After 23 years living in Oakland, the time has come for me to find a new home. My partner and I are going to be moving to Seattle by early August. This has been in the works for a while. In fact, the first time we talked about it was about 12 years ago. Elizabeth […]

I recently posted Learning to Ask on Fetlife (one of the most widely-used social networking sites for the S&M scene), and it quickly received a lot of comments. Many of the folks who responded shared that they face a lot of challenges with asking for what they want, or that it took them plenty of […]

The way we present our gender to the world around us can have big effects on how people treat us, but so far, there isn’t much research on how gender nonconformity shapes our work lives. Of course, plenty of people have stories to tell, and my friend Alison Fogarty is looking for research participants for […]

Yesterday, Jezebel posted an article about a woman whose post on Fetlife (a social networking site for the BDSM world) about an experience of sexual assault resulted in the usual slut-shaming and victim-blaming. It’s worth checking out, and if you’re on Fetlife, take a look at the original post. The Jez piece ends: Dayna’s experience […]

In some of the (mostly online) discussions I’ve seen around BDSM & kink, there’s a sticking point that seems to come up over and over. What does it mean when people say that they get turned on by “pushing boundaries”? I think this is worth unpacking because there are at least two different meanings to […]

I’ve been having conversations about the meaning of BDSM for a long, long time. Part of that is that I’ve been doing various things that generally fall in the kink category since I was about 19. Part of that is that sex educators have these sorts of talks with a lot of different people. Part […]

Some new headlines about the Robert Pickton case are making the rounds. It seems that Jim Brown, one of the police officers involved in the investigation of the serial killer, had some photos on Fetlife, a social network for the BDSM world. The images of him holding a leash that’s connected to a collared woman […]