Month: October 2018

R is for Ridiculous

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“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of.” Indicating contempt.
“Don’t be ridiculous, nothing happened.” Indicating exasperation.
“Why would you even consider doing such a ridiculous thing?” Indicating disbelief.

All three of these sentences could be about anything at all, but for the sake of this essay, let us assume the subject matter involves spanking.

“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of. You want to be spanked? That’s just stupid.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, nothing happened. I would never spank someone, no matter how badly they behaved.”
“Why would you even consider doing such a ridiculous thing? Spanking is so perverse and degrading.”

Ridiculous: deserving or inviting derision or mockery; absurd – mid 16th cent.: from Latin ridiculosus, from ridiculus ‘laughable,’ from ridere ‘to laugh.’

Is BDSM ridiculous as described in the definition above? Deserving derision or mockery? Absolutely not. Inviting the same? Wellllllll. Like every human endeavor, there is always a hint of the absurd lurking in the not so distant background. However, it is also the case, that only those involved, deeply involved in a particular activity, are allowed self-mockery. Spanking is a serious business: except when it’s not. If you’re not a spanko, you’re never understand the need — the craving — for the burning heat, and orgasmic submission that spanking can engender in the parties concerned.

What is ridiculous is how often we humans feel the need to poke our digits in other’s private lives. It’s absurd that my welfare could be endangered by consensual BDSM practiced halfway around the globe. [That’s ‘globe’ as in the Earth, not globe as in an arse.] Personally, I feel that if more people gave spanking a try, they’d discover that life doesn’t have to be a dreary slog towards the inevitable end. Carpe diem, and all that. Get that slogan off your shirt and back where it belongs. Over a knee and loving every smack.

D/s is a true partnership between equals who find things that both enjoy in a loving, respectful and most importantly, with honesty in a relationship with full knowledge, consent and trust.

Byron Cane

Q is for Quixotic

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Having a lifestyle of BDSM can seem at times to be like ’tilting at windmills’. This phrase as well as the word ‘quixotic’ derive from the novel, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in two parts by the Spanish author Cervantes in 1605 and 1615. There are currently 22 English translations beginning in 1612 and the most recent, in 2011. Most readers are familiar with the truncated title, Don Quixote.

The hero of this romance — a satirical account of chivalric beliefs and conduct — Don Quixote is a character that has a romantic and naive unworldly idealism. Thus giving quixotic its definition: exceedingly idealistic; unrealistic and impractical.

It is after all, exceedingly idealistic that the general public will ever accept BDSM as a normal and healthy variant of romance. It is also unrealistic and impractical to agitate for PDAs [public displays of affection] to include spankings in grocery stores, anal plug insertions during staff meetings or nipple clamping during an opera intermission. Stories about fundraisers involving sexy calendar shoots are just that, fantasies. And yes, there are locales that have public BDSM during a festival setting, but obscenity statutes still are enforced.

But I venture to state that many of those who ‘venture’ into BDSM, do so out of a longing to conduct themselves in a more formal manner. Chivalric even. Being beholden to a Lord, or Mistress, who takes away the stress of day-to-day romance and codifies behavior into strict protocol with seemingly harsh consequences for errors of submission and omission. Punished for minor lapses in order to forestall major mistakes. It may seem naive to outsiders to willingly submit and surrender control of self to someone whip-in-hand, but that submission comes from strength, not weakness, and certainly not, unworldly idealism.

Tilting at windmills may indeed give a knight’s lance a strenuous workout, but the giants are real. Those monsters that seek to devour and conquer through fear and violence. The world doesn’t need more dictators strutting on the stage, but more Don Quixotes would be very welcome. Only this time, let there be spanking.

D/s is a true partnership between equals who find things that both enjoy in a loving, respectful and most importantly, with honesty in a relationship with full knowledge, consent and trust.

Byron Cane

P is for Prurient

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Prurient: having or encouraging an excessive interest in sexual matters — is a word passed down from Latin unchanged in spelling, and nearly so in definition.

Purient, late 16th cent. (in the sense ‘having a mental itching’): from Latin prurient– ‘itching, longing’ and ‘being wanton,’ from the verb prurire– ‘itch, tingle’ ‘I long for’.

This word shows that — despite the preference for visual cues — the largest and most dominant sex organ is the brain. The ‘mental itching’ we feel varies upon individual triggers, but it’s the longing that causes arousal, not the other way around. After all, if you are sightless, imagination is what engorges your clitoris.

But who decided that excessive interest in sexual matters was a bad thing? Is being wanton such a threat to society that the Romans [not known for restraint] needed to separate the sensation of attraction to a potential sex partner, from the action of intercourse? Reproduction [not the ‘fake’ authentic antiquities peddled by the roadside] has always been controlled by DNA, despite the best efforts of despots, religion and fanatics to sanctify the process through the dubious institution of male/female marriage. I say dubious, because marriage should be a private matter untrammeled by bureaucracy of any flavor. If hand-fasting worked for the Scots, you shouldn’t require a license to wed your lover.

Certainly the rise of the internet has given new life to prurient behavior with unlimited excesses at your fingertips 24/7/365; but on the balance, I would argue that more people have been helped than harmed by the flood of sexual information now available. Yes there are lots of bad things and evil people online, but they already existed in real-life. But for every stalker or troll, there are thousands if not millions of LBGTQT+ persons who have finally found affirmation that they are not damaged, not defective, not diseased for being who they are. They are normal people for longing for someone other than the accepted binary coupling. It’s not prurient: it’s natural.

D/s is a true partnership between equals who find things that both enjoy in a loving, respectful and most importantly, with honesty in a relationship with full knowledge, consent and trust.

Byron Cane

O is for Obscene

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Obscene speech is not protected speech, per the United States Supreme Court in 1957. Nor are obscene actions in public, and in many locales in private, protected either. The most famous case still remains, Jacobellis v. Ohio, decided June 22nd, 1964 in favor of the defendant that the screening of The Lovers, was not obscene. Included in the judgement, which makes for interesting reading is this:

3. The test for obscenity is “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.” Roth v. United States , 354 U.S. 476 :1957:. Pp. 191-195.
(a) A work cannot be proscribed unless it is “utterly without redeeming social importance,” and hence material that deals with sex in a manner that advocates ideas, or that has literary or scientific or artistic value or any other form of social importance, may not be held obscene and denied constitutional protection.

In 1973, the Supreme Court further refined, in Miller v. California, the definition of obscenity from that of “utterly without socially redeeming value” *see 3a above* to that which lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”.

But lets go back to the beginning.

The word ‘scene’ comes from the mid 16th cent. (denoting a subdivision of a play, or (a piece of) stage scenery): from Latin scena, from Greek skēnē ‘tent, stage.’ The prefix ob-, is directly Latin, meaning: ‘toward, against, in the way of.’

Combined however, ‘obscene’ arrives later in the 16th cent.: from French obscène or Latin obscaenus ‘ill-omened or abominable.’ In modern English, ‘obscene’ has two definitions. 1. (of the portrayal or description of sexual matters) offensive or disgusting by accepted standards of morality and decency. 2. Offensive to moral principles; repugnant.

But the true root of ‘obscene’ is this explanation. To be ob “off of” the standards of the scaenus “the Theatre stage”. In other words, miss your mark, fumble a line, act in a way unbecoming to the profession of acting, and you are obscaenus.

Is acting out BDSM obscene? Are spanking blogs obscene? Nudity? Are the things we [meaning those that write, speak, show the human body in a sexual manner] project to the public truly obscene? Is it really the court’s job to mandate how each person lives their life? To me, there are a lot of obscene things on the world stage; what consenting adults do or say or exhibit in a sexual way in public or private, is not one of them.

D/s is a true partnership between equals who find things that both enjoy in a loving, respectful and most importantly, with honesty in a relationship with full knowledge, consent and trust.

Byron Cane