This is a confession of sorts but also a cry for help. I think about myself in reference to kink and sex and realize that I associate submission and service with being feminine. I associate beauty, weakness, and delicacy with being feminine. And I also realize that I am so terrified of being seen as anything other than feminine that I put up some strange defenses against this.

Case study A: Ariel

Ariel is my gorgeous girlfriend. She is beautiful and petite and has long flowing hair. She moves gracefully on high heels. She also has a powerful job in a male-dominated industry and changes car batteries and asserts herself aggressively in conversations. She looks high femme but has always thought of herself as butch. Still, when I touch her I sometimes feel huge, ham-fisted, rough, and all-together ugly. I know she longs for me and I fail her because I don’t know how to be. On the one hand, strapping on a pretty dildo and fucking her for hours sounds like pure bliss but I know that getting to that point will be full of second-guessing myself and my desires and my actions.

Am I being entirely heterosexist in my view of this sexual relationship? Abso-fucking-lutely! Because she is feminine, I feel masculine. (We won’t even get into the terrible fact that I associate masculinity [on myself!] with ugliness) I don’t want to feel this way. It isn’t enlightened, it isn’t sex positive. I wouldn’t teach it to my students. But it infects my reality and I don’t know how to deprogram it.

Case study B: Michael

[Note: This section has been edited for nuance. The lack it previously exhibited, though, is likely symptomatic of my issues with binary thinking.]

Michael is a petite man. We are the same height and I outweigh him significantly. When we first met I didn’t think the relationship would work because of this. I thought I would feel huge and be self-conscious and afraid. So I submitted myself to him. He felt like he was capable of being in charge and I let him be. Even if I couldn’t be delicate and small by comparison physically, I knew I could shrink myself mentally. It works out well that he has discovered enjoyment of beating me until I cry, pulling my hair, grabbing my throat. (Again we won’t get into how fucked up it is that my way of feeling feminine involves simulated victimization) Even when I am initiating sex with him, it feels like an act of service and devotion. He often gives me feedback on how to touch and where and when. I siddle up to him and slither a limb around his body. I kiss gently. The touches are a seduction and they are a worship and only in my most wanton and least self-conscious moments do I allow myself to be aggressive and take up space.

Taking up space

I haven’t really defined what this means to me just yet. You may have guessed some of it by now, though. I think of it in terms of physical space – my body is larger and I attempt to diminish that regularly. I also think of it terms of political space – my voice should be smaller, my needs should be less important, my desires should be locked away.

This might seem ridiculous to some of you that have met me or read this blog. Of course I take up space in terms of talking about sex. Here I am now with this presence on the internet. Blabbing, opining, discussing in detail, issuing edicts and judgments and ideas. But some of that strength leaves me when I’m making love to some of the people I adore most in the world.

I know that every relationship goes through growing pains and these are no exception, but this issue feels bigger and scarier and more about me being fucked in the head than any I have run into before. So, dear reader, tell me what you think. How do I get my theory to line up with my practice? How do I deschool myself of gender? How do I embrace femininity in a way that doesn’t make me need to masculinize others? How have you done it or how do you wish you could?

April – Where I attended Sex 2.0 and had a fire lit under me. I started a Twitter account, got involved with FetLife, and relaunched my podcast. I finally realized that I was part of a community and felt like I belonged.

May – I started reviewing products on my podcast and blog for VibeReview.

June – I spent a lot of time thinking about sex work in both text and audio forms. I also got sort of pissy and ridiculous about blogging and met Artemis Hunter for the first time.

July – I had my first freelance work published in The Naughty American and dug up some old camwhore shots. I also experienced a bit of heartbreak, but it turned out a great piece of writing if I do say so myself. I also got tied up by Artemis and finally hooked up with Carmine who had previously only been known as “cross-dressing law student“. Finally, I began publishing the Musings on Masculinity series.

August – The biggest news and one of the happiest days of my last several years was telling my dad about my “secret identity”. I’m still basking in the joy of that moment as I remember it. Also in July, Jay and I got to know Hania much better.

September – I was named #5 on the list of the Top 100 Sex Bloggers of 2008 among started a bajillion other projects. We also went to Dark Odyssey Summer Camp which was a watershed event for me despite the fact that I haven’t talked about it too much. I also presented at the Fetish Fair Flea Market and got to meet Catalina and Marky for the first time.

October – The posts slowed down and the earth stopped moving because something remarkable happened. We met Ariel and Michael and fell in love and my feet still haven’t touched the ground. At first I could only express the feelings in music. But. . .

November -  . . . soon I found more detailed words and images to express my thoughts. I captured the unique sadomasochistic relationship that Michael and I have developed as well as the experienced of being fucked by Ariel for the first time. And the sexy gave way to the mundanely profound as we found ourselves forming a type of family, broken hollondaise and all.

December – Ariel starts lending a hand with reviews and I think that the format suits this site. Jay and I also visited New York and saw tons of the friends that we met through the year. I also spent a sedate Birthday and Hanukkah at home with my new chosen family.

Okay. Let’s put our niche porn marketing hats on here and shine the red light of reason upon this logic. Someone who is looking for cartoon photos of The Simpsons characters is probably not fueling the demand for genuine child porn that does involve the abuse of children. Shock-value cartoon porn simply doesn’t tend to cross over to the screams and pain of gory reality. Many–most I’ve talked to–viewers of cartoon porn and hentai prefer it because they’re trying to get away from the gray areas of gory reality. Let’s ignore, for a moment, the obvious slippery-slope leap of logic used here and assume, for a moment, that it’s possible for fiction to inspire its viewers to enact crimes portrayed therein.

(“Pull Down Your Skirt; Your Id Is Showing”)

I’ll spare you the round of, “Amen, sistah” and just direct you to read the rest of her insightful commentary. She has moved past outrage, into logic, and ultimately has me a little afraid. Fiction is just that and the goriest and most brutal crimes and atrocities are committed in it. When I think of the fictional material available in the world, Bart banging Lisa is pretty low on my scale of disgust and revulsion.

People like Andrei Bely, Mikhael Bulgakov, and Anna Akhmatova had important things to say and vivid artistic expression that simply could not be expressed. Their ideas were not just unpopular, they were dangerous to the government. And, the simple knowledge of the existence of these writings would have been sufficient to cause them and their entire families to be imprisoned or killed. Writing for the drawer was a political reality and necessity.

People still write in this way today, but not for such dire reasons. The cloak of anonymity that most bloggers maintain is significant but sometimes even it isn’t sufficient. What if I told you that even on an anonymous blog, the community that exists is enough to cause some to self-censor?

If anonymous blogging is already writing for the drawer and this blog is a space for my most personal and difficult thoughts, then where do I write down the things that I can’t even say here? One solution is personal friendships. I have a friend that frequently sends me emails with pieces of writing and a subject line like, “I can’t blog this”. Sometimes he is correct. For social reasons or political ones or just “good taste”, he really can’t. Sometimes I convince him that he is wrong because I know his subject line is a challenge to both of us, of course he “can” blog it, but will he?

Me? I don’t even commit these dirtiest of thoughts to words in a publishable way. I may talk about them with friends or even allude to them on Twitter but the simple act of stringing words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs seems very risky and final to me. If I write and I don’t publish, I am admitting that the thoughts are unpublishable. And if I don’t publish the unpublishable, what am I doing here?

So, my challenge to myself and to every other reader, writer, and sexual being out there is to think about those controversial thoughts. The ones that are too provocative, too infuriating, too risky for even your anonymous self. If you’re brave, you’ll share them in the comments, if you’re braver you’ll commit it to posterity in some way.

I’ll be writing a series of posts that reveal these thoughts and ideas. They won’t be comfortable and they won’t be nice but they aren’t written in the spirit of burning bridges but rather in the hope of forging difficult and painful connections through honesty.

It is official. The connection I find between knowledge/schooling and sex moves beyond the theoretical and beyond the fact that I want to fuck my professors.

My notes scribbled inside The History of Sexuality Volume 1 could be for a future paper and they could be for this blog and I’m not sure which venue is appropriate anymore. I’m not sure that my identity as a potential scholar is at all divorced from my identity here. Each day that identity gets more fluid. I tell one more person that I am a phone slut for hire or that I am polyamorous or that I am kinky or that I own sex toys or any number of other details that are starting to feel mundane.

This evening I went to a Foucault reading group. It was 6 graduate students plus Jack, a professor in my department. I refer to him now by the name I gave him in a piece of fiction I wrote 3 years ago (and by “fiction” I mean “daydream committed to blog“). That piece was written near the beginning of my graduate studies (and at the beginning of this blog) but I have known Jack since I was an undergraduate. I don’t kid myself that I have come full circle in some way, but over 3 years of documenting my feelings and thoughts about sex must mean something.

The nature of blogging is that it busts up our ideas about narrative, there often isn’t a clear story or arc of reasoning. Especially in the world of personal blogs, the evolution of emotions and ideas is what carries the real narrative quality. With each post I write I know that it will reach the readers that have read every word I have ever published here (a *very* small group) as well as those that stumble upon it in isolation of what comes before and what comes after. They may see it 5 minutes after I write or 5 years but it stands on its own in a way that it absolutely cannot. That is my cross to bear of course, but sometimes it makes the writing unbearable and impossible. An impenetrable wall of hyperlinks, exposition, caveats, and insecurity. But I still write.

This isn’t an essay about what compels me but this is rather a story about how I am longing to set myself free from this anonymity. It sounds like a contradiction, right? Anonymity is supposed to bestow my freedom on me, allow me to say and be the things that I never could be in the rest of the world. But what if I want to be those things out in the open, proudly, and productively. What then of my ubiquitous “head shot” that features my arm flung over my face? Where my body is capsized, the emphasis of my being not on my eyes but on my mouth and my tits. Am I just a mouth and tits? I have a voice and I have a sexuality (or at least desireable curves) but I can’t be seen and perhaps I can’t see out. Perhaps you didn’t come here for a deconstructive analysis of my own dirty photos. Perhaps you are the reader I cited above and (if you are even still reading) you are thinking “what is this chick on? what can I get off to? isn’t this supposed to be a sex blog?”

I know that risk. I know that being a sex worker I have this privilege of being myself that I can only exercise to a certain degree. I do have to be always on, always willing to serve, I do have to present an image of myself that is both real and hyper-real at the same time. Am I horny? Generally, yes. This moment, of course. With you, absolutely. That is my mantra and it reflects who I am to a degree. It also determines me. Is it a fabrication if I have *become* what I strove to represent myself as?

So I was talking about Jack and the Foucault group. I sat with a group of my peers today and I talked about Foucault. Simple enough, something that graduate students do. But it felt like I had so much more at stake. Every fiber of my being was screaming to really dig into the implications of these ideas. What about sex workers? What about BDSM? What about bisexuality? What about a million other predilections/perversions that are all around us but I may not be personally invested in?

But we talked about power. And there is nothing wrong with that, it is the guiding idea in Foucault’s work and it is crucial to understanding what he says about sexuality and sexual identity/orientation. But I craved something else, an honesty that would shock and impress and be productive. I wanted to share knowledge, an ars erotica, with my peers but instead I operated in my usual capacity. I listened to Jack, I nodded my head, and occasionally I re-phrased what he said in order to make sure I understood it. He agreed and all was well but my insides were screaming and my mind was racing with ideas and questions that were both on the tip of my tongue and impossible to articulate.

So, I’m left in this chasm between my academic authority and the authenticity of my experience. Neither is represented here or there and I feel incomplete.

I know this post went in a million different directions and there are more still streaming around in my mind. What would Foucault say about this? Why do I even care what Foucault would say about this? Really, it is an absurd and laughable question but I still find myself clinging to it.

Oh, and happy fucking Half-Naked Thursday, here is a picture of my ass splattered with come. It was taken with Jay’s camera phone after he fucked me during a call with a client. Posting this feels so mundane.

The event was an interesting one for me personally because I have never appeared publicly in relation to this blog or my work in phone sex. I was both excited and nervous but luckily I met some of the most amazing people during the process and therefore felt totally safe.

The weekend began for us on Friday afternoon when Jay and I arrived at our hotel, I had time for a quick cleaning up after the car ride and then ran to the airport to pick up Melissa who I’ve been waiting to meet forever. You know how you meet some people and they are nothing like you expected them to be based on their writing? Well, this was not the situation with Melissa. She is bright, cheerful, sarcastic, and carries this amazing presence given her tiny frame. After getting Melissa to the hotel I met up with Match for a drink before the pole dancing party.

The pole party was a blast, again I expected to feel self-conscious and worried but everyone was gorgeous and sexy and uninhibited and that sort of thing rubs off on you. This is where I met Mistress Maeve, who happens to be one of the most stunning women I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do pictures but here is everyone at the party (excluding myself and Maeve.)

While I was pole dancing, Jay was at the Clermont Lounge with a bunch of people from the conference. The original plan was to head over there after the party was over but I was so exhausted that we headed back to the hotel instead. We went to a lot of trouble to get a nice hotel room with a whirlpool tub and all sorts of neat features but we didn’t use them at all and instead just crashed. I was surprised to realize that I had actually gotten sore from pole dancing. The front of my thighs were in rough shape because I guess that a lot of what I had been doing was basically squats.

We woke up bright and early, had some breakfast at the hotel, and headed to the conference. I got to see 1763 for the first time and was pretty impressed. When they said that the conference was happening at a dungeon, they weren’t just messing around. This place was, as they like to say on the internet, serious business. There were several rooms outfitted with lots of different equipment and the central space was huge and featured a giant shower in one corner (that Viviane quipped was the size of a New York studio apartment.) We arrived as Amber was giving the opening comments and then got to see Dacia give her keynote remarks. At this point it was time for the first session and I chose to attend Melissa’s. She trotted out her bag of tricks from being a sexual health educator and assigned us to perform roleplays of various sex and internet problems that people might have. I got the joy of performing a creative piece that Match and I developed to deal with jealousy that insignificant others might have over blog fans. I don’t remember much of it other than Match cracking everyone up with his request that I “@ him while I do it“. This was the first sign that Twitter was going to be a driving force of the weekend.

The next session I went to was run by Elizabeth Wood and was on Creating the Sex Commons. This was definitely the most thought-provoking and emotionally difficult sessions that I attended because we talked about responsibility. And I thought a lot about my responsibilities as a sex positive person when I step into a classroom and when I open a blog post and how (if ever) those two things are meant to interact. (I have written about this before). I also thought a lot about my responsibilities to my clients and friends and this session made me realize what important group of people were missing from Sex 2.0 – the clients. We were many of us there sex workers but none of us were paid consumers and I really wished that perspective had been present. Maybe next year!

After lunch I attended a session by the lovely Cunning Minx of Poly Weekly. Since Jay and I have struggled with our open relationship I thought that some tips might be helpful and Minx was encouraging and helpful while remaining quite realistic. I appreciated her sense of humor and grace in discussing icky emotions such as jealousy.

After this session, it was time for my own. I felt under-prepared but the vibe at the conference was so pleasant and open that I was really excited and confident anyway. In preparation, I had surveyed some phone sex operators and asked them about their personal phone sex habits and histories. I found out some interesting tidbits about the industry and how the average operator feels about phone sex. Some said that they regularly get off during calls, some said that they would never ever get off because phone sex doesn’t turn them on at all. Some said that they have NEVER done phone sex before being hired as a professional, others had done it recreationally for years. These statistics were interesting to my audience but what they really wanted to know was the nitty gritty of the job. How to get started, how to promote yourself, what to do to get the caller to tell you what they want and make them happy. I enjoyed sharing my expertise and it seems like there might be some more bloggers cum phone sex operators on the scene in the near future. Certainly a lot of women decide to do phone sex (as themselves or as a character) and the blog and promotional efforts come later. This is a logical way to go about things but I’m really grateful for the route that I ended up taking. This blog is too important to me to be reduced to a pure marketing effort. The minimal planning that I did for the session went out the window when I realized that we had run out of time just on me answering questions.

The last session that I attended was Viviane’s sex blogging session. Since I’ve been doing this for a few years, I had covered most of the ground that she did but it was amazingly informative. I can imagine that people just starting out with blogging got an amazing leg up because Viviane was sharing things with them that it took me *years* to figure out. Also, she is hot and amazing and brilliant so I wanted to bask in her presence.

Honestly, the day ended too soon. As it was wrapping up I was wishing that there was more but luckily the social opportunities had just begun. More on that later but for now check out Sakura Sarashi’s account of the evening and Sunday as she was with me the entire time.

Oh, that one, I thought, as a conspiratorial smile spread across my face. Finally a concept I can fully grasp in this course.

Our textbook describes four basic types of phonation: voiced, voiceless, whisper, and murmur. When I read the text before class I didn’t imagine that it was *that* sort of murmur. Technically, a murmur is a combination of the vibration of a voiced sound and the voicelessness of a whisper. Place your fingers on your throat and say the sound /f/ and then the sound /v/ – you should feel a vibration on the /v/ because it is voiced. When we murmur (sweet nothings preferably) our vocal cords do not close along their entire length and the air that flows through adds whisper to our voiced sounds.

At first it seemed a bit antiseptic to turn something that, for me, was almost second nature into something scientific and classifiable. Then I thought of the bodily nature of this thing, the murmur. The movement of the tongue in the mouth and across pearly teeth. The breath sent through pursed lips to caress any vulnerable and exposed bit of a lover. The vibrations of the vocal chords that carry through our entire bodies. Perhaps understanding this little bit of biology, anatomy, and the marvel of the human capacity to communicate draws me closer to understanding the communication between bodies and minds during lovemaking.

This little lesson in the phonation is part of the science of arousal and seduction. Especially vocally. That murmur that we love to hear, the breathiness and raspiness of it, signals something in our psyche, an utterance between voice and whisper that points to a similar longing.

I guess I always knew that my voice was an instrument but I never quite knew how it was tuned. And now, with this awareness, I’m ready to stretch the vocal chords again.

Gang members in one of Colombia’s most violent cities face an ultimatum: give up guns or give up sex. In what is being called a “strike of crossed legs”, supported by the Pereira mayor’s office, the wives and girlfriends of gang members have said they will not have sex with their partners until they vow to give up violence.

[...]

The city’s security secretary, Julio César Gómez, said surveys of gang members showed that their favourite activity was having sex and their membership of gangs was more about power and sexual seduction than money.

Read the rest (via Sexoteric)

It is interesting to think of women successfully using their bodies to deter violence. However, one has to wonder if this concept of so many women as blockades will lead to them being literal punching bags. The women interviewed in the article claim that they are not afraid of violence from their partners but I wouldn’t be so sure. People that thrive on sex for power might not take well to it being witheld. This is an intriquing story, I hope it gets followed after the initial coverage. It could signal a new method of direct action. Well, as new as anything that Aristophanes wrote about over 2,000 years ago.

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. – Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

This semester I will take a seminar on Gilles Deleuze it is being taught by two of my favorite professors, Thomas and Jack. These are also professors that I have no small level of longing for. Afterall, how could I resist them, I am young and impressionable, eager to please and desiring to be intellectually sexy to my idols. They are freshly minted PhDs with good looks, charisma, and a laid-back approach to instruction. They intentionally blur the line between teacher and student. They cultivate casual relationships with students, curse in class, and teach incredibly sexy theory. In the bar a few nights ago, I ran into Thomas and my friends and I sat down with him for a drink.

One drink became several, the conversation got intense and personal, and everyone I had come there with trickled away to go home. Thomas and I were alone at the bar now and continued to talk. Then Thomas made a remark that changed everything.

I wish I remember the exact thing that I said directly beforehand but I can’t. It was hopefully insightful and sexy. Perhaps it was relatively mundane but regardless it elicited a significant response.

Thomas shrugged his shoulders forward, resting his head in his hands with his elbows on the bar and said, “I have to keep reminding myself that you are my student.”

I look away, facing forward, bars are good for diverting a gaze in that way. “So that’s where we are,” I reply.

We said some more things in the following minutes, they were pithy and flirtatious and in the spirit of negotiation. I knew I wanted him but I also knew it would put both of us in a peculiar position starting on Monday.

In a moment of courage and brilliance, I look up from my drink, gesture to the bartender and say, “Hey Paul, can I borrow a pen?”

Paul used to fuck a roommate of mine, they aren’t dating anymore and she doesn’t live with me but I still feel guilty when I see him since I was the one that convinced her to break up with him. Paul delivers the pen and I murmur my thanks.

I take two cocktail napkins from the stack in front of us and put one in front of Thomas and one in front of myself. I write down the URL for this website, fold the napkin in half and pass it to him along with the pen, “Your turn.”

He writes something and passes it back to me.

I look in his eyes and desperately want him to kiss me but I gather the resolve to say, “That is all I can give you tonight.”

But by way of consolation (and perhaps to convince myself as well) I continue, “The best stories like this climax at the moment of desire being expressed, I always end up writing them that way.”

He nods, seemingly unconvinced.

I know that there are other possible endings to this story: outright rejection, a torrid affair, kinky sex that is never repeated, a teary regretful morning after, he has done this with half a dozen students before, I am not special, someone falls in love, everything is peachy, or many hot encounters. They flare out before my mind as possibilities that are entwined and intersecting, weaving their way through the landscape of my sexual consciousness. I feel a surge of warmth like the first sip of a coctail but I know I’m on my fifth.

I know that I’ll see him on Monday, that this is far from over, that my resolve might not be sustained through another night of coctails. But for that evening, the story is over and I stand up and say, “Goodnight.”

One ideology I encountered in debate was Objectivism. Objectivism seems to be a pretty easy philosophical system for white, affluent, argumentative teens to grab onto. For this reason, the objectivist society actively recruits high school debaters to brainwash with their Randian message of greed. I never thought of it as something that someone would hang onto once they became an adult nor of something that could get you laid.

I was wrong.

***

For many open-minded Westerners, the fear of racial mixing was dismissed long ago. Still, it remains a spectre on race relations and the associated taboos constitute a frightening series of questions and problems. Liberal beliefs in equality and color-blindness often fall by the wayside at the moment that the question of erotic desire and racial mixing is introduced into the equation. In this way, deeply seated anxieties about racial contamination and power remain an element of sexuality around the world, making work on colonial sexuality continually vital. Frantz Fanon dedicates a significant portion of Black Skin, White Masks to describing interracial sexual relationships between the colonizer and the colonized. His chapters on the woman of color and the white man and the man of color and the white woman present two sides of the same coin; sexual power dynamics that fluctuate based upon sex, race, and political position.

In both situations the woman in question is the site of colonization – in the case of the woman of color, she is rendered as a symbol of the colonization of her nation. Fanon also expresses some clear resentment towards women of color as he describes their desire to always pursue the lightest men possible, to deny their nationality via their chosen sexual partners. Clearly, though, they are often the chosen. The conquest of these women by white men is an additional manifestation of the conquest of their nation. However, in the example of Mayotte, Fanon demonstrates a woman of Martinique that is bent on class ascension via racial means, “every woman in the Antilles, whether in a casual flirtation or in a serious affair, is determined to select the least black of the men.” (47) Fanon predicts that this racial self-loathing is re-projected onto the the youths of the next generation, either through the family structure or through the classroom or other social institutions. The message that will be passed on is of presumed inadequacy, one is only as “white as one is rich, as one is beautiful, as one is intelligent.” (51-52) These desired characteristics are ingrained as markers of whiteness. However, while attaining whiteness means attaining these characteristics, it is not clear that the converse is true. The colored person of the Antilles, in Fanon’s description, simply does not have true access to wealth, beauty, and intelligence because even having these qualities in abundance does not make them more white.

Fanon opens his chapter on the man of color and the white woman with the following confession:

Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white.
I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white.
Now – and this is a form of recognition that Hegel had not envisaged – who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man.
I am a white man.
Her love takes me into the noble road that leads to total realization. . .
I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.
When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine. (63)

Fanon’s rhetoric in this poetic moment emphasizes the interaction between desire and identification. He desires a white woman because he desires to be a white man and if not a white man, then just like a white man. The white woman’s body, her breasts are the symbol of dignities that are refused Fanon as a black man. This mythical white woman is deeply objectified, a mere marker for her race and civilization. A less than human symbol and battleground for resistance. Jonathan Dollimore, in a chapter on bisexuality, writes, “Do we ever simply desire the person we love, or is our desire not also partly an identification with him or her? Simply put, the ‘I want you’ of desire is complicated by the ‘I want to be you’ of identification.” (27) While Dollimore refers to gender difference, the argument is clearly manifested in Fanon’s desire for racial difference and identification. Fanon describes these urges as coming from the “darkest part” of his soul but from the “zebra stripping” of his mind. The desire to be white comes from the part of him that is fully and darkly black, the soul and only “across” the part of him that is already conspicuously colonized by whiteness, his mind. In this way, Fanon seems to imply that the desire for whiteness or more generally the desire for identification and assimilation is intrinsic to him, separate from his experience with colonization. More importantly, this experience of identification may be just as commonly experienced by a white person as it is by him.

Can Fanon’s troubling portrayal of racial mixing be used to describe the impetus behind contemporary examples of miscegenation? Certainly, a change in setting effects the validity of this claim. Furthermore, Fanon does not regularly acknowledge the actual human relationships and emotions that are in play as the result of a given marriage. His psycholanalysis is societal instead of individuated and therefore makes sweeping generalizations about the motivations of all interracial relationships. It discounts any instances of true cross-racial compatibility or couplings that are motivated by non-political factors (love or passion spring to mind although neither are fully outside of politics.) For this reason, his work is inadequate to explain actual interracial relationships. At the very least it must be acknowledged that his condemnation or critical approach to them is over-arching.

However, there is something very useful about Fanon’s theories as they can be received by a contemporary, multi-racial American audience. It is clear that they can go a long way to explain the production and broad appeal of interracial pornography. The epidermalization of desire is reflected in contemporary interracial pornography. We need to look at not just how but also why interracial pornography portrays its characters in this way.

As an opening caveat, it should be clear that I approach this question by considering these erotic materials as texts. While much ink has been shed by anti-pornography feminists, I do not wish to enter the fray on the question of censorship. Therefore, I have refrained from making normative claims about the existence of such work or its legitimacy in the community. While it is easy to see why many find it distasteful, my purpose is to interrogate the psychology behind its creation and message, not the psychological effects of its existence or consumption.

Of course it is never fully possible to bracket this question and I hope to dismantle one particular underpinning of the anti-pornography argument. Most of the arguments to censor pornography rest on Catherine MacKinnon’s position that pornography is a form of harmful hate speech, the speech is an action in itself and has harmful effects. The effects described usually are in the form of unrealistic attitudes towards women and sexuality. However, I will argue that the adult industry does not create these myths as an invidious attempt to corrupt the psychic and sexual health of the pornography consumer. Rather, the pornography industry (perhaps more than any other group of businesses I can imagine) creates their product based upon demand. Being affiliated with “the oldest profession” means that pornography makes a business of selling sex, one of the most basic of human drives. While a gadget manufacturer is also in the business of manufacturing desire for their product (humans are not born with a drive to own a mandolin slicer) the adult industry caters to a market that is always already there. Their productions do not exist in a social vacuum, rather they are based upon the desires and fantasies of their audience. This is not to say that pornographers cannot be exploitative. But it is to say that their marketing techniques and product development are almost necessarily some of the least invasive of any type of business that exists. This is not because of particular benevolence but because of the nature of the product, they sell something that is built into humans to want and desire. They also sell the manifestations of often unspoken fantasies.

Another important caveat is regarding the appropriateness of comparing contemporary racism in the United States with the post-colonial condition of racism. Certainly the diaspora of Africans has unique impact based upon their geographical location. My argument is that these representations in pornography constitute a colonizing mindset that has never fully diminished in the American psyche. This helps one to get away from the argument that particular pornography producers are racist and hateful (although some certainly might be) and allows for the more fruitful line of thinking that the demand for this sort of material makes a very real statement about the society that produces it. The presence of this fantasy of colonization and subordination blur erotic lines to make a political statement.

It is appropriate to begin with a description of the state of contemporary interracial pornography. What happens in these films? How are they marketed? And what are the racial tropes circulating within them? One popular weblogger and adult industry insider, Sam Sugar, described interracial pornography in the following way:

I am a black man
Your name: People will want to name you something that get’s across that you have a big, black cock. The porn industry knows that black guys with small dicks do not exist. They know you have a cock like a cruise missile covered in radar absorbing paint. [...]
Your movies: You will be offered roles in movies with the words black, gang, ballin’, ass, jungle, and chocolate in the title. When you are asked to perform with white women they will be referred to using the words little, tiny, innocent, stretched and meat. E.g. “Big Black Beef Stretches Little Pink Meat”. I’m sad to say that’s a real movie.
Your press: Every mention of your name will be followed by the imagined length of your cock in inches. People will refer to the ’soul’ you put into your performances and the ‘rhythm’ of your love tenderizing.

I’m a black woman
Your name: Anything you like – bonus points for making it extra ghetto. Shaniqwa Debonair is an excellent choice.
Your movies: It’s all about being a chocolate sister. People will be unable to look at you without wanting to put your ‘phat ghetto booty’ in a video with some guys from The Digital Underground. The people doing this will be white. Regardless of the size of your butt it will be referred to as ‘two fine hams’. Expect to get spanked a lot.
Your press: The world needs to know that you have a lot of junk in the trunk. Your ass will get more coverage than your medical degree. If you ever get upset about anything you will be called an uppity high maintenance bitch.

While meant to elicit a laugh, his analysis is a grippingly honest description of the racialized discourse of sex and pornography. He makes few apologies for these realities and instead describes them plainly. These descriptions are difficult to stomach at times and seem as if they must be exaggerations. They are not, and while graphic, the honesty of these complaints is compelling. It is probably not shocking to know that Sugar’s descriptions of the treatment of black men and women is sandwiched among other groups of people that are fetishized in pornography including Latinos, Asians, and physically different people. Especially useful is description of how these films are marketed. The titles that are chosen and the words and descriptions that appear on box covers are the essence of the pornography producer’s pitch to their client. They are meant to appeal to their audience instantly and stand out amongst a plethora of other options. Why do these titles have such a broad appeal? The easy answer is that only racists buy such materials but the broad demand and the mainstream nature of them seems to undermine that option.

At face value, it is simple to dismiss these representations as repugnant, however there is a deeper ambivalence to this genre. Some argue that by depicting interracial sex, a traditionally taboo subject in American culture, that this pornography can lead to breaking the taboos that exist and allow for greater acceptance of interracial relationships.(Williams, 274) The counterpoint, of course, exists that the extreme caricatures are more damaging than they can ever be fruitful. Because the focus of these films is on the interracial aspect, the performers are distilled to cultural and sexual stereotypes and are not individuated outside of that. Pornography is rarely interracial in an incidental way. The question of race is constantly brought to the fore in the titles of pieces as well as the dialogue that occurs between characters.

The market for these films is varied. Some are meant to appeal to white men while others
are intended to have a broader appeal. This begs the question, if the audience of interracial pornography is, itself, interracial what is the message of it? Clearly, the message is different for each individual viewer just as their motivations for watching may be individual. The BDSM fetish community has a motto: Safe, Sane, Consensual. Practitioners of bondage, domination, and sadism maintain that as long as an activity between two adults meets that three-pronged test, it is acceptable. While not all people within the community may find it arousing and some may even find it repugnant, if it passes this test BDSM practitioners will not practice judgment. “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” is used to eroticize and create safe spaces for acceptance of many fringe forms of sexual play and the role playing of extreme situations such as rape, bestiality, and incest. If these acts are accepted by a sexual community can educated people make the same allowances for what we find distasteful in interracial pornography? One thing that BDSM play and pornography clearly have in common is the element of performance and the desire to segment desires in such a way that they have multiple interpretations. If pornography is nothing else, it is rhetorical, and its reception is entirely dependent upon the desires of the viewing audience.

Interracial pornography requires a performance of race by the actors involved. The dialog in these films is always self-aware and referential to the racial difference between the actors. The contrast between their bodies is emphasized continually. A black actress is playing a different role in an interracial film than she might be in a film that emphasizes the size of her breasts or a particular sexual act. She is always a black actress but her blackness becomes the commodity that is traded. While it may be hard to believe, it is plausible that the actress in question derives just as much sexual satisfaction from racialized sexual play as the white male that may be watching her performance. Likewise, a submissive in a BDSM context is just as sexually invested in their own humiliation as the person that does the humiliating. It is easy to revert to the argument that such sexual desires stem from some manifestation of self-loathing or insecurity but that explanation is dangerously paternalistic. Acceptance of such lifestyle choices does not necessarily imply advocacy of them or agreement with them. However, exiting personal preferences for a moment in order to fathom difference is a crucial step in the obliteration of oppressive taboos, including those against racial mixing.

Just as Fanon interprets negrophobia as a form of white sexual anxiety, the politically
fearful dismissal of interracial pornography stems from deeply held taboos about race. The performance of stereotypes, while distasteful can have a positive effect,

Stereotypes are important objects of study not because we can better learn to eliminate them from our thinking, but because they cannot be eliminated. Stereotypes persist, and perhaps even thrive on, the protestations against them; the louder the protest, the more they thrive. [...] To forbid all utterance or depiction of the stereotype of the originally phobic image of the large black penis is to grant it a timelessness and immortality that it does not really possess. (Williams, 284)

So, it is because of the fetishistic nature of the stereotypes, as they are already uttered, that the compulsion to repeat their utterance can actually have a positive effect. This is not a blanket suggestion to toss around slurs and half-truths but instead a way to implore people to see them for what they are – archaic but deeply held beliefs to be questions. The sooner a move is made away from holding them as sacred, the sooner we can mock and demystify these stereotypes, the more likely it is that interracial sexual relationships will lose their stigma. However, I want to be perfectly clear that these arguments are merely a way to accept and interpret interracial pornography in a useful way – to find a space where these celebrations of difference can be transmuted into an understanding of the powerful erotic desires that ground contemporary race relations. Are the stereotypes exploited in interracial pornography liberatory in and of themselves? Are the actors involved always intentionally problematizing race or experiencing sexual satisfaction from their performances of racial stereotypes? Of course not, the producer’s only intrinsic intention is to make money on their product, making it neutral at best. Many actors are exploited or at least not particularly invested in the racial tone of the product they are producing. But recognizing the adult choices that go into the production of such material and accepting fantasies without judgments can contribute greatly in stripping the stigma from interracial sexuality.

Works Referenced

Dollimore, Jonathan. Sex, Literature, and Censorship. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Volume 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

MacKinnon, Catharine A. Only Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Penley, Constance. “Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn.” Porn Studies. Ed. Linda Williams. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004.
Sugar, Sam. “Porn and Prejudice.” Sugarbank. 23 June 2005. 14 Nov. 2005 .

Williams, Linda. “Skin Flicks on the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation, and Interracial Lust.” Porn Studies. Ed. Linda Williams. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004.

Let me set the scene. We met at a nearby coffeeshop that I frequent regularly. Occupants included a former DJ at the radio station and a current grad student in English. I quickly ignored my concerns – it is just coffee, right?

The first hour or so we talked about mutual interests (literature, music, teaching). I found him funny, engaging and attractive. Then the conversation turned to me and I feared that I would shock him with my sexual lifestyle and proclivities as I described this blog, my podcast, phone sex work, my relationship, and my preferences. I talked a lot, perhaps too much.

Finally, the conversation turned to the situation at hand. And the ethics and emotions surrounding it. I was somewhat amazed by his level of consideration and thought in the decision he was making. No apologies or excuses. Perhaps I’ll write an entry soon on the ethics of adultery because it is something I have been thinking about a lot. I left the coffeeshop knowing that the Professor was about to embark on a very personal and life-affirming journey. Like many risks, it is not one without selfishness. But, I was convinced of the purity of his motivations and the desire that lay behind them.

When I got home, J and I had a long conversation about my coffee date and continued to hash out and digest what I had witnessed and learned. I realized that the reason I date other people is just what the Professor described: excitement, trepidation, flirting, desire. I went to bed with a hopeful heart (not to mention some very dirty thoughts) after sending him an email letting him know I’d love to see him again.

This afternoon (when I was nearly done writing this entry) I received a reply. The Professor thanked me for my time and conversation, he shared that he had a lot of thinking to do. He also wrote that he suspected I was ambivilent and didn’t think we should see each other again.

I wish I could say I was shocked, but I’m not. I guess the awkward moments that I found to be pregnant with sexual tension were just awkward, afterall. Sometimes you jump in with two feet and get what you want, but sometimes those moments of hesitation and second-guessing can shipwreck our intentions. I’m not the type of woman who looks a man in the eyes and says, “I think I’d like to make love to you.” I also don’t think that this experience will make me become one. However, I suppose I’ve learned my lesson that candor and resolve can make all the difference. That lack seems to be the crux of my present disappointment.

I scrambled for the radio and just caught him announcing. Fuck fuck fuck. I recognize him as a philosophy professor that sometimes does shows during the summer. So, I’m presented with an ethical problem. I know a big secret about him (conspiring to cheat on his wife) and he doesn’t have any clue about me. I bit the bullet and decided that he was at much higher risk than I and told him who I was. I was expected a flurry of embarassment, backtracking, and begging for mutual secrecy.

It wasn’t that simple. The Prof didn’t seem phased too much and kept hitting on me. This had me floored but surprisingly intrigued. It seems deliciously dirty to have an affair with a professor (even if he isn’t from my current department).

We’re having coffee tomorrow.

Too bad he isn’t the one I wrote this about.

The popular stereotype (pornographic at least) would tell you that librarians are repressed nymphomaniacs desperately trying to maintain decorum. Its a nice thought. . .

I’ve been wanting to write about sex in libraries for ages and something happened this week that drove it to the forefront. Little do you know but this week witnessed an annual cultural moment that *concerns* many librarians. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.

I’ve never thought much of the Swimsuit Edition one way or another. There are certainly more revealing photographs in various popular magazines all the time. Granted, I live in the South where the grocery store puts modesty guards over Allure, Cosmopolitan, and even Shape magazines as well. I was surprised this week to notice about 15 other library students most of whom currently work in libraries grappling with the question of the Swimsuit Edition.

The first shocker is that it is a question at all. The original poster asked about it with disdain and some assumption that certainly librarians needed to lock away these shocking, disgusting images of . . . the female body! The responses varied but most gave a level-headed reply that it was handled like any other issue of Sports Illustrated (put on the browsing shelves and almost immediately stolen.) Other librarians pointed out that young adults are savvy and know exactly where to find the sex books in libraries already and that hiding these things away just makes something natural an issue to snicker over.

The thing that bothers me about this exchange isn’t the conclusions that the future librarians came to. No one advocated banning the Swimsuit Edition or was even particularly offended by it (except perhaps the person who originally asked the question.) But librarians are particularly susceptible to societal pressures and many have convinced themselves that the risk of someone seeing something pornographic at a library is absolutely terrifying. I’ve seen dozens of intelligent conversations on offering digital information to patrons devolve into “how do we stop them from looking at porn?!” hysteria.

Of course there are several practical reasons why openly viewing pornography in a library should be prevented. And unfortunately, common sense and social etiquette of patrons does not necessarily pick up the slack. However, I’m not sure that I’m convinced that sex is the most pressing issue facing libraries today and I wonder if it is a waste of resources worry about it so extensively.

This issue touches on the development of library collections (what books and periodicals appear in the library), the training of reference staff (which questions are appropriate to answer), and access to electronic resources (requirements to use an internet terminal and whether or not that internet access is filtered.)

So, I propose an experiment! I intend to visit the public library in my medium-sized Southern city and attempt access at several websites. I suspect that the filtering software will stop me from viewing many informative sites and blogs that are not pornographic but are about sex or pornography. Conversely, I suspect that it will allow me access to sites that perhaps should be filtered but are smaller. How do I know this? A preliminary experience with the filtering software allows my site (maybe it shouldn’t, I post filthy stories and pictures – it is almost certainly pornographic) but does not allow access to Sugarbank (that site has always intentionally been non-pornographic and is a source of business information.)

I have a list of sites that I want to test this theory with but I’d like more suggestions. Post links as a comment and I’ll include them in the “study”.

* I just discovered Balthazar B, Man of His Words. This man seems quite brilliant and sexy and wonderful and not updating for the past few weeks. I hope he comes back because finding a hot new blog that is already a dead old blog is so depressing. . .

* A bit of a dialogue has formed between Melissa Gira (aka, Sexiest Podcaster in the World) and I on this question of “fake women.” Touch My Blog has stepped into the discussion with this post. And while not directly related, I think that the Female Mysogynist is weighing in on the issue as well when she writes today about the “anti-feminine feminist bitch”.

* I’ve been desperately searching for Chanukah porn and the best I have been able to find (despite the hysterics of this article) is at the Yarmulkebra Website. Looks like I’ll be making my own, I can’t believe no one has tried to serve this market before!

Who knew that the porn studies field would be so couched in niceties that there wouldn’t be a single concise description of the state of interracial porn? There are plenty of screeds in the anti-porn, MacKinnon-esque camp to latch onto. But, in the world of people taking a rhetorical or cultural studies approach I found very little in terms of hard-hitting soundbites. So, who summed things up best, in my estimation?

None other than Sam the Man over at SugarBank in his post “Porn and Prejudice.” He says in a bulleted list what it takes the academics three chapters to write.

So, why am I linking to a 5-month-old entry in a blog you all read anyway? Because this week I cited it in a paper I wrote for a graduate seminar in Postcolonial theory. Sammy, step right up and receive your accolades with Judy, Michel, Gayatri, Frantz, and Homi.

The title of my paper? “Black Dicks in White Chicks:
fantasies of miscegenation, black power, and the colonization of
interracial desire”