More about The Shadow Sacrament
This is the note I just sent to contributors:
Partly for reasons of focus and partly because of the current political climate, I have decide to change the focus of The Shadow Sacrament to "sex and spirituality," instead of "BDSM spirituality." I have altered the headers, footers, and title page of the current issue to reflect this change.
From the beginning of the idea, I had considered whether "BDSM" might be too narrow to include everything I wanted to hear about sex and gender as it related to the spiritual. After receiving a number of excellent submissions that touch only peripherally on kink per se, and deciding to publish them anyway, I think it is for the best, esthetically speaking, to enlarge the scope of the journal. However, the deciding factor to do so now (and ex post facto) was the recent news that the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales has decided to more vigorously prosecute what it considers particularly virulent Internet porn -- that which has to do with "bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior." For more information about this, see
http://www.ncsfreedom.org/news/2005/102005ObscenityWave.htm
Even though it seems very unlikely that we will come to Gonzales' attention -- what with 14 million other possible targets available on the World Wide Web -- it seems to me that becoming less googleable might be the better part of valor. Me, I've had enough trouble with laptops lately that I don't want to add to the list of worries, having it confiscated by the government. So -- there it is.
Partly for reasons of focus and partly because of the current political climate, I have decide to change the focus of The Shadow Sacrament to "sex and spirituality," instead of "BDSM spirituality." I have altered the headers, footers, and title page of the current issue to reflect this change.
From the beginning of the idea, I had considered whether "BDSM" might be too narrow to include everything I wanted to hear about sex and gender as it related to the spiritual. After receiving a number of excellent submissions that touch only peripherally on kink per se, and deciding to publish them anyway, I think it is for the best, esthetically speaking, to enlarge the scope of the journal. However, the deciding factor to do so now (and ex post facto) was the recent news that the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales has decided to more vigorously prosecute what it considers particularly virulent Internet porn -- that which has to do with "bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior." For more information about this, see
http://www.ncsfreedom.org/news/2005/102005ObscenityWave.htm
Even though it seems very unlikely that we will come to Gonzales' attention -- what with 14 million other possible targets available on the World Wide Web -- it seems to me that becoming less googleable might be the better part of valor. Me, I've had enough trouble with laptops lately that I don't want to add to the list of worries, having it confiscated by the government. So -- there it is.