You've changed
You're thriving
There's something about the woods
Not just
Surviving
You're blossoming in the woods...
- It Takes Two, Into the Woods
This weekend was DeepMind Darkwood, the erotic hypnosis retreat in
western Massachusetts. It was the second time I've gone. My last time
was 5 years ago. A lot of stuff has happened in that time!
My first time was within my first year of knowing that hypnokink
exists, and it was my first hypno con of any kind - I wouldn't go to my
first NEEHU until the following March. I was in way, way over my head. I
came in without any play partners or good friends, I had barely ever
hypnotized anyone, and I was just freaking out most of the time. (I
looked up my old blog entry to remember the date, but I don't dare read
it!) I still found it mindblowing and valuable, but this time I was so
much better positioned to dive into its cultish charms.
This time I knew so many more people, including close friends from
the Boston scene (thank you again DigitalSwitchGamine and AndSleep for
the ride!) and most of all I got to share it with my wife khatsha.
40 people in a wooden lodge in a big clearing in the woods, 36 hours,
no classes, mostly collective activities. There is nothing remotely
like Deepmind. Every year LeeAllure and MrDream set out to engineer a
very specific atmosphere, that might not work for everyone, but which I
found both cozy and invigorating - a wonderful invitation to relax, open
up, and try new and scary things.
Scary things: yes there were still occasional moments of anxiety and
missed connections, and we certainly put to use our couple skills of
calming each other down (that get heavily exercised at every con - cons
are the greatest, but also stressful!). But we came out having learned
new things about ourselves and each other.
Some of the best moments, and achievements of Lee and Dream that I want to call out:
Opening and closing ceremonies. Simple yet lovely, they grounded me in the present and made me feel connected to everyone.
Something called the word cloud (?), which is hard to describe but
involved people running around in the dark on the lawn yelling things
that are part of hypnokink like "DOLL PLAY!" or "ORGASMS!" and it gave
me warm feelings.
Speed trancing! I'd avoided that in the past at NEEHU, but now that
I've done it, I see it is genius the way they set it up, and we are
going to steal it for BEHIVE. I had so many great hypnotic encounters
and so many good conversations in a short span of time - each one only 6
minutes.
Plentiful and delicious food along with cozy communal dining,
signalled by a dinner bell that brought me right back to summer camp.
Breaking into groups and creating group trance activities, for three
of the modalities, which took up the bulk of the day on saturday. It's
really striking how little there was that felt like a class, and it made
me realize how I can sometimes get into passive, cautious,
overintellectual mode sitting in classes at Charmed, NEEHU etc, rather
than putting energy into creating new things, both 1 on 1 and in groups.
Deepmind insists that you come to do.
For one such activity, digitalswitchgamine's droning collective "sound
bath", which definitely felt just as cultish as I wanted the weekend to
be. Any lost tourist happening up the road just then would definitely
have been justified guessing they were were about to see or be part of
ritualistic murder.
Outfits! So many people brought their A game and showed just how
alluring they can be. The 15 minutes it took for two of us, using half a
tube of lube, to get khatsha into her latex dress? Well. Fucking. Worth
it.
My performance at (alcohol-free) dizzy bat, which I can confidently
call the worst ever, wherein I ran in a tight circle and fell down
possibly having recrossed the starting line
Gorgeous weather. That wasn't their doing (I think??), but we got
lucky with a couple of perfect golden September days outdoors in
Massachusetts. Even the route there and back was beautiful.
Amidst all that khatsha and I got to watch and do some wonderfully
twisted and pleasurable scenes, and enjoy many quiet moments of
togetherness with likeminded pervs.
Thank you to the organizers, the volunteers, and everyone who came and made it so special!
In the BEHIVEconsent and conduct policy,
we wrote "Our default approach is to believe accusations unless there
is powerful evidence to the contrary." This caused some consternation
and objection from one person. He compared it to the satanic panic of
the 80s and falsely imprisoned anti-war activists of the 1960s.
Later, he backed off and apologized, saying "I have been reassured
that the statement means that any and all accusations will be taken as
seriously as possibly and investigated, thoroughly." Another observer
agreed, "With some very subtle changes the meaning could have been more
clearly presented to eliminate any confusion."
We did not mean that. We meant what we wrote.
We don't intend to conduct investigations.
We are not investigators.
We don't have the training. Or resources such as background checks or
ability to subpoena evidence. We have no desire to build a formal
investigative procedure. Not to mention that in the case of consent
violations, legalistic questioning is often retraumatizing, and sharing
information with the accused can put the accuser in danger.
Even if we could conduct thorough investigations, in most cases there
would remain a fog of uncertainty. Very many consent violations don't
have witnesses except the people involved.
With all the information in the world - which we will not have - you
still have to make a call. And we choose, by default, to make the call
to believe the accuser.
This is different from the legal system! It makes sense that the
legal system should require an assumption of innocence, with the burden
of proof on the accuser. We do not. The key difference being, and I
can't stress this enough, that one involves going to jail, and the
other, not getting to go to a dinner.
Positive, lively kinky atmospheres are so fragile. I have seen them
wither and die because of only a couple of individuals, and those events
continue on, dead. Zombie events. I've seen people show up at an event,
smell the decay, and turn right around and walk out, never to come
back. And that's a good scenario, compared to the one where an event
becomes a hunting ground for serial predators.
We built the BEHIVE executive, and started our jobs, ready to fight
for the atmosphere. The need to deal with consent violations and
creepiness doesn't take us by surprise. That would be like a hotel
manager not being ready for shit-clogged toilets - it's a horrible part
of the job, but it's the job. And since all of society is weighted
towards dismissing assault reports, the best way to do our job, and deal
with that shit, is to believe accusations, the first time.
That said, of course we're going to use our intelligence. Even though
we don't consider false reports to be a big problem relative to actual
cases of assault (when it comes to rape, the Journal of Forensic Psychology estimates
about 20 true ones for every false one, and that's based on law
enforcement reports), it's happened. And of course rules can be gamed,
consent rhetoric can be weaponized. (and if you don't believe that,
you've never seen someone accused of an assault turn around and accuse
the accuser) So nothing is automatically triggered by an accusation. We
make a decision by having a discussion, and then taking a vote.
That vote is among the five of us on the executive. Three are femme,
and three are people that primarily bottom. That means that even if I
turn out to relate a bit too much to an accused person who is like me,
an older male dom, I can be outvoted. By people who each have more than
enough experience with being creeped on.
All this is designed to weight things towards believing accusations,
and taking action. If this stance rubs you the wrong way, start your own
club! I'm serious about that! All you have to do is click "Create new
event", and then call a restaurant.
For the people we most want, hopefully this all sounds good, but
words are not that useful - watch our actions. Over a long period of
time. If you make a report, see how we react to it. But here are some
actions the BEHIVE exec has taken in its first six months, besides write
a consent and conduct policy:
We've added three previous munch attendees to our ban list, and sent one official warning.
We created Google docs to accumulate reports and observations about
people, even minor ones, so that people can be banned for patterns of
subthreshold behaviour.
A different person, who has never been to one of our events, wrote to
us: "I think that your group is very concerned with rules and laws and
control, and not so much about considering the humanity of people." I
disagree: I think that we are using explicit rules and laws (which
include, by the way, such laws as "Be nice") to express our intention to
protect the humanity of our spaces. It's an agonizing, painful thing to
ban someone, but not to do it is to fall into geek fallacy #1, and to fail the amazing people we might not even get to meet.
We are doing our absolute best not to make mistakes. But, inevitably,
we will. We're going to ban people who shouldn't be banned, and not ban
people who should be. All this is just to say: we want to risk making
more of the first kind of mistake than the second.
And that's what we meant.
(this is a personal essay, not a BEHIVE statement, but it was read by the other four executive members)
