Go back to the five and dime, Jimmy Deen, Jimmy Deen

Posted on January 14, 2016 by jaime

This is Stoya. I picked this shot since it’s as close to a demure pic as I could find.

I‘ve never met Stoya. And, weirdly, I’ve never seen a porn with her in it. But I decided a long time ago that she’s cool, because she did a song and video with Amanda Palmer.

And I’ve read interviews, in which she comes across as smart and funny. She isn’t just intelligent and savvy, though; she’s remarkably beautiful.

Therefore (for the other reasons, not the beauty), if she says something about conditions in the porn industry, I’m inclined to think it’ll be the view of a sensible, smart person.

So when she said she was raped by James Deen, I didn’t think that on its own was legal proof, but that it was more likely than not to be true.

I haven’t met James Deen, either. He’s a male porn star, maybe the only male porn worker to be a star in his own right, right now. I haven’t seen any of his videos either. I mean, I do watch porn, but I don’t have time to keep up with all of it.

But I knew submissive women who thought James Deen was supremely good news. He was much more fanciable than the tattooed, muscle-bound caricature that the porn industry thinks is an attractive man. Deen looked like a regular guy, someone a woman might meet and decide to take home and fuck. So, over time, his videos became starring vehicles for him. The naked women got equal or second billing to a man, which is incredibly rare in porn.

James Deen is almost always clothed in his porn and publicity shots.

In the bdsm-flavoured porns he did, I’m told the vibe was both rough but also playful. He’d be savage, but politely so, and he’d manage to communicate the idea that he didn’t hate the woman performer, or think she was bad. They were just playing a sexy game.

So a lot of people were reluctant to write him off when Stoya complained. He’d managed to make himself an acceptable face of porn. And it’s a “he said/she said” scenario. What can you do?

Well, you can follow the balance of the evidence. When Stoya said he’d raped her, and not stopped when she used a safe word, I thought that was probably true. Short of legal-standard proof, of course, but enough to decide that he’s probably not a nice guy, and not what he seemed to be.

But then the balance tipped dramatically in Stoya’s favour: there are now eight other women with similar stories about Deen. So it’s not “she said/he said” any more. That’s nine women with similar stories: of course it’s true. That is, of course Deen rapes women, and he can’t be trusted to respect a safe word.

Which takes any potential pleasure out of watching any of his old videos. I’m not going to look at the bloody things, I’m afraid.

His career is effectively over, I hope. The one thing is that I’m pleased about is that it seems the porn industry didn’t fuck around on this, like other media have with their rapist creeps (e.g. the BBC and Jimmy Saville; American media and Bill Cosby, and so on).

Anyway, sometimes you just have to let someone go. He may have looked like an “acceptable face of porn”, but it turns out he wasn’t. Now’s the time to drop James Deen.

And Stoya had things to lose by reporting her experience publicly. That took courage. But assaulting women, using the ambiguities of the setting and your own fame, doesn’t take courage: it’s bastardy. What else may happen depends on the women concerned, but it’s to be hoped his career stays over. .

Mouth to mouth 19: After-anal care for the not quite submissive woman

Posted on January 3, 2016 by jaime

The last thing I remember for a while was finding myself half asleep and my cock softening, still semi-hard and still mostly inside Qing’s asshole. I grabbed the ends of the condom before I softened any further, and withdrew. This was not sexy. The condom went over the side of the bed.

I thought I should clean up. Including Qing’s asshole and perineum. A semi-liquid mess of faecal matter and lube had escaped from her asshole.

Frothy human waste: Rick Santorum.

Dan Savage launched the habit of calling that mess “santorum”, after Rick Santorum, the creepy religious right politician. But that never felt right to me. It must annoy Santorum and that’s probably good, but associating him in any way with sexual pleasures, even ingloriously, seems to do the man too much honour.

Also, he’ll be forgotten soon, while faecal accidents and by-products will be with us forever. We humans are part of the biological world, even the beautiful and golden Qing.

Anyway, that faecal mess doesn’t happen with most anal sex, and even when it does it’s a perfectly natural by-product of a vigorous anal fuck, and not a sign of damage. But I was mostly responsible for the mess being there, so it was my responsibility to get rid of it.

Also, I’d learnt by then that girls sometimes found the sight a little challenging, and that if I cleaned up quickly with a damp cloth or a handful of tissues, without their being shamed or embarrassed about it, then life and post-fuck calm will go on. Harmoniously.

So I thought about searching for the bathroom, which was probably on the other side of the kitchen. And then she put her hand on my waist and I fell asleep. Did I say that humans are biological creatures?

When I woke up again it was much lighter outside. Qing, fortunately, was still sleeping. I edged out of the bed silently, and took the little collection of used condoms to the bathroom. I disposed of them, washed my cock thoroughly, and collected a bunch of paper towels.

Back to the kitchen I saw it was after nine, so I made instant noodles with strips of egg, shallots, black mushrooms and a very mild, slightly sweet soy sauce. I had to hope that Qing would like Chinese. But she, or her household, had nine different kinds of soy sauce. I figured she probably did.

I took two bowls and my tissues, two of them dampened under the tap, into her bedroom. Qing was stirring and looked up at me. “Breakfass? I’d have made you breakfass.”

“But you looked too cute to disturb.”

She smiled. “You shoul’ see my ass in a kitchen.” The smile became a laugh. “Specially you.” She chanted, “Jaime likes my aa-ass, Jaime likes my aa-ass. Wooo! You really like my ass.”

I held out the bowl. Instead of taking it she said, “Oh! I mean, thank you. Tha’ smells haochi.” I didn’t ask. “Haochi” was clear from context. It was good, and it meant something like “yummy”.

So I put her bowl on the bed beside her head, and pushed her down onto her front. I brushed her back with one of the wet clothes, by way of misdirection, and then opened her legs and wiped away the mess. Three dabs and a rub with a wet paper towel, then finishing with a drier sheet, was all it took. The mess had been there and it was gone. It would have been much more dramatic if she’d seen it. Qing didn’t even murmur. All was well.

I scrunched the paper towels into a ball with the unused sheets on the outside, and dropped it on my side of the bed. A second later I said, “oh. Juice.”

I hopped up, flushed away the paper towels, washed my hands, and returned to the kitchen, where I’d seen some horrible, thick green juice in the fridge. I poured her a glass, and unhealthy ginger beer for myself.

Qing was just finishing her bowl when I returned. She said, “Tha’ was grea’. Gimme some of yours, and you might get to fuck me. Again.”

I raised my eyebrows. So much for her feeling submissive.

Moth to mouth: Ties that bind in a police state of mind

Posted on November 9, 2015 by jaime

I’m visiting Cuba. It’s a police state. Seriously. And my phone doesn’t work and I can’t get the internet. There are no newspapers.

The woman in this Cuban painting isn’t a real policewoman. We know because:
1. She’s not wearing the correct hat.
2. She looks happy.
3. She’s not holding her hands out in the international “bribe me NOW” gesture.

On the other hand, the whole damn island is rich in police, who make up 2% of the population. Most of the rest of the population reports to them, generally about their neighbours.

Since there’s nothing much worth stealing, what keeps the cops busy is collecting bribes so people with work to do can go about their business without police harassment.

You’ve probably heard this gag before, but here it’s literally true: you have to fail an exam to get to be a policeman (or a policewoman.)

Either women don’t fail as many exams, or the place somehow failed to stop being a macho culture after the revolution. Because there aren’t so many women cops, though there are a few.

Look, I like Cuba. It’s beautiful, there’s good music, rum and food. And peop[le. But this aint no socialist paradise. The people are waiting for the government to fall. Hang about, if you will. I’ll be writing this blog again shortly.

BDSM and pick-up artists

Posted on January 30, 2015 by jaime

I’ve mostly ignored the pick-up community. On this blog, obviously, but also in my life.

1 Better a person than a method

The main thing I know about encouraging a woman to want to fuck me is to talk to women I fancy and think are interesting, so that I’m enjoying myself whatever happens. That way, though I hope she’ll want to take me to her bed, or flop into mine, I can be relaxed about it. I try to be funny and clever, and let her talk what I probably think is most of the time. (Which means that she probably does about half the talking.)

At some stage there’s a pause, and a moment, and then we look at each other, and we might decide that it’d be a good idea to kiss. Or else not. But if the pause ends in kisses or a held hand or a held thigh, then more physical stuff is likely to happen, after which we take it outside. And then we take it home, hers or mine.

That’s how most sex has happened to me, anyway. But it isn’t the PUA (pick-up artist) way.

Of course, it’s fine that the PUA approach doesn’t suit me. My approach is my approach because it’s what works reasonably well for me. I’m better at talking than anything else, so I stick with what I’m best at.

I’ve seen guys impress and attract women on the dance floor, where it’s damn near impossible to say a word. So I know that that works. It just doesn’t work for me. People don’t actually see me dance and run away in horror, but that’s all you can say. No-one has ever seen me dance, and, as a consequence, wanted to fuck me.

So don’t go for formulas. Keep the sun out of your eyes and be yourselves, that’s the spirit*.

2 PUA thinking, “negging” and so on

But there’s more wrong with the PUA mind-set than just the fact that it doesn’t suit me.

PUA guru Mystery. Truth is, I've got a hat like that, and it gets outings at parties. Wouldn't wear it to a bar, though. Not in the mountains, hey?

PUA guru Mystery. He’s wearing a ski hat with sunnies, which is his idea of “peacocking”. I thought it was pilot headgear at first, which was more interesting. I’ve got an old-fashioned pilot’s hat and goggles thing that I sometimes wear to parties, so I do peacock. Wouldn’t wear the Biggles gear to a bar, though. Not in the mountains, hey?

Take the “neg” thing, where the PUA says something to the woman that sounds like a compliment, but also undercuts her. Like, oh, “Like your hair colour. Are the roots meant to be showing?” Or, “That’s a great dress. And brave of you to wear it.” Or some such.

The idea is that attractive women get compliments all the time, and handle them complacently, reading them as, “please pay attention to me, you goddess.” So they ignore those approaches.

A neg is supposed to be more interesting than a straight compliment, and because it includes an element of put-down, it’s supposed to make the woman feel that she needs to work for the respect of the man who negged her.

So it’s manipulative, and that’s creepy. It also seems pointlessly unkind. Why would you say something calculated to make the person you’re with feel slightly worse? Especially if you actually fancy that woman?

Even a single night in bed is a relationship. It seems odd to want to start any sort of relationship based on putting the other person down.

If you use negs, and other “techniques”, you turn yourself into a method and not a person. I might get sex from a method but I wouldn’t get the affirmation and, oh fuck it, the ego boost I get when someone meets me and decides she wants to fuck my lights out.

Worse, it’s a sign of contempt. You could only bring yourself to neg someone if you think they’re dumb enough not to notice, and unassertive enough to feel a little worse about themselves rather than realising that you’re a toxic fool who should be avoided.

So the put-down isn’t the specific content of the neg, but the fact that you even chose to try one.

So that’s one part of my lack of interest in PUA and “game”..

There’s also the talk about alpha and beta males you get on PUA boards and sites.

I’m not a biologist or animal psychologist, but I’m interested in n how ethics works across species. Also, in some parts of Africa and Asia, when you get out of your vehicle it can be handy to know about the likely behaviour of pack or herd animals that can kill you.

I’m snob enough not to want to have much to with people who write ignorant bollocks about how animal heirarchies work. Mostly they’ve only read some dated stuff about wolves, and about non-human primates, and tried to apply it to humans. This is doubly stupid: first, their model is wrong about every animal species I know something about.

For example, most alpha males aren’t all that aggressive, and they spend a lot of time making sure everyone else in the troupe or pack is fed. And alpha males generally don’t keep their position unless the alpha females support them. They don’t control who gets the sex in their group, because the females fuck who they want to. The females initiate a lot of the sex, and it seems that they like youth and good looks more than alpha status. Alpha males aren’t the aggressive ones, and they aren’t the studs: basically, they’re politicians.

Second, you can’t even apply models from chimps to bonobos, let alone from wolves or chimps to humans. It’s just embarrassingly stupid.

Also, the homo sapiens guys who think of themselves as alpha males, as they understand the term, tend to strut about doing a lot of body language and oration. And that’s just tedious.

3 The bdsm link

So what’s this got to do with bdsm? Well, the PUA message seems to be getting more openly nasty as time goes on. There’s an increasing emphasis and acceptance of non-consensual scenarios.

For example, there’s the PUA “teacher” Julien Blanc who recommended that guys just go up to women, grab their heads and push them down towards the guy’s crotch. He showed footage of himself doing just that, in Japan. He got away with it, because he’s a gaijin, so the girls laughed because they were shocked and embarrassed about how weird and offensive he was being.

In Japan, laughter doesn’t necessarily mean the person laughing is having fun, or that they are enjoying you being around. Blanc was too stupid and arrogant to bother knowing anything about Japanese culture. It’s a pity no-one called a cop or kneed him in the bollocks: he couldn’t claim he didn’t understand that.

Blanc also recommends that men wear down women’s “bitch shield” (which seems to mean reluctance to spend time with Blanc or his “students”) by commanding them to “get down on your knees, call me Master, and BEG ME to kiss you.”

The use of bdsm tone and terms is becoming more common. There’s another PUA guy (not linking to him) whose training includes telling guys with poor social skills that many women will obey commands, and “secretly like to be commanded”.

This worries me because that’s actually true about many women, and not just women who identify as “submissive”. I’m not going to argue about why that is. Of course it’s partly cultural, and to some extent it’s also probably innate and part of our primate, even mammal, heritage. Dominance and confidence are survival traits, and they’re sexy. But there’s a reason why bdsm has so many caveats about consent, in particular informed consent.

If they want to be any good at domming, doms have to learn a lot about power and how to exercise it. And also how to not exercise dominance and power. At work, for example, I keep a very firm lid on all dom signs: body language, tone of voice and so on. As much as I can manage I’m mild-mannered Clark Kent, very polite and unassuming. In fact, I’m like that everywhere, except in the company of a submissive woman who knows who she is and who I am, and who has explicitly given me her consent.

But it is true that a man can give a woman (some women) small commands, and make the orders bigger by degrees. He can also make the orders more and more explicitly sexual, after that third glass, and he’ll probably get away with it. He may get her undressed and himself on her body. He may get a fuck out of it.

It’s just … Afterwards, she may be happy with that and she may not be. She probably wasn’t raped, in a legal sense, but she has good reason to feel that she was conned and manipulated. It’s rape-ish. Not necessarily a prosecutable crime, but certainly bad behaviour.

So my problem is that some bdsm skills, about mind-fucking and establishing dominance and submission, seem to be seeping into PUA teaching. But without the ethics.

The Jian Ghomeshi case, where Ghomeshi assaulted several women quite seriously, and then claimed he was doing consensual bdsm with them, was an early warning. Promoting behaviour control methods from bdsm, without including bdsm’s ethical rules – especially about informed consent – is dangerous and irresponsible. I don’t see it leading anywhere good.

* “Keep the sun out of your eyes and be yourselves” is said by the bad guy in Cherry 2000, whose dialogue is a mix of feelgood psychobabble and psycho-killer babble. I’m going to watch Cherry 2000 again soon. It’s probably terrible, but I’m curious to see if I’m still in lust with Melanie Griffith. There was something about her sullen face and squeaky little voice that deeply appealed to the schoolboy Jaime Mortimer. Phwoarr, I thought. Hope I still do.

Banned from Pinterest

Posted on January 24, 2015 by jaime

My Pinterest page has been taken down. I thought it was pretty innocent, but anyway, someone at Pinterest doesn’t like mild bdsm imagery.

I saved it only a couple of days before it went down, so I’ll be able to retrieve the images and captions. Though right now there’s some tech stuff to solve, about that.

I’m busy at the moment, so I’ll just run a picture of rope marked thighs. I think I like the body-marks bonds leave, afterwards, more than I like bondage itself.

Jian Ghomeshi, safe-words, face-hitting and choking

Posted on October 30, 2014 by jaime

Jian Ghomeshi, radio guy, alleged puncher and choker of women. Bdsm martyr? No thanks, says bdsm community.

Jian Ghomeshi, radio guy, alleged non-consensual puncher and choker of women. Bdsm martyr? No thanks.

There’s a guy, Jian Ghomeshi.

He was a Canadian radio host. Apparently he was good at that. But he just got sacked because a number of women (that number’s 8, right now) made allegations against him of non-consensual violence (face-hitting, choking, and some stuff that sounds kind of rape-y).

He responded by claiming he was into bdsm and it was consensual.

He wants to present himself as a martyr, sacked for his consensual sexual kink, and the bdsm community is not exactly thrilled, or feeling like cooperating.

Try, for example, Yingtai’s blog, which you should be reading anyway: http://abjectsub.com/jian-ghomeshi-scum-of-the-earth/

Jian Ghomeshi and safe words

Ghomeshi said there were agreed safe words; the women who’ve accused him say there weren’t. That’s not “he said/she said”: that’s multiple reports, so I don’t believe Ghomeshi.

But it opens up a wider issue, which is what a dom should do when a submissive indicates she’s not happy without using a safe word. I’ve been told by submissives about guys calling themselves doms who won’t stop unless she uses the exact agreed word:

Tied submissive: No, I really don’t like this. STOP NOW!

Fuckwitted, criminal, dom: That’s not your safe word! (WHACK!)

When a dom and sub are new to each other, then things like “stop”, and “please no”, and so on, really are safe words, because a submissive can always forget their “agreed” safe word in the heat of the moment.

If crying out, “please, no! I can’t take it!” was theatre and the sub’s really ok, then the scene can continue.

For me, though, if a submissive wants the fun of screaming and begging me to stop, secure in the knowledge that I won’t stop (unless she uses the real word), I’d rather she let me know that beforehand. Though you can tell a lot by tone of voice anyway.

Later, a dom can be less formally careful, because he or she knows more about the sub’s limits and reactions. If I’m punishing a submissive, for real, in a long-term relationship, I might say that there’s no safeword and I’ll decide when she’s had enough. That’s the rhetoric: the reality is that I watch carefully to make sure she’s okay and handling it.

Tears count as part of “okay”. Panic is not okay. Shutting down is complicated. If it’s because she’s quietly going floaty into subspace that’s fine; if it’s, “the world is terrible and I am not in my body; I’m not here at all”, that’s not fine. Flying (apparently) without safewords is only possible if you know each other, and if the dom is ready to check whenever there’s doubt about the submissive’s state of mind.

When the dom and sub don’t know each other thoroughly they can still have a strong experience, with safewords, and without having to use them.

Ambiguity about safewords is for when the relationship has lasted a while and communication between two adults who know each other well can be more subtle.

Which is another part of why I don’t believe Jian Ghomeshi’s story. If he was starting bdsm relationships with those women, with their agreement, there wouldn’t be any confusion over whether there were safewords or not.

Choking

Some of the women have said that Ghomeshi started hitting them in the face with a closed fist, and choking them, without consent.

I don’t believe that you start a bdsm relationship with face-hitting and choking, unless you’ve done some serious discussion beforehand. Which it’s clear hadn’t happened.

Face-smacking and choking are big on the internet, and I think that’s why Ghomeshi started there. Maybe he imagined it’d be a nice surprise.

I don’t think they’re especially big with submissive women. Some like them, but they’ve come up as a hard limit with a lot of submissives I’ve communicated with. “No cutting or blood, no scat, no hitting my face, no choking.”

Seriously, this stuff is fragile.

Personally I don’t do throat choking, not even if I’m asked for it. If a submissive said she wanted breath play, I can hold my palm over her mouth and pinch her nose, or push her face into a pillow for a few seconds at a time.

But seizing and squeezing the throat: I’ve been a nurse (psychiatric, but still a nurse), and I simply Will Not Do That.

Of course there are safe-ish ways to constrict the throat, or there’d be corpses littering the floors of bdsm porn studios everywhere. I’m not condemning those who enjoy it, and take the time to learn to do it safe-ishly. But to me, it’s too damn dangerous.

Face-hitting

Face-slapping can be a good way of shocking a submissive and “dropping” her, but a dom has to be confident that the sub knows him/her well, and feels bedrock secure that the dom likes her a lot, and the dom has never been angry with her or disliked her. Because it feels much closer to domestic violence, for a lot of women, than to sexy kinkiness.

There I’m talking about slapping with an open palm; that’s emotionally risky, but you can do it, lightly but still shockingly, without risking physical damage. But punching a woman’s face? That’s physically dangerous. There’s lots of breakable, fragile stuff in the head. I don’t believe that Ghomeshi had consent for it. And for me, I couldn’t do it even if I were asked. Don’t like the risk; don’t like the symbolism, either.

So it’s not the first bdsm thing you’d do, unless the submissive specifically said, “Nah, getting spanked or tied up or having to serve bores me: just punch my face and choke me, that’s all I want.”

And I’ve never met a submissive who’s said that. I’m pretty sure Jian Ghomeshi hasn’t either.

Great moments in science: giving electric shocks to masochists

Posted on October 19, 2014 by jaime

We’ve had two posts on the psychoanalyst Dr June Rathbone, and her textbook on “Masochism”. The book’s mainly interesting for its over-the-top hostility to the people she chose as her topic.

Still, if someone who was attracted to or practiced bdsm ever needed counselling or psychiatric help, and they went to a therapist whose ideas about bdsm were shaped by Rathbone’s book, then they’d be likely to be harmed.

Still, you can do even worse than that sort of bigotry. My favourite contender for the Great Moments in Science series is some early work by John Bancroft.

Stoned elephant. Of stone.

He turned his attention to one of those great scientific questions we’ve all wondered about, lying awake late into the night. Like, “Can you kill an elephant with LSD?”

That one was solved by a Dr Richard West, then working on some extremely dodgy projects for the CIA.

The answer was, “Yes, but it takes one fuck of a strong dose.”

But I digress.

“The safe word is Bzzzzzzzttttt…”

Anyway, Bancroft’s question was different:

“If you give masochists ‘aversive therapy’ to cure their sexual orientation, are you going to cure masochism, or are those pervy masochists just going to get off on the electric shocks?”

This one’s been solved too. Bancroft’s team found that masochists, just like everyone else, generally dislike getting electric shocks. So they didn’t actually pick up an electrification fetish.

So aversive therapy could proceed.

Postscript

That was early in John Bancroft’s otherwise distinguished career. I’d expect he finds that project pretty embarrassing now, if he ever thinks of it.

And he’s done some good and progressive stuff on increasing understanding of a range of minority sexual tastes.

I shared a taxi with him once, on the way to dinner at some conference in Scotland, and it crossed my mind to ask him about that study. But it would have been rude, and anyway I was too star-struck. He’s actually one of the good guys.

Explaining bdsm again: ah, Freudians…

Posted on October 18, 2014 by jaime

It’s often said that bdsm is roughly where homosexuality was fifty or sixty years ago, in terms of social, political and media acceptance.

Rathbone’s textbook on bdsm, Anatomy of Masochism, definitely supports that idea. If anything, it’s more hostile, more overtly bigoted about the sexual desires of others than most psychologists would have been about gays and lesbians in the 1950s.

As well as coming up with a bizarre list of “causes” for bdsm, as seen in yesterday’s post, Rathbone also provided a helpful checklist of the distinguishing characteristics of “sadomasochists”.

Aw, not Nazis again. I hate those guys!

You can sum up our personalities, we perverts, as being steeped in rigidity, fantasy, infantilism, hypocrisy, passivity and tension, also deceptiveness, pathological selfishness, and authoritarian politics. Did I say authoritarian? Well, Rathbone thinks it’s more a matter of our peculiar tendency towards Nazism.

To Rathbone, it’s not just that all bdsm relationships are dysfunctional, it’s that bdsm is almost the only cause of relationship dysfunction. She wrote, “When a ‘love’-relationship is not loving, it is usually sadomasochistic.”

Anatomy of Masochism’s bigotry is so overt and so intensely hostile that – as you can see – it’s essentially comic.

Still, it’d be an unlucky person who needed information and advice about their bdsm desires, and sought those things from a doctor or therapist whose perception of bdsm was guided by Rathbone’s book.

What causes bdsm? A Freudian knows!

Posted on October 17, 2014 by jaime

So we’re picking up where we left off, in the series in which various scientists and psychologists try to come up with explanations for why some people are weird enough to like bdsm.

We had Karl Abraham’s theory that our bdsm desires are caused by teething. I wrote about that charmingly bonkers theory here: http://preview.tinyurl.com/nt54dmq
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And we had the team who studied “sadists” by dissecting the brains of dead axe murderers. Read it and weep! http://preview.tinyurl.com/mufu5h3
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June Rathbone, PhD

But those guys are lightweights, since they offer only one explanation for bdsm each.

As far as I’ve found, the record holder, for the most – and I think it’s fair to say the craziest – explanations for bdsm is Dr June Rathbone, in her 2001 textbook Anatomy of Masochism.

Dr Rathbone dispenses bdsm explanations like a party magician gives out balloons.

For example, Dr Rathbone explained that we bdsm perverts suffer from “incomplete individuation”, by which she means that, having failed to develop as human beings, we avoid intimacy for fear that our personalities will be swamped by closeness to another person. We stave off intimacy by turning aggression outward if we are ‘sadists’, inward if we are ‘masochists’.

In addition, we are addictive personalities hooked on the endorphin rush of pain.

Moreover, we are stuck in Freud’s anal stage, unable to achieve normal sexual release because for us “the anus and buttocks are more erotogenic than the genitals.”

We also have Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a hereditary condition involving “mental retardation, self-mutilation, and sudden aggressive behaviour.”

We probably also had a childhood fetish for rubber or plastic. Comic books are also to blame, and so is science fiction: “the mindless ruthlessness of most sci-fi is identical with the sadomasochistic compulsion to win at any price … and, when ingested in a steady diet, can only help to create or reinforce such a mind-set.”

Superhero comics are certainly to blame…

Finally, Rathbone blamed bdsm on superhero comics, especially the body-revealing costumes. Also, Tom and Jerry cartoons. The weirdest thing was, she doesn’t blame rock music or marijuana.

You’ll have noticed that if you like bdsm, then Dr Rathbone doesn’t like you much, to an extent and level of intensity that goes well beyond mere bigotry. You’ll also have noticed that she’s a Freudian believer, taking seriously things like “the anal stage” and such.

There’s a connection between those two facts, which we’ll come to shortly.

Up on the roof (a confession of cowardice)

Posted on October 2, 2014 by jaime

It’s a very retro look, the skinhead thing. These are 1960s skins, but the guys who crashed the party dressed exactly the same. But they didn’t listen to ska anymore; it was white power music.

I was at a party once, that got gatecrashed by skinheads. Shaven heads, Doc Martin steel-capped boots, yellow laces, admiration for Hitler, weird views about Jews and Asians, and so on. Neo-Nazi skinheads, not the fashion trend following kind.

Quite a lot of the guys at the party got beaten up, and … I couldn’t see anything I could do. I could get beaten up too, but I couldn’t save anyone else. I hadn’t punched anyone at high school or since. I was shit at fighting. So I wasn’t much use to any of the non-skinhead guys present.

The skins didn’t attack the women. They made themselves unpleasant, but they didn’t do any punching or raping.

They’d planned it. Someone in the house must have annoyed them, because they’d guarded the doors and windows so there was no way out.

So, because my girlfriend and I were less drunk or drugged than most people there, we climbed to the end of the fire escape, and then pulled ourselves up onto the roof. It was quite cold up there under the stars, with this house of horror scenario going on underneath us. She was shivering, so I held her tight for body warmth.

We finished up fucking. On a sloping corrugated iron roof, with a two and a half story drop below us, and nothing to break your fall except the concrete at ground level.

We must have made enough skeleton sex noise that the skins realised there were people hiding on the roof, because one of them poked his head over, but before I’d even moved he fell while he was trying to pull himself up.

He must have hit the concrete walkway at some speed, but I never heard the impact, or what happened to him. Drunks are often lucky. I don’t like skins, but I hope he was lucky.

Eventually, it was the women at the party who saved the guys. They realised that the skinheads weren’t just ideologically weird about women: they were afraid of them. So some of the bigger women simply beat up a couple of the leaders.

The skins leaders didn’t know what to do. Getting punched by big punkette and goth women hurt, and it was humiliating; it didn’t fit the things they believed. Then the guys from the party started punching back, and someone grabbed a poker from the fire and was angry with it. This time the skinheads lost.

Me and girlfriend, we were on the roof. Unscathed. Useless.

Jerusalem Mortimer: Between the Lines

Jerusalem Mortimer wants a word

Category Archives: Evil morons