Supporting my community by backing Sexy Little Pages and Sex Down South

My two biggest goals this year were to get my financial life in order (I have a list of specific goals around that, but they basically amount to increasing my income, raising my credit score, upping my savings and amping up my retirement account) and to get pregnant. So far I've had zero luck on the latter, though I haven't given up, and am working diligently on the former. Five years ago, in October 2011, I was laid off from my full time magazine editing job and I really had no idea what I was going to do. My forays into the job market yielded nothing and that was depressing and demoralizing and I quickly realized I needed to simply adapt and rather than look for another full time job, I had to hustle as hard as I could.

That worked for a while, and last year was a good year financially, but it also came at a cost; I researched an article for a print magazine I'd dreamt of breaking into while on vacation in Thailand. I worked many odd hours and always felt like I was scrambling to read every last news item to see if I could pitch a story on it. So this year, when things got rocky in my little freelance world, I reached out to people I love and trust and told them I was looking for work, and lo and behold, I got part-time jobs writing for OMJ (Oh. My. Jersey.) and doing copywriting. Both have amounted to pretty much a full time job, and I still pour my heart and soul into editing and promoting my anthologies, teach my online erotica writing class at LitReactor, do occasional freelance writing and consult with writers about erotica. At the end of this year I will be formally assessing what's working and what's not so I can figure out my next steps.

But since this year has mostly gone well and seems to be on the upswing, I wanted to take a small amount of the money I've earned and find ways to both give back and spread the word about my books. I pour most of any extra income that doesn't go to bills or debt or savings back into promoting the Best Women's Erotica of the Year series, and that's paid off in the sense that I'm about to sign a contract to edit a fourth volume. That means I can plan and grow the series and really think strategically about what my goals are for it.

Additionally, I also plan to make an end of year donation to one of my favorite nonprofits, the New Jersey based Bridge of Books Foundation, which provides books to children in need. I used to volunteer helping sort books for them when I lived in Red Bank, and miss that experience but am so glad they are out there helping kids get their hands on books.

So while I'm still in the midst of really getting a handle on my money, when I have had a surplus due to especially good months, I've been looking for ways to give back, and two of those have been by supporting the sex positive community. I just backed my first Patreon, for the UK based publisher Sexy Little Pages. I've really enjoyed the books of theirs I've read, especially their tattoo erotica anthology Inked, and think it's wonderful for the genre to have new publishers, new voices, new ways of drawing in readers and new outlets for authors. I encourage my students to check out their calls for submissions and am always thrilled when one of them gets an acceptance.

The bottom line is, publishing is a business, and I believe we all have to support each other. This may be with money, by buying books or backing a Patreon like this, or by reviewing books on Goodreads, Amazon, your blogs, etc., by asking your library to buy an author or publisher's books, etc. There are really an infinite number of ways you can support the publishers and authors you love and want to see stay in business. I find that when a publisher closes, there's a lot of disappointment, but I think we then all need to ask ourselves, what were we doing to support them? So I wanted to use the blessing and gratefulness for what's been a good year so far to support a publisher I think is doing great things, and I encourage you to as well. If you back them for $3 a month, you even get a link on their site, so there's something in it for you too.

I have heard wonderful things from participants in the Sex Down South conference in Atlanta. I wasn't able to attend this year but I wanted to both support them and reach out to a community I think would enjoy my books, so the Best Women's Erotica of the Year series is now a sponsor of the conference. It's really an honor for me to be able to do this, and while large sums would have been out of my reach, theirs were very reasonable. So if you're in or near Atlanta, I encourage you to attend the conference this weekend and think about submitting to speak next year! Their lineup covers a wide range of topics, they bring in fascinating speakers and it looks like a wonderful event that I do hope I can experience for myself at some point.

6 Awesome Women I Met at Catalyst

I was in Long Beach, California for the first time this weekend at CatalystCon and a full summary will have to wait because I have 3 days to get ready to go to Dubai. But I met some amazing women, who totally inspired me. A few I'd met before, but I was so impressed with these ladies and highly encourage you to follow them. Catalyst will now be hosting Catalyst East and Catalyst West conferences, the former taking place March 15-17 in the Washington, DC area and the latter I believe in fall of 2013, so check their site and follow @CatalystCon on Twitter for details.

Megan Andelloux (@HiOhMegan) - Megan is a sexologist and sex educator and runs the The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health in Rhode Island. She told a story at Bawdy Storytelling involving her first fisting, gone very, very wrong, and did it so flawlessly that she had the whole room agog. I can't even do it justice by summarizing it because it was just one of those brilliant live moments where nobody could figure out what was going on and the room was utterly silent waiting to find out.

Jessica Drake (@thejessicadrake) - Jessica is a porn star with Wicked Pictures and sex educator and this was the first time at one of Dee Dennis's conferences a porn company was a sponsor. Apparently, some people didn't love this idea, but I thought it was great and I caught Jessica on a sex education panel and she talked about how her audience has changed from mostly men to lots of women and couples. She is the force behind the Guide to Wicked Sex line of educational DVDs and was also incredibly nice. If you are going to CatalystCon East, I highly recommend you go to any panel she's on and if you want to know what a smart, sex-positive porn star actually thinks, ask her.

Amanda Hess (@amandahess) - Amanda was covering Catalyst as a journalist (check her out on Slate) and we had lunch and talked books and freelancing. I've been impressed with her writing since she was blogging at Washington City Paper; she writes smartly about sex and current events and porn; one of her more famous pieces profiled porn star James Deen for GOOD.

Lidia-Anain (@SexLoveJoy) - I met Lidia-Anain at Bookshop Santa Cruz earlier this year when I read there with Susie Bright, but had no idea she was such a powerhouse and awesome person. She runs the show Sex With Others with Jamye Waxman, is involved with Bawdy Storytelling, and I look forward to reading more of her work and meting her again. She also, I must add, had on a killer black and white dress and amazing heels at Bawdy Storytelling. I'm not saying you should go to Catalyst East for the fashion, but there was a lot of awesomeness inthat regard.

Allison Moon (@TalesofthePack) - Allison is the author of the lesbian werewolf novel Tales of the Pack and is working on a sequel. We'd met briefly before and I'd heard her tell a story at a Bawdy Storytelling event in San Francisco, but we got to actually chat about the ins and outs of self-publishing, which was fascinating and she told a story about a furry lesbian orgy that was utterly hilarious. Also, she was wearing, and is selling on her site, "Eat Fuck Howl" t-shirts!

Sex Nerd Sandra (@SexNerdSandra) - Sandra produces a podcast called, yes, Sex Nerd Sandra. She also spoke on the sex education panel and told a hilarious story about oral sex, dental dams, and the pressure to live up to society's, and her own, expectations at Bawdy Storytelling that was brave and wonderful.

Fucking: What's feminism got to do with it?

I tried to write this last night and was so addled from doing the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer I could barely think, so here's what I've got so far, I hope to add to this, and apologies if it's a bit disjointed, but I wanted to get this up while it's still timely.

This is going to start with four cliched words: I'm a feminist but...I don't think feminism and fucking are quite as intertwined as they are sometimes tagged as being. That is not to say I think they're unrelated, but there is not always an obvious connection, and that's a good thing.

What do I mean? Well, let's look at Karen Owen and the Duke Fuck List. Much of the discussion about the list asked the question of whether what she wrote was an example of "feminist empowerment." But that idea in itself almost mocks feminism, because it means that anything a woman does is automatically assumed to be speaking for all women and having some grand meaning rather than an individual one.

Jasper Hamill wrote in Scotland's The Herald:

No-one admires the misogynistic way sports teams objectify women, so why on earth would we admire the same thing flipped on its head?

Why does that question automatically have to be asked? Why does every woman, whether or not she's a feminist, have to be a stand-in for all women and all of feminism? Isn't that just another version of putting women on a pedestal, except this time it's a feminist one?

Witness Catherine Cai in The Emery Wheel:

But to call Owen a feminist hero would be a disgusting misinterpretation of the events. By assigning worth to individuals based on appearances and sexual performances, she’s only reversing the roles, not doing away with them. In the end, Owen is not empowering women, but simply subscribing to the same patriarchal system that feminists have fought against for decades, one that insists on a dominant party and a subordinate party.

Feminism is also not about women’s domination over men, power plays, reversing the tables or spite. That counterproductive approach is what gave rise to such negative terms as “feminazi” and “manhater,” which, at the end of the day, only detract from the movement. Feminism should be about women’s self empowerment — a simple and worthy goal that’s too often lost in translation.

I think to take something that was never intended to be shown publicly (unless that is all a ruse and it was a wonderful media ploy, but I don't believe that) and try to assign some grander meaning on Owen's part is problematic, to say the least. Whether or not it was empowering for Owen is a different question from whether or not the list's public spectacle is "empowering" for all women. This is the same question that came up ad nauseam about Sex and the City, though there it was slightly more valid, as that was a television show aimed at the public, but still, it was never allowed to just be entertainment, and Samantha Jones was repeatedly held up as a negative example of "sexual empowerment." But was she trying to be a feminist heroine (or hero) or, like Owen, perhaps, just herself? Do we need to hold up every promiscuous woman as the "new" feminist icon?

This is not 1994, and we have moved on from the Tad Friend-coined term "do me feminism," though there are still plenty of feminist sex activists, women who are starting sex toy stores, sharing information, providing options.

The problem becomes when we start to make judgments against women like Owen because we don't want her to be held up as an icon. "That's fine for her, but..."

Tom Leonard in the Daily Mail, to my mind, misread the original Jezebel post when he wrote:

Meanwhile, critics are ­particularly offended that she is being held up as a ­champion of female sexuality and empowerment. Feminist icon ­status beckons.

Two websites that printed her ‘thesis’ claim they have been approached by the William ­Morris talent agency, the publisher ­HarperCollins and a film company, desperate to get hold of Owen to discuss book or film deals.

An editor at HarperCollins was quoted as speaking about the student’s ‘sense of self-empowerment’.

The women’s website Jezebel ­proclaimed: ‘Here’s another reminder that women can be as aggressive, or acquisitive, about sex as men can. And there’s ­nothing wrong with that, as long as all ­parties are consenting.’

I think this is the same reason that a lot of women, myself included, have struggled with our own masochism and kinkiness, especially when our play partners are men, because that seems to smack of some kind of antifeminist imagery. In other words, how can you be a feminist and like: to get tied up, verbally degraded, choked, spanked, exposed, etc., by a man? Those kinks are held up as examples that we often internalize about how we are supposed to behave, and rarely does the female dominant/male submissive get mentioned.

When I've edited the Best Sex Writing series, I get a disproportionate number of essays from feminist submissives grappling with how feminism and submission fit together. It's not that this is not a worthwhile topic to write about or consider, but the fact that we belabor it to such a degree means that we do think, on some level, that our individual actions need to be held up as some sort of heroic feminist acts, and that's where I think we've taken the political too far.

I also think that while of course the personal is political, that doesn't mean that everything about an individual's sex life can be reduced to politics. For example...I have trouble orgasming. I'm one of the women that new national sex survey is talking about (not literally, as I wasn't surveyed, but in general), but whenever I see that reduced to a "problem" or called anti-feminist, it makes me feel like there is something personally defective about me.

Perhaps the larger question is: does everything a feminist does have to be "feminist" or can it just be something she does? Because we are never all going to agree on what a proper feminist sex act is, in part because I don't think there can be such a definition. It's like we're being goaded to hold up Owen as a hero or dismiss her as a whore, and I would hope that we could recognize that people do not so easily fit into extremes, and that sex, of all things, is more complicated than that.

I think Megan Carpentier at Jezebel is dead right that women are told:

Don't watch porn, don't give blow jobs, don't go home with just anyone, don't give away the milk so that he doesn't think the cow is free. Don't be an exhibitionist, don't be submissive, don't engage in sex work, don't expect to be loved if you've been too slutty.

BUT, and this is a big but, those things are not then by definition, because they're excoriated by certain segments of society, feminist acts just because a feminist (or a woman) is doing them. That is my main point about this post. Not that feminism and sexuality aren't intertwined, but that we can stand up for sexuality without having to hold women to a higher standard because of feminism.

Or in the words of Jezebel commenter blueberryblackberry:

I practice BDSM and I'm a woman who tops men. It frustrates me when others try to politicize this into a feminist statement (and especially into some kind of bizarre "female supremacy" bullshit). My kink is my kink because it turns me on, not because it aligns with any social or political ideology.

For some kink or a fetish or their sexual expression might be linked to their feminism, but to assume it's so, or to imbue feminist ideals onto sexual acts and motivations without hearing from the participants, is a grave mistake in my opinion, especially when we have people like Rabbi Shmuley Boteach telling us that "How The Condom Culture is Killing Sex". The answer is not that "all casual sex is wonderful" or "empower" or "feminist," but that as autonomous adults, we have the option to engage in casual sex and discover whether it suits us or not.

I will have more to say, especially as this relates to topics like BDSM and female masochism, but I have to head back to the walk.

There is also a very interesting discussion going on at Violet Blue's blog Tiny Nibbles about what the definition of "sex-positive" is that I think can help inform this discussion.