Franklin Veaux's Journal

The world's first 3D printed gun: Ho hum.

Mon, 06 May 2013 20:13:53 GMT

Today, a landmark in improvised engineering was reached. Plans for an (almost) entirely 3D printable firearm went up on the Internet, able to be freely downloaded by anyone.

The reactions around the Net are predictable. Libertarians and gun nuts are ecstatic, gushing all over themselves about how this will be the "end of gun control" and usher in some kind of "new age of freedom" or something.

Law and order types, gun control advocates, and the government are wetting themselves with the prospect of legions of terrorists printing up virtually undetectable firearms and taking over airplanes or something.

And it's all completely ridiculous. Neither a new age of freedom nor a new age of terror are in the works; in fact, I'm quite confident in predicting the total impact of this technology will be statistically undetectable. Self-congratulatory (on the one side) and paranoid (on the other) ravings aside, this thing simply does not make any meaningful difference whatsoever.

First, let's see this ~~harbinger of freedom~~ ~~end of civilization~~ toy for rich white kids:

It's printed from ABS plastic on an $8,000 3D printer. Almost everything is plastic, including the barrel; the only non-plastic parts are an ordinary nail (for the firing pin) and the bullet itself (in this case, a .380 caliber).

Now, I've owned firearms and shot recreationally for most of my life,¹ and the first thing I can say upon seeing this thing is that I wouldn't want to fire it. My instinct is that it's probably about as dangerous to whoever's on the trigger end as whoever's on the business end.

The one shown here was test-fired three times. The first time, it misfired. The second time, it successfully fired a .380 round without destroying itself. The third time, when the .380 was replaced with a 5.7×28 cartridge, it exploded.

Could it survive multiple shots with the smaller round? I don't know. Maybe. I wouldn't bet my life on it. Doesn't really matter. Not only is this thing not a game changer, I reckon it's about as significant in terms of its overall impact on society as whatever toy they choose to put into a box of Cracker Jacks next week.

For starters, what you're looking at here is not only a shoddy firearm of dubious reliability and ruggedness; it's an $8,050 shoddy firearm of dubious reliability and ruggedness. This prototype was printed on an $8,000 3D printer with about $50 worth of materials, making it arguably the single most expensive zip gun that's ever been fabricated. A person looking for cheap, untraceable guns would be able to buy an arsenal on the street for less than the cost of the printer that produced this thing.

Now, I already know what you're going to say. The cost of 3D printers is dropping quickly. People can rent one or use one at a school. Companies will 3D print parts for you.

All of which is true, but irrelevant; the ability to make crude, cheap firearms for a lot less than just the cost of the plastic alone for this thing has existed...well, for about as long as firearms have existed. Prisoners have been known to build guns from parts available in prisons.

It has never been lack of availability that has kept people from using small single-shot firearms like this. The reason every criminal in town isn't sticking up convenience stores with zip guns isn't that they have been languishing in wait for a Libertarian college student to design one that can be 3D printed and put on the Internet; it's that these things are virtually worthless as weapons. They tend to be used in prisons but few places besides, because they're unreliable, prone to failure, inaccurate, and dangerous to the operator.

Just like, ahem, the 3D printed version.

Seriously. Even when they work, you have to be at point-blank range (or better yet, in contact with your intended target) for them to be terribly effective.

Which leads to the next hand-wringing objection: OMG this is made of PLASTIC you can take it onto an AIRPLANE through a METAL DETECTOR!

Which is, err, only kind of true. It's a bit bulky to hide on your person, and there's still the fact that the firing pin and ammunition are metal. Now, you might be able to get a nail through security on some pretext or other, but I doubt many folks will let you carry ammunition onto a plane.

If they notice it, which is a different matter; I've had friends who've carried brass knuckles and switchblades onto planes without difficulty. The reality is that few people actually want to, and have the means to, attack an airplane; nearly all of what happens at the airport is security theater, not security.

But let's assume just for amusement that you can get one of these onto a plane. So what? What of it?

If I wanted to attack an airplane with a weapon I made on a 3D printer, it wouldn't be this gun. Even if it works, it only works once, and I doubt the other passengers would sit around idle while I reloaded it and prepared to fire again. Assuming that the first shot actually did any good anyway.

The guy who designed this says “You can print a lethal device. It’s kind of scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show,” as if this is the first time that's been possible. Sorry, kid, but you're a ridiculous wanker; a 3D printed knife or spear is actually a lot more lethal than this toy gun. (There's a reason shivs rather than zip guns are the preferred weapon in places like prisons, and it's not all down to scarcity of ammunition; given how easily drugs flow into American prisons, ammo isn't that much of a stretch if there were a demand for it.) The 9/11 hijackers, who were well-funded, used...box cutters.

But I wouldn't carry a 3D printed knife, or even a cheaper and better ceramic knife, onto a plane with mischief in mind either, because I'm not suicidal. Post 9/11, one thing has actually made air travel safer: the fact that the other passengers aren't about to sit quietly by and hope for the best if someone tries to take a plane. All the other security changes that have happened since then have paled in effectiveness next to passenger attitude.

So, here's the million-dollar question. You take a plastic gun onto an airplane, and...what, exactly? What in the name of the seven holy fucks and the twelve lesser fucks do you do then? What's your plan?

If your goal is to destroy the plane, you can't do that with this thing. If your goal is to take over the plane, well...good luck with that. You might survive what the other passengers do to you, maybe, if you're lucky. Everybody is shrieking about how this thing can defeat airline security...and then what?

In fact, that million-dollar question can be extended to just about any possible use for this thing. You've bought yourself an eight-grand 3D printer, or somehow got access to it. You download the plans like an eager little hacker and you print this out, and then you...um, what do you do then? Go online and brag to your Maker friends?

You aren't going to use this for home defense. I mean, seriously. A baseball bat or a tire iron makes a better home defense weapon, and the baseball bat probably has a longer effective range.

You're not going to use it to outfit your secret militia that's ~~pining for~~ anticipating the day that the Federal government starts rolling the tanks down Main Street. You aren't even going to use an AR-15 for that, because, listen, seriously? The government has drones. They can blow your ass to hell and gone and you'll never even see someone to shoot at.

You aren't going to take it down to the range and pop off a few rounds in the general direction of paper cutouts of zombies or Trayvon Martin. No gun range is going to let you anywhere near the firing line with this; it's too dangerous to the other shooters.

And please, please tell me you think you can go hunting with this thing. Bring a video camera and let me know when the video is up on YouTube. You can't get enough of that for my entertainment dollar.

So you're going to print it out, you're going to put it together, and then...what, exactly? I'm still not clear on that.

Now, if you designed it, what you'll do is obvious: you'll get media exposure for congratulating yourself on what a clever Libertarian you are. And as near as I can tell, that's really this thing's only usefulness.

¹ Full disclosure: I've been a private firearm owner on and off since 1988. I like guns, I like target shooting, and I'm neither opposed to nor afraid of guns. All that being said, I still won't fire one of these.

New essay on Promiscuity Keepers: Ending Rape

Thu, 02 May 2013 22:33:23 GMT

I've just posted an essay over on Promiscuity Keepers, Some Thoughts on Ending Rape. Here's a teaser:

Recently, I started noticing references in my Twitter feed to a Twitter account called @EndingRape. The account belongs to a man named Richard Hart, who has a Web site and book called Keep Your Daughter Safe.

Now, I don’t think Richard Hart is a bad guy. I don’t think he’s evil or malicious. I think he probably sincerely believes that rape is a Bad Thing and he probably genuinely wants a world with less of it.

But his approach is deeply troubling, and in some cases even destructive, for a number of reasons.

Feel free to respond here or over there.

Stealth WordPress attack: How to get hacked without even knowing it

Wed, 01 May 2013 20:05:49 GMT

Lately, one of the contact forms on a Web site I run has started to get hammered with spam form submissions. The spam submissions appear to be able to defeat common CAPTCHA programs (those things that won't send a Web form unless you type a blurry, wiggly word to show that you're a person, the idea being that a computer has trouble reading the word).

Interestingly, these spam submissions seem to go to sites that are just fine; ordinary, everyday sites, most but not all running WordPress, with no spam in sight. The majority of the sites that aren't running WordPress are, naturally, running Joomla.

Of course, being the suspicious bastard I am, I immediately suspected a subtle attack like the one I talked about in October of 2010, where modifications were made to the main WordPress loop PHP file that would serve up ordinary blog posts to ordinary visitors and serve up redirectors to spam if the visitor was a search engine or if the visitor came from a search engine.

And sure enough, a quick Google search showed I was right.

Here is one of the spam submissions I received on my contact form:

wkgFqTcoAqy

Where do you come from? <a href=" http://www.construction-accident.us ">cheap stendra</a> helpings of Peninahâs food are hard to resist. Peninah also runs the store in the Miti House 2. This is a major

If you visit the site www.construction-accident.us you see a perfectly ordinary WordPress site that appears to have nothing wrong with it.

Ah, but now let's see what Google sees!

The site has been hacked and the main WordPress loop has been tampered with. When Google looks at the page, keywords advertising prescription drugs are inserted into the page's code.

If you click on the link in Google, you're sent to www.construction-accident.us and then promptly redirected back to Google. It seems like the redirection is based at least in part on the browser you are using; when I use Safari on Mac, I end up at Google, but changing my browser's user agent to Explorer 7 results in no redirection, Explorer 8 and 9 redirect to Google. I haven't quite figured out the magic combination of browser and platform user agents to see where the hostile redirection leads to.

I downloaded the page using wget (a terminal-based Web downloader) and looked at the file that was downloaded. Whenever the hacked site sees Google as the referrer, it modifies the page by adding pharmacy keywords to the Title tag:

<title>Buy Stendra Online | Construction Accident|Oil Rig Explosion|Dallas|Texas|Gulf Mexico|Construction Accident Lawyer|Construction Accident Lawyers|Construction Accident Attorney|Construction Accident Attorneys|Construction Accident Law Firm|Construction Accident Law Firms</title>

and then it inserts the following code after the WordPress header:

<div class="post">stendra
avanafil
stendra for sale
stendra (avanafil)
stendra side effects
stendra dosage
stendra vs viagra
stendra online
buy stendra
buy generic stendra
generic stendra
stendra generic
where can i buy stendra
cheap stendraorder stendra
stendra pricestendra coststendra cost per pillstendra coupon
stendra orderstendra online
stendra avanafil</div>

You can see this if you do a Google search for

site:www.construction-accident.us

and then look at the cached version of the first hit.

So that's how the attack works. WordPress sites are hacked. The WordPress files are modified so that ordinary users and the site's owner are not aware that anything is wrong. The site continues to look and work as normal.

But oh, people who find your site by using Google? They see ads for fake pharmaceuticals! If they visit your site from Google, they get redirected to God knows where.

There are a lot of sites that have been hacked this way. I'm getting buried under a blizzard of spam Web form submissions advertising WordPress sites that have been hacked.

A partial list from the last few days includes:

http://www.thevisualexperience.org (the hack is only visible in Google if you do a search that includes pharmacy keywords; for example:
accutane site:http://www.thevisualexperience.org
http://www.fro2012.com
http://javajitterprint.com
http://www.grouna.com
http://www.nutria.com/ (This one isn't using Wordpress; it's using a CMS called Website Gadget by an outfit called Firefly Digital, but it looks very WordPress-like. It may be a WordPress derivative or clone.)
http://www.info-kod.si/ (Also not using WordPress)
http://autofinancedfw.com (Also not using WordPress)
http://www.guylaramee.com/ (If visited from Google, redirects to http://www.pharmacymall.net/prozac_generic.php, hosted in the Ukraine)
http://sedrez.com/ (If visited from Google, redirects to http://goldenpharma24x7.com/order-topamax-online.html, hosted in the Ukraine)
http://www.joomx.com/ (a professional Joomla developer's site--oops!--that has been hacked; if visited from Google, redirects to http://goldenpharma24x7.com/order-topamax-online.html
http://www.fremantlefishingboatharbour.com/ (Running Joomla; if visited from Google, redirects to http://goldenpharma24x7.com/)

Once again, if you are running a WordPress or Joomla site, it is absolutely essential that you keep on top of all security patches PROMPTLY and that you use very strong admin passwords.

With this hack, it's likely that you could be hacked and never even know it--at least until Google starts flagging your site with a "This site may be compromised" tag.

Some thoughts on appropriation of another sort

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:54:46 GMT

The complaints about cultural appropriation by the polyamory community that I talked about in my last blog post got me to thinking about a different kind of appropriation. It often takes place in the same places and the same contexts as cultural appropriation, and a lot of the same people do it, but it's a very different animal.

I'm talking about science appropriation.

Science appropriation is what happens when someone uses a garbled, factually incorrect, and/or completely unintelligble statement about science in an attempt to justify or rationalize something that has nothing to do with science at all.

This isn't directly relevant to polyamory, except insofar as there are some folks (particularly in the New Age crowd) who are polyamorous and do it. I've also seen it in religious groups, in alternative "medicine" communities...hell, even among conspiracy theorists.

Science appropriation typically goes something like this: A person with little or no formal background in science wants to believe something. What he wants to believe isn't especially important. Maybe he wants to believe that fluoridated water is a secret conspiracy of shadowy government agencies trying to control us with mind control drugs, or that diseases can be cured by the waving of hands and the application of spiritual energy, or that benign beings from another dimension want to make us all better people, or that after we die things become wonderful forever. Whatever it is, the person attempts to support the belief with a bizarre and often nonsensical application of some poory-understood scientific principle, or at least sciencey-sounding words like "quantum" or "frequency" or "DNA." The result makes a hash of science, and in the few cases where the belief might have some kernel of validity, completely obfuscates its validity under a blizzard of intellectual rubbish.

This plays out in practice in a number of ways, and often involves other forms of appropriation as well.

Take this Web site. Please.

It talks about raising our "spiritual awareness" to a higher plane by using the powers of the twelve chakras, possibly related in some manner I'm not entirely clear on to the pyramids, to activate the hidden powers in our DNA.

In addition to a staggering amount of cultural appropriation (I'm not sure the authors of this stuff are even aware that the idea of chakras comes from an entirely different culture than the one that gave us the pyramids), the level of science appropriation reaches nosebleed proportions. For example (I can not make this up):

Most people know that DNA is the 'blueprint of life' and is located in every cell of the body. In addition to each chromosome's 2 strand double helix of DNA, there are an additional 10 etheric strands of DNA available to each human, which have been de-activated and dormant since the beginning of recorded history. Each additional strand possesses attributes that permit the individual to perform greater human accomplishments. Scientists acknowledge that we currently only use 3% of our current 2 strand DNA. Thus we live in a society where people are sick, unhappy, stressed out, create wars, have difficulty experiencing love, and are totally disconnected with the universe. Most people have to meditate for many years just to have a so-called 'mystical' experience, that's how disconnected we are now. Imagine activating 100% of your 2 strand DNA, PLUS 10 additional strands! You will go from using 10% of your brain to becoming a multi-dimensional being with psychic, telepathic, and manifestation abilities beyond anything you've ever dreamed of. Plus, you will stop the aging process and actually start to rejuvenate to look and feel YOUNGER. [...] The portions of the DNA chain that science has presently identified as the "Double Helix", represent only the SURFACE portions of the chemical, elemental, and electrical components of the active DNA strands. Science has yet to identify the MULTIDIMENSIONAL spectra of DNA manifestation, and has yet to realize that within the structures of detectable DNA, there are levels of structure and function that direct the operations of the entire genetic blueprint, which are not currently detectable by the contemporary scientific method.

This quote hits pretty much all the hallmarks of science appropriation.

First, there's the garbled misunderstanding of science facts. Science says that a small percentage of the human genome is made up of "coding DNA"--the percentage is actually closer to 20% than to 3%, but never mind--which is DNA that directs the cell to make proteins. However, that doesn't mean the rest is inactive! Non-coding DNA is involved in many functions: activation and deactivation (usually through epigenetic methylation) of protein-coding sequences of DNA; coding for strands of RNA that affect the translation of messenger RNA into proteins; and more. Many areas of non-coding DNA aren't well understood but are highly conserved, indicating that they play an active and essential role in biology.

Then there's the faux pop-sci mythology that we only use 10% of our brains, a nonsensical superstition remarkably resilient to the light of disproof. This and other popular science superstitions (like the notion that science says bumblebees can't fly) are common in science appropriation.

And then there's the hint of secret knowledge--information beyond what science can see, or facts that transcend the current state of knowledge--that's part and parcel of science appropriation.

And finally, there's the bizarre, anti-intellectual hatred of science and the scientific method that almost always accompanies sience appropriation. The folks who appropriate scientific-sounding language and ideas for unscientific or pseudoscientific notions seem to have a love-hate relationship with science; on the one hand, they speak with derision and contempt about the scientific method, but on the other, they seem eager--even desperate--for the validation of science.

In fact, about the only thing missing from this particular example is the word "quantum," which as near as I can tell is what science appropriators use when they mean "magic."

A great deal of science appropriation comes from folks who seem to genuinely want to make the world a better place, but don't want to invest in the tools to do it because making the world a better place is often very hard work. Folks who want to be healers but who don't want to get a medical degree or invest the serious amunt of time and money it takes to understand biology are big offenders here. There's a Web site (and, I gather, a set of beliefs) called Healing Heart Power that's a great example of science appropriation:

The heart's electrical field is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the electrical activity generated by the brain.

The magnetic field produced by the heart is more than 5000 times greater in strength than the field generated by the brain

The electromagnetic energy of the heart not only envelops every cell of the human body, but also extends out in all directions in the space around us [...]

Research conducted at the Institute of HeartMath suggests that the heart's field is an important carrier of information.

Our mental and emotional state impacts the quality of contact we offer to another person. When we touch one another with safe, respectful, loving intention both physically and emotionally, we call into play the full healing power of the heart. The greater the "coherence"--a sense that life is comprehensible, manageable and meaningful-- one develops, the more sensitive one becomes to the subtle electromagnetic signals communicated by those around them. [...]

Heartpower and our genetic make-up: Dorothy Mandel writes, "Genetically, cells adapt to what they perceive their environment to be. Because an event experienced in the midst of a heart response will be perceived and interpreted very differently than an event experienced in the midst of a stress response, the heart can also powerfully affect genetic expression"

Becoming more heart aware and working towards authentic emotional expression and inner peace may positively impact our genetic health.

Anyone who has any backgrund in biology at all is probably cringing and eyerolling right now. The notion that human beings benefit from positive interaction with one another is pretty straightforward, but here it's dressed up with a level of science appropriation that's almost physically painful to read.

We see unsourced, vaguely-defined claims about the heart's electrical and electromagnetic field that are remarkably content-free (what units are we talking about? What's the absolute strength of these fields?) and that we are expected to infer are important. (If it's significant that the heart's electromagnetic field is stronger than the brain's, what are we to infer from the fact that the bicep's electromagnetic field is also stronger than the brain's?) The biological basis for these claims is not presented (I would reasonably expect the brain to have a weak electromagnetic, as the activity in it is electrochemical rather than electromagnetic!), yet the claims are used to try to support other claims, such as the heart's electromagnetic field being a "carrier of information" (what information? in what form? From where to where?).

This particular Web page does do one thing that a lot of science appropriators doon't do, though, which is to make a falsifiable prediction ("the heart can also powerfully affect genetic expression"). Unfortunately for the creators of healing heart power, this prediction doesn't have any evidence at all to support it.

That does bring up an important distinction between science and science appropriation, though. People who appropriate science for non-scientific or pseudoscientific ends don't actually know what science is.

Science isn't a body of knowledge. Science isn't a collection of facts or books. The Theory of Relativity isn't science; nor is Western medicine or the Hubble Space Telescope.

These things are the products of science. Science itself is a process, not a library of theorems. It's a way of looking at the world. It's a carefully designed system for figuring out what's true and what's false that s founded on a simple idea:

Human beings suck at separating truth from falsehood. When we want to believe something, we will find ways to fool or trick ourselves into believing it, even if we're not consciously aware that's what we're doing. Therefore, actually separating what's true from what we want to be true means systematically dealing with our own cognitive shortcomings, confirmation biases, and predilection for fooling ourselves.

Science insists on falsifiability because without it we tend to persuade ourselves that anything we want to believe is true. We learn about the Scientific Method in school (at least if we got anything even remotely approximating a decent education), but the version we learn in school is dry and not very illuminating. The scientific method, put more plainly, looks something like this:

You are not as smart as you think you are.
1. If you want to believe something, you'll find a way to make yourself believe it.
2. If you think you are rational, you're probably good at making yourself believe what you want to believe.
3. You are gullible.
4. If you think you're not gullible, you're really, really gullible.
If you want to know what's true, you shouldn't believe things without reason.
1. "I really, really want it to be true" isn't a reason.
2. An anecdote isn't a reason.
3. Your feelings aren't a reason.
  1. Feelings can lie to you.
  2. Your emotional self isn't very good at fact-checking.
Reality doesn't care very much about what you think.
1. Reality is really, really complicated.
2. Reality doesn't give a hairy flying fartknuckle about politics.
3. Reality isn't human-centric.
  1. If a person in New York and a person in Tehran both measure the universal gravitational constant, the result better be the same.
  2. If you get different results when the "negative energy" of "unbelievers" spoils the experiment, your results aren't worth a fetid dingo's kidney.
if you want to understand how the universe works, you have a lot of work to do.
1. The universe doesn't fit human stories.
  1. Storytelling isn't science.
2. If it can't be quantified, it isn't science.
3. If you can't figure out a way to test whether an idea is wrong, it isn't a scientific idea.
  1. The best way to see if an idea holds any water is to try to prove it wrong, not try to prove it right.
  2. Your own tendency toward confirmation bias will lead you to see evidence that your ideas are true even when it isn't really there.
Sometimes, the answer to a question is "we don't know," and that's okay.

The things I've talked about so far are all examples of pseudoscience, so it might seem like sciece appropriation is simply another expression for pseudoscience.

All pseudoscience is sciene appropriation, but not all science appropriation is pseudoscience. Science appropriation also happens when something that isn't science claims that its principles have been "scientifically proven," something that happens often in the world of religion.

My sweetie Eve has remarked about how Westerners are quick to appropriate elemets of Indian culture, what with Tantra this and chakra that and having sex is all about spirituality, really it is, I'm being so sincere right now. But when she was in India, she saw the same thing happening in reverse; Indian mystics ad religious people often tried to claim scientific legitimacy for their religious practices, saying that science has "proven" beliefs such as cutting one's hair is wrong.

When I was working prepress for a living, one of my clients was a book publisher that specialized in supplying books to Christian bookstores. Every year I worked on their catalog, which had an entire section devoted to books that claimed to show how science "proves" that Christianity is the true religion or that Jesus was the son of god or something.

I don't think of these examles as pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is when something claims to be a science but isn't, like phrenology or DNA activation or dowsing. The Christians who claim that science supports the divinity of Jesus or the Sikhs who say that refusing to cut their hair is scientifically proven to be beneficial aren't saying that Christianity or Sikhism is a science; they're appropriatng the respectability of science to try to support an idea that at its core has nothing to do with science. To me, that's a it different from prenology and similar systems that claim to be scientific fields but aren't.

There are overlaps, of course. Creation "science" is a religious belief that's also a pseudoscience. Sometimes the boundaries get fuzzy. That doesn't change the fact that some folks claim scientific legitimacy for a belief without saying the belief itself is a science.

Science appropriation also happens in pop culture. An astonishing number of people believe that humans only use 10% of our brains, that the left brain is rational and the right brain is creative, or if you rescue a baby bird that's fallen from its nest you shouldn't return it to the nest or its mother will reject it. None of these ideas has any basis in science, but they're incredibly, annoyingly persistent and many people pass them off as science fact.

Science appropriation is more than annoying; it's harmful. We live in a technological, post-industrial society with a public school infrastructure that is crap at teaching basic science. Thanks to that, we've created a society uniquely vulnerable to science appropriation. When a person with diabetes uses homeopathic "treatment," the diabetes goes untreated. When someone spends time and money on "DNA activation" in the hopes that it will let her unlock the other 90% of her brain (whatever that means; ae these folks saying that someone with a 110 IQ will have a 1,100 IQ after DNA activation?), she gets fleeced by a scam. The fact that the scammer might also believe the scam dooesn't make it any less of a scam; it simply means the educational system has failed the scammer, too. Public policy decisions based on science apropriation have the potential to harm lots of people.

So, as part of my own personal crusade to make the world a better place, I've created this handy-dandy Science Appropriation Bingo card. Keep it with you when you read New Age Web sites or browse the alternative healing section of WebMD. If you want to print it out, clicky on the picture for a link to a PDF version!

Some thoughts on poly identity

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:24:03 GMT

As I write this, I'm visiting my sweetie Eve in Olympia, Washington. Alas, thanks to a signficant user interface misfeature in the program (Caron Copy Cloner) I use to sync my laptop with my desktop, I don't have my laptop with me. I'm posting from an iPad. Which has a keyboard quite poorly suited to typing long bits of text (anyone who has a BlueTooth keyboard you're willing to donate to the cause, see me after class). And I suspect this might get long. In other words, buckle up, it's going to be a bumpy ride!

A short time ago, I discovered an essay over on the Boldly Go blog called Why I'm No Longer Poly. It's about seven or eight months old as I type this, but if you haven't read it yet, it's worth the read. It's a critique of the poly community, and there's quite a bit in it I want to respond to. (This blog post started as a comment over there but quickly overran what can reasonaly go into a comment.)

The critique as I read it breaks down into four main points:

Poly is a form of privilege. The time, resources, and attention necessary to find and maintain multiple romantic relationships are most available to middle and upper class people; hence, the poly community tends (unsurprisingly) to be very middle-class and very white.

The poly community, possibly because of point 1 above, is guilty of a great deal of appropriation. Some poly folks consider themselves 'queer' just based on having non-traditional relationships, which does a disservice to LGBT folks. Gay, bi, and trans* people have been murdered for who they are; to date, that hasn't happened to anyone for being poly (at least not as far as I know; if you've heard of this happening, I'd love to hear about it in the comments). This appropriation is cultural, too, with some poly folk integrating a wishy-washy, Westernized, wildly inaccurate understanding of things like Tantra into the fold of polyamory.

The poly community shelters abusers. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the poly community has failed to create a robust culture of compassion and consent. Serial abusers operate with impunity within the organized poly community.

People in the poly commmunity tend to see polyamory as a superior alternatve to monogamy, and therefore (accordng to the Transitive Property of Smugness¹) polyamorous people as superior to monogamous people.

The author is talking primarily about the UK poly scene, which I do have some familiarity with, though I'm more grounded in the US poly community.

I think this critique of the poly community has some important points, so I'd like to examine it more closely. Ready? Here we go!

Part 1: Poly Is Privileged

This is an easy claim to make. Look around the poly community in a lot of cities and you'll see a whole lot of folks who are econmically and racially homogenous. The essay also makes the point:

I’m wondering if non-monogamy is seriously possible for people who are economically disenfranchised or people who blatantly don’t have the time to devote away from work, children, and other social responsibilities to give to other partners. And I wonder now, as I try and create a balance between work, blogging, writing fiction, working out, and all of the other things I have to do if, when I do decide to adopt children, I’ll have the time to devote to more romantic partners.

For a certain model of polyamory, this is true. Maintaining multiple dating-type relationships requires financial and time resources that a lot of folks don't have. It's also true that polyamory, as much as it may not be mainstream, is still a hell of a lot more accepted than LGB relationships or relationships with or between trans* people. I know poly folks who have lost custody of their children for being poly, but like I said, I've never heard of anyone being killed over it.

But these points, while they are valid, don't tell the whole story.

One thing it's important to remember is the poly community is not the same thing as polyamory. The poly ommunity is largely made up of racially and economically privileged folks, but it's dangerous to infer that polyamory is mostly practiced by that demographic. I've met people who are polyamorous who don't belong to or identify with the organized poly community (particularly when I was living in Florida and Georgia), and there's quite a lot more variety in socioeconomic class than a look 'round the poly community might suggest.

Likewise, the notion that poly requires a certain level of disposable income and time is true for some models of poly, particularly the I'm-dating-a-bunch-of-people flavor of poly, but it doesn't necessarily follow that polyamory is therefore limited to the economically privileged. I've known--and been involved with!--poly folks who are financially quite poorly off, and who discover in a more communal model of polyamory a way to increase their standard of living.

Indeed, many of the folks in my own poly network have a level of income that's perilously close to, or in some cases below, the Federal poverty line. Poly people have discovered something that roommates have known for a long time: two can live almost as cheaply as one, and three can live almost as cheaply as two.

The same calculus works for time. A person who's working two part-time jobs may not have the time to go out on several dates a week, but that's not the only way to do poly! Both long-distance relationships and communal relationships require much less investment in free time to maintain.

Why is the organized polycommunity so homogenous? That question has a complicated answer. Even the simple version is probably outside the scope of this particular blog post. (That's not an attempt to handwave away the question; it's just a really, really complicated subject.) Is the organized poly community a showcase of privilege? You bet. Does that mean polyamory is only for privileged people? Well, that's a tougher argument to make. The organized poly community does not necessarily reflect the diversity of people who practice polyamory, and identifying as polyamorous does not necessarily mean identifying as part of the poly community.

Part 2: Poly as Cultural Appropriation

This critique breaks down into a couple of broad categories: poly appropriation of the spiritual beliefs of other cultures, usually in a highly adulterated (and somewhat confused) form; and poly appropriation of LGBT identity. As to the first part, from the essay:

I get sick to death of seeing white people in polyamory communities reference a tribe or a culture outside their own, putting white names to their practices, and using them to validate their relationship style or choice. I get sick and tired of the “Ooh”ing and “Aah”ing over appropriated concepts of tantra, chakras, chi, and whatever I’ve seen white people mix together in a fruit salad of whatever cultures they want to build their ignorant burrito out of to try and make their polyamory practice more “exotic” and “sacred”. You shouldn’t have to justify your relationship choice via bigotry. When you act like your polyamory is valid because it’s made of “tiny bubbles of imperfections as proof that it was crafted by the simple, hard-working, indigenous peoples of wherever” you’re being a colonialist jerk.

This gets no disagreement from me. In fact, the urge to validate having multiple romantic partners by mashing together assorted bits of poorly-understood religious traditions from a number of different cultures and wrapping the whole thing up in a ribbon of chakra-expanding tantric sex is one of the more annoying facets of (part of) the poly community.

In fact, my sweetie Eve has a close friend named Chris who's written an extensive and meticulously-researched history of tantra called Tantra Illuminated, in which he says:

Tantra is now a buzzword in the modern Western world. We see it on the covers of popular magazines and books, usually linked suggestively with the notion of superlative sexual experience. Though almost everyone has heard this word, almost no one—including many people claiming to teach something called tantra—knows anything about the historical development of the Indian spiritual tradition that scholars refer to as Tantra. What these academics study as Tantra bears little resemblance to what is taught under the same name on the workshop circuit of American alternative spirituality.

(Check out the book if you're interested; a second edition is on the way.)

Does this happen? You bet. I don't think blame for this rests on the doorstep of polyamory, though. First, most of the offenders I've personally seen did it before they became polyamory; they started out involved in alternative New Age spirituality and then, when they started exploring polyamory in the mid to late 90s, they brought their garbled mishmash of other cultures' spiritual ideas with them.

At least here in the US. I can't speak for the Tantric/New Age part of the poly community in the UK, because it's not the bit I interacted with, which brings up a second point:

Not all of the poly community does this. In fact, the poly community is quite diverse in this regard. Most of the community I was part of in Florida, for instance, is made up of rationalists and skeptics with about as much interest in New Age tantric appropriation as they have in six-day-old potato salad.

There's a polyamory meetup group in Portland for fundamentalist Christians. There's a group in Vancouver that's essentially entirely secular. The poly community is not monolithic; to accuse it of cultural appropriation is to miss big chunks that aren't spiritual at all. Do some poly people do this? You bet. Do most? Not in my experience.

Which brings up the second kind of appropriation. Again from the essay:

I’m sick to death of “allies” telling me that they have a right to call themselves queer just because they date more than one person, especially when they have lipstick parties in middle class suburbia while queer kids are forced into homelessness, nonconsensual sex work, and death. I’ll feel more sympathy for Poly Patriarch not being able to marry all of his concubines when trans* people can get married without having to worry about going to jail for fraud.

I can definitely understand being pretty fed up with this sort of behavior. I personally am not sick to death of it, because so far I personally have not seen it. I certainly would never consider calling myself "queer" because I'm poly; as a cisgendered straight white guy, that would be profoundly nonsensical of me².

This might be something that's more common in the UK than the US; I don't know. I do know that the poly communities I've been ppart of have had members who are gay, members who are bi, and members who are trans...all of whm have a reasonable claim to "queerness," but no because they're poly.

Part 3: Abusers In the Poly Community

This is the most head-scratching part of the essay to me.

Yes, the poly community has abusers. I don't see it as a poly problem; I see it as a problem of minority sexual subcultures in general. Ironically, the essay's author still identifies as kinky, whereas I've seen abuse happen a lot more in the BDSM community, as I've written about here (trigger warning: rape), here, and here. But saying it isn't a "poly problem" doesn't mean it's not a problem in the poly community. It absolutely is.

And it pisses me off.

A couple of months ago, my partner zaiah and I hosted the first of what's likely to be a bimonthly poly get-together, whose purpose is to create white papers--papers that an be used by other poly organizers. The very first one? Creating poly communities that are safe and do not shelter abusers. Last month, we hosted the Portland West Side Poy Discussion Group. The topic? Preventing abuse in the poly community.

When I say this is the most head-scratching part of the essay, it's not because I believe the poly community is a beautific assemblage of saints. It's because the claims of abuse sound a bit...strange to me. The essay contains this bit...

If I’m dating Tom and Tom is treating his boyfriend Phil like dirt, I can’t possibly tell Tom that I’ll break up with him or I can’t sit by and watch him treating Phil like dirt. Because then I’m being controlling, jealous, and manipulative. I’m stuck in a trap where I have to put up with abusive shit all for the sake of not exercising the dreaded veto. [...] Until poly people stop demonising things like “veto power” and start talking and taking seriously how polyamory can work well for abusers, I have a hard time taking on the label...

...which I find a little odd. I'm not sure I get the connection between "opposing veto" and "sheltering abusers." I am an outspoken opponent of veto³ in poly relationships, because in my experience vetoes are often used as tools of abuse. I almost always see them wielded with indifference of--even contempt for--the needs of the people against whom they are used (people who, most often, are on the short end of a significant power imbalance to begin with).

What I also tend to see in conversations aout veto is a strange sort of either/or, all-or-nothing mentality: if you don't have veto, that means you have no say at all, and you just have to lie down and take whatever your partner does. You can't express an opinion or an objection of any sort; to do so is the same as veto.

And don't psychologists tell us that one of the defining characteristics of many abusers is the fact that they seek to control their partners and particularly control their partners' interactions with others, cutting their victims off from other sources of love and support?

Frankly, I find the discussion of veto with regards to abuse bizarre. If I were dating Sally and I saw her mistreating Bob, telling Sally I'll break up with her if her behavior doesn't improve isn't veto. Telling Sally "I demand that you break up with Bob"--that is veto.

I don't do veto, nor get involveed with those who have it. Yet if I'm dating someone who is treating another partner like dirt, or who is being treated like dirt, I'm going to say so. And if someone says that's "controlling, jealous, and manipulatiive," that says more about that person than it does about me, I reckon.

Conflating "doesn't do veto" with "supports abuse" seems...well, I'm not really sure what's going on there, but in my experience if someone is being abused and won't leave the abusive relationship if you say "hey, this is abuse," they aren't too likely to leave if you say "hey, veto" either.

Just sayin'.

Part 4: Smug

From the essay:

While many poly people acknowledge that “Relationship broke, add people” probably isn’t the best solution, just as many people act like polyamory is the solution for anyone’s relationship problems, or they look down on silly monogamous people who feel things like jealousy and fear (because, you know, non-monogamous people never feel that).

I've met this guy. Once. On a Facebook forum. He was roundly (and loudly) ridiculed.

This may be a regional thing. I totally get that there are folks who act this way, but in my expeience there aren't "just as many" folks who say this as who say exactly the opposite. In fact, the poly groups I've belonged to in Florida, Georgia, and Portland, and the poly folks I've met in Boston and Chicago, actively frown on the notion that polyamory is more evolved, more enlightened, and/or good for what ails those poor Neanderthal mono folks.

If I were to meet a lot of people proclaiming how backward monogamy iis, I suspect it'd get right up my noose, too. So I'm willing to give this critique a pass; it's not my experience, but different poly communities, as I mentioned in art 2 up there, have very different attitudes. Perhaps there's a poly community over across the pond where this idea is prevalent; if so, I can certainly understand opting out of it.

Opting out of a community, though, isn't the same thing as opting out of an identity. I've disassociated myself with the BDSM community, because it has a lot of behaviors and practices I find toxic. I still do BDSM. Distancing myself from others who do some of the same things I do doesn't, at least for me, change my identity. If it did, the way I see it, I'd be letting folks I don't like dictate my identity, and that seems an odd choice to me.

¹ The Transitive Property of Smugness is what I call the propensity of some folks to talk about how doing some thing like having multiple partners) or being part of some group (like people who practice BDSM) requires skill at a particular thing, and then to assume that because they do that thing, they have that skill. For example: "It takes good communication to be polyamorous. I am polyamorous. Ergo, I have good communication skills. Yay! Go me!" There are variants of this in almost every subculture I've ever belonged to; its kink equivalent is "Consent is an important part of BDSM. I am part of BDSM culture. Therefore, I am awesome about consent! Woohoo!"

² Not to mention insensitive. Rude, too. And kinda stupid.

³ Defined here as a right or agreement by which one person can tell another person "I require you to end your relationship with so-and-so" and have an expectation that the other person will break up with so-and-so. I've spoken to some folks who use the term "veto" to mean "I have the right to give you my opinion about whether I like so-and-so." I don't think that's the most common usage of the word "veto," and it's not the one I use here.

Evolution of the W32/Kuluoz malware scam

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 21:45:09 GMT

Well, boys and girls, it looks like the malware distribution I talked about here and here has morphed again. This morning, I started receiving emails that pretend to be DHL delivery notifications, rather than American Airlines ticket sales or FedEx notifications:

As before, the links take you to hacked WordPress or Joomla sites that will examine your browser user-agent. If you're on a Mac or Linux computer, or you're using a modern Windows browser, you'll see a phony 404 Not Found error that looks like this:

If you're using a Windows browser that has vulnerabilities, the link will download a copy of the W32/Kuluoz information and bank password stealing malware.

Stay safe out there.

Malware attacks after the Boston bombing

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:52:04 GMT

Yesterday, in the wake of the bombings in Boston, I received an email that looks like this in my inbox.

The links, needless to say, do not go to CNN. Instead, they lead to

http://playhard.by/bostoncnn.html

*** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING ***

This site IS LIVE as of the time of writing this. It WILL attempt to infect your computer with malware. DO NOT visit this site if you don't know what you're doing!

playhard.by is a hacked site hosted in Belarus. The URL in the email is a link to a file planted on the site that redirects visitors, using both JavaScript and a REFRESH meta tag, to

http://sub.piecedinnerware.com/complaints/messages_shows_mentions.php

This site is hosted by an outfit called Colo Crossing, a server colocation facility headquartered in the US. The domain was registered through (wait for it...) GoDaddy:

tacit$ whois PIECEDINNERWARE.COM

Domain Name: PIECEDINNERWARE.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, LLC
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com
Name Server: NS17.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server: NS18.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 19-nov-2012
Creation Date: 19-nov-2012
Expiration Date: 19-nov-2013

>>> Last update of whois database: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:42:55 UTC <<<

Registrant:
Jigar Kapadia
B-32, Mani Ratna Raw House, Opp Sai Nagar
New Gujarat Gas Road, Adajan
Surat, Gujarat 395009
India

Administrative Contact:
Kapadia, Jigar contact@NewWaysys.com
B-32, Mani Ratna Raw House, Opp Sai Nagar
New Gujarat Gas Road, Adajan
Surat, Gujarat 395009
India
+91.9076026366

Technical Contact:
Kapadia, Jigar contact@NewWaysys.com
B-32, Mani Ratna Raw House, Opp Sai Nagar
New Gujarat Gas Road, Adajan
Surat, Gujarat 395009
India
+91.9076026366

The domain was registered last November, and put into service after the Boston Marathon bombing. (Interestingly, the HTML file that redirects to this site contains the following block of text:

Be sure you have a transfer reference ID. You will be asked to enter it after we check the link. Important: Please be advised that calls to and from your wire service team may be monitored or recorded.

Redirecting to Complain details... Please wait...

This suggests that an ordinary, garden-variety malware attempt, possibly something like a fake PayPal or bank transaction notification, was hastily modified to exploit the Boston attacks.

As per usual, if you receive any emails like this, do not be tempted to click on the links in them.

I expect to start seeing similar emails targeting the explosion at the fertilizer plant in Texas within the next 24 hours.

More on the W32/Kuluoz malware attack

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 22:08:03 GMT

A short time ago, I wrote about a malware attack in which hacked sites were being used to spread the W32/Kuluoz malware. Kuluoz is a password-stealing Trojan; when it's installed, it scans your password files for Web browsers, password wallets, and so on looking for bank, PayPal, eBay, FTP, and other sites. People infected with Kuluoz may see their bank accounts emptied, their PayPal accounts drained, and if they use FTP to manage Web sites, their Web sites may be infected with the same malware.

Since I first wrote about it, the attack has changed and grown a lot more aggressive.

I saw the first sign of this attack on November 26 of last year. At the time, the attack was still quite crude: the victim would receive an email claiming to be from FedEx (though the body copy of the email said UPS) that had a message saying a package could not be delivered, and the victim would have to click a link to print out a receipt to pick the package up.

The link, of course, went to a hacked Web site being used to spread the malware. Clicking on the link would download a copy of W32/Kuluoz.B, regardless of what kind of computer the user was using. The first infected link I saw was

http://elbosquedelaherrezuela.com/wp-content/plugins/akismet/track.php?c003

hosted on Spanish Web host Arsys. The compromised site was running an outdated copy of WordPress; it has since been pulled down by the host.

In the time between last November and this March, the attack grew more sophisticated. The emails attempting to lure marks to hacked sites got more polished, and grew to resemble actual FedEx emails quite closely. The malware downloaders placed on hacked sites changed; they now examine the browser's "user agent," a header that tells a Web site what kind of computer you are using. If you're on a Mac or Linux computer, you see a bogus "404 not found" error; only if you are on a vulnerable Windows browser does the hacked site download malware. And the malware itself changed rapidly as well; VirusTotal identified the first malware as W32/Kuluoz, but later downloads, with different file sizes and MD5 hashes, are identified as W32/Kuluoz.B or W32/Kuluoz.3.

Since I wrote the report last March, the attack has ramped up significantly and changed again.

At first, in November and December, I averaged 6 emails a month trying to get me to click on links. Now I'm seeing an average of more than 15 of these emails per day.

The emails themselves have changed, too. The fake FedEx emails, though I still get them occasionally, have become quite rare. Instead, the new wave of attacks involves emails that look like American Airlines ticket confirmation emails:

Needless to say, if you get an email that looks like this, DO NOT click on the link.

Right now, there is a hack attack of unprecedented scope and tenacity going on against WordPress and Joomla sites. The attack uses tens of thousands of compromised PCs to try to log in to WordPress and Joomla sites with the username "admin" and a vast number of common passwords. The attack is so severe that some Web hosting companies are reporting that WordPress and Joomla sites on their servers are slow to respond or not loading at all.

I believe that those hack attacks are related to the W32/Kuluoz malware distribution.

I don't have any direct proof of that. The people attacking WordPress and Joomla sites are covering their tracks well, using botnets and IP spoofing to carry out the attacks.

But the circumstantial evidence seems strong. So far, every single compromised site I've seen that's hosting the Kuluoz downloaders is running WordPress or Joomla. As time has gone on, the number of infected WordPress and Joomla sites has scaled rapidly. The recent wave of emails trying to lure people to infected sites coincides with the ramping up of attacks on WordPress and Joomla sites.

None of this is incontrovertible evidence. It could be coincidence--two different organized crime gangs attacking the same kinds of sites at the same time and ramping up their efforts coincidentally. But my gut says they're related.

One of the most frustrating parts of this problem, for me, has been how slow Web hosting companies are to respond to reports that their systems have been penetrated and they are hosting computer malware.

I've compiled a list of statistics about infected Web hosting companies. Since November 26, I've started keeping track of which Web hosting companies are affected by the attack, and how long they've taken to remove a malware dropper once they've been notified it exists.

Not all Web hosts are created equal. Here, for example, is a graph showing the number of malware infected Web sites I've seen on various Web hosts since November, with the Web hosts identified by Spamcop:

The worst of the worst of the lot in terms of sheer number of virus droppers hosted, by a large margin, is GoDaddy.

Now, some ISPs host more Web sites than others, so if all ISPs were equally vigilant (or equally lax) about security you would expect to see larger hosting companies hosting more viruses than smaller companies. But this graph shows that isn't really how it goes. Hostgator is larger than most the other hosting companies listed here, but has only a small number of malware-infected sites. Dreamhost and OVH are disproportionately represented for their size by a significant margin.

Another place where hosting companies are not created equal is in how speedily they remove malware droppers once they're notified. The best Web hosting companies will do this within 24-48 hours, which to my mind is still quite a long time to leave a malware dropper active. When I've complained to Hostgator, arsys.es, and Lunarpages, for example, they've typically taken action quite quickly.

On the other side of the coin, some Web hosting companies take months to remove malware droppers...or don't remove them at all.

I don't know if it's because they are easily fooled by the phony 404 errors or if they simply don't care, but a number of Web hosting companies on this list appear unwilling or unable to deal with malware-infected sites at all.

The worst of these are Dreamhost (which has not removed one single malware site from its servers--every single one I've notified them of, without exception, is still active as of the time of writing this), GoDaddy (which used to be one of the top most responsive Web hosting companies, but no more; sites that they are notified of typically remain active on their servers for months, with one site I notified them of last December finally being taken down this April), OVH (which, like Dreamhost, appears not to deal with malware-infected sites at all), PrivateDNS.com (a site they were notified of in January is still active and spreading malware as of the time of writing this), and, sadly, Bluehost (which keeps emailing me to say the problem is resolved but the malware droppers remain active on their servers nonetheless).

Other ISPs on the Walk of Shame include 1 and 1 (which typically won't remove a malware dropper until I've emailed them three or four times), Peer 1 (which has several malware droppers active for two months or more), and Calpop (which typically leaves malware droppers live for about six weeks after being notified).

Now it's time for the practical bit.

If you have a WordPress or Joomla Web site, what can you do to keep it secure?

The two most important things you can do are to use very, very strong admin passwords and keep on top of security updates religiously. When a security update for a popular Web package is released, organized crime gangs will examine it and then roll the security holes it fixes into their automated exploit tools, because they know that most people don't install them right away. If you don't install a security patch within a day or two of its release, you run the risk of being pwn3d.

So, here's a quick list of dos and don'ts to run a WordPress or Joomla site:

DO

Use strong passwords.
Install updates immediately.
Consider locking down your /wp-admin or Joomla admin directories with an .htaccess file that does not permit access without a password. If you don't know how to use .htaccess files, there are some plugins that can do this for you. A WordPress plugin that can lock down your wp-admin directory is Bulletproof Security. A similar Joomla plugin is JHackGuard.
If you have more than one WordPress site, install InfiniteWP. This is a WordPress administration console that will notify you by email when any component of any of your WordPress sites needs to be updated, and allow you to update all your sites with one button click. It's free.
If you create your own WordPress or Joomla themes, consider removing the WordPress or Joomla footers. Automated tools are used to scan for these so that the bad guys know what sites to attack.
Make sure you remove the /install directories when you install any CMS. (Joomla requires you to do this.)
Use a Web host that is proactive about security and responds quickly to abuse complaints.

DO NOT:

Assume you don't have to worry about security because you have a tiny little site that nobody visits. The organized crime groups don't care what your site is or how much traffic it gets. They use automatic tools that search through hundreds of thousands of Web sites a day searching for vulnerable sites. If you are vulnerable, you will eventually be cracked.
Leave your plugins or themes directories indexable. If you don't know what that means, the easiest way to make sure you're not indexable is to create an empty file called index.html in your plugins directory and your themes directory. This will keep people from getting a list of all the files in those directories, which they can use to search for vulnerabilities.
Set up a WordPress or Joomla Web site and then just walk away from it. If you are not actively maintaining it, take it down.

2013's First Big List o' Linky Links

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 21:28:11 GMT

Once again, I have so many browser windows open that my computer, newly upgraded to Mac OS 10.8, is slowing to a crawl. (And on the subject of that upgrade, I'd just like to say that the latest and greatest Safari seems to handle large numbers of open windows with considerably less grace than the old version did, illustrating once more the age-old principle that human progress and the fall from grace go hand in hand.)

So, in time-honored tradition, I'm dumping a list of links here for you. Enjoy!

Photography and Cats

From Buzzfeed comes this awesome page called Perfectly Timed Cat Photos. The Internet is not just for porn; it is for porn and funny pictures of cats. And this page has some of the best of the latter.

This next link is porn, of a sotrt. It's a Web site called Abandonedography, and it has some of the most amazing photos of urban decay you'll ever see. Me, I really, really like urban decay.

Science

From Science Daily comes an interesting article, Monogamy and the Immune System: Differences in Sexual Behavior Impact Bacteria Hosted and Genes That Control Immunity.

Through a series of analyses, MacManes and researchers from the Lacey Lab examined the differences between these two species on the microscopic and molecular levels. They discovered that the lifestyles of the two mice had a direct impact on the bacterial communities that reside within the female reproductive tract. Furthermore, these differences correlate with enhanced diversifying selection on genes related to immunity against bacterial diseases.

The Guardian has an article that speaks to my interest (and my annoyance with pop understanding of science), Our brains, and how they're not as simple as we think.

As neuroscience has gained authority over previous ways of explaining human nature, it is not surprising that people will be compelled to use it if they want to try and make persuasive claims about how people are or should be – regardless of its accuracy. Folk neuroscience has become Freud for Freud-phobes, everyday psychology for the sceptical, although in reality, rarely more helpful than either.

Over on io9, there's a somewhat breathless but still interesting article, Temporary tattoos could make electronic telepathy and telekinesis possible. The actual technology isn't about "telepathy and telekinesis" so much as it's about using tiny, microns-thick electrodes to interface human beings to the world, but headline hype aside, it's cool stuff.

Society and culture

This is a fairly old article, about a year old at this point, but still worth noting. When people talk about the 'gay agenda' as if it's some dark and sinister thing, I think it's fair to be reminded occasionally that there are still rather a lot of folks who believe that gays and lesbians should be rounded up and executed. There is little about the supposed 'gay agenda' that even comes within a light-year of that.

Over on No Place for Sheep is this article, What is objectification, anyway? Objectification is a hot-button topic in any conversation about misogyny, and this essay lays it out rather well.

Similarly, there's an article on lacigreen that talks about how oppression works. Many folks I've talked to about the ideas of privilege and oppression try to paint the ideas as creating a strict hierarchy, with (presumably) strait white men at the top; this essay talks about why that model isn't realistic.

Speaking of misogyny: A while ago, there was a short-lived Tumblr blog called "Nice Guys of OK Cupid," which hilighted online dating profiles of men who called themselves 'nice guys' and lamented the fact that they were always getting 'friend zoned,' while also expressing horrifyingly misogynistic (and in some cases potentially violent) ideas. The Tumblr blog is no more, but there's an essay over on Jezebel called No One is Entitled to Sex: Why We Should Mock the Nice Guys of OkCupid that's definitely worth a read.

The plea to replace mockery with understanding is a familiar one; it's what lies behind the calls to stop using the word "creep," because men find it shaming. But in the case of Nice Guys of OkCupid, disdain isn't rooted in meanness as much as it is in self-preservation. While only a small percentage of these guys may be prone to imminent violence, virtually all of them insist, in one way or another, that women owe them. Mockery, in this instance, isn't so much about being cruel as it is about publicly rejecting the Nice Guys' sense of entitlement to both sex and sympathy.

John Scalzi can always be counted on to lay things out plainly, and his essay An Incomplete Guide to Not Creeping is no exception.

Hacking

In a feat of improvisational engineering that's equal parts awesome and horrifying, a guy has built himself a drone, armed it with a paintball gun, and programmed it to shoot at human-shaped targets.

I'm a big fan of Arduino hacking, having used an Arduino to make everything from a thought-controlled sex toy to a brainwave-controlled Rubens' tube to a vibrator guaranteed not to get you off. Adafruit, a company that makes all kinds of neat DIY Arduino-like gear, has introduced a new Lilypad-like microcontroller designed for wearable computers and paired it with programmable smart LEDs to create some really cool stuff. Check out the how-to video on making a tie with a glowing VU meter built in!

A Visit to Miss Isadora's School for Wayward Girls

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 03:33:06 GMT

When last I ventured into the land of the frozen North, the vast tundra of snow and ice known to the local Kurgen raiding clans as "vash'Tûl morg Athûl" (the Fields of Death) and to the English-speaking world as "Canada," I had the opportunity to pay a visit to Miss Isadora's School for Wayward Girls.

Miss Isadora, whose full name must for reasons that will soon be obvious be kept from your humble scribe's recounting, had invited me to help her learn some basic skills involving the use of rope, and also to assist her in the photographic documentation of certain activities related to the disciplining of Miss Cassandra, whose real name will likewise be redacted from this tale.

So it came to pass that we braved the gale-force winds and icy cold of vash'Tûl morg Athûl to travel by bicycle to our destination, where Miss Cassandra awaited the sort of stern discipline that only a good Catholic schoolgirl, ever desiring of being steered in the path of the Light, can know.

Miss Cassandra knows that being bound to the path of the Light is an important part of righteousness

Miss Cassandra, whose greatest desire above all else is to be led on the path of Righteousness, accepted the necessity of the corrective hand of discipline with nary a complaint. She is truly a shining example of how one must accept one's role with a meek and gentle heart.

At Miss Isadora's School for Wayward Girls, Miss Isadora takes a direct, involved approach to the spiritual well-being of her charges

Miss Isadora knows the value of leading us all down the proper path. Spare the rope and spoil the nubile flesh, as the famous saying from Proverbs goes. While we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God, Miss Isadora knows that sometimes just a gentle correction is all that is necessary to restore us to the path.

The power of symbols is not lost on Miss Cassandra, or on Miss Isadora

If Jesus died for our sins, dare we make His sacrifice meaningless by not committing them? This is one of the many ethical questions the students at Miss Isadora's School ponder in Religious Philosophy 201.

Penitence is not a skill that comes naturally to Miss Cassandra, it must be said

It is often true that our progress toward the Light comes in fits and starts. Our striving toward the Good often conflicts with our own baser impulses. Miss Cassandra finds penitence a difficult concept; it is up to Miss Isadora's gentle admonishments to correct her.

Miss Isadora believes a hands-on approach to teaching the Way is best

It sometimes comes to pass that even the most stern verbal corrections are insufficient to show a student at Miss Isadora's school the Way. When a student becomes particularly willful, a more hands-on approach to their spiritual welfare may, from time to time, become necessary. When this happens, Miss Isadora understands that this is, in the end, for the greater good of her charges.

The Good Book teaches us the value of modesty

It is written, "Women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair." At Miss Isadora's school, restraint is an important part of modesty.

The flesh is corrupt; the lash is purity

In this modern, sinful age, we have turned away from the Light. Political correctness has replaced the Truth: the flesh is sinful and corrupt, and must sometimes submit to the purifying caress of the lash to be cleansed. Miss Isadora has not forgotten the old lessons, and Miss Cassandra understands that the wicked flesh must be punished.

Compassion, too, has a place in the education of the fallen

But it should not be assumed that at Miss Isadora's, the rod is the only instrument of governance. Compassion is just as important. After the correction of the lash, Miss Isadora teaches Miss Cassandra the value of the compassionate touch.

Knowledge of sin is the fall from Grace

Miss Isadora understands that to avoid sin, we must first understand it. Her techniques for schooling Miss Cassandra in the nature of sin, the better to help fortify her against it, are unparalleled in their effectiveness.

Who says polyamory is complicated?

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:07:25 GMT

A lot of folks who read this blog know that I've been on-again, off-again working on a book on polyamory.

The project is back on again. A few weeks ago, when i was in the Wildlands of Canadia visiting my sweetie Eve, the two of us sat down to brainstorm ideas for the book and to try to pick out themes. I've written an outline and a sample chapter already, but Eve pointed out that it might be valuable to go back and revisit the idea by working out the topics we'd like to see included without referencing the original outline, to see if there's anything important that got overlooked on the first go 'round.

So we got some markers and closed ourselves up in a room with a whiteboard for a while, and...

I keep hearing that polyamory is complicated. i have no idea what people mean by that. :)

Clicky for an embiggened version!

Polyamory: So What Is Couple Privilege, Anyway?

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 03:53:20 GMT

I've been chewing on this post for more than two years now.

Part of the problem is that it's a daunting subject; one could easily write a book on the subject of couple privilege and how it plays out in relationships. Another is that a lot of otherwise well-meaning folks tend to get freaky-deaky about the P word; it's perceived as an accusation or an attempt at guilt-tripping, because we all like to think of ourselves as basically fair and decent people, and the notion that we benefit from advantages that we haven't earned is an uncomfortable one.

Part 0: Privilege: What is it?

Put simply, when you talk about people or societies, a 'privilege' is any advantage that one person or group has over another that hasn't been specifically earned.

It's a simple idea that's complicated and fraught with land mines in practice. Part of the reason for that is that privilege is invisible to those who have it. If you are in a privileged position, it doesn't seem like you have advantages over other people; it just seems like the Way Things Are. People don't consciously assert privilege. People don't get up in the morning and think "Wow, as a heterosexual white guy, I think I'll go out and oppress some women and minorities today!" Privilege is insidious because it is structural; privileged people get advantages without having to consciously think about them.

Because privilege is invisible, it can be really, really hard to admit we have it. We like to think of the world as being more or less mostly fair; we don't like to think of ourselves as benefitting from or participating in the oppression of others. We like to think that we are where we are because we've worked for what we have. The notion that we indirectly benefit from things that other people don't have access to tends to make us uncomfortable.

The best introduction I've ever had to the idea of privilege and the invisible ways it works is the essay Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh. This essay was certainly an eye-opener for me.

Whenever people try to talk about privilege, certain criticisms always seem to come up. Many people, for instance, will claim that talking about "privilege" is nothing more than a way to shut them down; "Well, you aren't black/female/whatever, so you simply have no right to say anything on this topic!" I don't know whether or how often that happens, but I do know that I've seen people respond as though this is happening when what is actually being said is "Your experience is different from mine, and it seems like the privileges you take for granted are interfering with your ability to understand why."

Another criticism I've seen is that the notion of "privilege" creates a pyramid of social advantages, with rich straight white guys on top and, presumably, poor black trans lesbians on the bottom. This isn't actually how it works; while rich straight white guys do have the lion's share of social privilege, privilege actually isn't so cut and dried. There are environments that privilege different groups in different ways. Men tend to enjoy many advantages over women much of the time--we are paid more in most jobs; nearly all CEOs of large corporations are male; most politicians are male; if you walk into a room of people in business suits, the "guy in charge" will usually be a guy--but in, say, family court, there are advantages that women have over men. All other things being equal, women are awarded custody of children in a divorce more often than men are. In US society, whites have a lot of advantages over blacks, but a black man will probably get better treatment at an auto mechanic than a white woman will. (The extent to which women are treated as total ignoramuses by auto mechanics never ceases to amaze me no matter how many times I see it.)

A lot of folks object to the word "privilege" on principle, saying that it's an inherently offensive word and that some other word (like "advantage") should be used instead. I think this is hogwash; it's not the word that's offensive, it's the idea behind it, which as I've said tends to make us profoundly uncomfortable. John Scalzi wrote an essay about privilege that deliberately avoided the P-word, and people still, predictably, reacted quite poorly to it.

The fact is, we are not all born equal. Some of us are born into situations--wealth, power, race, whatever--that give us advantages over other people. That does not mean that we are bound to succeed. It doesn't mean that we do not work for what we have or that we have not earned any of our accomplishments. It just means that it's easier for some of us to accomplish things than others of us--that we benefit from the situation we're in whether we want to or not.

So that's privilege.

And I want to talk about the role it plays in polyamorous relationships.

Part 1: Couple Privilege in Society

We live in a society that expects certain things of us.

One of the things that our society expects is that we will find someone else, fall in love, get married, and start a family.

The default social expectation is heterosexual monogamy. People who are born clearly male or clearly female and generally like getting it on with other people who are clearly of the opposite sex are granted certain privileges by our society. By default, their lives are easier in many ways than people who aren't born clearly of one sex or the other, or who aren't born in a body that fits their self-conception, or who are born with a taste for the romantic company of folks of the same sex.

What kinds of advantages? Other people will, by default, tend to react better to straight (or bisexual but straight-partnered) cisgendered folks better than they do to gay, trans, or intersexed folks, all other things being equal. Certain legal advantages are conferred upon straight folks, though that's (finally!) changing. Religious institutions overwhelmingly favor monogamous straight folks--not always and everywhere, but by and large. It's easier for you to adopt children. You get certain tax benefits.

So polyamorous folks already have a disadvantage. We don't fall neatly into the expectation of monogamy.

That expectation can seep into us even when we know that monogamy isn't a good fit for us. I think this is most often true of people who come to poly after having been in a monogamous relationship for a while--the couple looking to expand on their relationship with polyamory.

When a couple first tries to venture into polyamory, they'll often get a lot of eyerolls and heavy sighs from experienced poly people. It can be a bit disconcerting; you've thought about it carefully, after all, and you really want to try this non-monogamy thing...why is everyone giving you such a hard time?

The answer is that no matter how carefully you've thought about it, you will likely carry some ideas and expectations that privilege your existing relationship, often in the guise of "protecting" it...and a lot of us poly folks have been hurt by well-intentioned people unconsciously exercising privilege to the detriment of others, without even intending to.

Thinking about privilege is a bit like listening to music. If you have an untrained ear, it can be really difficult to, say, pull out the bass line from the music. But if you hear the bass line by itself, now suddenly you'll recognize it in the music.

Which is what this essay is all about--letting you hear that bass line by itself, so you can still pick it out when you're actually building your relationships.

Part 2: The Unicorn

When an existing couple first starts exploring the notion of polyamory, it can be very tempting to try to keep hold of as many elements of monogamy as possible.

After all, we live in a world that tells us that commitment means the same thing as exclusivity. We live in a world that says if your mate wants to have sex with someone else, it means you aren't good enough--better watch out, or you will lose your mate! We live in a world that says sex and relationship go hand in hand.

So to step outside that world can get pretty intimidating. What happens if our lover wants sex with someone else--does it mean that he or she will just start running around willy-nilly, having sex with everyone? That doesn't seem like a good way to have a relationship, right?

And what about jealousy? How can we keep from feeling jealous if our lover has sex with someone else?

The solution to all these problems that seems obvious and occurs to a lot of folks right out of the gate is to find a bisexual woman to have sex with both members of the couple in a fidelitous triad. After all, if you're both having sex with the same person, then nobody will be jealous, right? If you are fidelitous and nobody has sex with anyone else, you won't have to worry about your partner having sex willy-nilly with the whole world, right? And of course it's a woman--bisexuality in women is hot, but bisexuality in men is kinda yucky, right?

There's a reason such a woman is called a "unicorn," and the 1,872,453014 couples searching for her are called "unicorn hunters." The idea of looking for a unicorn feels perfectly reasonable--but it's rooted in a lot of ideas that aren't necessarily true and often it's based on a set of expectations that privilege the existing relationship, even if it doesn't seem that way.

Couples looking for a unicorn aren't evil. They're not mean or malicious or bad people. Yet they often end up doing a lot of harm to anyone who crosses their paths. A friend of mine refers to being a third partner to a couple as "being a couple's chew toy," and by far the majority of poly folks I know who have done it once will never do it again.

But why? What's wrong with it?

For starters, you probably sat down and talked very carefully with your partner about it, and both of you probably agreed that it would meet your needs, right?

So what's wrong with that?

Well, let's step aside for a moment from the fact that whenever you're talking about non-monogamy, anything that you do which starts with "We both ..." automatically places one relationship above the others, and think about things from a prospective third's point of view.

It didn't give any thought to HER needs. She wasn't part of the conversation--and how could she be? You haven't even met her yet. When you decide in advance what the rules of a relationship are, without even being in that relationship yet, well...people tend to feel a bit disenfranchised by that.

And most folks in the poly community are poly because they reject the idea of restrictive relationships; they reject the notion that being in one relationship means giving up on being in any others. So the poly community is really not the best place to look for someone if you plan to tell her "As long as you're involved with us, you won't be allowed to be with anyone else."

But most importantly, you haven't thought about how what you're asking for puts your relationship with each other ahead of your relationships with her. Which means that when you do find that "her" you'd love to welcome into your relationship, she quite likely won't be very keen on joining. (A lot of folks looking for a partner will say "This is what we want, don't judge us!" and then in the next breath "...but man, it sure is hard, we've been searching and searching and we just can't find anyone.")

Privilege is an insidious thing; it's very difficult to think about how you're giving your own existing relationships a heaping cup of unearned advantages when you're not even aware of what those advantages are.

So let me talk for a bit about what some of those advantages are.

Part 3: The Not-So-Complete List of Couple-Based Privileges

Let's play a thought experiment. Let's say you're in an existing relationship. You've been in it for a while--years, even. You might live together. You might be married. Maybe you have a dog named Spot or a kid named Freddie or a goldfish named Wanda or something.

Anyway, point is, you're together and you're happy, but you think it might be cool to have more. So you decide you might want to give polyamory a try.

Now imagine that you've found a third. She's beautiful and smart and dynamite in bed, she fancies both of you, she even likes your fish.

And let's say your existing partner says to you, "I'm still feeling a bit uncertain about all this. I know we both wanted to try this, but it still makes me feel awkward when I see you have sex with our third. Can you do me a favor and stop having sex with her for a while until I feel better?"

Now let's suppose your third says to you, "You know, this is all feeling new to me, and I still feel a bit uncertain about all this. It makes me feel kind of awkward to see you have sex with your wife. Can you do me a favor and stop having sex with her until I feel better?"

There, did you feel that? A disturbance in the Force. For most people, the response to each of these requests probably wouldn't be the same. That's one example of couple privilege.

Now let's say you're invited to a company picnic. You can bring a partner with you. What do you do? Do you bring your husband, or your third?

Tch. There it is again, that disturbance in the Force.

What do you say to your family? Do you bring your third to Thanksgiving dinner? You've been accustomed, all these years, to having the nearly-invisible social benefits that come from a typical het monogamous relationship. Now, all of a sudden, you have to start thinking about the fact that you're not. What do you say? Do you stay closeted? Do you tell any of your monogamous friends? Your boss? The person at the sandwich shop across the road?

Uh-oh. Now it's starting to get complicated. What will your mom think? Maybe it's better not to say anything...stay in the closet.

But if you do that, what are you telling your third? You're telling her that she's good enough to fuck but not good enough to be seen in public with. You're telling her that you love her--but not as much as you love the social privileges of seeming to be monogamous.

Ouch.

What if she doesn't like that very much?

There are a lot of privileges that go along with being monogamous. Some of them are "external" privileges--social privileges you get without even necessarily asking for them. Some of them are "internal" privileges--privileges that make your relationship feel safer and more secure by placing it on a different plane from any "third" or "outside" relationships.

External privileges:

- You can check into a hotel as a couple and expect to share a room with one bed. Many hotels have policies forbidding them from renting a room with one bed to three or more adults.
- Ability to easily find greeting cards in any store that will describe your relationship or express what you want to express.
- Assumptions about couplehood in work and social environments: you will often be permitted, or even expected, to bring one partner to company social functions, to weddings, to parties, and so on.
- You can easily expect to find an apartment that will rent to both of you; many apartments won't rent a one-bedroom apartment to more than two adults, and may impose other restrictions on the number of adults staying there.
- If you have children, you may be at risk from child protective services for being involved in non-monogamous relationships.
- Being involved in non-monogamous relationships may bring social judgment or assumptions about promiscuity.
- Being non-monogamous may count against you in custody disputes or other issues involving the courts.
- Being non-monogamous may create problems during background checks, security clearances, and so on.
- In the military, adultery is a crime under the UCMJ.
- You can get married to one partner but not to two. Marriage brings a whole slew of privileges of its own: tax advantages, legal protections for joint property, survivorship benefits, Social Security benefits, insurance benefits, and on, and on.
- Most religions endorse heterosexual monogamy above all other sexual and romantic relationships
- Fostering or adoption of children is easier in a monogamous relationship
- Medical visitation and medical power of attorney often extend to only one (often legally-married) partner.
- Many cultural ideas privilege heterosexual monogamy, including: deviency in romantic relationships is linked to pedophilia; if a non-traditional relationship fails, it's because of the non-traditional part; polyamorous people are always on the prowl and are therefore a threat to monogamous relationships; if you're polyamorous it means your current partner isn't "good enough" or you don't "really" love him or her; polyamory is a polite term for "playing the field."
- A "third" partner may not be able to do things like pick a kid up from school.
- Family events or vacations are easier when you have one partner than when you have two.
- The ability to say "I've been with my monogamous partner for 18 years" without being seen as a 'credit to monogamy' or "I broke up with my monogamous partner after 3 months" without being seen as a 'detriment to monogamy.'

Internal privileges:

- Assumptions that the couple comes first in priority (more on this later).
- "Veto" arrangements that allow either member of a couple to unilaterally demand that the other member end an "outside" relationship.
- Many people expect certain financial privileges, such as joint ownership of property or the expectation that a "third" will not share a mortgage.
- Assumptions that if the couple wants children, they will have them within the couple but not with an "outside" partner.
- Closeted polyamory, which disenfrachises the relationships with the third person.
- The assumption that as long as the original couple remains together, everything's OK.
- The idea that if the couple "tries" polyamory and decides they don't like it, it's acceptable to simply cut off the third person and go back to monogamy; this idea inherently treats outside people as though they are expendable.
- The history shared by the couple, which carries with it its own language, shared experiences, and "in" jokes and which is often both intimidating to and impenetrable by the third person.
- Assumptions that if a new person decides to share living space with the couple, the new person will move in with the couple rather than vice versa.
- Territoriality, which may be expressed in a number of different ways: "you may never have sex with anyone else in our bed," "you may never call anyone else by my favorite pet name,""you may never take anyone else to our favorite restaurant," and so on.
- The couple usually expects to set the terms under which any third person may join the relationship, which inherently disempowers the third person.
- Sometimes, couples may decide that a third person isn't really part of the family if she isn't having sex with both of the members of the couple.
- The couple has a built-in support system if the "outside" relationship fails, which may not be true if the original couple's relationship fails.
- Assumptions about what will happen in the event of an unplanned pregnancy inside the couple vs. what will happen if an unplanned pregnancy happens with an "outside" party.
- The idea that an established couple that runs into problems may be able to just put outside relationships on the back burner to focus on the problem, vs. the idea that if a person has a problem with an "outside" relationship, he or she will not be able to put the established relationship on the back burner to focus on it.
- The idea that a couple may be able to cancel a date with an "outside" lover if one of them feels the need, but "outside" partners are usually not given the power to cancel a date or event within the couple.
- The couple may want to keep any "outside" partners away from day-to-day activities like chores.
- Assumptions that one member of the couple's time is dedicated to the other member unless explicitly negotiated otherwise.
- Differences between what happens if a member of the existing couple has a debilitating injury or illness vs. what happens if an "outside" partner does.

Of course, not every relationship benefits from every one of these privileges, and not every couple privileges their relationship in these exact ways. These are examples of ways in which privilege can favor established couples.

Part 4: But What About Protecting the Couple?

By this point, you've probably already started thinking "Hey, Franklin, wait a minute! Some of the things on your list, like having a shared history, are inevitable. I didn't set out to turn that into some kind of privilege! And if I already have kids, or a mortgage, or other obligations, of course those obligations come first! What's the big deal? There's nothing wrong with that!"

And you're right. There's not.

You have pre-existing commitments and relationships and you want to take care of them. That's reasonable. It doesn't have to turn into an exercise of privilege.

Imagine that you've just made a new friend. You probably would not see the need to make a production of telling your new friend "You know, I already have existing friends, and I've known them longer than you, so I prioritize those friendships over yours." You probably wouldn't find a need to tell him "Just so you know, my kids' needs come before yours;" in fact, it'd probably seem a little weird if your new friend didn't get that. And unless you're in sixth grade, you would almost certainly be looked at oddly if you told your new friend "I already have a best friend, and there can be only one best friend, so I want to make sure you know that I can be friends with you but we will never be best friends."

Yet often, this is exactly what couples who are new to poly will tell a new partner--occasionally in the same breath as talking about how they want an "equal" triad.

So how can you tell the difference between protecting something you've invested in and asserting couple privilege?

This is a sticky wicket. Privilege, by its nature, tends to creep into everything we do; it's the framework of How Things Are, the ideas and experiences we take for granted on an almost unconscious level. I've pondered some ponderings about separating privilege from a simple acknowledgement of the fact that we have invested more in some relationships than others, and here are some of the differences I've observed:

Privilege Protecting an investment

- I want to have more than you give your other partners. - I need this much from you.

- Nobody else can ever be financially entwined with us. - Protecting my existing financial assets is important.

- I want to vet your other partners; you may date only partners I approve of. - Because you are important to me, meeting your partners (if possible) and getting along with them (if possible) is important to me.

- Your resources (time, financial, and so on) belong to me unless we explicitly negotiate otherwise. - Your resources are yours to do with as you please so long as you take care of the obligations we have incurred together.

- I will always be able to veto your other partners. - I can always express any opinions, problems, or discomforts I may have with you. I trust that you will find a way to honor your commitment to me.

- We will sit down and create a set of rules together with any new partner is expected to abide by. - We will sit down with any potential new partner so that we can all put our needs and ideas on the table.

- One relationship has to be the most important one. Since I was here first, that means me. - Relationships vary in importance and investment over time. What matters is that my needs are being met, not that I am getting more than anyone else.

- In any conflict that arises between me and another partner, I win. - Conflicts may arise. I may not always get what I want. What matters is that my partner listens to me and hears my concerns, not that I am always right or I always win.

- My needs always come first. - I may not get my way all the time, but that's okay. It's okay for others to express their needs, too.

A lot of these come down to the sorts of things you might expect if you had two kids. You wouldn't reasonably say that one kid was "primary" and all the others were "secondary," or that one kid's needs always came before any others'. We all can instinctively recognize that if we have a second child, we still want to protect and invest in the first child, and we can do that without privileging the first child over the second.

So why is it so hard to recognize this when it comes to relationships?

Part of it is the way that society privileges couples, and the expectations we're given (and can internalize without even being aware of it)--letting your partner have sex with someone else is dangerous, if you let someone else in you'll lose what you have, that sort of thing.

And part of it is that, as human beings, we get so wrapped up in our own experiences, especially our own fears, that it can become very difficult to look past that and see someone else's experiences.

Part 5: Seeing Past Ourselves

There's an awesome essay on the Weekly Sift called The Distress of the Privileged. It talks about the backlash we often see when we try to discuss privilege. When a person in a position of privilege begins to see that privilege, it can be very human to want to lash out, to say that it's not really a problem. Those of us in positions of privilege benefit from that privilege, after all; we're so used to our privilege, so accustomed to thinking of it as just the Way Things Are, that the idea of giving ground on any of it can feel like someone is taking away what's rightfully ours.

And it's a thousand times worse when we invoke privilege out of fear. When we feel a fear of loss--which, it must be said, is quite normal for someone coming into polyamory for the first time--it is almost impossible for us to be compassionate toward others. Especially toward the people we see as being responsible for that fear.

So the privilege goes from being unconscious to being something we feel entitled to. (True story: I know a guy, who will remain nameless, who is quite hostile to the idea of feminism. He especially resents what he sees as the feminist idea that men are dangerous--that women should take care around strange men because strange men represent a threat of rape. He also feels very uncomfortable walking through black neighborhoods. He sees no parallel there, and no irony.)

When we are in privileged positions, it's not usually because we asked to be. It's just how things are. And when we start to lose that privilege or people start telling us we're acting unfairly, well...

Privilege benefits couples in ways that go beyond merely calming fear of loss. They also help to keep the original couple in control. Many exercises of privilege keep the locus of control within the couple to the exclusion of the newcomer to the relationship--overtly, as in the case of "the couple sets the terms and the third person signs on the dotted line," or covertly, as in the case of assumptions about holidays or resources.

Any time a couple starts to negotiate the process of opening a relationship, there are some tools which I think are quite valuable in preventing the unconscious assertion of privilege. Some of them include:

- Asking "Is the goal of this agreement to help choose compatible partners, or to protect the 'real' relationship from a perceived threat?" Perceived threats to a relationship are often the door through which the assertion of privilege walks in.
- Asking "At what point do things that are important to me start becoming expectations I impose on others?"
- Asking "If I were a single person who'd just met another single person for a monogamous relationship, would this seem reasonable to me?"
- Asking "Am I disempowering any third person who joins us?" The more decisions you make about what a relationship must look like and what role a newcomer must play, the less you are empowering that third person, the more you are asserting couple privilege...and the more likely it is that any third person you DO meet will look at you and say "no thanks."

Ideally, relationship structures are flexible and are designed to promote the growth and the needs of everyone involved. But often, especially for newcomers to polyamory, there can be a fear that unpleasant feelings (whether they be jealousy or feelings of threat or whatever) mean implosion of the existing relationship; in that way, use of privilege to defend against jealousy or other unpleasant feelings becomes a way to avoid personal responsibility for growth. We need not fear unpleasant feelings; they are a part of life.

The exercise of privilege may also become a way to avoid facing that members of a couple might have different goals or needs in the relationship. Privileging a relationship by saying things like "the couple always comes first" or "the couple has veto" can become, in this sense, tools for the couple to avoid facing differences in ideas or needs; if such differences come up, the third person is ejected from the relationship and voila! Harmony is restored.

It is my experience and observation that the more a couple clings to couple privilege, the more disempowered and unhealthy new relationships are...and the more easy it is for the couple to blame their dysfunction on the third person. "You are not respecting our relationship," "you knew the rules when you signed on," and "you're a secondary, so you have to take what you're given" can all be ways to say "our dysfunction is not going to be addressed, so just shut up and deal with it." That dysfunction may mean anything from insecurity to actual out-and-out emotional abuse, and the refrain of "you're a secondary so that's what you signed up for" dodges it all.

And, unfortunately, relationships that start out from a position of rules, restrictions, and couple privilege can easily become relationships where the greatest dysfunction wins. This is something I've seen many times; whether it's "I'm the most insecure person so I demand the greatest level of control over any new relationships" or "I feel most threatened so I will exert the greatest privilege," once it has become acceptable to assert privilege in a relationship, the assertion of privilege often ends up driven the most by the most dysfunctional dynamic.

Again, I'm not saying any of this is malicious or evil. The invisibility of privilege, coupled with the fact that a fearful person often finds it difficult to act with compassion and empathy, can combine to make even well-meaning people act in ways that are harmful.

Part 6: Privilege and the Single Person

So far I've talked about privilege as something that couples exert against newcomers to a relationship.

But one of the things about privilege that's sneaky is that it so thoroughly permeates our social expectations that even single people can end up thinking in ways that emphasize couple privilege. The fact that someone is single doesn't meean that person is immune to internalizing privilege! This takes a lot of forms:

- My relationship with these people isn't working out. I need to find a primary of my own if I want to be happy. (The subtext here is that sharing a partner will never be as good as a pair-bonded relationship; it's a compromise you make until you find a real partner of your own.)
- I am not getting my needs met, but that's because I'm a secondary. As a secondary, I shouldn't expect to have them met.
- Of course my partners won't acknowledge their relationship with me; I'm only a secondary!

Privilege even seeps into our language. When couples talk about "our third" and say that polyamory is successful if it works for "both" of them, that's a reflection of privilege. When couples say they want a relationship with a third to "bring them closer together" or to help kick things up in the bedroom, that's an example of utilitarian language that, again, reflects privilege.

We don't go into traditional monogamous relationships thinking "Oh, boy, I am going to set a bunch of rules and my new partner will be happy to sign on in order to get all the wonderful benefits of my love!" Often, though we do go into poly relationships with exactly that mindset. To a couple, it can feel natural and reasonable that they set the terms, and to a single poly person, it can feel just as reasonable and just as natural that getting involved with someone who's already partnered means having to accept all the terms as they come. Again, the point stands that if you wouldn't start a monogamous relationship this way, it may not be reasonable to start a poly relationship this way.

Part 7: Putting It All Together

If you've made it this far (and I congratulate you if you have; this is quite a lot of writing!), there's a take-home point I hope will stick with you:

Relationships, if they are to be healthy and functional, are not about what a third party can give to, or give up to be with, an established couple.

The moment a couple begins to think in terms of "What wonderful things can we give to a third and what will we ask her to do to reap the awesome benefits of being with us" instead of "What can we build that nourishes all of us and gives all of us room to grow in whatever unusual and delightful directions we grow in?" an expectation of privilege has crept into the relationship on little cat's feet.

A relationship need not be about erecting walls and fences to protect one's self from some marauding outsider.

Many, many of the conscious and unconscious projections of privilege are prevented simply by trusting your partner. When you say "My partner loves me, my partner wants to be with me, and as long as I ask for what I need, my partner will choose to make decisions that cherish and nurture me," the fears that drive the projection of privilege fade.

Looking from the outside, it often seems to me that many people in polyamorous (and monogamous!) relationships don't trust their partners--not really. So they look to create rules and structures to meet their needs, because they don't really believe that if their partner can do whatever he or she wants, their partner will freely choose to meet those needs.

When you trust your partners, things change. You no longer feel the need to assert privilege by saying "My partner can only have sex with someone else as long as I am there," because you know that no matter how amazing that sex is, your partner still loves you and wants to be with you. So instead, you can say "When we find a third, we can all talk together to decide what our sexual boundaries are." And so on.

Having tried both approaches, I can say from experience that letting go of privileges and entitlement and instead building relationships with people who I trust and believe will, if given free rein to make any choice whatsoever, will still choose to nurture me is the most wonderful, secure feeling in the world.

With grateful acknowledgement to seinneann_ceoil, zaiah, Eve, and many others for contributing thoughts and ideas to this essay.

Spam of the day: With heat showers!

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 23:49:13 GMT

Most of the spam I get these days is in Spanish. Sometimes, it's in English. Occasionally, it's in Russian. Very occasionally, it's in Arabic. And every so often, it looks like it's in Russian that was translated into English via Google Translate.

Take, for example, this spam, which I reproduce below for your viewing pleasure unedited save for the reply email:

Subject: You I really liked

Hello Solitary heart!!!

I am a girl with beautiful name Julia, me 27 years. Dream to find the person for serious and long relations! I have interested your profile, since I seem that you search for such relations! Now I shall tell little about itself. I very cheerful and communicative, attractive girl. My growing forms 170 cm, my weight forms 57 kilograms. Much love to read the books, listen the classical music, walk on autumn wood and communicate with interesting people. If I have interested you, that anxiously waits your letter and photographies on my e-mail : m---------c@yandex.ru With heat showers! Julia.

Best wishes,
Juliya

I am grateful for Juliya's concern for the well-being of my romantic life, since truly do I search for such relations, it must be said.

I'm not quite sure, though, what "with heat showers" means. Google Translate renders this back into Russian as "С тепло души," though of course I haven't the foggiest notion what that might mean either.

I imagine it to be part of a lengthy blessing of travel in ancient Russian folklore, a ritual to prepare the hero for a journey of particularly perilous peril: "With this ox blood and this stone ax I bless thee, my son. Now go, and bring honor upon our clan, with heat showers."

You have a package! Surprise, it's the W32/Kuluoz malware!

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 23:02:10 GMT

About three months ago, I got an email telling me that my FedEx package couldn't be delivered. The body of the email told me that the UPS courier tried to deliver it, and that it would be sent back if I didn't click on the attached link.

Naturally, as I wasn't expecting a FedEx pacakge, and given that FedEx presumably knows it isn't UPS, I knew immediately that clicking the link was a Very Bad Idea...at least on an unsecured Windows box. Sure enough, clicking it downloaded a Windows executable, which VirusTotal identified as W32/Kuluoz, a backdoor command-and-control software that also attempts to download other malware.

I reported the site hosting the malware and forgot about it.

Then, things started to change.

I've been getting more and more copies of this email lately; I'm now averaging several a week. The silly error and grammar mistakes have been fixed, and the emails now look quite polished. Here's an example I received a couple of days ago:

The "Print Receipt" link leads to http://www.123goplus.com/components/.wye6fb.php?receipt=831_1493393532

CAUTION *** CAUTION *** CAUTION

The links in this blog post ARE LIVE as of the time of writing this. If you attempt to visit them with a vulnerable Windows computer, they WILL try to download malware to your computer. DO NOT visit these links if you don't know what you're doing!

The site 123goplus.com belongs to a company that produces business cards and similar printed pieces in Montreal, Canada.

$ whois 123goplus.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain Name: 123GOPLUS.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, LLC
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com
Name Server: NS1.MTLEXPRESS.CA
Name Server: NS2.MTLEXPRESS.CA
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 06-jan-2013
Creation Date: 06-may-2006
Expiration Date: 06-may-2014

>>> Last update of whois database: Thu, 14 Mar 2013 22:32:30 UTC <<<

Registrant:
Pierino Pezzi
8630 Perra #3
Montreal, Quebec H1E5M8
Canada

Administrative Contact:
Pezzi, Pierino creationexpress@yahoo.com
8630 Perra #3
Montreal, Quebec H1E5M8
Canada
+1.5142741616

Technical Contact:
Pezzi, Pierino creationexpress@yahoo.com
8630 Perra #3
Montreal, Quebec H1E5M8
Canada
+1.5142741616

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.MTLEXPRESS.CA
NS2.MTLEXPRESS.CA

The site 123goplus.com is running an outdated, insecure copy of the popular Joomla content management software, which has been hacked to have the malware downloader on it. (Joomla is a common target for this kind of attack. If you run Joomla on your Web site, and you don't keep on top of security patches religiously, it's a certainty that you will be hacked--it's not "if," it's "when.")

Here's where things get cool.

Visiting this URL from a Mac browser or a Linux browser returns a 404 Not Found page, presumably to fool folks like me into thinking that the problem has been fixed.

Visiting the URL http://www.123goplus.com/components/.wye6fb.php without the "?receipt=831_1493393532" at the end also returns a 404 error; presumably, that code identifies a target that the email has been sent to. The 404 error looks like this:

But hang on! Let's go to http://www.123goplus.com/fghfghghf and see what a REAL 404 error looks like on this server:

See the difference? The 404 error that you get when you go to the malware dropper is phony. The malware dropper is there, and it does live at that address.

If you visit the malware dropper with your browser user-agent set to, say, Internet Explorer 6 (God help you), you won't see an error message. Instead, it will download a .zip file called "PostalReceipt.zip".

I have downloaded several copies of this file from several different compromised hosts over the past couple of months, all of them from nearly identical FedEx emails.

The payload sites vary. Many different sites have been hacked and used to download this malware: 123goplus.com, yourinternationalteam.com, youknowlee.com, theqcontinuum.com, canyonlakeboatstorage.com.

In every case, the site is running an outdated, insecure copy of WordPress or Joomla. The hackers hack the site (which is trivial to do), place a PHP script that downloads the malware, then send out a bunch of these phony emails about a non-existent FedEx package, hoping to trick people into clicking the link.

Most of these sites remain infected, weeks or months after being reported to the ISPs, because either the ISPs don't care or the ISPs aren't paying attention to the fact that the malware scripts return phony 404 pages. (GoDaddy and OVH, I'm especially looking at you here.)

The people behind this attack are adapting the malware rapidly. I downloaded three samples of the PostalReceipt.zip file, one on January 25 aqnd two on January 30, and they differ from one another. VirusTotal identifies the earliest one as W32/Kuluoz, the second as W32/Kuluoz.B, and the third as W32/Kuluoz.3.

There are some interesting things about this attack.

The group--and I bet it is a group--of criminals responsible for this attack are taking care to cover their tracks and to keep abuse teams from removing the malware from infected sites. Each spam email contains a code at the end of the malicious URL, and the URL returns a phony error message if it doesn't see a valid code.

The virus downloader script is smart enough to examine the browser user-agent to see what kind of computer and what Web browser the victim is using. If it sees a browser or a computer that it can't exploit, it returns a fake error message.

Only if it sees a vulnerable browser does it attempt to download the malwarewhich then surrenders the computer to the control of the hackers.

The malware droppers are installed, probably automatically, on sites running insecure WordPress or Joomla software. The phony 404 error messages slow down the Web hosting companies' response, so the malware droppers stay active for long periods of time.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you run a Web site that uses a content managemet or blogging or ecommerce package, you *** ABSOLUTELY *** MUST *** check periodically for software updaes and install them immediately. (When a software update comes out, the organized crime gangs that do this kind of attack will analyze it and figure out what security holes it patches. Within days, they will start taking over any Web site that hasn't installed the update.)

The fact that malicious scripts will cloak themselves behind fake error messages means that you can never trust that a problem has been fixed just because you see a 404 error if you try to look at a suspicious URL.

Any Vancouverites want to meet up?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:56:17 GMT

I have successfully journeyed north of the Wall into the wildlands of Canada in search of adventure and fortune, having triumphed over some suspicious and generally resentful Canadian customs officers.

I'm not quite sure why it is, but on three trips to Canada I've been detained for additional screening twice. The first time, they asked me for a list of every place I've lived for the past twenty years and did background checks on me in all of them. At the time, I chalked it up to my own foolish decision to wear bunny ears through customs, but now I'm not so sure.

This time, they pulled me aside to ask me questions about how much money I was bringing into the country, who I worked for, how long I'd worked there, and who I was seeing. Then they did a Web search ("Hm. You do adult Web sites?" "Well, some of my clients do!") and grilled me further about the folks I know here ("How did you meet? When did you meet? When was the last time you saw these people?") They carefully wrote down my answers,and then called my sweetie Eve (who had apparently just stepped from the shower, lucky for me) and asked her the same questions.

Finally, after a delay that was just long enough to make me the most hated person on the bus, they cleared me, but only reluctantly, and I was on my way.

Polar bear saddle in hand, I went off in search of a McDonald's hamburger, which I was unable to procure because a fraud flag had been raised on my debit card on account of some bloke who apparently was trying to use it to buy a hamburger in Canada...a problem it eventually took three phone calls and twelve hours to resolve.

That problem fixes, with polar bear saddle and computer in hand, I went off with my sweetie Eve to work, where I soon found that my Yahoo IM account was locked on account of some bloke with a Canadian IP address trying to access it, my LiveJournal was flagged on account of some bloke with a Canadian IP address trying to access it, my AOL...but you get the idea.

I've had to spend much of the day dealing with the fallout of some bloke with a Canadian IP address stomping all over my digital life--that is, when I haven't been fighting off Kurgan raiders, doing battle with polar bears, treating my feet for frostbite, building igloos, or looking out over the desolate, frozen expanse of steppe beneath the floating cloud-city of Vancouver.

Anyway, I'm in Vancouver, and apparently some of the local poly crowd is hosting a get-together at The Pint, a pub located deep in the bowels of the Kurgan district. It starts at 7:30 PM on Wednesday, March 13, and anyone who happens to be local and not preparing for battle with the raiders of the North is welcome. The address is 455 Abbott Street, and I'd totally embed a Google map if I could figure out how to do it.

Guest post: Polyamory and Hierarchy

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 02:43:23 GMT

This entry is a guest blog by my sweetie Eve on the subject of hierarchy in poly relationships. It's a topic that's common in poly circles, but 'hierarchy' is rarely defined. Eve proposes a definition for the term:

A post by the blogger SexGeek last month on polynormativity created quite a stir in my poly circles, with some of the discussion focusing on the ethics of hierarchical poly relationships. I find that these discussions often get derailed by a lack of clarity about what we actually mean when we talk about a poly hierarchy. So I want to propose a definition. It’s based on how I most commonly observe hierarchies playing out in poly relationships. I shared this on a Facebook poly list, and it initiated a lot of discussion—some of it controversial, all of it thought-provoking. While I'm still pondering, and I appreciate and respect the concerns and input that have been offered there, I still pretty much hold my initial position. So I offer this as what resonates most and rings true for me, while I also consider the input of others.

I worked pretty hard to get this down to something short, succinct, and more-or-less in plain language. So here is my best definition so far of a poly hierarchy:

A poly hierarchy exists when at least one person holds more power over a partner's other relationships than is held by the people within those relationships.

One classic hallmark of such power is the veto. But it doesn’t always have to include a veto, and it can manifest in many smaller ways, such as restrictions on how much time a person can spend with their partners, qualifications of potential partners, where a person can go with a partner or how much money they can spend, whether someone can spend the night with their partners, or whether and how they can have sex—the possibilities are pretty endless.

In this definition, I have tried to remove any assumptions of intent, purpose or duration. I see a hierarchy as a means to an end, not an end in itself: so, while some have argued that my definition is about power and control, I don’t see it that way. I think people choose to exercise power over other relationships as a way to get what they want out of their own relationships. For example, some people see poly hierarchies as a way to ensure existing commitments are met, preserve existing relationships, or provide a feeling of safety and security. Other people choose different means to achieve the same ends.

Here’s why I use the word in this specific way:

A hierarchy (when it refers to people and not, say, computer programs or classification of organisms) is, by definition, about unequal distribution of power. It refers to rank: first, second, third, etc. (hence the terms "primary" and "secondary"). We speak of hierarchies, for example, in companies and in the military. Generally speaking, though, in interpersonal relationships (outside organizational structures), we only use the word when speaking of poly relationships. We don't use them, for example, when speaking about a couple with children, or relationships among siblings, or commitments within an extended-family network, even when such networks may include a complex web of priorities and interdependencies. So with the phrase "poly hierarchy," I am referring to a specific structure concerning three or more adults in a romantic network. A poly hierarchy does not concern the distribution of power among other players in a person's life, which could range from employers to landlords to parents or children. It refers to the distribution of power among romantically connected adults.

A poly hierarchy is not a set of boundaries. A boundary is a statement about what you need and what you will accept. In a negotiation between grown-ups, an adult states their boundaries and trusts their partner to honour them--and does not, generally, stay in a relationship where their clearly defined boundaries are consistently crossed. A hierarchy, on the other hand, dictates another person's behaviour with regard to the other person or the other person's other partners. Examples:

Not hierarchy: To protect my sexual health, I choose not to have unprotected intercourse with anyone who has unbarriered sex with anyone else. If you choose to have unbarriered sex with someone other than me, I may use condoms with you, or even refrain from having intercourse with you at all. However, because I know you value the ability to have unbarriered sex with me, I trust you to check in with me about my comfort level before you choose to have unbarriered sex with someone else.

Hierarchy: I don't want to have to use condoms with you or stop having sex with you, so you can’t have unprotected intercourse with anyone but me unless I agree to it.

The second example (from real life) is hierarchical because the speaker is making decisions for their partner's relationships in which the other partners have a lesser say.

A poly hierarchy is also not the same as providing information to your partner about what your needs are in the relationship. In a negotiation between adults, each person expresses their needs in the relationship and trusts the other to decide if they can meet them and how they can do so. For example, if I need more of a partner's time, it is for me to say I need more of their time, and for them to say whether they can give it to me, and what other activities they will take that time from. It is not for me to decide, for example, that they must take a lower-paying job or cancel their poker night or stop visiting their mom or whatever it is I think they should give up, including time with other partners. They must be free to decide whether they can give me what I'm asking for, and how they will do that. Example:

Not hierarchy: I'm being asked to work longer hours and I can no longer take the kids to daycare every day. I need you to help me figure out a solution to make sure they get dressed and off to daycare in the morning. I trust that you and your partners will be open to adjusting your own schedules to help me accommodate these new circumstances.

Hierarchy: I'm being asked to work longer hours and I can no longer take the kids to daycare every day. You can't spend the night with your partners anymore, because you have to start taking the kids to daycare.

In the first example, the speaker is making statements about their needs and approaching their partner as an equal to work with them to solve a problem. They are leaving their partner's own choices in their partner's hands not making any statements about the behaviour of third parties (e.g. their partner's other partners). The second example is based on a real-life case, but is not exact.

A poly hierarchy is not about honouring pre-existing commitments, or being judicious about what kinds of new commitments you can enter while making sure you have the resources to honour all your commitments, old and new. There are all kinds of commitments that influence how much time and energy someone has to devote to relationships. My mortgage, my business, my personal health, and my cat all represent commitments that require a substantial amount of time and energy that is then not available for relationships, yet we don’t say my partners are in a hierarchy with these commitments. That’s because my staff, my clients, my cat and my yoga teacher don’t expect to dictate the terms on which I can engage with my partners, just to ensure I have time for them (though my cat may express an opinion sometimes). Likewise, the fact that a partner expects me to keep commitments to them doesn’t mean they’re in a hierarchy with my other partners; it becomes a hierarchy when they begin telling me how I should conduct my relationships with my other partners—and I allow them to—in order for that partner to feel secure that I will meet their needs.

A poly hierarchy is not about prioritization. Again, we all have competing priorities in our lives, whether we’re mono, poly, or have no intimate relationships at all. Dividing my time on a day-to-day basis, for example, I usually prioritize my clients over my partners, because my clients pay my mortgage and (most of) my partners don’t, and without a roof over my head I’m not in much of a position to conduct relationships at all. I have to make my sick cat a priority because she can’t take care of herself; my partners, on the other hand, will not literally die if I leave them to their own devices for a few days. But again, my clients expect and trust me to meet my obligations to them in the way I see fit: as long as the outcome is what we agreed to, it doesn’t matter when or how I work or what else I choose not to do to make that time. These aren’t hierarchies, and similar prioritization among partners’ needs is also not a hierarchy. This is just being a responsible, accountable grown-up.

A poly hierarchy is also not about accepting the fact that relationships will take different forms and allowing them to do so. When I explore new connections, I remain open to the directions they can grow in and the level of intensity and connection they can reach. Some connections may be better suited for interconnected, life-partner-type relationships, while others may be better suited for less interdependent relationships with fewer expectations. What makes a poly hierarchy is when the form a relationship can take is prescribed at the outset (“I can only have secondary partners”), more specifically, when it is prescribed at the outset (or, for that matter, at any point during the relationship) by another partner who is not in the relationship (“You can only have secondary partners. I want to be your only primary”). If relationships are allowed to unfold naturally, it’s not a poly hierarchy when, with the consent and participation of those in them, they end up in different shapes.

The difference concerns personal agency: who makes decisions for whom. The key elements of a poly hierarchy are:

Authority: The ability to make rules or place limits on what can happen in relationships that are not yours (i.e. your partner’s other relationships).
Asymmetry: Your partner’s other partners may not place the same restrictions on your relationship that you can place on theirs.

If it doesn't have these elements, it's not a hierarchy. It's something else.

Additionally, the following are not defining elements of a poly hierarchy (they can exist within a poly hierarchy, of course, but they don't define it as such--having these things doesn't mean you are in a hierarchy):

Expressing your needs in a relationship regarding your partner's behaviour toward you.
Making agreements with your partner concerning your own behaviour in relation to them or commitments you share (such as children) and trusting your partner to keep such agreements with you.
Letting your partner make their own decisions regarding how they will honour your needs and meet your shared commitments while building the kind of life they want for themselves.
Setting personal limits on the kinds of relationships you will build or stay in, such as refusing to stay with a partner who consistently breaks agreements.
Allowing relationships to develop and grow in different directions and take the form that best works for the people in them, even when some of those relationships are more or less closely connected than others.

These are also the kinds of things people who practise genuinely hierarchical poly say they are doing, when they engage in conversations about whether and why it is helpful or necessary to have control over their other partner’s romantic relationships. This is why I think it’s actually quite necessary to establish a clear definition of poly hierarchy, because this slippery shifting of definitions frequently derails any attempt at discussing whether hierarchical poly (as I am defining it here) is a good idea.

Posing the question, “why does one partner need authority over their partner’s other relationships in order to ensure that partner meets their commitments?” is not the same as asking “why do you need to have different kinds of relationships or give them different levels of time or energy?” And yet people who practise hierarchical poly will argue that not having a hierarchy (as defined here) means making a new partner equal to a co-parent or spouse. It doesn’t: it means making a new partner equal to her own partner within her own relationship (thanks joreth for that eloquent turn of phrase). And we need to be able to discuss the costs and benefits hierarchical power dynamics within poly relationships without consistently being drawn off by this straw man.

Onyx, the Game of Sexual Exploration, version 3.5 now available!

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 22:50:32 GMT

New Optional Rules

New Resizeable Gameboard

New Special Squares

New Actions

Newly Redesigned Graphics

New Roles

Improved Card Editor

Free Update for Registered Users!

Finally, after many months of coding, the new version of my sex game Onyx is ready! This new version is a significant overhaul, and contains tons and tons of new features and new game-play mechanics. It also contains lots of new actions (coming up with lists of hundreds of sexy things that people can do to each other is harder than it sound!).

To celebrate, I'm offering a special discount on registration if you want to play the full version. Of course, the free version is still free, and Onyx 3.5 is a free upgrade for registered users.

Check it out!

Fuck Comcast right in their stupid EAR. And also, polyamory!

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 06:43:34 GMT

I am on TV right now. Or, at least, I think I am. I don't know, because Comcast is the most miserable tech company I've ever had to deal with.

Err, actually the second most miserable, but only by a nose.

Some time ago, i got contacted by producers from the Oprah Winfrey network. They were shooting a segment of "Our America" about polyamory. I pointed them to some friends of mine, who they liked so much they set up a camera crew in their house for weeks. They also filmed a smigeon of zaiah and I, and... Anyway, I was curious to see how it all turned out.

The show was set to air today, something I didn't realize 'til this afternoon. So zaiah went down to the Comcast Worker's Dormitory, Public Relations Orifice, and Meat Processing Plant to pick up a cable box. We plugged it in. Went through a lengthy process on Comcast's miserable Net-site to "activate" the box, whatever that means. Web site said "OK, now activating your cable box, please wait 45 minutes."

Which is a little weird; in 45 minutes, Russian organized crime can infect 250,000 American PCs with malware, so taking 45 minutes to program a cable box seems inefficient. But whatever.

Then the Web site said "Success! Your cable box has been activated."

It lied.

Connect the box to the TV, nothing. Okay, bad cable maybe? Go outside the house, in the rain, diddle with the cable connection. Nothing. Replace the cable. Nothing. Run a known-good cable through the window into the house. Still nada.

Take the cable connector out of the wall. Looks good. Replace the cable that came with the cable box, the one that goes from the wall to the box. Still nada.

Call tech support. "No problem, we'll reset your cable box. Should take ten minutes."

10 minutes later, I'm 10 minutes older but no closer to working cable.

Move the cable box around the house in a bizarre game of whack-a-cable-outlet. Nothing works anywhere. (Seriously, who uses cable any more, anyway?)

OWN is not available streaming over the Internet; presumably, Oprah, who is, like, the richest woman in he world or something, isn't getting enough fees to allow Net streaming.

Okay, back on the phone with tech support. "We can't see your cable box."

Uh...

Okay, fine. Move it to a different cable outlet. "We still can't see it. You're on a TV show, you say? About polyamory? What's that?"

The inevitable "what is polyamory?" conversation over, we start playing this whack-a-cable-outlet game again. No matter where we go, the tech says "I sill can't ping your cable box."

Go back online to Comcast's miserable activation page on Comcast's miserable Web site. "You have 1 cable device (1 not activated)."

Apparently, it will tell you "activation successful" even if the device in question is disconnected, turned off, shot repeatedly with a 12-gauge, and buried in a lead-lined box outside of Roswell, New Mexico beneath a crumpled up ball of aluminum foil and two empty cans of baked beans. When the Web site says "activation successful," that doesn't mean that the activation was successful, you see...it simply means that enough time has passed that the Comcast Central Babbage Engine should have been able to align the gears and pulleys to the right configuration to activate the box.

zaiah is still on the phone with the tech this whole time, while our dinner slowly turns to charcoal and then catches fire on the stove. The tech is being really patient (and curious), but nothing works.

Finally, I yank the cable out of the cable modem, which we know works on account of I was able to communicate through the web-net on the Internet-tubes to the Babbage engine that runs Comcast's Net-site, and plug it straight into the cable box.

"Oh," chirps the tech, "your cable box is defective. Please bring it to your nearest Comcast cable Box Redemption Center and place it on the redemption line."

Which might have explained why when zaiah picked it up from the Comcast Worker's Dormitory, Public Relations Orifice, and Meat Processing Plant the person-unit behind the counter mentioned casually as if in passing that she'd plug the box in and make sure the blinkenlights came on because "we've had a bunch of bad boxes lately."

So after four plus hours of work, we were unable to see the show. We had several friends over who were also on the program, because, like, who the fuck has cable nowadays anyway?

If you could even begin to feel one one-hundredth of the depth of my frustration and rage at Comcast right now, your monitor would catch fire.

The Cucumbers of Wrath: "Fairness" in Poly Relationships

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 21:06:23 GMT

My sweetie Eve pointed me to this video, which was presented in a TED talk about moral reasoning in animals. It shows two monkeys who have each been trained to perform a simple task (handing a researcher a rock) in exchange for a reward (a bit of food).

In the experiment, the researcher could give the monkey a bit of cucumber or a grape as a reward. Monkeys given cucumber rewards were quite happy...unless they saw another monkey being given a grape for the same task. When that happens...well, see below.

Eve showed me this video while we were talking about polyamorous relationships. And she pointed out that the things these monkeys are feeling translate directly into the things that can trip us up as human beings when we're involved in non-monogamous relationships of all sorts.

OF GRAPES AND CUCUMBERS

The notion that relationships have "cucumbers" (things that help feed the relationship, but aren't necessarily fun or thrilling) and "grapes" (exciting things that are fun to do) seems straightforward.

The problem, naturally, is that what constitutes a "cucumber" and what constitutes a "grape" can be highly subjective, and can change depending on where you happen to be in the relationship configuration.

For instance, to me some of the most delicious grapes of life are also some of life's most mundane things: the day-in, day-out living with a partner, doing all the tasks and chores that add up to shared intimacy and a shared life together. I've had relationships where I live with my partner and we spend our time doing dishes, watching Netflix, and snuggling on lazy Saturday mornings, and relationships where I see a partner perhaps once a year for a wild frenzy of hot kinky group sex in a French castle.

Don't get me wrong, the hot kinky sex in a French castle is a grape, no doubt about it. But for me, relationships where I spend time just quietly sharing a life with a partner are incredibly rewarding, and it's far easier to build intimacy with that kind of shared life than with one week a year spent together. No matter how much fun that week happens to be. With a partner I see seldom, the time spent with that partner can look like an intense whirlwind of nonstop fun, because we have to pack all our relationship time into a very small space. It doesn't account for the long periods of time spent apart, when the relationship is barely fed at all, with grapes or cucumbers. (I am a person whose love language is touch; it is harder to meet that need long distance.)

To a person who has that day-in, day-out living together, the weekend trips to a faraway land can look like grapes, and the doing of dishes and moving of furniture looks like a dull and unappetizing cucumber. On the other hand, to the partner who only gets my time in small dribs and drabs, the shared experiences of a life spent together looks like a plump, sweet, delicious grape. And so each person sees nothing but cucumbers in front of them, while the other person has an entire plateful of grapes.

GRAPES AND HIERARCHY

When you look at your own plate and see nothing but cucumbers, while it seems like someone else gets entirely 100% grape,it's reasonable to feel like the monkey in the video up there. And when we feel like that, often our first impulse is to want all the grapes for ourselves.

It gets worse if we feel that we're entitled to all the grapes, or that someone else might steal our stash of grapes.

Since I've been thinking about polyamory in terms of grapes and cucumbers, it has occurred to me that often, the rules and hierarchies imposed in prescriptive relationships, particularly prescriptive primary/secondary relationships, seem calculated to make sure that all the grapes belong to one partner and other partners are metered out nothing but cucumbers.

This can sometimes even go so far as "grape hoarding"--fencing off particularly tasty grapes to make sure nobody else comes near them. (Examples of grape hoarding might be forbidding a partner to go to a certain restaurant with another partner, say, or forbidding a partner to spend any holiday or vacation time with another partner.) Even sharing a grape with someone else can make us feel like that poor monkey on the left, if we feel that grape belongs to us by right. When our monkey emotions get monkey going, someone's likely to get things flung at them.

The impulse to want to keep our grapes and make sure nobody else takes them isn't just a human thing, or even a primate thing. Dogs do the same thing; a dog trained to do a trick to get a reward who sees the other dog get that reward for nothing may stop doing the trick.

SEPARATING THE GRAPES FROM THE CHAFF

What are the grapes in a relationship? I've been thinking about that ever since my sweetie showed me this video.

Kinky group sex in a Medieval castle is definitely a grape, don't get me wrong. Intense experiences that form lifelong memories are very tasty indeed.

But focusing on those kinds of grapes, I think, makes me lose sight of the grapes I get every day--the grapes that it's easy to disregard because I have so many of them. I've resolved to be more conscientious about valuing the grapes that I have, the ones I might otherwise take for granted.

If I were to make a list of the grapes I'm blessed with, it would include kinky sex in castles and trips to exotic places, no doubt. But it would also include:

Being able to wake up nearly every morning with my partner.
Having my partner close enough to touch, almost all the time.
Curling up on a rainy afternoon with my partner, snuggling beneath warm covers.
Building a private language from a shared history of experience.
Having someone next to me while I deal with all the various ways I have to hold back entropy.
Being able to plan with someone
Working on projects with a partner.
Creating with a partner.
Having a partner who sees me, who really get me and understands me.

So I do very much like the trips to see my distant sweeties, but I wish they were closer. I enjoy vacation time spent with far-flung lovers, but I would not trade those experiences for living with a partner. At the end of the day, if I had to choose, I would give up the vacations for having the people I love close to me all the time.

And that might be the real test of what's a grape and what's a cucumber: Would you choose to trade places with the person you see getting all the grapes? If the vacation experiences seem like such tasty grapes,would you trade a life spent together for a distant, vacation relationship?

How about you, O readers? What are your grapes and what are your cucumbers?

Noted without comment: Safari

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 20:19:18 GMT

Safe for work; has sound.

The Adventure Van

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 21:25:19 GMT

I am a bad polyamorous person.

I'm not bad in the sense that I don't talk to my partners, or in the sense that I want to control my partners, or in the sense that I want to have veto over who my partners have sex with. I'm bad in the sense that there lives, deep within my breast, a deep and passionate love for tiny, wildly-impractical two-seat sports cars.

I have, for many years, owned nothing but tiny, wildly-impractical two-seat sports cars. It has created problems for me on more occasions than I can remember, where I needed to go somewhere with more than one of my partners and the only car available was a two-seat sports car.

This has been the background source of much relationship stress for rather a long time. Fate, it seems, has finally conspired to get me to do something about it.

It started with a trip to a friend's house to help her celebrate her birthday. We had the bad fortune to head out toward her place just as rush hour was starting on a Friday evening, and got to the interstate on-ramp to discover a parking lot.

Right next to the on-ramp is a used car place. In the parking lot of the used-car pace was a conversion van, with a sticker in the window advertising...

...the same Blue Book value of my Honda del Sol, a tiny, wildly-impractical two-seat sports car.

zaiah and I joked that it would make a much better poly vehicle than the del Sol. Then we joked about it again. Then we thought about it. Then we said "Hmm." Then we said "Hmm" again.

I will spare you the details, which I'm sure you can probably imagine, and cut straight to the chase: We pulled into the dealer's lot in a tiny, wildly-impractical two-seat sports car, and pulled out in a conversion van.

Which has, I feel compelled to say, a bed in the back.

All my life, I've always wanted to own a vehicle with a bed in the back. They don't make tiny, wildly-impractical two-seat sports cars with beds in them, so that deep desire has never been satisfied. Until now.

I've written about game-changing relationships before in this very blog. Swapping my del Sol for a conversion van has been a game-changing relationship.

Since making this exchange, zaiah and I have taken it camping twice. It has also been invaluable for my trips to see my sweetie Eve. In fact, it's safe to say that owning a conversion van makes a significant difference in one's quality of life in many ways.

Having a van makes camping a much more comfortable proposition, as it turns out. Not to diss on anyone who enjoys roughing it in the Great Outdoors, mind, but a queen-sized bed with a memory foam topper is actually a considerable step up from a sleeping bag in a tent in terms of creature comforts. Not to mention available positions for sex.

Not long after the exchange, we were invited by those very same friends whose party we were attending on that fateful evening to go sledding...or, as we call it in the language of my people, "Oh god oh god we're all going to die." (Kidding! I'm kidding! Nobody died. We ended the sledding with no more than a cracked rib and a mild concussion between us.) As it turns out, it's easier to fit sleds in a van than in a tiny sports car.

As it also turns out, sledding technology has advanced in leaps and bounds since I was a child, but sled steering technology has been all but lost.

I soon started personalizing the van. My friends DO kick ass. For the Brotherhood!

On our most recent trip, zaiah spotted the ruins of an old timber mill, long abandoned and turning to rust. We stopped, parked next to the "No Entry" sign, and I ducked under the "No Trespassing" and "Danger - Keep Out" signs to take photos photos, which I will likely be posting soon.

A lesson I've already learned from our adventures: Temperate coastal rainforests are soggy. Very, very soggy.

The Pacific Northwest doesn't really understand beaches.

I grew up in Florida. I know what beaches are. Beaches are endless vistas of glittering sand, over which the surf rolls constantly. Seagulls circle overhead. The sun beats down on sand castles and little brightly-colored canopy tents.

In the Pacific Northwest, they apparently heard that "beaches" are places where the ocean meets the shore, but they were a bit hazy on details beyond that. Beaches here are rocky, with enormous boulders standing among piles of small round pebbles, while the rough surf pounds anyone who dares venture too close into oblivion. Oh, and it's also bitterly cold.

So, not unlike the beaches I've seen in Great Britain, really.

One nice thing about camping in winter: you get the whole campground to yourself. Seriously, on our first trip, we were literally the only people there. Even the park ranger had the sense to be elsewhere. I woke thinking the Second Coming had happened and we'd somehow been missed. (It's an easy mistake to make. Angels pouring out their Seals, the armies of darkness sweeping over the land, the Final Judgment...there's a lot going on! It's surprising how easy it is to overlook a couple of yahoos out camping in a van in the dead of winter. Who camps in winter?)

Shh! We're hiding! Bet you can't see us!

A rest area late at night. It looks so homey! It's like a miniature house on wheels. A house without a bathroom. Or a kitchen. Or Internet access. But it has a bed! And that, by itself, means that when we're camping in it, our standard of living is probably higher than most of humanity for most of human history.

Does this officially make me a pornographer?

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 01:38:08 GMT

Quite some time ago, I got involved in an IM conversation with a friend who had asked me the question "Why on earth would someone want to be a submissive in a BDSM relationship? What would the submissive possibly get out of it?"

After thrashing around for a while trying to find an answer, I decided to write a short story about BDSM from the point of view of a submissive.

The person I was talking to really liked the story, and suggested that I should write more erotica.

So I started writing on Literotica, and the things I wrote became very popular--much more so than I would have expected. (For a very brief time, a few years back, I had the most read and the highest-rated story on the site.)

So I kept at it, and write a pair of eBooks about a relationship between a highly repressed woman and the man who married her in order to train her as a sex slave. These eBooks got so popular on Amazon that they're paying my rent now.

And now, they're actually real, things-you-can-feel, dead-tree books.

Imagine my surprise.

Anyway, I have some promotional copies of these books, which I've made available on my Web site as a two-book set. Which, if you like, I will autograph for you under my pen name. Check it out!

Polyamory, Monogamy, and Ownership Paradigms

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 20:12:03 GMT

On another forum I read, someone made a complaint that folks in the poly community tend to see monogamy in terms of ownership and control; that is, for many poly folks, monogamy is about owning your other partner, while polyamory is more egalitarian, treating other people as fully actualized human beings.

And, sadly, I've encountered poly folks who do believe that. The misguided notion that polyamory is "more evolved" than monogamy comes, in many cases, from the assumption that monogamy is inherently rooted in ownership and polyamory is inherently egalitarian.

As with many preconceptions, it's possible, if one squints hard enough, to see where this idea comes from. There's nothing inherently wrong or controlling about monogamy per se; monogamy, by itself, is not necessarily disempowering or ownership-based.

But there is some truth to the notion that monogamy as a cultural norm comes with a set of social expectations that are deeply planted in the soil of ownership of others.

People in our society are expected to believe not just in monogamy, but in a whole set of social expectations that comes along with it. People say things like "you let your wife spend time with other men?" or "you let your husband talk to his ex?" as though it is natural and expected that we should be able to control who our partners interact with. People say things like "I would never allow my partner to masturbate" or "I would never permit my partner to fantasize about other people" as if it is normal to control our partners' bodies and minds.

Not every monogamous person does this, of course. But these ideas are very commonly attached to our social expectations of monogamy; monogamy as a social institution began in cultures in which ideas of ownership were deeply embedded, and those ideas have proved very tenacious.

There's a problem, though, in that polyamory is not necessarily any better.

People who live outside the cultural mainstream love to believe that they have escaped the petty social norms that enslave all the other sheeple still trapped in the spider web of normative behavior. In reality, though, cultural ideas have an insidious way of seeping into us even when we're aware of them. Simply knowing that we were raised in a climate of ownership assumptions about sex and love doesn't make us immune to internalizing them. In fact, many, many people in the poly community cling just as strongly to paradigms of ownership and control as they believe all those poor "unevolved" monogamous folks do--they simply manifest differently, that's all.

I've been putting some thought to the sneaky ways that social expectations can creep into relationships even when they're outside the social mainstream. Here are some examples I've come up with.

Control paradigm		Egalitarian paradigm

I let you have other partners. This is a privilege I grant you. I can tell you who, under what circumstances, when, and how you may have other partners.		You are a human being with the right to make your own choices about having other partners. I will tell you what I am comfortable or uncomfortable with, and trust you to make choices that honor and cherish our relationship.
I let you have sex with other people. This is a privilege I grant you. I can tell you how you may or may not have sex or otherwise control the timing or manner of your sexual activity.		You have an intrinsic right to make choices about your sexuality. I will communicate you what I am comfortable or uncomfortable with, because I trust you to make choices that honor and cherish our relationship.
My sexual health is your responsibility. I will set limits on your behavior to ensure that you only engage in sexual activity that meets my sexual risk limits.		My sexual health is my responsibility. I will communicate to you my sexual health boundaries, risk limits, and concerns. Because your risk limits and concerns may not match mine, you are free to make whatever choices with your own sexual health that you like. If your behavior exceeds my threshold of risk, I have the right to change the sexual relationship between you and I, including adding barriers or even ending it entirely. If having a sexual relationship with me is something you value, you can make choices to remain within my levels of acceptable risk.
I may fetishize your other sexual partners for my gratification. I have the right to tell you how to or not to have sex and/or demand the intimate details of your sexual activites for my sexual gratification.		Your sexual activity with other people and your other partners are not merely for my sexual gratification. I will accept your right to choose sexual activities that you and your other partner find fulfilling, and that you and your other partner have a right to privacy about your own intimacy.
If I am sexually attracted to your other partners, it is your responsibility to share them with me. You have an obligation to provide me with access to your partners if I want it.		Your other partners are human beings. As they are not your property, it is not your obligation to make them sexually available to me.
My sexual partners are mine. You are not permitted to express an interest in them; if I want to keep them to myself, this overrides the wishes or desires of both you and my other partners.		My other sexual partners are human beings. As they are not my property, I do not have the right to "keep" them; they are people, not things, capable of making their own decisions about sexual intimacy and partner choices.
My fears, insecurities, and jealousy are your responsibility. I have the right to control your behavior and/or the behavior of your other partners in order to manage my fears and insecurities.		My fears, insecurities, and jealousy are my responsibility. I have the right to communicate with you about them, and to ask for your help in dealing with them. Because you love and cherish me, you will work with me to help me when I am afraid or insecure. These feelings do not give me the right to dictate your choices, however.
I have the right to ensure that you may have other partners only to the extent that your other partners do not affect me or our relationship. I may limit or control your other relationships so as to make sure they do not affect me.		I understand that there are many uncertainties in life. Everything from a new job to being fired to illness to family of origin problems to being hit by a runaway bus may affect our relationship together. When your other partnerships affect me in a way that concerns me, I have the right and the responsibility to communicate with you about it, so that we can work together to address my concerns.
Your other relationships exist only on my say-so and only for so long as I permit. I have the right to order you to terminate any of your other relationships if I feel it is necessary or desirable.		Your other partners are people with needs and feelings; they have have the right to explore and develop their relationship with you, to be supported by you, and to expect that their relationship with you will continue for so long as it benefits you and them. I may reasonably expect that they will respect the relationship between you and I; they may reasonably expect that I will respect the relationship between you and them.
Understanding my needs is your responsibility. If you fail to meet my needs or expectations, even if I have not made them explicitly clear, you have wronged me, and I have the right to control your behavior so as to ensure they are met.		Understanding my needs is my responsibility. Communicating my needs with you is also my responsibility. You can not be expected to meet any needs of mine that you are not aware of. I may ask for your help in making sure I am taken care of, and trust that you value me and want to take care of my needs.
The relationship between me and your other partner is your responsibility. I may require that you arrange meetings between us, that you keep the other person separate from me, that you ensure I am comfortable with your other partner, or otherwise make it your responsibility to manage the relationship between us.		The relationship I have with your other partner is our responsibility. As I am an adult and your other partner is an adult, it is on each of us to negotiate what kind of relationship we want to have with each other.
I permit you to have other relationships only so long as they are subordinate to me.		The people with whom you develop relationships have needs and feelings, and have just as much right as I have to asking your help in meeting them. Should our needs run into conflict, we can come together to communicate and negotiate as adult human beings; I may not claim authority over another human being merely because I met you first.
I have the right to control your emotional engagement with other people. This includes the right to tell you that you may not experience certain emotions (for example, you may not fall in love with another partner) and/or the right to control the extent to which you feel emotions with others.		Your emotional experience is one of the most fundamental parts of who you are as a person. I recognize that it is impossible for us as human beings to place arbitrary controls on our emotions.
I have the right to control how far and to what extent you become entangled with other people. For example, I may forbid you to become financially entangled with other partners.		Decisions about how to conduct your life can only be made by you. Realistically, whatever promises you have made and whatever rules I have made, there is nothing short of a shotgun and a length of chain that compels you to stay with me. I have the right to expect that you will uphold agreements you have made with me, and I have the right to expect that your decisions will account for the responsibilities you have incurred with me. Beyond that, I can not realistically lay claim to your autonomy; even if I want to, it is not possible for me to compel your decisions.
I have the right to control your expressions of love, affection, or feelings for others. I may forbid you to give gifts to other partners, do errands with other partners, use certain pet names with other partners, or have certain experiences with other partners.		The way you express love is one of the most intimate of all choices you can make. Attempts to dictate how you may or may not do this are not only extremely intrusive, they may undermine the foundations of your other relationships. As long as you express the love you feel for me with me, it is not necessary for me to control your expressions with others.
My emotions are your responsibility. If I feel something that I don't want to feel.this is your fault, and I may limit your behavior as a result.		My emotions are my responsibility. Even when they are surprising or unpleasant, they belong to me. I have the reponsibility to communicate with you about my emotions, and I may ask for your help in feeling loved and supported by you.
I have the right to define your other relationships.		As adult human beings, you and your other partners have the right to define your relationship for yourselves.
I have the authority to place your other relationships in a hierarchy of my choosing.		As adult human beings, you and your other partners have the right to determine the shape of your relationship. I have the responsibility to communicate my needs to you; as long as you are able and willing to work with me to meet those needs, the ordering of your other relationships is a decision between you and your other partners.
Agreements between you and I are binding on any other partners you may have.		All the people involved have a right to negotiate any agreements that may affect us.

I'm sure there are more. What are your experiences?

Journal is back to normal!

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 09:38:57 GMT

Or at least at the perigee of its eccentric orbit around normalcy, in any event.

The comments have been restored, and the zillions of messages that got inadvertently splattered all over everyone's friends page have been removed. Thanks to a considerable effort on the part of LJ support, the blog is more or less back where it was.

Here's the status of the move to WordPress:

- The WordPress importer absolutely does not work, full stop. It will import posts, but it will not import comments correctly; roughly one in every 20 comments is imported to the wrong post. Since I have about 22,000 comments, that makes quite a mess of things.
- I have found a Perl script which exports an entire LiveJournal into a WordPress backup file. However, it's quite buggy and finicky. Among other things, it removes formatting from posts which contain lj-cut tags.
- The blog is up and running in its new home, but about 2/3 of the posts have bad formatting. I am currently debating which would take less time--going through and reformatting every post by hand, or attempting to fix the bugs in the Perl export script. Right now, "hitting myself in the face with a hammer" sounds better than either one.

I have a lengthy list of posts I want to make, and I'm still stalled on working on any of them. Between this head cold and the blog getting scrambled, it's been a frustrating few weeks.

Trying to move...

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 22:23:58 GMT

I've been a LiveJournal paid member since 2001, and now I think the time has come to move my blog.

I've been working on this project behind the scenes for several weeks, which is why I haven't been posting lately. My goal is to move to a self-hosted blog, probably running WordPress, and to have posts over there automatically be crossposted here (for those of you who still use LiveJournal).

In theory, that would make the move seamless. The entire blog would be on franklinveaux.com and also here at LiveJournal, and comments would be synced so that people could comment here or there.

In practice, it's turning out to be a problem. The LiveJournal WordPress importer is buggy; when you move a large blog like mine, it tends to import comments attached to the wrong posts. There seems to be a subtle bug in the regex that parses the LiveJournal XML feed, and I suck at regex, so I can't fix their bug myself.

So for now I will continue to blog here, while I work on getting the blog copied over there.

Why am I moving?

LiveJournal has, increasingly, been creating problems for me. They have a really difficult time getting the spam problem under control (for a while, I was averaging more than two hundred spam comments per day, though that has slowed). Paid accounts are expensive for what you get. And worse, there is now some question about what it even means to have a "paid account" any more--the devs are apparently moving to a model where the friends feed is radically different and the notion of "paid accounts" will give way to a model where users pay for specific features of LiveJournal.

So, I think it's time to move. I've allowed my paid account to expire, and I'll keep you posted on what happens as I sort out how to transplant eleven and a half years' worth of blogging to a new home.

Privilege		Protecting an investment

- I want to have more than you give your other partners.		- I need this much from you.
- Nobody else can ever be financially entwined with us.		- Protecting my existing financial assets is important.
- I want to vet your other partners; you may date only partners I approve of.		- Because you are important to me, meeting your partners (if possible) and getting along with them (if possible) is important to me.
- Your resources (time, financial, and so on) belong to me unless we explicitly negotiate otherwise.		- Your resources are yours to do with as you please so long as you take care of the obligations we have incurred together.
- I will always be able to veto your other partners.		- I can always express any opinions, problems, or discomforts I may have with you. I trust that you will find a way to honor your commitment to me.
- We will sit down and create a set of rules together with any new partner is expected to abide by.		- We will sit down with any potential new partner so that we can all put our needs and ideas on the table.
- One relationship has to be the most important one. Since I was here first, that means me.		- Relationships vary in importance and investment over time. What matters is that my needs are being met, not that I am getting more than anyone else.
- In any conflict that arises between me and another partner, I win.		- Conflicts may arise. I may not always get what I want. What matters is that my partner listens to me and hears my concerns, not that I am always right or I always win.
- My needs always come first.		- I may not get my way all the time, but that's okay. It's okay for others to express their needs, too.