Nice to meet you! My name is Pepper, and I am starting this blog as an outlet for my thoughts on various outcast sexual communities.
My background is primarily in self-taught queer theory. For the theoreticians among you, I focus on Foucauldian power dynamics, and I subscribe to a fairly strict deconstructionist model of culture. My writing is driven by queer and polyamory activism, and so this blog will take an anti-oppression approach to analysis. Posts here will be US-centric, referring to my experience in these identities at this particular cultural moment.
You can see my more formal writings at pepperminty.com, including various papers for conferences and a paper on cheating for the Journal of Bisexuality.
My blogging style tends towards longer and (hopefully) semantically tight entries, so each blog post should be an engaging subject on its own. If you like any of the posts here, I encourage you to look through the blog history for other tidbits. Thanks for reading!
March 24, 2008 at 11:55 pm
[...] — Araliya @ 10:55 am Freaksexual is a wonderful blog I found (via Bitchy Jones) in which Pepper deals intelligently and accessibly with issues surrounding polyamory and sexuality. The entries are [...]
February 24, 2009 at 7:15 am
Hi Pepper,
I read with interest your musings on the poly speed dating and wanted to support your suspicion that many poly people don’t attend poly events for many of the reasons you mention. For ex., support is good if you need it and I’m glad it’s there but what if you just want to have fun or are horny? Most poly events fitting into the “stereotypical” format don’t address that sort of thing and are not fun enough. I suspect this is partly why PSD was a hit; it’s fun, from the sounds if it (I will try to attend the next one, as I live out of the area, this will require travel and some advance notice of scheduling, I’ve requested the info person to tell me as early as possible, hopefully they’ll be able to). I think also that you hit on another problem with poly events being that *immense* time commitment is required to enjoin a community and most of us don’t have it. Lastly, there tends to be an uptight air at many poly events, which is also no fun. I used to live in SF for quite a while but now live in Vancouver, and folks up here are *really* uptight, particularly the females, it’s a real problem. Actually, the guys don’t help much either, now that I think about it, there’s a distinct lack of playfulness which I think really helps to make events attractive and PSD also has that to it’s credit. So I think that this is another reason that PSD was a hit because the format tends to deal asunder people’s tendency to be uptight which makes for a better vibe that puts both men and women (and others) at ease and then they can have fun and when they have fun they realize they like the event. I really like your idea of creating events out of silliness and other such things, I think you’re on the right track for improving events for us poly types as my experience has been that non-mono & poly types are often very open minded awesome people, have often thought about themselves and others in useful and thoughtful ways and so I hope you hit on other formats to improve the event situation, as by your own characterization of it, it could use some help and it looks like you guys (guys meaning people in this context) have hit on something awesome here. I also like your theorizing, btw, I’m very busy and supposed to be reading something else for work, but fuck it, this is more fun and I have enjoyed reading what you have to say. If you folks would like any help, please feel free to contact me, I tend to have a decent imagination for fun and it’s a central theme in my life, as potentially silly as that sounds. Life is short, you know, so I think it would be better if it’s fun. Anyway, nice to (sort of) meet you and keep up the good (fun) work! ;)
Jack
February 24, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Jack:
I used to live in SF for quite a while but now live in Vancouver, and folks up here are *really* uptight, particularly the females, it’s a real problem.
See, one person’s “too uptight” is another person’s “setting personal boundaries”. Or to put it differently, perhaps these women are just not interested in the same things as you? Or maybe they want to get to know people before getting naked, sexual, or what have you?
I think you may be looking in the wrong community. Polyamory has been very friendly to women, and one aspect of that is that women (usually) can go to poly events without being hit on. This is hard to maintain, as guys often show up to events looking for casual sex. So at poly events, there’s a certain defensiveness around guys looking for sex (or “fun”), and maybe you are running into that.
In fact, one of the reasons poly speed dating works is because women attending have a lot of control over who they talk to: they can limit it to guys in a particular range, or just women, and so on. For more on women and nonmonogamy, see my post on the subject.
Have you considered checking out the swinger community or sex party scenes? If you’re looking for a fun sexy time, it makes sense to go to events specifically set up for that. I don’t know anything about Vancouver, but here in San Francisco there is a very lively sex party scene, with some parties being swinger-style, others held by Burning Man types, still others with a sex radical or BDSM theme, and so on. Often there is an overlap between these parties and polyamory – some of the people at the parties are poly in addition to being into play parties. I find that these parties are a great way to meet people who are sexually open.