A link to my latest Stranger column: an interview with Sex At Dawn author Christopher Ryan, about life after one's book is published.


And, a little word-rant of mine, first written in 2004, polished up a bit and presented for your amusement.

***

BDSM Word-of-the-Day: Domme. Noun. Pronunciation: 'däm
Domme is a made-up word, the faux-Frenchified and feminized offspring of the abbreviation, "dom", which of course means "dominant". Both dom and domme are used as nouns: "he's a dom," or "she's a domme". But be aware that both words are pronounced exactly the same way: they rhyme with the name "Tom". "Domme" is absolutely not pronounced "dom-may" or "dom-mey".

Even aside from some people's cringe-inducing tendency to mispronounce this word, it isn't one of my favorite terms - it just seems clunky and affected. When I came out into the scene, people used the words "top" and "bottom" as flexible generic terms to indicate someone's dominant or submissive role or behavior, and I still use those terms a lot, even though they've fallen out of vogue. I was taught to use "Master" and "Mistress" mostly as terms of specific address, and only occasionally as descriptive terms.

Another thing: a "sub" is either an underwater boat or a sandwich. I realized this word has drifted into mainstream culture, and I'll cut non-BDSM folks some slack about using it, though I may wince slightly. But for someone involved in the scene, using the word "sub" to refer to a person is extremely gauche. I really feel that there is no punishment too strong for people who say or write "subbie" as a pseudo-cutesy way of saying "submissive".

Also undesirable is saying "subbing" to refer to either a status or an activity. "Chris is subbing to Pat." Don't say that. You could say, "Chris is Pat's submissive." Or, "Chris is submissive to Pat." Or if you are speaking of a scene rather than a ongoing relationship, you could say something like, "Chris is submitting to Pat tonight at the party."

One last word rant: Dom-i-nant, when used in this context, is a noun. If you are a person who likes to be in control, you're a d-o-m-i-n-a-n-t. When you are playing with your partner, you dom-i-nate them. That's a verb. As you can see, they're spelled differently, and that's because they're two different words. If I see one more personal ad or profile saying, "I'm a dominate Master," I'm going to give someone an enema with a pureed Webster's dictionary.

Language is a beautiful thing. Words are very important. So don't fuck with them or the Mistress will kick your ass.

Original version published Tuesday, May 25, 2004

I just finished polishing the final draft for the next Stranger column, so in honor of that, my answers to a few often-asked questions about me and The Stranger.

I get a lot of emails telling me the columns are too short. I love hearing that you like my column. I wish it was longer too. Writing something interesting in 490 words is very, very challenging. Very.

But, The Stranger sets my word count, and I cannot exceed that. It's a business decision. Each dead-tree page of the paper costs money to print. In order for The Stranger not to go bankrupt, the paper can only be so many pages long. On each of those pages, there is a certain percentage of space dedicated to editorial content (like: my column), and a certain percentage of space dedicated to the advertising that pays for the paper. Removing an ad so my column could be another hundred words long would make you and me happy, but it doesn’t make business sense for The Stranger. And I’d like them to stay in business.

So there is no wiggle-room on the column length, that's it. If I write it too long, someone else will cut out parts to make it shorter, and ooooo, writers hate that. So it behooves me to make it the right length.

Maybe you should just print the first part of the column and put the longer version online. We tried that a while back, actually, and I didn’t like it. I had a lot of people coming up to me saying, “Hey, I read the first part of your column, but I keep forgetting to go online and read the last part. What did it say?” This is the sort of question that makes a writer want to scream. Apparently The Stranger didn’t like this system either, so we scrapped it, for which I am profoundly grateful.

You should write one version of a column for the Stranger and do a longer version of the same column for the blog. That would be a rather unprofessional thing to do to The Stranger. They don’t pay me a lot of money, but they do pay me, god love ‘em. And when you pay me to write something, you get an exclusive.

The fact that certain words are printed in bold? I get many emails about this. No, I don’t do that, it’s not under my control. Someone at The Stranger does that. If you have an opinion about it, I’m sure they would be happy to hear it.

There's about a 7-day gap between my submitting a column and it being printed. The column I turn in today, for example, will be in the paper published next week. There's some cushion there, time-wise, in case an editor reads what I turned in and decides he wants a big revision of it, but that very rarely happens for short pieces like mine.

If you're imagining me at The Stranger editorial offices, verbally sparring with the other staffers like a kinky Rosalind Russell in His Gal Friday, I fear I must disabuse you of that charming notion. I am very rarely in The Stranger offices. I just email them a column when it's due.

The person I submit to (yes, yes, I said submit!) will show me whatever edits he's making to what I turned it. But our exchanges about it are usually pretty brief. My mother was an editor for years, and I learned from her that while all writers think every single word they write is like the perfect tear of a unicorn falling upon a golden page, editors... don't. They are not butchering up your precious creation just to be mean, it's their job. And they get cranky if you spend a lot of time arguing with them about the placement of a comma or some such thing, because they're on a deadline and they have a damn paper to put out.

Most of the time my column doesn't get edited very much. It galls me only slightly to say that the edits that do get made are usually an improvement, because the editor has a fresh eye.

I choose my own topics, too. Very occasionally someone from The Stranger will make a suggestion to me about an idea, and when they do, I usually do it.

Can I reprint this very recent column of yours in my small publication? I cannot grant you permission to do that. Obviously people do, and I cannot stop them, but once again – The Stranger paid me to write that for them. It’s rude, at best, for me to then turn around and immediately give it away to someone else.

It’ll be ten years this fall that I’ve been writing for The Stranger. Ten years. That’s hard to believe when I stop and think about it. I’m grateful they took a chance on me then, given that I had no noticeable writing credentials when I pitched them the idea. And the way the newspaper industry has gone, I’m damn lucky to still see be seeing my name in ink-on-paper. I have no plans to quit, so we’ll see what the next ten years bring to me, in my adventures in tabloid journalism.

Online translators are responsible for a lot of unintentional comedy in the world of email. I got this note recently, and I will preface my remarks about it by acknowledging that no, I don’t speak French, so I probably couldn’t do any better.

That doesn’t make it any less silly-sounding to read, though. It’s entitled “Gynarchy.”

…you can enhance your role as a dominatrix is a dream to be able to worship your gorgeous. You seem to be the incarnation of female supremacy. We would be happy to support you through our site as we do for free.

It is a small team that is dominating the initiative on this site gynarchy. We strive to make it as close as possible to the values we wish to defend. We try to find independent dominatrix could recognize themselves in the gynarchy.

Our universe is female domination and we made some changes to make it more ergonomic and more dynamic future. We plan to continue this adventure in improving a little closer making it accessible to a wider audience, including women.

We would like to add your site to ours with your comments, or your photos. Know that we are far from the BDSM community and that we operate quite independently.

The team gynarchist

It took me a minute to understand that the sender was inviting me to place photos and ad copy on a French website for professional dominatrixes. I was too busy thinking: “gynarchy? Is that really a word, or is this some made-up kink slang like domme?”

So I looked it up, and to my surprise, it is a real word. I had not heard it before. It means, of course, “rule by women” and matriarchy has always been the word I’ve heard used to refer to such an idea.

The Universe of the Gynarchy! Kinda sounds like you’d be entering The Matrix, doesn’t it? Similar outfits, I imagine. And similarly righteous goals, as apparently The Gynarchy defends the values! Of what, I’m not sure. But I'm glad The Universe of the Gynarchy is going to be available to women, too - that seems like a good move, PR-wise.

And it’s ergonomic as well. No RSS in The Universe of the Gynarchy, nosireebob!

Gynarchy! It’s the word of the day, people. As the nuns used to tell us: “Say it three times and use it in a sentence. Then it’s yours forever.” Whether you want it or not, because this is a Gynocracy!

This blog post will not make much sense to you if you didn’t read my column last week, and the blog post that went with it. You also need to read my column this week, and if you want the fullest possible perspective, listen to the 50-minute-long audio file linked from it.

***

Let me preface this by saying clearly: Ms. Febos, I do not think you are a bad person. I don’t harbor any personal rancor towards you.

I am not attempting to “silence” you, either, and to demonstrate that, I asked the The Stranger to make the audio of our entire conversation available for download so people can hear exactly what you said when I interviewed you.

For the readers, let me also just run down the timeline of how our meeting came about:

• I arranged this interview with Ms. Febos, via her agent, on March 15th, and I told him that I would publish my review of "Whip Smart" in advance of her Seattle appearances the weekend of the 27th/28th. I had a personal email exchange with Ms. Febos subsequent to that.

• My review of "Whip Smart" was published in print and went live on the web on Wednesday March 24th.

• Saturday March 27th at 5pm, Ms. Febos walked into an interview with me – without having read my review. In fact, she admitted that while she had heard of me, she had actually never read anything I’ve written.

That was not a smart way to handle a professional situation. Ms. Febos teaches writing to college students. One wonders what she would think if a student of hers showed up for class without doing any homework whatsoever.

So it’s true that I didn’t like her book, but books are not people. I was completely prepared for this interview to reverse my opinion of Ms. Febos’ perceptions of BDSM and sex work. It failed to do so.

I don’t wish you unhappiness, Ms. Febos, but this not about just you and me. This is about some bigger issues. That’s why you are making another appearance in my Stranger column this week.

***

In many ways, Ms. Febos is a striking example of what happens when people write about kink and sex work in cultural isolation. She is not a part of the BDSM community, nor is she participatory in any sex-work activism circles, so she has not been educated by leaders in those communities on how to talk about them without putting her foot in her mouth.

She’s getting a remedial education now, and not just from me. I’m sure she’s not enjoying it. Judging by the difference in both her tone of voice and in the answers she’s given in her more recent interviews, Ms. Febos is adapting quickly to the feedback she’s gotten. That’s good. But it does indicate to me that her perspective on her experiences is still very much evolving. That’s understandable, because according to my calculations, Ms. Febos finished writing "Whip Smart" when she was just twenty-six years old. I myself shudder to think of the book-length memoir I would have produced at twenty-six. That’s the tough part about writing: once the words are out there, you can’t unwrite them. They take on a life of their own - but you still have to stand behind them.

Aside it just being too soon for her to write this book, I think Ms. Febos’ post-addiction views about BDSM sexuality and sex work have been largely shaped by vanilla people - 12-step people, therapists, family – who have a very one-dimensional view of kink and sex work. She has not put herself in situations where kinky, sex-working people who are smarter than she is can raise her consciousness. I could tell, talking to her, that a lot of the experiences and reactions she thought were uniquely hers were, actually, experiences and reactions I’ve seen people have time and again. Some of them I’ve had myself.

One's experiences are not either right or wrong, they just are. But the conclusions we draw from them can be either accurate and insightful, or – not. When I had some of what I might call the Universal Kink/Sex-Work Experiences, I had the advantage of having like-minded people to turn to and say, “Hey, this weird thing happened and I’m feeling X way about it.” Not everyone in my communities always dispenses Solomon-like wisdom. But you can’t get education; you can’t get perspective, if you never talk to anyone who knows more than you do.

I have been asked why I can’t just “be nice”, and say nothing critical about Ms. Febos’ words. No, I cannot do that, because I am part of these communities, and I would not be the person I am, or have the life I do, without them. When I was just beginning to understand who and what I was, writers like Susie Bright and Patrick Califia literally changed my life by brilliantly and ceaselessly refuting the lies that are told about people like me. And I would not be here now, safe and sane and happy, without the kinky, sex-working people in my everyday life who corrected me when I made mistakes, and told me truths I didn’t always want to hear. So while I didn’t necessarily like it at the time, it’s a damn good thing they did it, and now I owe them.

At the end of the interview, Ms. Febos said something that explained a lot to me. She said, “Learning how to do something new in public is so uncomfortable.... I’m not good at being a beginner at anything.”

I thought to myself, And therein lies the problem here. Because she is a beginner when it comes to talking and writing about BDSM and sex work. Unfortunately, by publishing the book, Ms. Febos has placed herself in the expert’s seat. Now she has to learn, in public, to handle her discomfort in that position.

Today I'm observing the 6th anniversary of this blog. Yep, I've been writing here steadily for six years. That's practically forever, in blogger time.

When I started doing it, I had no idea how popular this blog would get, and how much it would change my life. In my cranky moods, I often compare this blog to the alien, blood-sucking plant in Little Shop Of Horrors: constantly demanding my precious time and energy.

And blogging is not the shiny cool new thing it was when I started writing here. The constant work of it, combined with the general decline of blogger-chic, has thinned the blogging ranks. I have observed other sex bloggers fall by the wayside over time - including several who were once loud in their disdain for me. Naturally I would never lower myself to publicly sniping with such people. I simply recalled to myself a line from the novel Gone With The Wind, where Rhett Butler remarks to Scarlet O'Hara, "Nothing annoys the godly so much as seeing the ungodly flourish like the green bay tree."

But as much trouble as it is, my little blood-sucking pet here has me brought me many amazing people and fabulous experiences that I would not have had otherwise. And equally valuable, it’s given me a place to examine and organize my thoughts on those things, which is good for my personal growth.

Starting the Stranger column, nine years ago, was also a hugely pivotal point for me. I love being part of The Stranger, and I believe being published in a print publication granted me much local popularity, as well as some real-writer credibility in certain circles.

However, I would have to say, while I don't get anywhere near as many hits as the Stranger site does, this blog seems to have disseminated more widely than the column. I base that only on the number of people I've spoken to who know about the blog, but are surprised to learn of the column. It may be that I just don't talk to as many folks for whom the reverse is true.

But it gets around, this blog. People from all over the world send me the sweetest, kindest, most touching letters imaginable, telling me how much they like reading it, and what they’ve learned from it and especially enjoyed about it. Those little notes mean a lot to me. I can’t always respond personally to each one, but I read them all, and they make me smile. So thank you all for that.

Another year. I’m still here, and I’m still flourishing.

Art Imitates Life



Or is the other way around? I can never remember. But I was thinking about it last night, when Monk and I did our second appearance at the Peg-Ass-Us show. That photo? I brought that very harness and dildo with me to the show and displayed it to the audience. Everyone seemed to enjoy seeing it, although no one volunteered to let me actually demo anything on them. Too bad.

The show is fun and sexy and educational and simply delightful in so many ways. And John and Sophie are the cutest, sweetest, most winsome pair of sexual outlaws in the world, you just want to pet them and cuddle them and take them home and... do evil things to them.

But I digress. We went out for drinks after the Sunday show with John and Sophie, and I got to talk to them about how they handled putting their very real, intimate lives out on a stage for everyone to see. Because as I was watching the show, I was thinking that in some ways, Monk and I do a written version of this on our blogs and podcasts.

Obviously for us the topics are different. We do reveal a lot, though, and sometimes that gets uncomfortable. Particularly because we are not anonymous bloggers. We put our faces are on our blogs. Our professional names and reputations on riding on this. The stakes are high for us.

But we don't want to be too safe, because that's boring. So it's a continuous dance on the edge between regrettable TMI and the same-old, tame-old stuff. And I for one think Monk has nothing to apologize for, because when it comes to busting out of the stereotypes about straight male tops, he will go there. Even when there is right up onto a stage to talk to an audience full of people about pegging.

The reason people like to read us, and like to see shows like Peg-Ass-Us, is because it is real. We're just talking about things lots of people either really do, or really want to do. That blurry, low-rez camera-phone snapshot of mine? Almost seventeen thousand views since I put it up less than a year ago. (And that's just on Flickr, God only knows how many people have it posted on a website somewhere.) I'm quite clear that many of even the straightest of straight male tops are not utterly uninterested in having a woman touch their ass. You've still got two nights to catch the show, guys. Go there.

I amused myself by going into the blog archives to see what I was writing about on January 20th in 2005. It turned out to be one of the Silly Phone Calls posts. You can read that here, if you like: link opens in a new window.

The Silly Phone Calls posts were always a big hit - with certain people. I flatter myself that some of them are very funny stories. But still, I officially stopped doing Silly Phone Calls some time back for two reasons.

Firstly, I had mined a lot of my best material. Monk and I have often observed that many of our best early blog posts were the stories we’d told before. Even a writer can hone a story out loud, get the best turns of phrase, gauge the audience's reaction, and tune up the tale based on that. Many of the most popular early Silly Phone Calls posts were written versions of anecdotes I’d regaled my friends with already.

Granted, I had many years of talking to weird strangers on the phone to draw from, so I had plenty of well-polished stories. But eventually, every well runs dry. Since I no longer have a public phone number – and oh, how I do not miss that – I have no fresh material.

But the deeper reason was: I found that sometimes those posts hurt people’s feelings – not the random callers, but people that I know and like in real life. That surprised me. See, I know I’m a dominatrix and all, but inside my own head, I don’t think of myself as a scary badass. I think I’m a pussy-cat. And not even a particularly sharp-tongued one, at that. I just thought I was being cute with those posts. But mere text on a page robs one’s words of certain nuances, so people interpret it differently than intended.

When sex workers talk about our dealings with clients, we tend to position ourselves as the potentially vulnerable ones, and our clients as the ones who must prove themselves to be not dangerous, not disrespectful, not unkind. And certainly there’s plenty of evidence to back up the wisdom of that. I’m not suggesting otherwise.

But – I decided that I wanted to be more sensitive to their vulnerability, too. It’s easy – and often satisfying - to crack jokes at a population we often see as having more power than we do. But when I heard about some of my guys being hurt by things I said, I realized - they actually don’t feel as powerful as an outside observer might assume.

It was one of those moments when something you already know crystallizes into a new form. I’m a dominatrix - I put people into vulnerable positions when they are in my dungeon. That part is obvious. But it sharpened my understanding of how, even in a professional situation, my emotional power over my clients doesn’t end when they leave my house.

I have power, and it’s not necessarily the type of power I set out to get - but I have it. So I have to use it carefully, and not leave bloody weals on boys I like. Unless of course I mean to.

***

EDIT: True, I occasionally sharpen my claws on people who write me letters and ask for advice. But that's different - they generally say, "You can write about this." That's consent, in my book.

I’ve been thinking, the last few days, about how Twitter and how much I have come to use it.

Twitter seems to be a rather polarizing thing – people either love it or they hate it. (And some people start out saying they hate it, but then wind up getting their own account and happily tweeting away on it. Not that I know anyone like this, of course.)

Twitter-haters say “It’s so mundane, it’s a barrage of banal trivia. I don’t care if someone’s making toast, or is bored at work.” I recall that people said much the same thing about personal web sites, and then about journals and blogs when they became popular. “Why would anyone want to read about some stranger’s private life?”

Well, apparently they do. So I would say that yes, Twitter entries certainly can be banal and devoid of interest. But that’s true of any form of communication. Have these people never had a face to face conversation that was mundane and boring? I envy them.

I feel that as a writer, the challenge is to create 140-character snapshots of one’s world – either the outer world, or one’s inner one - that are interesting to read. It’s a good exercise in learning capture a reader’s attention concisely.

(It’s also a useful tool for quickly mobilizing large groups of people – witness the Amazon episode – but that’s a different conversation.)

Because you can talk to me on Twitter, it also takes the place of the comments feature on my blog. (Which was abolished mainly because it was hijacked by porn spammer and a few vitriol-spouters.) It’s always been possible to email me, but some people like to publish comments to me, too.

And I think the fact that Twitter is often assumed to be dedicated to mundane trivia is useful for me. Mundane trivia adds dimension to who I am. My friends and I joke about how people think, because I’m a dominatrix, I fall out of bed every morning in a corset and thigh-high boots. I think if I had time, it would be terribly amusing to start a Twitter in the voice of that mythical stereotypical Mistress. Like this:

Mistress WhiplashYourAss: Got out of bed and stood on slave while I brushed my teeth. Then administered beating to him for not squeezing toothpaste from bottom.
9:25 AM Apr 12th from web

Mistress WhiplashYourAss: Drinking first cup of coffee at kitchen table while slave licks my six-inch stiletto-heeled pumps. Kick him for whimpering about beating.
9:55 AM Apr 12th from web

Mistress WhiplashYourAss: Going to the post office. One of 4 super-buff slaves who carry me everywhere in a curtained litter has ingrown toenail. Administered beating.
11:07 AM Apr 12th from web

That’s actually not what my life looks like, and I’d rather not have to unravel those assumptions when I meet people.

I’m not sure my Twitter would be interesting or make much sense if you didn’t know who I was, and you didn’t read anything else by me. But I think it works well as an addition to all the other words I publish.

And as a reader, I myself am enjoying following the daily lives of other interesting folks. So Tweet on, people.

So, I have been digitally acquainted with San Francisco writer and editor Stephen Elliot for a while. He's the editor of the online arts and culture magazine "The Rumpus", in which Monk was profiled not long ago. And soon I will get to make his acquaintance in person, because Stephen has a cool event happening here in Seattle in March. Read all about it!

Tuesday, March 24, The Rumpus, in association with Northwest Film Forum, presents PIG HUNT.

"Perhaps the finest horror film to have been made this year," according to Eye For Film. PIG HUNT is the tale of a Guy's Weekend of hunting gone wrong in the backwoods of Northern California, set amidst the chaos of marijuana, meth, rednecks, and a killer cult that worships a legendary 3,000 pound wild boar called "The Ripper."

Join us for the Seattle launch of The Rumpus, and the first Seattle screening of Pighunt.

Hosted by author and editor of The Rumpus, Stephen Elliott. Rumpus contributor Ryan Boudinot will give a reading before the film and director Jim Isaac and writer/producer Robert Mailer Anderson will answer questions following the screening. The party will continue across the street at the Vermillion art gallery.

6 p.m. Happy Hour at Vermilion, 1508 11th Ave.

7 p.m. Screening of "Pig Hunt," preceded by a short reading by Ryan Boudinot, at Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave, Seattle. Following the film, director Jim Isaac and writer producer Robert Mailer Anderson will take questions.

9:30 p.m. Post-screening party at Vermillion

Get tickets online at Brown Paper Tickets.

A milestone: as of yesterday, I have been blogging for five years.

Five years. That feels like a long time. I had no idea, when I started, that this blog would become such a defining part of Mistress Matisse. But it has. I have often wondered what would have happened if I’d started blogging anonymously. Would I have as many readers? Would I have been outed by now, or would I have been able to remain a mystery? And what would I have said, and not said, differently? I’ll never know.

I’ve been writing for The Stranger for about eight years, and between that column and this, I have a lot of words out there in the world. (Plus there’s the podcasts, and a few video clips here and there.) There are good sides and bad sides to that. If you want to get to know me, there’s a lot of information available. If you’re wondering about an issue that might fall under my umbrella of expertise, search around a bit, chances are I’ve talked about it.

Or, if you want something to be offended about, you can just cherry-pick through the archives, and I’m sure you can find something I’ve said that you think is reprehensible. I actually don’t subscribe to the idea that “if you don’t piss people off, you aren’t doing it right.” But as even-handed as I think I’m being, some people seem determined to be offended. Which I find baffling… but hey, if that’s what you get off on, enjoy yourselves. I have weird hobbies too.

I admit that some days I think, “Oh god, I have to blog. I don’t want to, I have nothing to say, I don't feel like writing... but I have to put something up.” My relationship with this blog is sometimes a bit like the one Seymour had with his blood-sucking alien plant in Little Shop of Horrors. It’s brought me a lot of great things – and great people – but it does suck up a lot of my personal juice.

But over the years, I’ve learned to worry less about it – I don’t check my hit counts every day, like I once did, or obsess about Technocrati ranks. Internet fame is an ephemeral thing. If you try to hang your hat on it, you’ll just make yourself crazy. As a blogger, I’ve learned a lot about just doing the best I can, and being gentle with myself for not always doing moremoreMORE.

Having the Twitter feed does makes me a feel a bit less derelict in my duty when I play hooky. It also allows me to have some back-and-forth with people, without having the flood of comment-spam and hate-bombers that the comment feature unfortunately devolved into. I’m interested in doing more podcasting, too, and I’m also intrigued by this application, as brought to my attention by the clever Violet Blue: 12seconds video. So you may be seeing some of that in the near future…

It’s hard to know how this blog will end. Perhaps fashions in internet communications will evolve and render blogs obsolete. Or maybe I’ll just wake up one day and realize I’m done with it. But for now, I’m still here. We’ll see what the next five years brings.

So, I'm currently banging my head against the keyboard of my computer, trying to make a Stranger column come out of it. I'm not sure if the magic words are lodged in my skull, or if they are trapped somewhere between the keys. But I feel that some percussion is required somewhere, and quickly, because it's due today.

That's all exactly as much fun as it sounds like it would be, so I'll spare you further description. Until I'm done with my impact-play scene, perhaps you'll amuse yourself making up captions for this Flickr shot.

Wow, did I get a lot of advice and helpful suggestions about my refrigerator! Ya’ll are better than “This Old House.” So thank you, nice people, for all your words of wisdom.

Several clever readers noted that they Googled for answers to this domestic puzzle. Perhaps they were insinuating something. Yes, I know I lecture you about intellectual laziness and tell all of you to ask Mistress Google something before you ask me. But hey, those rules don’t apply to me, I’m a special snowflake, right?

Mixed in with the suggestions were several emails that read, “Yeah, mine is doing that too, would you post the other emails so I can see them?” So without further ado, Mistress Matisse’s Supah-Sexy Refrigerator Repair Tips! I myself will be trying all of these out as soon as possible.

***

I’m sitting at my desk preparing for a class I’m teaching at the Emerald City Writer's Conference in October. I was very pleased to be asked to present at this con, and I’m excited by the prospect of talking about kink, polyamory and sex work to people outside of what I sometimes call “the love bubble.” I think that will be very interesting. It’s not like teaching a how-to BDSM 101 sort of class, which I always find a little frustrating. It’s more about teaching people what kinky/poly/sex work people are like, which I think I’ll enjoy much more.

I’m also pleased that this is specifically a romance writer’s conference. I think romance writers are a bit like the sex workers of the writing world – a lot of people like to turn up their noses at them because they write about ew, dirty things. And because the books are just all fluffy insubstantial crap. But the romance genre accounts for a very large chunk of the popular-fiction market - so regardless of the sneers, a lot of people are voting with their dollars.

And while I have certainly read romance novels I thought were terrible, I’ve also read plenty of them that amused and entertained me. I think genre fiction novels are a bit like sonnets, in a way. You have this clearly defined structure and rhyme scheme, but within that form there’s flexibility and plenty of room, I find, for originality.

I want this class to be good - so I should go work on it now. Bye!

Someone was remarking to me lately how I should write a book. Which is very flattering, but not in the cards right now. I've talked about my reasoning on that subject before. And really, I just don't see how I'd ever have time.
Sometimes it sort of stuns me, though, when I look back and see that I've been blogging for over four years now. There's a lot of stuff here! Some of it's just random bits of trivia, but some of it bears re-linking. Thereupon, without further ado, The Best Of (The Last Couple Months Of) Mistress Matisse's Blog.

Nazi Play
S/he's A Lady
The Bank Job
Bad Approach
The Bra-Fitter
D/s And Relationships
Must One Bottom Before Topping?
My Wedding Photos
Getting Your Partner Into Kink
And, my favorite: What Not To Say - The "Puffy" Man.

And from the dusty vaults: Older Greatest Hits

Oh, man. See, this is why I’m not sure I want to be any more famous than I am. The New York Times ran an article this week about the fact that all links and references to sex writer Violet Blue have been systematically removed from the website Boing Boing. (Need a password? Use one of these.)

This isn’t recent news, and I’m not sure why the NYT decided to talk about it now. But they did, and they speculated that the “unpublishing” happened because of a personal issue between Violet Blue and one of the site’s contributors, Xeni Jardin. I myself do not know Ms. Jardin, and I have only an electronic acquaintance with Ms. Blue. So I do not have any idea what really happened there. Nor do I think it’s any of my business. But then, I don’t really think it’s anyone’s business.

Granted, the writer also posed – but did not answer – a few token questions about the responsibilities of bloggers, which is not an uninteresting subject. But overall, the whole thing just felt really gossipy to me. Oscar Wilde once said the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about. I know what he meant, and I often enjoy my tiny bit of celebrity-dom. But I also know I would hate it if my private affairs were being commented on in the bloody New York Times. Luckily, that doesn't seem like something that's likely to happen.

Before I go further, yes, commenting is off right this second, there’s some issues there, hopefully it’ll be back up soon…

So, my feature piece in The Stranger is out. It’s so different, writing a longer piece. With the column, it’s fairly quick and dirty – what you read is pretty often exactly what I wrote. Occasionally changes are made, but usually not. There was a much longer writing/submitting/editing/rewriting cycle with this piece, and even so, my editor had final say of what ran. That’s probably for the best. Every writer needs an editor, even though we hate it. We think poetry flows from our pen like liquid silver and that it should be unstained by any other human hand. But that’s why we have blogs. For any other type of publication, the dispassion and discipline of another set of eyes is a necessary thing.

Until comments are back up, you are welcome to email me with feedback.

So, the amazingly cool event of last week? I got an email from someone saying she liked my columns. I do get some of those kinds of emails from people I’ve never met, and it’s always extremely nice to hear. But this was a bit different.

It was from Susie Bright.

Yeah, Susie fucking Bright! I’m not kidding.

Now, some of ya’ll may actually not know who Susie Bright is, and I feel sorry for you. You should immediately go subscribe to her blog and buy all her books, and then you’ll understand. Only you won’t really understand, unless like me, you were once a lonely, isolated teenager in a small, sex-negative Southern town, before the internet existed, and writers like Ms. Bright were the only, only hope you had in the world that somewhere, there were other people like you. Let me snip from Wiki here:

Susie Bright co-founded and edited the first women's sex magazine, On Our Backs, "entertainment for the adventurous lesbian," from 1984 to 1991. She founded the first women's erotica book series, Herotica and edited the first three volumes. She started The Best American Erotica series in 1993, which is still being published. She was the choreographer/consultant for the Wachowski Brothers film, Bound (in which she also had a cameo appearance). Bright also appeared as herself in an episode of the HBO series Six Feet Under.
Bright taught the first university class on the subject of the aesthetics and politics of pornography at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1986, and became well-known for her scholarship in sexual representation through her courses on the subject at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Bright was the first female critic of the X-Rated Critics Organization in 1986, and wrote feminist reviews of erotic films for Penthouse Forum from 1986-1989. Her film reviews of mainstream movies are widely published, and her comments on gay film history are featured in the documentary film The Celluloid Closet.

Yeah. So, as you may infer, me getting a note from Susie Bright is like a parish priest getting a note from the Pope saying, “Hey kid, nice Mass.” I know I'm gushing like a schoolgirl here, but truly, this was A Big Deal to me. I would not be the writer that I am without people like Susie Bright, and she was a huge influence on me as a budding young kinky and not-heterosexual woman. I just hope I can do as much for other people as she did for me.