Yesterday I published a post called Feminist S&M Lessons from the Seduction Community. There was a formatting error in the post that removed three paragraphs from the first section and created an incoherent sentence where they used to be. Should’ve caught that in my initial edits, but I’ve been running my brain into the ground lately trying to finish up some stuff in time for my awesome upcoming panel appearance on pickup artists and feminists at the SXSW conference! I fixed the error yesterday evening, and the correct version of the post is available here.

And with that … I have little interest in mainstream politics, but this made me dissolve in laughter. I hope that on the off chance I actually have any conservative readers, y’all aren’t too offended. I present you with an episode of the political cartoon “This Modern World” by Tom Tomorrow (click the image to embiggen):

Does that remind you of my article A Unified Theory of Orgasm? Me, too! Also it is such a perfect send-up of the ridiculousness going on these days around reproductive rights. If it amuses you, maybe consider donating to Planned Parenthood.

Description of the comic:

This article was originally published in three parts over at the Good Men Project. I’m really close to finishing my eBook Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews With Hideous Men, and believe me, you will all know as soon as it is done. The eBook is way awesomer than anything you can imagine. It also has many more fun anecdotes and is much less academic in tone than this article.

Update! The ebook is out now!

Before we get into the article, here’s my absolute favorite comic on the topic of seduction. Description and transcript at the end of this post. Click the image to embiggen it:

There is an enormous subculture devoted to teaching men how to seduce women. Within the last half-decade or so, these underground “pickup artists” have burst into the popular consciousness, aided by Neil Strauss’s bestselling book The Game and VH1’s hit reality show “The Pick-Up Artist.”

Pickup artists — also known as the “seduction community” — exchange ideas in thousands of online fora, using extensive in-group jargon. One pickup artist site lists “over 715 terms, and counting.” There are pickup artist meetups, clubs, and subculture celebrities all over the world. There are different ideological approaches and theoretical schools of seduction. Well-known pickup artist “gurus” can make millions of dollars per year: they may sell books; they may sell hours of “coaching”; they may organize training “bootcamps” or conventions with pricy tickets; they may run companies full of instructors trained in their methods. The community even generates its own well-thought-out internal critiques.

I am a sex-positive feminist lecturer and writer. I write primarily about my experiences with sadomasochism, but I have a general interest in sexuality. I first encountered pickup artists when smart ones started attending my educational events and commenting on my blog.

Some aspects of pickup artistry are hugely problematic; many parts of the community showcase and encourage misogyny. While exploring the PUA jungle, I observed things that turned my stomach and brought tears to my eyes. On the other hand, I had to admit that some pickup artist perspectives were very interesting. Some had fascinating insights about gender theory and social power. I also felt drawn by their exploits. Learning seduction, and watching hypothetically-dazzling Casanovas run a courtier-like game, sounded like an extremely fun way to spend my time.

I started my journey by talking to a few pickup artists and reading their fora. By the end, I had given a lecture at a seduction convention, and I had decided against developing my own coaching business. Within the next few months, I plan to release a pop-feminist book online titled Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews with Hideous Men. In the meantime, I can offer a quick synopsis of my own history, and why I became so interested in PUAs. I will break down some elementary distinctions among the men of the seduction community. Finally, I will offer a few PUA-influenced thoughts on feminist goals.

I was an awkward little bookworm of a child, but at least I was creative. I liked to draw, invent games, and run amateur social experiments. When I was in high school, most of my friends were on the Internet; I did not date a real-life boyfriend until college. I was inevitably teased by my peers, but even when treated well, I rarely engaged with the social hierarchies around me. I had difficulty grasping how social mechanics were “supposed” to work. A lot of things seemed obvious to other people that were not obvious to me.

For example, in sixth grade, a female friend of mine teased me about flirting with a boy. “What was I doing?” I asked. “Come on, you were flirting!” she responded. While I thought I almost understood what she meant, I was unsure — so I set out to poll everyone I knew about what constitutes “flirting.” Responses were inconsistent. One person said, very definitely: “Giggling.” Others cited examples such as “intense looks” or “making jokes.”

By the end of this experiment, I concluded that no one seemed able to explain “flirting” in terms of consistent behaviors; there were few commonalities in my final list. From what I could tell, flirting could only be explained in terms of invisible interpersonal dynamics. I found this both entertaining and frustrating.

I sometimes wonder what would have become of me if the modern pickup artist community had existed back then, and I had discovered it. PUAs devote a lot of time to understanding seduction in terms of observed behaviors. They have terms for social tactics that run the gamut from creating rapport, to encouraging trust, to building sexual tension, to shifting social power. But although the purpose of these social tactics is to manipulate emotion, the tactics are typically described as concretely as possible. Some PUA coaches provide long memorized “routines,” but it is more common to talk about particular social actions or broader strategies.

One famous PUA tactic is called the “neg.” “Neg” stands for “negative hit”, and one site defines a neg as “a remark, sometimes humorous, used to point out a woman’s flaws.” Like many PUA terms, the deeper meanings and usage vary from PUA to PUA — but there is an especially dramatic range of meanings with “neg.”

Some PUAs see negs as friendly teasing: a way for the PUA to show that he is paying attention to the girl, without appearing needy or overeager. I can offer a cute example of this approach from my own life. I was sitting in a café with a former PUA, and he gazed deep into my eyes.

“Wait a minute,” he said slowly. “Are your glasses held together by epoxy? It looks like you had to repair them at the corners.”

“Yeah,” I admitted.

He grinned. “Everything about you just screams ‘starving artist’, doesn’t it.”

This made me laugh for quite a while. I think it worked because he understood that I have chosen (for now) to be a broke writer — but he also recognized the tension I feel about that choice. So this gentleman was demonstrating that he correctly discerned my priorities; that he is not bothered by a choice that makes me feel self-conscious; and that he is confident enough to tease me.

Also, at a moment when I thought he might compliment my eyes, the former PUA shook up my expectations by breaking the romantic pattern. Often, effective flirting involves offering the right mixture of confidence plus charming novelty plus paying attention.

Some PUAs see negs more strategically, as a way of passing a woman’s “tests” or breaching her indifference. They argue that this is necessary for women who are very high-status, very beautiful, etc. They argue that some women develop a kind of immunity to compliments, and that some women actively prefer feisty, faux-adversarial flirting. Most PUAs only advocate using negs on women who meet a certain “minimum” level of attractiveness, or who seem particularly feisty. Neil Strauss, a famous PUA and author of the bestseller The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, once wrote that:

Neck-breaking! It happens. It happened to me, and people keep asking for the details, so here’s the Definitive Story of Clarisse’s Broken Neck.

The Accident

I’ve always been terrified of both biking and driving; I never wanted to learn either skill. One could blame this on the fact that I was in a car accident at a very young age. Or on the fact that I tend to live in my head a lot and I’m not great at staying 100% aware of (or interested in) the physical world around me. Or on the various nightmares about biking and driving that I had as a kid. I kept dreaming that I was in charge of a vehicle that went out of control.

I ultimately learned to drive when I was 21 for work reasons, and also because — while I try to make sure that my risks are very careful and well-considered — I also try not to indulge myself when I’m scared of things. Age 26 was when one of my friends finally managed to teach me to ride a bike. Many had tried before, but I just couldn’t get it until age 26. I gritted my teeth, I learned, and I practiced.

And then, in August 2011, age 27, I fractured my spine in a stupid accident. Maybe the fear itself was what screwed me up. Or maybe my fears were extremely rational; maybe I sensed something about myself and my balance and my own physical awareness that other people couldn’t see, and maybe I should have listened to myself …. Oh well.

Basically, I slammed headfirst into a lamppost late one evening. This would have been much more hilarious if it hadn’t almost killed me.

The accident happened while I was practicing on Chicago’s lakefront path. Other than the broken neck, I was almost completely unharmed. I was wearing a helmet, which is presumably why I survived. I didn’t even know my neck was broken at first. I hit the lamppost, fell back off my bike, landed on my knees, and realized that my neck hurt a lot.

I remember being relieved that my glasses weren’t broken.

I lay down on the path and caught my breath. The pain in my neck didn’t register so much, as long as I lay straight. Then I thought: I’m not in a safe area of the city. I should get home. So I stood up — fuck, my neck hurts — I stood up, took a few deep breaths to power through the pain, and picked up my bike, which was unusable. I decided that I ought to go home and sleep; I figured I’d feel better in the morning.

After walking maybe a hundred feet, I knew something was wrong, like seriously wrong. My body felt dulled and my movements felt uncertain. I ruffled through my thoughts and decided that although I felt like I could remember everything important, something was fuzzy. Maybe I have a concussion, I thought. So I called one of my flatmates and asked him to come get me. When he found me, I was throwing up into a garbage can, and he insisted that we go to the hospital.

I vomited four more times while the hospital kept me in the waiting room; I also started shivering and crying uncontrollably. After maybe an hour, they took me back into the Intensive Care Unit and laid me down on a table, where some doctors gave me morphine and informed me that I’d fractured my spine. I was told to lie very, very still and to quit doing things like standing up and walking to the bathroom. Some doctors were very reassuring, but others were like: “Um yeah, we don’t really know the extent of the damage and you could still accidentally sever your spinal cord, so just lie still, would you?”

That was when I got really scared, and started composing messages for people I loved in case of my untimely death.

I thought about calling my parents, but I knew they’d freak out way more than I was freaking out, and I didn’t want to upset them until I had some kind of solution to the situation. And I updated Twitter, which is ridiculous, but I guess that’s what bloggers do when we break our necks, especially if we only have a text-capable phone rather than a smartphone.

I lay on that table for many hours, until well past dawn.

The Choice

I had texted my in-case-of-death messages to my best girlfriend, which was sort of a mean thing for me to do, I guess, but I wasn’t sure how else to go about it. Obviously, as soon as she woke up the next morning, she got the messages and freaked out. She was out of town, but she sent her husband to keep me company. As the news got around, other friends of mine came to visit or called or texted. Some of them brought me vegan food, or actually stayed with me in my hospital room on cots, or argued with health care professionals who didn’t seem to be listening to me. The guy I’d broken up with several days before came and fed me smoothies all weekend, which was incredibly nice of him.

This was written for and originally published at Role/Reboot last month, under the title “Mica: A Strange Binary”. I became the Sex + Relationships Section Editor for Role/Reboot on December 15, 2011; for more of that Sex + Relationships Section, click here.

It’s been a while since I felt simultaneously very into someone, and very sure about him. It’s a strange feeling. I’ve been playing with theories about how “flirtation is basically an exercise in strategic ambiguity” and “insecurity is an integral part of romantic intoxication” and “uncertainty is an emotional amplifier“, and I do think that those ideas are true in many ways. But I got so wrapped up in theory that I forgot how it feels to be way into someone … and only a little bit scared.

I met Mica at a Saturday night party. When I left the next morning, he said he wanted to see me again as soon as possible. “Monday?” he asked. “Tuesday?”

“Monday,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

He’s a smart, creative thinker. There are layers to him, and he practically shines: so why not call him Mica? I would love talking to him for those reasons alone. But there’s also a kind of certainty to him; a calm presence; an extraordinary quality of attention. Once he’s focused on a partner, there’s a rhythm behind everything he does. He’s so precise that when I’m kissing him, I feel like an awkward puppy.

I observed this very quickly, and something else: that the quality of his attention — often overtook him. Controlled him. In a sexual interaction, it’s difficult to distract him from catering to me. And since he’s excellent at reading my desires, I usually don’t want to distract him.

It made me think of what I was like, years ago, before I understood my submissive tendencies. Mica hadn’t done much explicit S&M before, and when he’d done it, he was dominant. I didn’t want to project too much, or make any assumptions about him … but I couldn’t help noticing.

The second night I was with him, I asked him to inflict light pain on me. Very light. I didn’t want to go further with him, yet. But his instincts for delivering pain and watching my reactions were, as I suspected, beautifully calibrated.

The third night I was with him, he touched my face and kissed me. I felt my eyelashes flutter and my body melt, and he smiled. Then he said, “I’m feeling really gentle tonight. I don’t know how much I’m up for.”

He doesn’t want S&M right now, I thought. Sometimes guys date me and get anxious that I’ll be disappointed when they don’t want to do S&M. This is understandable, given that I’m an S&M writer. But I hate that, because the last thing I want is for one of my partners to feel obligated … and besides, even I don’t want all-S&M-all-the-time. I smiled directly into Mica’s eyes and told him I was fine with it.

In bed, I watched him. Watched his extraordinary attentiveness. Eventually we got to a point where I was leaning over him, kissing him. I watched him give up his body to the kiss. He doesn’t want S&M right now, I thought, … except that his main experience with S&M, so far, is being in charge.

“Do you trust me?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”

I clenched my nails into Mica’s side, and his back arched. It was the clearest invitation I’d seen from him and, I suspected, the clearest invitation he knew how to give. If he even knew that he was giving it. It can take a lot of time and experience for a submissive to learn what they want well enough to give good feedback for it. It’s one of those submissive skills that people don’t think about enough, because for some reason we’re always too busy teaching dominant skills.

I kissed Mica again, and tore into his back.

He was ready for it. His breathing fast became irregular; he gasped; he shook in my hands. After a while, I pulled back and simply observed the intensity flooding through him. His body undulated like a wave.

“I knew you were dangerous,” he breathed. “In exactly the way that I want.”

“Dangerous,” I repeated. I hesitated. “What do you mean?” His eyelashes flickered, and I saw that he was too far under to answer me. He probably barely knew what he was saying. (In S&M, we call this state of mind subspace.)

I pushed him a little farther. I only used my nails, but you can do a lot with your nails. I said his name, over and over. He struggled, he fought his own body. I observed the struggle and saw myself in it. “I know,” I told him.

Eventually Mica said, quite seriously, that he wanted to stop. I was certain that he could take more. A lot more. I might have been able to convince him to continue, and had him thank me for it later. But he needs to know that I’ll respect him when he says to stop. Also, in a somewhat self-interested way, I don’t want to set a precedent where his boundaries are entirely nonverbal; where his limits depend on my capacity to see through him. Maybe someday, when we know each other really well. Right now, it would make it too easy to seriously harm him … and for him to hate me afterwards.

So I stopped.

“No one has ever touched me so deeply, so fast before,” Mica said, later. And, later later: “This changes everything.” I lay still, kept my arms around him, listening. “That was total catharsis,” he said. “I mean –” a note of doubt crept into his voice. “Do you actually like doing that?”

“Yes,” I said. I said it fast and hard, because he needs to believe it. I understood why he was asking: I’ve been there. When I was first getting into S&M, the first time I felt that way, I had a hard time believing that my partner actually liked doing that for me. It felt so incredible. It felt like I couldn’t possibly be giving back as much as I received. Sometimes, I still feel that insecurity.

In mid-December, I took on the role of editing the Sex + Relationships Section at the gender-focused site Role/Reboot. Role/Reboot is a nonprofit organization that is specifically designed to talk about gender issues with an audience that has little exposure to them.  In fact, this is one of the things that excited me about working with Role/Reboot; like my sex-positive film series, it’s intended to create new conversations, to bring new people and new perspectives into the gender discourse.  The managing editors at Role/Reboot identify as feminist, although they explicitly prefer to position the site outside existing gender discourses.

This editorship is a bit of an experiment for me, and I’m interested to see how it will go. It’s an opportunity to highlight some work that I think is both excellent and accessible. I don’t choose every piece that is published in the Sex + Relationships section, but I choose a lot of them. Here are some of my favorites from the last six weeks:

* Mica: A Strange Binary, written by me! This is a storytime-type article in which I talk about how it feels to start a relationship with a gentleman who’s new to submission, and isn’t sure how to talk about it. And in the end, he and I switched BDSM roles, too … (I later reposted this article to my blog under the title, “The Strange Binary of Dominance and Submission”.)

* Virginity and Sexual Realization, written by Nahida Sultana Nisa (who blogs at The Fatal Feminist). Nahida is a really interesting writer whose main focus is the intersection of Islam and feminism. This piece is about her understanding of Islam and female sexuality, and her feeling that her Islamic culture is fundamentally more sex-positive than the Western culture in which she grew up.

* Born This Way: Black Box Sexuality, written by Noah Brand (who’s part of the blog team at No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?). This is an exquisitely constructed, hilarious piece about why we should treat sexuality as a “black box” — we don’t know why personal sexuality is the way it is, and it arguably doesn’t matter. (I’ve covered similar ground in my old piece on BDSM as a sexual orientation.)

* Picking and Choosing from the “Act Like A Man Box”, written by Charlie Glickman. Charlie is one of my favorite writers on issues of masculinity. This piece follows his earlier piece, The Performance of Masculinity, and it’s a wonderful discussion of the narrowness of our conceptions of manhood — plus ideas on what it means to create a “new masculinity.”

* Awesome Casual Sex for Single Girls, written by Adaya Adler (who blogs at My So-Called Polyamorous Life). If you’re a lady interested in trying casual sex, you couldn’t find a better place to start than by reading this article. Which is not to say that I think you “should” try casual sex; I’m not too interested in it myself. But if you want to, you know where to start reading!

If you’re interested in pitching me your own work, or you know someone who is, please do get in touch with me: clarisse at rolereboot dot org.

The following pieces were originally published at the girl-power site Off Our Chests: here’s Orgasms Aren’t My Favorite Part of Sex, and here’s My Chastity Urge. I’ve combined them in one post because they feel, to me, like they deal with fundamentally the same issues, and belong together.

A month or two ago, I published a piece called A Unified Theory of Orgasm. In that piece, I talked about my own history, and how long I took to learn how to orgasm. Basically, learning how to orgasm took a long time and a lot of angst. And I’m really glad that I eventually figured it out — and that I have many years of experimentation still ahead of me.

That piece was really well-received, and a lot of people have thanked me for writing it. As always, though, there’s some mixed feedback too. And I’ve been worried about one thing in particular: it seems like a lot of people missed the part in my article where I said that, now that I’ve learned how to have orgasms … orgasms aren’t even my favorite part of sex. It’s a long article, and I can see how people would miss that, but I did say it and I think it’s important.

Specifically, I wrote:

[It may help some people] not to prioritize orgasms. I am not saying orgasms aren’t important; I just don’t want the importance of orgasms to wound you, the way it wounded me. For me, it is helpful to imagine sex as a journey. For me, it helps to focus on having fun throughout, instead of doing what it takes to reach the “goal” of orgasm. If you’re not taking pleasure in the journey — or at least indulging some curiosity — then why keep going? Why not stop and try something else?

It’s also worth noting that our definitions of “orgasm” are fairly narrow. Some research indicates that there may be other ways to conceptualize orgasms than the stereotypical genital-focused approach.

And now I want to talk about it some more.

It may be ironic that I spent so much time feeling terrible and broken and depressed because I couldn’t figure out how to have orgasms … whereas now I prefer not to focus on them. In fact, I estimate that most of my current sexual encounters don’t include my orgasm, and very few of my most pleasurable sexual encounters have included my orgasm.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t know everything about sex, and there’s a lot that I haven’t experienced. Anything might change. But seriously. The best sex I’ve had in my life has been connective and emotional and, for me personally, has frequently involved intense BDSM. My favorite sex so far? Has also mostly been orgasm-free.

Some people in some sex-related communities have asserted that for maximum amorous power, it’s actually best to limit one’s orgasms, because then the contained sexual energy ends up channeling into a deeper connection with one’s partner. I can see that. For me, another way of thinking about it is that I’m really into being teased — and I’d rather experience hours of being teased without an orgasm, than have a quick encounter that ends in orgasm.

And …. (Oh no, I can already tell this is going to get complicated … but hey, sex is complicated, so I’ll give it a shot.) …. Especially when I’m doing BDSM, it can actually be hot sometimes if I don’t have an orgasm. For example: if I go to sleep so turned on that I can’t dream about anything but my partner, and then I wake up in a damp mess, and then my partner makes my life difficult all morning, it’s pretty awesome. (Although it’s very nice that I know how to give myself orgasms now, because that means that if I’m really feeling overwhelmed by my own sexual energy, I know how to give myself release if I have to. You know, like … if I need to get some work done.)

Aaaaand … here’s the most painful, ridiculous, circular irony of all. Ready? Here goes: now that I’m capable of having orgasms, I’ve found myself occasionally having orgasms only to satisfy my partner. How absurd is that? Plus, I know I’m not alone, because I’ve talked to other women who do the same thing!

I’ve written before that in the past I’ve felt trapped by fake plastic ideas of “what hot girls look like during sex”; I’ve written about how the pressure to “perform” my sexuality can hurt. What has amazed me, as I’ve gotten older, is just how pervasive that pressure can feel with some partners … and how little pressure there is with other partners. The question of how to create a low-pressure environment for sexuality to flourish is big and complicated, so let me just say here that although I’m all about people giving each other orgasms … it’s no good if my partner’s desire to give me an orgasm turns into pressure for me to have an orgasm!