Happy Friday, everyone. Here's the column for the week. And some social notes…

If, like me, you hate the Blue Angels and are bored breathless by terrible traffic, drunken crowds and noisy boat races, ditch that Seafair shit and come to Max’s Bondage For Beginners workshop at the Wet Spot on Sunday afternoon. We'll be at the party that night, too.

Call For Volunteers: Monk of Twisted Monk is having a large and fabulous party for all his kinky friends at his workspace, the Abbey, on August 19^th. There will be music and BDSM play and some sexy performances from the Thrillhammer people and Tamara the Trapeze Lady. To make all this happen, he needs some minions to help out. Nothing too complicated, mainly stuff like helping set up stages, music, and food, and some clean-up, all under the supervision of Monk, or Monk’s portable brain, NerdyGirl. Volunteering for events is an excellent way to meet people in the community, so if you’d like to be on the support team and attend the Monk-a-palooza, drop him or Nerdy a note. It’ll be a great evening.

And by the way - I wanted to include Plastic Man in this week's column about tertiary partners. I love Plastic Man, he's definitely the kinkiest superhero. But, you know, I only have so much column space.

Squeamish about blood or CBT? Don’t read further.

An email I received today...

I am just curious, would you be interested in doing a moderately severe cock and ball torture session with me. What I have in mind is very simple, to allow you to stick approximately a half a dozen needles through my cock head. Does this interest you at all? If so, what would your price quote be, I imagine it would be about an hour long session.
Thanks…
By the way I have absolutely no experience with cbt or sadism/masochism.

I’m pretty sure this is a troll. By that I mean: not a serious inquiry. Maybe he wants to be blogged about, maybe he wants to get some dirty email exchange going, I don’t know.

If it is a serious question – darlin’, I completely support your desire to have terrible things done to your dick. I cherish the hours – and there have been a lot of them - I have spent tormenting boy’s bits. Binding them, squeezing, slapping, pinching, pulling, shocking and just generally being evil - it’s not simply my profession. I actually feel it’s my vocation in this life.

But. The words “moderate” and “half a dozen needles through my cock head” do not go together. Especially when they are followed by “absolutely no experience”. Dear, dear man – no. I will not do this with you. I don’t know if you saw it on a porn site or what, but needles in your bits is advanced play. (Hell, needles anywhere on the body is considered higher-level play by many people.)

Do I play-pierce people’s genitals? Sure I do. I might put some needles through, say, the skin of the scrotum. Just the skin, mind, not through the testicle itself. And I have put needles through the top layer of skin – not the shaft proper – of dicks, and some around the ridge of the corona. That was with Mr. Wood, god bless him, a man with whom I have a long and bloody history of really heavy CBT. He knows the risks of what we’re doing. And believe me, I did too. It was one of those scenes where one thinks, “Shit, this is really hot - and I hope to god I do it just right.”

Needles straight through the head? I’ve not done that because I think the risk outweighs the possible pleasure. It's true that the glans penis is soft tissue. The chambers that fill up with blood and make the cock hard are in the shaft, so you’re not going to rupture one of those. On the other hand, that’s a thick piece of flesh. I mainly prefer to pierce through skin I can pinch up between my fingers. You know what you’re getting into there. I know professional piercers do it – the ampallang, the apadrayva - but as you’ve noticed, I am not a professional piercer.

And son, you want to walk in and have me do six needles through your cockhead, bam, just like that? You’d be howling like a coyote at the first one, and two would make you faint. I will bet you any money in this world on that. There is nothing moderate about this scene. It's very severe.

CBT fans often experiment on themselves to learn about where their limits are. Try that. You don’t need to spend a lot of money at first. Get a bag of clothespins, a paint stirrer, and a stiff scrub brush. Put on some kinky porn on and go to town. Put the clothespins on, wait a few minutes, and then take them off. Press the bristles of the brush against your cock as hard as you can stand it. Smack it with the stirrer. See how all that feels. Then talk to me again. Because I can actually put six needles into you in about two minutes, but I don’t want to spend the other fifty-eight watching you recover from your faint.

***

Obligatory Disclaimer: Piercing is not a 100% safe activity. If you are not experienced, you should not do anything like this without the supervision of people who have already done it and know what they are doing. Be sure to use only fresh, sterile needles, and use rubbing alcohol to clean the area before and after you do the piercings. Wear latex (or nitrile) gloves, and change them if you play for a long period or touch unclean stuff during the scene. Use needles once, on one person, then dispose of them in a bio-hazardous waste receptacle (sharps container). Even if it’s done correctly, you may bleed, bruise, get an infection or possibly even scar from this activity. You’ve been warned, proceed at your own risk.

So, since my run-in with the feminists two weeks ago, I’ve been poking around some more into the feminist blogosphere. I’ve been reading some of the more mainstream ones, like Feministe and Pandagon, for awhile, although I never comment. Alas, a Blog is interesting too, and well-moderated, which I like.

But if you link-hop a little off the beaten feminist-blog path – wow, it’s a whole other world. I don’t know what to call it, precisely – I’ve seen some of these bloggers refer to themselves as radfems, meaning radical feminists. Whatever one calls their world, it’s a place in which the feminist sex wars of the 80‘s are apparently still raging, especially lately.

I suppose it’s like any other subculture, capable of getting obsessed with its pet issues. You can certainly find blogs for the kink community, for example, where folks get all worked up and personal about insular issues like “We’re Old Guard” vs. “That’s Pretentious Crap”, as if it was something a tiny handful of people in cyberspace could decide once and for all, for everyone.

However, even with that experience under my belt, I’m boggled by how the merest suggestion that sex work could be a free and positive choice for some people makes these women’s blood pressure skyrocket. I mean, they come unglued. And the sheer venom of their remarks to/about sex-positive feminists - it’s like Anne Coulter has been cloned or something. I’m not going to link the tirades themselves, because I don’t feel like dealing with the blowback. But here are some links to friendlier sites (or at least more neutral ones) discussing the matter, and it’s easy to hop from there to the more extreme ones, if you wish.

(Mandatory disclaimer, in case anyone new to me comes along: sex work should only be done by freely consenting adults. Like BDSM, if there is not adult consent, it’s not okay, end of story. But I think I should be able to do whatever I want with my own body.)

What puzzles me is this: sex work is, in America and many other countries as well, either strictly limited or downright illegal. There’s a social stigma attached to sex work, and sex workers themselves are marginalized. Some more than others, it’s true, but no one completely escapes it, not even women like me – white, middle class, economically successful.

So, all that being true – what exactly do these women want to do to us that hasn’t already been done? I mean, you’d think we had control of the Senate or something. The most I can gather is that they find it offensive that we write articles and books about our lives and get them published. They call that “being overrepresented” and they want us to shut up and stop talking about how happy we are.

And they talk about “eliminating prostitution” – well, I suppose if you think it’s inherently and irredeemably evil, I can see where that would be your goal. But I don’t know of any culture or any time period where women trading sex for something else they wanted has not existed. It even happens in the animal world. So when I try to imagine what these particular women would do to make that happen – given that the whole illegal/stigma/marginalized thing is already in place - I’m stumped. They don’t give specifics, so maybe the first item on the agenda is to bicker with women who ID as sex-positive feminists and post lots of judgmental, divisive comments. They’ve certainly made tons of progress in that arena.

***

Edited To Add: It strikes me that I’ve written about weird people several times in the last two weeks or so. I’ve just been in the mood to observe and comment on the rest of the world lately. But that’s not a reflection on my general mood, which is actually quite good, and the overall happiness of my life.

Fat Actress

Ring Ring!

Me: Hello?

Caller: Hello, Mistress Matisse? I had a question for you. Do you know any really fat dominatrixes?

I am deeply suspicious. There’s something about the way this young man says “fat” that makes me think he does not respect and esteem big women.

Me: I’m sure there are some ladies around town, have you looked online?

Caller: Yeah, but – I want someone really big and fat. My buddy is getting married, it’s for his bachelor party. We’d want her to come in and tie him to a chair, dance on him, and like, smother him with her big tits and stuff.

Me: So, your buddy likes big girls?

Caller: No, no, that’s what I mean. It’d be like a gag to get a big fat girl, you know?

Yeah, I do know. Gag indeed - this guy is the one who should be gagged, preferably with something sharp. I’ve performed at some bachelor parties in my life – a long time ago, and never again, I assure you - and I can picture the kind of scenario he's talking about. This caller wants to hire a woman be mocked and made fun of by a bunch of drunken idiots because she’s a) big and b) being sexual. The fact that he’s conflating professional dommes with bachelor-party strippers is beside the point. The point is that I don’t approve of people hiring sex workers – of any size - specifically to demean them.

It’s interesting how rarely I run across this kind of nasty attitude. Perhaps it’s because I never deal with more than one man at a time. There’s something about groups of men, especially young men, that creates a space for that “Lord of Flies” mentality to happen. It’s sad that we live in a culture where some people are so terrified of their sexuality that they’re driven to scorn and humiliate proxy representations of it.

Perhaps the Mistress can give him a whack with the clue stick and make him realize.

Me: First of all, what you want is not a dominatrix, you want a stripper. Second, it’s a bad idea to hire someone and be rude to her. I do know some girls who specialize in performing at bachelor parties, I can give you their website.

Caller: Are they fat?

Me: No, hiring a big girl is a bad idea, because what you want to do would be really rude and disrespectful to her. You’d be making fun of her, and it would hurt her feelings.

Caller: (pauses) Well, it’s just a joke.

Me: I don’t think it’s funny. I bet she wouldn’t either. What if it were your sister or your girlfriend?

Click. He hangs up. I’m not surprised, he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who could be schooled. I just hope he doesn’t get any ladies to come to the party – he may not be a lacrosse player, but he doesn’t seem like any client I’d want to deal with.