First of all I would like to thank Lori for her typically thoughtful and open-minded blog post on this subject. Secondly I must state up front that I can not speak on behalf of the entire Kinky Salon London crew as I am but one of a larger crew. However I am the person who was quoted in the piece so I can give some context and personal observations.Knowing the highly intelligent bunch of people who attend Kinky Salon and After Pandora, I have no doubt that everyone fully understands that old adage about not believing everything one reads in the newspapers. Even still it's often possible to lose track of the fact that this principle applies to the broadsheets and the style mags just as it does to the tabloids.
It's less a conspiracy to mislead on their part and more a matter of expediency, practicality and a sense of what will appeal to the audience of a given publication. Although one might come across a piece on a website, it was usually designed to be published in print where there is limited word length and an imperative to be succinct. This always comes at a price: if the media were perfect at expressing complex ideas accurately, without bias and with brevity, Noam Chomsky would be out of a job.
Kinky Salon London does not go out of its way to speak to just any old publication. So far we've concentrated on reaching out to sex-positive blogs / online radio shows and the LGBT press. But it's worth people knowing that it's practically impossible to stop someone writing about you if they choose to do so. As an example we were first listed in Time Out without ever submitting a listing to them. So if a journalist contacts you to say they're going to write about you, it's often better to provide them with a quote and direct them to your website rather than allowing them to make it up off the top of their head.
In this instance the journalist approached me having met me on the Burning Man scene and through another night I'm involved in called White Mischief. She had previously put Kinky Salon in touch with some feminist blogs that she felt might be interested in covering us. The Guardian had put her on a last-minute deadline of a couple of hours to write about a few "eccentric" clubs and activities around the country and she was planning to feature Kinky Salon and other similar places. I suggested to her a number of clubs within the BDSM, queer/pansexual and cabaret/burlesque space.
On request I sent her a written quote that detailed all the aspects of Kinky Salon about which you will be aware: our aim towards inclusivity and not discriminating by gender, body type, ability/disability, sexuality, the PAL system and our strict code of conduct, the fact that we welcome all interests be they kinky, vanilla or even those people who love the party but never plan to play at all. I explained that I was but one co-founder along with Kitty and a crew of volunteers, and I detailed that the event was born in San Francisco but has spread to Sacramento, New York, Copenhagen and Amsterdam.Although Kinky Salon welcomes people who identify as swingers just as we welcome people who identify as polyamorous or non-monogamists or whatever, we have never used swinging to describe what we do. Clearly we would also never describe ourselves as hipsters (I think the term geek would be far more accurate.)
Furthermore the journalist who wrote the piece contacted me yesterday to explain that she did not use the term hipster swinger, she was not briefed that the piece would be pitched as something about "tribes", nor did she write the introductory paragraph that was finally published. Her original introduction talked about sex-positive culture rather than repressive attitudes to sex.
It's true that both swinging and hipsters have negative connotations but we'd be kidding ourselves if we said that no-one in our communities owns an Apple Mac, rides a bike everywhere, buys organic at Broadway Market, lives in East London and enjoys group sex from time to time. Indeed I know a good few individuals within our community have taken a journey that started on the conventional swinging sites before moving more deeply into the polyamory and BDSM communities. So the whole "hipster swinger" shorthand may be unfortunate and inaccurate but it's not exactly a massive insult - just as long as you can take it with the pinch of salt it deserves. And if you want to blame someone, blame the subeditor who came up with the headline, most probably as a way of filling the limited column width they had to work with.
When one engages with the media one takes the rough with the smooth. There is always the chance of factual inaccuracies, omissions or slants that may differ from those one might prefer. It is unrealistic and usually unacceptable to demand copy approval on a minor article that, let's face it, is tomorrow's chip paper. How many times do we hear some of the most powerful and influential celebrities saying that something they said was "taken out of context"...? In this instance, nothing I said was taken out of context: it was just framed in a way that some members of our community may find out of alignment with their experience of Kinky Salon.The question some of you may be asking is: with all this potential for misunderstanding, should we be speaking to the media at all? What follows is just my personal opinion - I can't speak for everyone within Kinky Salon London. But I believe that if we are serious about promoting sex-positive culture, a culture that involves positive consent, a culture that welcomes all identities, all genders and sexualities, a culture that rejects sexist entitlement, a culture that demonstrates that kink and polyamory are not dangerous or disgusting...then it is our responsibility to take our message to the wider world.
We are committed to keeping the intimate house party friends-of-friends feel to Kinky Salon but if we fail to welcome new people into the fold then we effectively become elitist, and that's not the Kinky Salon ethos. I believe it's our duty to ensure that all those people who might benefit from participating in our community get the opportunity to hear about it. There may be ways that we can improve how we achieve that end, and our internal crew is discussing that right now, but please don't worry that Kinky Salon is "going mainstream"...because that's hipster talk, and none of us is a hipster, right? :)
All images have been cleared for use with the participants by Kinky Salon London. Photography by Todd Hartman and Ben Hopper.
0 comments:
Post a Comment