A Tale of Two Cities

I have been studying a little about programming blogs, so you must forgive me if I try a minor flourish in here. I have learned the hard way that this stuff is tricky






This is a tale of two cities, or rather two concerts in two cities, or rather two crowd watching two concerts in two cities. In October, I went to see Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a three day free concert in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. This past weekend, I went to see Dave Matthew's Band Caravan, a three day concert in Atlantic City NJ, though I only went for one day. At the Atlantic City concert, I was older than maybe 1% of the crowd. At Golden Gate Park, I was right there among the beautiful people (or as you might say, the old people). And I couldn't help but wonder. Why at the one event and not the other. It wouldn't appear to be the city. After all AC, a casino town has a traditional codger demographic. It can't be the cost, as the young are usually the ones who can be priced out of events, So it is the music. But the music isn't really that different. DMB could easily play HSB and no one would raise an eyebrow. How is it different? Well none of the DMB Caravan bands played back in the hay day of the beautiful people, while HSB included Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, Emmy Lou Harris if you get the picture. Are my compadres stuck in the past clinging to the fragile memories of youth, or am I hopelessly chasing the illusion of actual youth. Or maybe living through the experience of listening to Bass Nectar has caused a subtle brain damage, and this sentence you read is the result.

Girls Just Want to Have Fun III

The picture was taken at a music festival this weekend, where there were tons of young people and one very affectionate female couple shown here. There was a mello vibe as these girls passionately kissed, but I couldn't help but feel this young and apparently very heterosexual crowd might have been more perturbed if the lovers were a pair of boys. But I leave that for my next post where I would like to describe the concert experience of one ancient hippy in a sea of the young and the restless.

In some previous posts, I was able to explore some issues near and dear to my heart, through an analysis of randomly sampled Fetlife profiles. I discovered among the participant in fetlife, that a lot of folks described themselves as switches, and a lot of folks describe themselves as bisexual.

>Part 1

Most surprising is while lots of males describe themselves as dominant, and lots of dominant males say that they are straight, Females are more varied in their descriptions. More of the gals describe themselves as bisexual than straight, and this is true even for submissive females.

Part II

Theres weren't enough transgendered people in random samples to really get a picture, so in order to get that picture, I looked at a popular group on fetlife, the genderblender group and sample transgendered people from there where they represent more than half of the thousands of group members. The table is seen below.

Most of the trangendered people were XY people, almost 70% as in the fetlife population as a whole. Almost 33% of those call themselves male, rather than one of the TG designations (MtF, genderqueer, etc) but the profile shows that they at least favor dressing girly. (In fact it is harder to tell if a female is transgendered, because these cues are less salient in the data.)





So here is the transgendered male breakdown.

	Dominant	Switch	Submissive
Straight	00%	11%	05%
Bisexual	02%	54%	25%
Homosexual	00%	00%	02%

So the overwhelming number of transgendered males describe themselves as bisexual (81%).

If the girls just want to have fun, the t-girls just wanna have more fun, and in their D/S preferences most are switches again, but they are more traditional females than the GG's, only 2% exclusively dominant.

The female sample was still small only 27. Ten of them were homosexual and none straight, so There is a signficant group of D/S lesbians on fetlife but D/S gay males are very rare.

The overall picture is pretty clear. The fetlife participants are not very traditional either in their D/S orientation or their sexual orientation. They like to experience the full range. Males and Females both span the D/S spectrum, and females , glorious females!! well they have come a long way baby. What all these numbers seem to indicate to me, I will leave to tomorrow's post when I tell the tale of my concert experience.

Discalced and Defrocked

There was a time when femininity was the cloak. Dark stockings hid hairy legs, and long satin blouses hid hairy arms, a hairy man become woman in simulacrum.

and then summertime, was the time to put away toys, and be one of the boys.

Then there was a time when masculinity was a cloak. Dark pants hide hairless legs and long dress shirts hide hairless arms and breasts and the effeminate becomes the masculine in simulacrum.

and then summertime. Shoes become sandals, and the flecks of red in hastily scrubbed nails are visible, and hairless legs and arms and rings and bracelets and long teased hair.

So what is the cloak, with closets full of skirts and shirts and blouses and pants, panties and y-fronts, and bras and stockings and socks. A corset makes a waist, and loose shirts hide breasts, and tight panties hide other things. But who is hidden and who remains in view?

in winter, the clothes are everything. boy clothes / girl clothes... in skirts you flirt.
Summer with so few clothes....

Thinking about a couple of days hanging out in an ashram or a zen monastery in mid-july. Almost always my genderification is defined by what I am doing and who I am spending time with. But this is a solo trip to do something I never do, so ... What should I wear? I mean it is spiritual renewal... What does one wear to enlightenment? frocks? socks? cloques? Nada?

And will I be in a dorm with men? I am planning to go to a sort of an ancient greek party this week. I have my peplos/tunic picked out, and it is not very different from a toga. And all the Eastern types are partial to robes as well... Maybe I can use that as my mantra as well as my mantle...
toga... toga... toga....toga....

Girls Just Wanna II

The last post gave the broad outlines that a substantial 30+ % of guys, and 60+%+ of girls! decline to describe themselves as straight among the profiles on fetlife. Transgender profiles that describe themselves as straight are even rarer. Breaking the numbers down into the D/S orientation does provide a little more information. Here are the percentages of each D/S category that call themselves straight for males and females. See below. I need a different data collection method for transgender people, so I leave that for another posting.

	Dominant	Switch	Submissive
Female	32%	24%	41%
TransGender	--%	--%	--%
Male	82%	59%	60%

The most heterosexual group of any is dominant males with 82% describing themselves that way. Those males who do not occupy the traditional male dom role, are less likely to describe their orientation as straight. Similarly the female group with the largest straight representation is the submissive females. Another way to put this is that DS switches or those who occupy the less traditional D/S roles, are also more likely to be heteroflexible, bisexual, or homosexual. And women in general are more likely to be "flexible in their sexual orientation.

I confess that I am less knowledgeable about bisexuality than I should be, so I am going to return to the topic after I digest some of what is on the internet. Turns out there is tons. Like this website



http://people.ucalgary.ca/~ptrembla/gay-lesbian-bisexual/6g-bisexual-resources.htm


Another thing I promise to do is to stop making such horrible tables. That is a matter of learning a little HTML, which for this old dog is a new trick. Once I learn it though there are going to be lots and lots of pretty tables. in sans-serif or perhaps courier, and if the information is too scandalous, I will code it in dingbats so only adults can figure it out. At the least no giant spaces, and horrible unreadable colors.


Anyway next post is back to my personal broodings which are as ever world shaking and festering. Shall I pierce my ears? Shall I spend a small fortune on a corset and vibrator? or save the dough and retreat for some days to an ashram? I don't think I can do both, I think that they frown on the constant.. buzz.... oh! buzz .....oh! in the spartan accomodations of the ashram. But corsets! Well that's another story. I think that fall clearly under the category "austerities" , and a lot sexier than a needle through the cheek. (for some of us)

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

In the last post, research on fetlife, had revealed a large number (37%) of the profiles described themselves as somewhere in the middle on the dominance/ submission axis, switches to some extent or another. These data were easily collected because the profiles themselves didn't need to be examined, just the thumbnail to the profiles. This week I want to describe some additional findings I acquired from examination of information contained in the profiles themselves. In the next post I will describe the results in detail, but here I just want to describe the most striking result. In the profiles people list their sexual orientation. The choices come from a pull down menu. One choice is straight, and then there are a number of more or less crooked choices. They include some mild deviations from strict heterosexuality, (heteroflexible, fluctuating / evolving) some clear bisexual choices ( bisexual, pansexual) and some homosexual indications ( gay).

So how many of the guys describe themselves as straight? 69% of our survey respondents did so. That means 31% did not, and only a few of those described themselves as gay, so it is a fairly substantial number of bi or heteroflexible gentlemen, much larger than the proportion that describe themselves that way in the general population, where the reports are in the low single digits.

http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/FAQ.html

But how about the girls? Well I hesitate to give the answer lest I be accused of besmirching the reputation of womanhood. Because the way I count it, only 34% of women on fetlife describe themselves as straight! 66% swing some other way, or at least are interested in doing so. Contact the American Family Association, we may have a problem. The Ladies appear to be coming across that ocean of girl on girl porn that the guys so love, and are liking what they see. At any rate, I had no idea. And the transex people, well transsex people who describe themselves as straight are an endangered species coming in at 10%. and I didn't even sample my own profile!!. So what gives? I will provide more info in my next post.

.

A sub is just a roll

Or is that a role. Why are some individuals committed to one role, while others are flexible?
I have been thinking about how I might contribute to the sum of knowledge through my blog entries ......beyond helping readers to understand that there is one more self involved asshole blogging happily away.

This is the first of a series of posts, which sampled profiles on fetlife to find some interesting things about gender, dominance and sexuality.  The other posts which followed  are  Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Part 1   Part 2    and    Part 3

Thinking about the malleability of gender and power roles. We grow up thinking that it is decreed, but I am learning that this is perhaps delusion. I originally was ready to proclaim the wisdom of my own insights into the psychology of gender bending and power relationships in the communities that I have come to know. Then I realized that in another life I function as a scientist, and that this topic is subject to some basic empirical research. So I present a bit of research I did which I hope some will find interesting. I basically developed a method by which I could randomly search profiles on Fetlife, the facebook of kink, and simply note the declared gender and preferred power status of the user. I did this about 350 times, and created the chart below. Gender-wise users can describe themselves as male or female or a variety of ambi-gendered descriptions. In the same way they can describe themselve with unambiguous power designations master, dom, domme or submissive, slave, bottom, or ambiguous terms like switch or kinkster, or sadomasochist, all of which I lumped into switch.
The results are shown below.

	Dominant	Switch	Submissive
Female	04%	11%	12%
Ambi-Gender	0%	01%	02%
Male	29%	25%	14%

.HTML Tables

Not Surprising. Almost 70% of profiles describe themselves as male while only 27% say they are female. I think that past research in this area has shown that males self describe as being into BDSM relationships at least twice as often as females.
Sorry Guys!

Where were my assumptions shattered? Well I imagined that close to 25% would describe themselves in gender ambiguous terms. Hey all my friends do!!
3%! alas! And I was ready to do my riff on how power preferences are malleable,but I thought only 20%- would self-describe as the old switcheroo, but it turned out to be 37%. More than chose the old tried and true male dom, female sub categories. So hush my mouth! I am abashed and educated. Gender is still a relatively inflexible category, but top/bottom preferences are much more fluid in the early 21st century, and that in itself is a sign of progressive understanding of gender. In traditional world, gender and power are fixed and inflexible. That so many do not fall into the stereotypical male /female power dynamics is a sign that this world is far behind us.
I think simple examination of the demographics of Fetlife may provide some other insights into the relative flexibility of gender and power. If I can only pause long enough in the continuing self examination to look at it.