Some Things I’m Reading on Substack
I’m a feminist, and I think it is harder to be a man than to be a woman. by
A survey of male submissive kinks: #9 Soiling of the man by
What I’m Listening To
Punk rock has traditionally been viewed as a rebellious genre whose adherents fight for freedom from tyrannical governments and restrictive social codes. In the West, punk has become a popular form of music, and its fashion has become not just widely accepted but cool. Now “rebellion” for some teens mean dressing in a manner their parents don’t like, and “oppression” for the bands that play on Andrew Wilkow’s show is just having others disagree with them about politics. It’s not all a bad thing to live in a free country, to be sure. The punks in Myanmar would prefer freedom.
The Rebel Riot and Cacerolazo are two punk bands from Myanmar that are fighting for freedom in a country with a military junta. They were fighting for freedom long before the junta overthrew the election results and took power in 2021. The Rebel Riot was formed in 2007 in Yangon, and, led by frontman Kyaw Kyaw (“Joe Joe”), they have helped spread punk culture around the country.
In Myanmar, there are layers of oppression to fight against. The punk fashion was still viewed as something subversive when Kyaw Kyaw started. There’s many layers of social repression stacked on top of each other, government violence against ethnic groups, government violence against all the citizens, and now a civil war.
This is their rendition of “Bella Ciao,” an Italian song of resistance that was first sung by women workers in the brutal conditions of rice paddies of Northern Italy. It became popularized as a general protest song and was sung at nationwide anti-coup student protests in 2021.
What I’m Watching
Yesterday, the Nowhere Bookstore, a Chinese bookstore in Chiang Mai, hosted a showing of My Buddha Is Punk, a documentary that follows Kyaw Kywa around Myanmar as he builds the punk community and shares his philosophy of non-violence, which melds aspects of punk and Buddhism.
This 2007 documentary was written and directed by German director Andreas Hartmann, whose 2021 documentary The Strong Sex explores male gender roles.
In it, Kyaw Kyaw and his friends and bandmates are shown traveling around the country, distributing punk apparel, and talking to people on trains, on the street, and on ox carts. In one scene, he confronts a guy who started a band and named it after Nazis and tells him, that doesn’t make you sound cool, it’s the exact opposite of what punk means.
What I’m Thinking / Punk and BDSM
BDSM (especially femdom, I might argue) has more in common with punk than just spiky collars and metal chains. Both have ideologies of freedom at their heart. BDSM (again, especially femdom) is viewed as abnormal by society.
From my wardrobe (only one of these things has been worn outside — indeed at a couple of rock concerts)
In the film, Kyaw Kyaw said he experienced strange looks and insults and sometimes even false arrests as a result of his dressing punk in public. But he didn’t back down. Paraphrasing: We had to argue with everyone in our neighborhood. They would insult us, so we would insult them. … Laugh at us, stare at us, but don’t insult us.
If you are living your life, no matter how “alternative” it is, you shouldn’t take insults from anyone. For me as a submissive male, I might be carrying an umbrella for Queen Nazz. I might be carrying three bags for her and her friends. I might even be on the end of a leash being led through a weekend market on two feet, as I was in a story I wrote about in Learning to Love My Leash, which is available for free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers and will be available tomorrow, Sept. 18, for a deep discount at $0.99 as a Kindle Countdown Deal.
Punk is about doing it yourself. Kyaw Kyaw was building a community. Mistress Taemin, who was the inspiration for the dominatrix character in my book PUNISHED by the Vigilante Dominatrix Out for Revenge, started an SM bar in Seoul where her customers can be themselves—and where she can whip her customers if they areshe and they both desire.
Queen Nazz and I have built a life together, and she is starting to build a community with some of her accepting friends to the point where even two of them took the leash and played with me two weekends ago.
As Kyaw Kyaw said in the Q&A session, “Freedom starts from yourself. If you don’t love yourself, you can’t achieve freedom.”
The submissive male must first love that he is a submissive and refuse to feel shame in his submission.
My Daily Lashes
This has been “Your Daily Lashes,” a new feature I am trying where I share my life and my thoughts on various things. These are my daily lashes, some lashes I took with Queen’s horsewhip last night—for no other reason than that it was fun.
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