Voice of the Mad

My Dorothea Dix: Voice of the Mad came today and it's already totally uplifting. You see, she singlehandedly transformed how we treated the mentally ill in the early 1800s when people lumped Mental Illness together with petty crime and other forms of immorality. She wrote about the horrific conditions patients endured in asylums. I, too, am interested in going into something messy and condemned or dismissed (kink) and want to talk about the conditions of loneliness, shame and marginalization that go unexamined in the lives of the kinky. I would like to change how society as a whole talks, thinks, teaches about alternative sexualities. That is my public health outreach mission. In Dorothea Dix's time, Massachusetts was actually very proud of its asylum system, they had built more than any other state and thought of themselves as extremely progressive. When Dix illuminated what actually went on inside those institutions, people were shocked and their vanity affronted. Kink is a battleground in a comparable way. In some way, there are so many media products and organizations reaching out and congratulating themselves for being progressive. It's true, they are fighting for rights and visibility. My interest is in something more subtle: the experience of the individual kinky person and where they are in their personal growth. I yearn for more complex discussion than political ballyhooing provides. Wow. That might be more than I've ever published about the subject. (This blog is still very private, I think it has an audience of one. Or two if you count me. I do read it avidly.)

xo,
T.