an endless refrain of the same: BDSM’ers are “good guys,” not like those “bad guy” abusers.

Again, a casual Google search will turn up countless articles and blog posts from BDSM’ers about the difference between “BDSM,” which is A-okay (and not-harm, remember?) versus “abuse,” which no real BDSM’er does, because then it’s not abuse, it’s BDSM (and that’s totally not a No True Scotsman argument, nope, definitely not that).

Even some professional psychologists (*cough*like Mitchell*cough*) are playing along. The Associated Press consulted Dr. Keely Kolmes, “a San Francisco-based psychologist who sees patients who practice BDSM,” for a story about Ed Bagley and his wife who “coerced a young woman to become a sex slave and sexually tortured her in their home in Lebanon Mo.”. Kolmes “said that many of the acts listed in the indictment can be part of consensual activities. But others might indicate Bagley was an abuser, such as allegations that he shot animals the woman cared about to prove he could kill her and that he refused to stop immediately when the woman used a ‘safe word.'”

So while the progressive, sex-positive, pro-BDSM feminist who assures everyone it’s all okay as long as safe words are respected may find this fact hard to stomach, in truth their position is not all that different from Dick Cheney’s. If it’s different at all, it’s different in degree, not in kind. In journalist Nicole Hemmer’s words, “We’re All Dick Cheney”:

Our comfort with torture is not a result of immediate post-attack fear, but something that goes far deeper. President Barack Obama has denounced torture many times in his presidency, saying, â€œThat is not who we are.â€ But Obama is wrong. We condone torture, both overtly and in our unwillingness to bring those complicit in torture to justice. And worse, we cling to an American exceptionalism that says our nation is a force of good in the world (which it is) that is uniquely untouched by baser human impulses (which it is not) â€“ this despite our record, in every single war, of violating civil and human rights.

That unwillingness to see ourselves as we are, that failure to recognize the American capacity not only for wrongdoing but for evil, prevents us from properly reckoning with the true costs of our wars, propelling us to go off in search of monsters to destroy without first confronting the monster within.

She may be more correct than she knows. Beyond theÂ explicit pro-torture policies our federal government enacts, our municipal police forces have the same history. For example, in Chicago, it’s well known that police officers tortured at least 110 Black men to elicit false confessions, and in New York City, a bevy of “isolated incidents” that all share common characteristics, like the torture and rape of Abner Louima in a Brooklyn police station, are all examples from recent memory.

But institutions such as governments like ours or, analogously, companies like these are not entities unto themselves. They’re made of people. And those people, these torturers, don’t exist in a vacuum whose boundaries are impermeable and separate from the everyday lives of everyday citizens. The same pattern, the same cycle of abuse, the same justifications for torture, are plainly visible at every level of American societyâ€”just ask any survivor of government torture, or any survivor of BDSM abuse.

In both the “national security” and the “sex-positive (BDSM)” context, I think it’s long past time for us to start asking ourselves whether “because freedom” is a sufficient justification for torture.

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Praxis Journal’s “Mapping Sexual Assault” and Technology for Rape Survivor Support Networks

16 Dec 2014 at 15:59

maymay

Politics of sex, Technology

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This is a long and highly technical paper written by someone who has been thinking about sexual assault survivor support along the same exact lines as unquietpirate and myself.

We began our work on Predator Alert Tool in early to mid-2012 and eventually released the first functional prototype on October 26, 2012. A little over a year later, on December 9, 2013, a technologist and social activist named Praxis published the first version of “Mapping Sexual Assault: Addressing Under-Reporting & Perpetrator Correlation Problems With Confidential, Double-Blind, & Anonymous Cryptographic Surveying Techniques” but it contains numerous serious security vulnerabilities, including ones that Predator Alert Tool for Facebook and some of the other Predator Alert Tools are also vulnerable to. But this week, Praxis published a revised proposal for a similar, fully decentralized system:

The cryptosystem proposed in this paper is designed to attack the impunity currently enjoyed by most perpetrators of sexual assault, who operate in an environment in which most assaults are not reported, and most judicial systems are not interested in prosecuting rape as rigorously as other violent crimes. This system is designed to pseudonymously connect survivors who share a common perpetrator with one another. By doing so we hope to introduce disruptive conditions that would lead to greater accountability for the perpetrators of sexual assault.

I’ve just reviewed the paper and, at first glance, I find much to like about it. My main initial frustration is mostly with what I still believe is an over-concern with mitigating harms from “false reports,” but in general Praxis’s approach to this problem and its related ones are survivor-centric and thorough, rightly surmising that the State-backed legal system is nothing but an obstruction to justice both for survivors and perpetrators. The conclusion of Praxis’s paper highlights the obvious overlap between their theoretical work on the problem of endemic serial rape and my own and my collaborator’s work on Predator Alert Tool:

Impunity is the key property that explains the widespread prevalence of sexual assault. Rapists are often able to remain anonymous to the next person they hurt, because most survivors do not report. Most survivors do not report because existing accountability mechanisms in society do not treat rape as a serious crime. Survivors who report are often subjected to blaming attacks by social peers and are ignored by those who are supposed to be responsible for investigation and accountability, whether that is the police and court system or a university administration. Lack of any real accountability for perpetrators who are reported and the low rate of reports overall are intrinsically linked; these two factors compose a mutually re-enforcing feedback loop that leads to greater impunity for rapists, who consequently enjoy relative anonymity when targeting people and little chance of facing serious consequences if they are reported.

One way to deal with the problem of impunity is to label people. The prison system does this all the time when it labels people as felons and sex offenders, labels that follow those people for the rest of their lives. This system relies on first demonstrating dispositively that the individual probably committed the act in question, and then publicizing a persistent label associated with their real name, or sometime even their biometric identity. This system has [many] flaws.

[â€¦But t]here is a[nother] way: ignore existing accountability mechanisms, which are unreceptive to prosecuting rape, and focus on connecting survivors who share the same perpetrator, without centralizing any information about the perpetrators or survivors themselves. [â€¦]

Introducing survivors who share a common perpetrator to one another would likely have a disruptive effect oncampus wide conversations about sexual assault, and would introduce new deterrents for perpetrators who would be more vulnerable to exposure, prosecution, or independent retributive action taken by the survivors themselves. Unlike a â€œlabel and publicizeâ€ system, this model would not rely on flawed dispositive accountability systems, in fact this system would be utterly neutral as to the question of whether an assault had occurred or not, it would merely link people who claimed a common perpetrator. What they should do with that information from there is entirely up to them, the survivors.

(Emphasis mine.)

I’m very pleased to see that other people are finally beginning to do serious work on sexual assault in this way.

To the best of my knowledge, the only existing tool designed to introduce survivors who share a common perpetrator is Predator Alert Tool for Facebook. It is not a perfect tool by any means, but the project is a free software, open source, anti-copyright, legally unencumbered, public domain repository.

To thrive, it needs to be used. Here are two very good, simple and user friendly introductions to using Predator Alert Tool for Facebook (and its sister tool, the Predator Alert Tool for OkCupid). Please share this with your friends: