Peter Tupper

Domina Irene Boss and the Other World Kingdom

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Feb 212012
 

One of my favourite podcasts, the Masocast, has an interview with Domina Irene Boss. Boss has been involved in both the pro Domme scene and the BDSM video scene for a long time, and has good historical insights on both fields. She was in both at the ground floor, and was able to vacation in Hawaii from the proceeds of her DVD sales. These days, particularly after the advent of Clips 4 Sale, the video market is so diversified that this isn’t possible anymore.

She also has some inside knowledge of the Other World Kingdom in the Czech Republic, which is about as close to “the Club” or “the Marketplace” or “the Network” as we’re ever going to get in real life.

Betty Dodson’s “Sex for One”

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Feb 202012
 

Salon.com has an interview with Betty Dodson (whom I once met at a TES meeting in NYC in 2005), author of Sex For One. She has interesting insights on the fall and rise of masturbation, and why we need gender parity in whacking off.

Obviously, the sexual climate was very different in 1974. How did people think about masturbation back then?

Who needed it? There was so much sexual freedom and there were so many groups and threesomes and couples getting together. It was very fluid in New York, L.A., San Francisco. I went to sex parties in the U.K., London, Amsterdam. I was one of the darlings of the jet set, so they’d invite me everywhere. I couldn’t have been happier. Then all of the sudden AIDS happened and the bottom crashed out of casual sex. That’s why the publisher in 1986 figured that they could finally deal with masturbation as the safest sex.

Do you think there’s less guilt associated with masturbation now?

I don’t think we’ve made any progress. If anything we’ve gone backwards.

What?! Really?

Well, you can at least say the word now. In certain circumstances you couldn’t say it at all, when I first started off. The response I got to using the word was people rolling on the floor laughing, and when I talked about teaching women how to masturbate, they was even funnier. What would you do to teach someone to masturbate? But it’s a physical activity that has an art to it. You don’t just grab it and whack it. It’s everyone’s favorite thing to do if you can’t get laid or you don’t have a delicious romantic relationship, but if we don’t incorporate masturbation into our relationships, we are going to lose sex anyway.

The Sioux Sun Dance

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Feb 182012
 

Mails, Thomas E. Sundancing: The Great Sioux Piercing Ritual Council Oak Books, 1998 Gbooks

In writing about the Sun Dance, one is tempted to being with a vivid description of the absorbing, flesh-piercing ritual. But to do so is a tragic mistake, for in focusing everything upon a single, albeit sensational, fraction of an entire and splendid religious ceremony, the overall significance of the four-day event is missed, and it is inevitable that the rest of the Sun Dance will be ignored and misunderstood — even by some Indians.

Pg.2

While working on Chapter 1 of the book, I wanted to spend a paragraph or two on the First Nations Sun Dance as an example of physical ordeals in religious practice. However, I wanted to make sure I got the details as correct as possible, so that sent me on another research trip. Sometimes you have to read a whole book just to make sure that a couple of sentences are accurate.

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Help Janet W. Hardy publish her book “Girlfag”

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Feb 162012
 

To my friends, family, colleagues and supporters:

With just two weeks to go, we’re past halfway in our fund-raising project for Girlfag: A Life Told In Sex and Musicals… but we’re Image
going to need a big last-minute push to take us over our goal amount of $7500.

Fortunately, we now have a great new tool to help with this project – an absolutely gorgeous cover by my longtime collaborator John Brenner of Johnny Ink, which you can see here. Hope you like it!

However, new donations have slowed down in the last week, and if we don’t get a kick of new people in the next couple of weeks we may miss our $7500 goal. Now, don’t get me wrong – I am going to publish this book anyway, somehow. But in order to do it justice – to back it with the marketing, PR and merchandising it needs to reach its intended audience of people who don’t feel comfortable with traditional categories of gender and orientation – we need to raise that money.

So, please: If there’s any way you can help – by donating what you can spare, by telling friends who might be interested, by posting our link to your Facebook page, or anything else you can think of – now’s the time to do it!

And, as if you needed any more incentive… if you refer a friend who donates at least $50, you’ll qualify for a free Girlfag patch. Just ask your friend to drop me a note along with their donation so I know who’s responsible.

So stop by now to the Kickstarter page. You’ll find everything you need – a complete description, some excerpts, and a nice big picture of the cover – plus a wide range of awesome incentives to loosen the strings on your wallet. Plus, of course, the knowledge that you’ve helped bring important new information into the world of sexuality and relationships (and, of course, musical theater)!

Thanks to you all,
Janet W. Hardy

Killing the myth of the Old Guard

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Feb 072012
 

It’s hard to kill a myth. In meme theory, myths are often analogous to parasites: hard to get rid of, but not too harmful. Or rather, they mask their harmful effects.

In the BDSM world, there are a lot of pernicious myths that many people want to believe. (Are kinky people more prone to this kind of fantasy?) The most enduring is the myth of the Old Guard.

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Self-inflicted violence in religion: Jack David Eller’s Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence

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Jan 212012
 

Eller, Jack David. Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence Prometheus Books, 2010.

I’m going back into chapter one of the book (hopefully to get a draft done by the end of the month), and that means going back into religion and violence. Eller’s book is about the relationship between religion and violence, not only that humans incorporate violence into religion, but that we also invest violence with religious meaning.

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Sadomasochism in Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers” and “A Dangerous Method”

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Jan 192012
 

I tend to cringe at depictions of BDSM in mainstream media, as it is usually flubbed in one way or another. Sometimes, however, a good (not necessarily “positive”) depiction appears in unexpected spots. For example, look at two films by Canadian director David Cronenberg.

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