I’ve been a bad author. I’ve let my day job interfere with my hobby for way too long. It’s an unforgivable crime. I promise to better myself. In the mean time, here’s some important news.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/bric-yard/brazil-putting-the-penis-passion-fruit

A new ground breaking scientific discovery has been made that will most likely transform life as we know it on this planet. Just make sure you wear a condom when you eat it.

/Tom Knox

http://www.bdsm-ebooks.com/shop.htm?cat=&pr=2520

Now I’ve also made my novel available on bdsm-ebooks.com

-Tom

Happiness in Slavery is now published and can be found on:

http://www.a1adultebooks.com/site.php?pr=2520&in=9002

I’ve been told it will soon be found on more websites too.

-Tom

Happiness in Slavery has been accepted by bdsmbooks.com where I published my first novel.

http://bdsmbooks.com/

So now I will have a second published book. Three cheers for me. This is (hopefully) the first novel in a series of five. Thanks Simon for having me.

What do you think of the cover? It was made by Agnes Knox, my wife.

Thanks to you all. And thanks Sharon and Terra for the proofreading. Without your help it wouldn’t be half as good.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18331257

I read all the research on BDSM I can get my filthy little perverted hands on. As I’ve been told, there’s very little research on BDSM at all because the world of psychology strongly suspects that there’s nothing actually wrong with us kinky people. And, as the logic goes, psychology researchers prefer studying stuff they later can dedicate their lives to fix. So in other words, there’s no money in telling people they’re healthy and can keep doing what they’re doing. The problem with this is that we have very little collected data from psychology research on the topic of why we’re bent and why we’re bent like we are. There’s just very many preconceptions, even within the scene itself.

In their infinite goodness an Australian team decided to do the research anyway. This is from 2008, which makes it the freshest. The population is almost 20 000 which is among the biggest I’ve seen.

It’s even got an impressive name:

Demographic and Psychosocial Features of Participants in
Bondage and Discipline, “Sadomasochism” or Dominance and
Submission (BDSM): Data from a National Survey

Abstract

Introduction. People with sexual interests in bondage and discipline, “sadomasochism” or dominance and submission
(BDSM) have been seen by many professionals as damaged or dangerous.
Aim. To examine sexual behavior correlates of involvement in BDSM and test the hypothesis that BDSM is
practiced by people with a history of sexual coercion, sexual difficulties, and/or psychological problems.
Methods. In Australia in 2001–2002, a representative sample of 19,307 respondents aged 16–59 years was interviewed
by telephone. Weighted data analysis used univariate logistic regression.
Main Outcome Measures. Self-reported demographic and psychosocial factors; sexual behavior and identity; sexual
difficulties.

Results. In total, 1.8% of sexually active people (2.2% of men, 1.3% of women) said they had been involved in
BDSM in the previous year. This was more common among gay/lesbian and bisexual people. People who had
engaged in BDSM were more likely to have experienced oral sex and/or anal sex, to have had more than one partner
in the past year, to have had sex with someone other than their regular partner, and to have: taken part in phone sex,
visited an Internet sex site, viewed an X-rated (pornographic) film or video, used a sex toy, had group sex, or taken
part in manual stimulation of the anus, fisting or rimming. However, they were no more likely to have been coerced
into sexual activity, and were not significantly more likely to be unhappy or anxious—indeed, men who had engaged
in BDSM scored significantly lower on a scale of psychological distress than other men. Engagement in BDSM was
not significantly related to any sexual difficulties.

Conclusion. Our findings support the idea that BDSM is simply a sexual interest or subculture attractive to a
minority, and for most participants not a pathological symptom of past abuse or difficulty with “normal” sex.
Richters J, de Visser RO, Rissel CE, Grulich AE, and Smith AMA. Demographic and psychosocial features
of participants in bondage and discipline, “sadomasochism” or dominance and submission (BDSM): Data
from a national survey. J Sex Med 2008;5:1660–1668.

Reading a bit further we find that the team’s questions were focused on affirming or rejecting these three common preconceptions about BDSM:

1.The assumption that a taste for BDSM is a
result of the individual pursuing in later sexual
life attributes of earlier scenes of sexual abuse
that are still experienced as arousing [4,16].
Although this has rarely been stated as an
explicit testable hypothesis, it is an underlying
assumption of many therapists [3] and of some
feminist disapproval of BDSM as a sexual proclivity
[17,18].

2. The assumption that BDSM interest is a
form of psychological abnormality and that
its practitioners are likely to be anxious and
maladjusted in other ways [4], though a number
of studies have questioned this [19–22]. This is
probably linked to the Krafft-Ebing/DSM view
mentioned above.

3. The assumption, perhaps nowadays more
common among lay people than professionals,
that people who are involved in BDSM are
sexually deficient in some way and need particularly
strong stimuli such as beating or being
beaten, being tied up, etc. to become aroused or
to reach orgasm, i.e., that they suffer from
sexual difficulties which they attempt to alleviate
or circumvent through their deviant activities
[4,19,21,22].

And the conclusion:

Our findings support the idea that BDSM is
simply a sexual interest or subculture attractive to
a minority, and that for most participants, BDSM
activities are not a pathological symptom of past
abuse or of difficulty with “normal” sex. This confirms
the conclusions of other empirical studies
based on purposive samples [12,16,20,21,24,26].

My comments:

These aren’t any new findings, it merely affirms earlier smaller studies. People into BDSM have been victims of sexual assault just as much as the population not interested in BDSM. If they’re not into BDSM then being the victim of sexual assault doesn’t explain BDSM interests. People are just as likely to be into BDSM regardless if they’ve been the victim of sexual violence. This is something I think needs to be hammered home in the heads of subs. There’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t need to “blame it” on anything.

The study found that people into BDSM are less anxious or be maladjusted in various ways than the population at large, which is probably a better explanation to why people are into BDSM. Perhaps it satisfied some basic deep-down monkey instinct we still have, that fails to be satisfied in modern society? That’s so far been my personal going theory. It seems to hold. Not only is nothing wrong with you, you’re probably in better shape because of your BDSM than the population at large. Being a sub isn’t self-destructive… its healthy for your head.

And thirdly… there’s nothing sexually dysfunctional about BDSM practitioners, not more than the population at large. So you’re not into BDSM as a result of something else being wrong with you or broken.

The team concluded that BDSM is simply a special interest like any fashion, be it skating, knitting or barn dancing. That may be… even if it would be nice to be a little bit more special

Over and out in scienceland

-Tom Knox

Atlanta Nights by Travis Tea was a book I came across when I was trawling the net trying to find publishers for my work. I write more than erotica.

#mce_temp_url#

There’s a lot of writers who desperately want to publish, and there’s plenty of dodgy publishers taking advantage of this. This is the story of PublishAmerica and how a group of authors exposed the biggest fraudster.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PublishAmerica

Their business model is based around pretending to be a real publisher but focused on unknown talent. In the real publishing world the publisher publishes a bunch of books hoping they will sell, and if they don’t they’re forced to buy them back from the book shops. At least if they ever want to sell books to that bookshop again. This is just the way the business works. Since Publish America is generous enough to give beginner authors a chance, they demand that the authors they publish share some of the risk. This doesn’t sound that bad, but which if one reads the fine print properly means that the author is the one who ends up having to buy all unsold books themselves.

Allegedly PublishAmerica don’t even bother sending the books to the bookshops. They just wait as long as they’re contractually obliged to, and then send the bill together with newly printed books to the author. A part of sharing the cost of publishing is that they make zero effort in selling them, and if an author tries to market his book himself, they won’t even provide the books, making all kinds of excuses. But all this is very hard to prove for an author. They provide no statistics on any part of their business to the author.

So this is where Atlanta Nights comes in. Travis Tea is the pseudonym for a whole bunch of real professional authors who collaborated to write this “fine piece of literature”. Only a group of highly skilled professionals going out of their way to write as badly as they can could possibly create something this awful. They systematically break every rule they know an editor (and mentally unchallenged reader) will react to.

The point of this is because PublishAmerica claims to be a real publisher. If they’re a real publisher they will only accept work they believe in will sell. They’ll have an editor read through it and suggest necessary changes to make it more saleable. If a publisher accepts anything straight away, they’re just vanity press, ie the author is in effect printing his own book just to be able to say he’s an author, hence “vanity”. If it’s a vanity press it’s unethical to fool the author into thinking it can ever become a commercial success. That’s not how the business works. According to reports from authors, every author PublishAmerica accepts has had minimal or no editing where they get the answer “it’s perfect as it is”. I don’t believe there exists such writer, who can produce an even passable piece of work on the first go. And neither did the authors behind “Travis Tea”. They reasoned that if Atlanta Nights would get published by PublishAmerica, that would be evidence enough to prove that they’re just a vanity press and it’s all just an elaborate scam.

Of course they succeeded and PublishAmerica were exposed for what they were.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights

Atlanta Nights badness is insane funny. Only pros can write this deliberately bad. In its genre, it’s a masterpiece. It does hurt the soul to read it, but it’s worth it.