Jan 222019
- The Divine Deviance documentary, in which I am a contributor, is holding another round of fundraising. Even a small contribution can help make this valuable documentary possible.
- The University of Guelph is running an anonymous survey on kinky people and their relationships.
- In the UK, BDSM is still technically illegal, ever since the case of Brown 1993, also known as the Operation Spanner case. Samantha Pegg, a criminal law lecturer, discusses the possible legal reform regarding BDSM, while still emphasizing that consent should not negate all legal liability.
- Cosmopolitan UK has a frank discussion of a woman’s involvement in BDSM as a way of processing her earlier rape.
- Narratively has a feature on an AA meeting held in the basement of a fetish shop in NYC, and addresses the difficulty of kinky people hiding or revealing their kink in therapy or recovery settings. Starting in the 1950s, Alcoholics Anonymous refused to list gay meetings in their literature. This policy did not change until 1974. It’s also important to remember that a lot of NYC kink venues in the 1980s had a lot of liquor and drugs around.
- Modern Meadow is a biotech company pioneering a kind of artificially-grown leather. Instead of a plastic like pleather, this is an organic material grown in a factory. This has several advantages over conventional leather production: less environmental impact from caustic substances, less animal cruelty, and it can be grown in large sheets to order. How this compares to conventional leather in terms of fetish or fashion remains to be seen. “Modern Meadow is not… actually out to ape leather. Rather, the firm’s aim is to produce a new material in its own right, complete with brand name.” The company’s line of materials is called Zoa. Perhaps some future generation of fetishists will prefer it to leather.
- Slave Play, by Jeremy O. Harris, is a dramatic look at possibly the most emotionally and culturally charged form of kink: raceplay. Three couples (two hetero, one gay male) flipflop between antebellum fantasies of racial domination and modern scenes of couples arguing. Interview with the playwright (video)
- We’re facing a new rising tide of online censorship in online communities like Tumblr and Facebook. Gloria Brame has a few tips on surviving this. Race Bannon discusses how, like it or not, social networks like Tumblr and Facebook have replace physical gathering spaces for connecting, organizing and discussing our sexualities. The moral panic over sex trafficking has led to SESTA/FOSTA and the subsequent restrictions on social networks, as covered by Cookie Cyboid on Medium.
- The mainstreaming of (a heteronormative subset of) kink in the form of Fifty Shades Darker coincided with Fetlife deleting a large amount of images and groups, and Kink.com moving out of the Armory building in San Francisco. MEL magazine covers the economic and social fortunes of the kink world.
- Waterboarding as a form of torture goes back at least to the Spanish Inquisition, but I would hazard there’s been an increased interest from the kink community in the last couple of decades. It’s been banned by the United Nations and classified as torture by the UN, and the US government has forbidden it. That adds an additional element of taboo to this technique, which would explain its popularity with certain edge players. It’s also more dangerous than some people think. Rolling Stone covers the controversy.
