People are so much better at making a good world in their hearts and in their beds than they are at making a good world out there in the world.

The one has to be the rehearsal for the other.

Last night we heard from a married Christian woman who talked about agapelove and her relationship with God; a Marxist student of History who’d recently and painfully left his Christianity behind and saw his feminism deriving largely from the writings of Aleksandra Kollontai; me (a queer advocate of polyamorous commitments and explorer of bdsm); an environmentalist lesbian who had tried both monogamous and poly families; and a utopianist, highly promiscuous anarcho-queer gay man whose former lover had just died and whose heart was lying before us in shards. Just an excerpt from my bit:

Uneasiness amongst feminists, especially with regard to practices involving a female submissive, is superficially understandable, but fundamentally misdirected at BDSM instead of at BAD SEX (some of which is of course “kinky” as well as sad). But comrades, bad sex is the enemy, not power play: power play can conceivably set us free. An anonymous poem in the zine runs simply: “There are three things I want to have / Your voice, your stance, your desire /I need not ask. You will give them freely./ I will take them by force.” I don’t know about you, but I think that’s damn hot. Because it’s playful, because it intelligently subverts the liberal taboo on eroticising violence, and because it is clear about consent. Obviously one cannot fuck the revolution into being, but there must, I contend, be something of the revolution in our fucking. A fluid, imaginative, all-out, queer, utopian approach to bondage, domination, sadism, perversion, and masochism, might be a good way of achieving that. Inter alia.