I love it when I come across people writing about submission in a deep and thoughtful way! If you have not discovered The Pleasure Coach, check out this post to get you started: The Sovereignty of Submission. Reading this post brought me back to the subject of power and submission (see here here and here for examples). I come from the viewpoint that both partners in a D/s style relationship have power and responsibility. Even in a 24/7 Master/slave dynamic both parties have s

With the 2020 election just days from now, I have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about power: structural power, institutional power, personal power. My entire adult life has been dedicated to the study and understanding of power in some form (go, go, grad school nerd!). In the last three-year shit show of the current administration, I keep returning to the idea that the power most accessible and most feared by people is the power of the erotic. The erotic is the po

A vast percentage of posts about submission and control (including mine) are about the relationship between a submissive and their D-type. It is interpersonal power dynamics. However, I was reading tweets by @Ignixia the other day (follow her, she is really smart!) and she nailed a concept I have been struggling to articulate for a long time. She pointed out the reason we in the kink community frame “submission as a gift” and say “the submissive is the one with the real power

Most people think BDSM is just about the sex. It is often reduced to sexual and sexualized acts, especially in mainstream media representations. People focus on gimp suits, anal sex and whips. In reality, BDSM is only partly about the sex and fetishes. For many of us, it is a whole way of interacting with the world. While the devotion to consent, communication, and understanding power is derived (mostly) from the types of sex folks have, these concepts transcend actions in t

For those of you unfamiliar with Fetlife, it is a social media site for kinky folks (kinky defined very broadly). Currently, there is a group of folks of undetermined size who are planning to temporarily deactivate their accounts at the end of April as a protest to some of the current policies and procedures on Fetlife. In the last couple of years as kink has become incredibly popular in the mass media the site has grown exponentially with folks looking to explore some part o

I have spent nearly 30 years working in political activism. My graduate work in political psychology focused on identity, education and political involvement. I have worked from inside and outside movements. There is one thing I have seen consistently: Sexually empowered women are the most powerful force in the world. Most cultures around the world have a lot of stigma and shame they train into women. Making us ashamed of our bodies, our sexuality, our desires and our needs w

Let’s talk about the idea of “religious freedom” and why it is absolutely imperative for all of us to be as queer and kinky as possible. Someone inside the current Putin/Bannon administration “leaked” the “religious freedom protection” document today. This document outlines the plans for stripping rights from millions of Americans. [I enclosed leaked in quotes because I think this is more of a trial balloon than an actual leak.] The wording released for the upcoming Executive

This morning Trump released a barrage of tweets speculating that former beauty queen Machado had made a sex tape. Of course, as with most of his claims, there is no evidence to back this up (as of this writing), but he managed to rile up the interwebs. This exchange and the response of thousands of other people elucidate so much about the way we treat female sexuality in the United States. As women, we are supposed to use our sexuality in the service of ad men and to meet unr

I get naked in public… a lot. I do burlesque and performance art with a number of groups and much of it involves taking my clothes off. Recently, I was a participant in an event called Strip Vocabulary. It was at a bar in Sacramento, CA and part of Drunk Poetry. Drunk Poetry is a monthly event at this bar. It brings in poets for rounds on on-the-spot poetry writing and geared at a fun night out. It has dirty haikus, limericks, poetic gangsta rap and other such activities. Thi

I have had to come out about things a few times in my life. I’m queer. I’m bipolar. I am kinky. None of these things are obvious at first glance. So, I have to make the decision to tell people over and over again. Coming out as queer has never been a big deal to me. I never had the impression that being gay was wrong or bad, it was always just a part of me. When I came out to my parents it was actually as a way of derailing my father during a fight about how much I was on the

“Submission is a gift.” I hear that phrase constantly in the kink community. I hear submissives say it. I hear Dom(me)s say it. Switches say it. I have said it. Pretty much everyone I hear speak about submission at some point utters this phrase. It seems almost like assumed knowledge in the kink world. But is submission really a gift? I want to unpack the idea of submission as a gift in this blog. Yes, It Can Be Okay, I do see some parts of submission as a gift. When you ente