Hello, lovely people! As there is no regular CV meeting due to Spring Break, please come join us for a fabulous time at 7pm, at the Good Stuff Diner, 109 West 14th Street, between 6^th and 7^th Avenue. Food and company await.

There’s a FetLife event too.

Erotic Writing as a Tool: Erotica and Sex Blogs as Tools for Negotiation, Seduction and the Articulation of Desire
1. How to use writing as a tool to articulate and process your desires and experiences.
2. How to use sex writing and correspondences as a negotiation tools.
3. How to use erotic writing as a tool of seduction and a way of making partners and prospective partners aware of your desires.

The presentation will include handouts and a short writing exercise in which participants will try and express their desires in artistic ways to communicate to partners and prospective partners.

I’ve presented at Sex 2.0 DC, KinkForAll NY and DC. I’m a published erotic and non-erotic writer with a thriving erotica and sex blog at writingdirty.com

Conversio Virium returns January 25^th with Mistress Coraline

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Hurt Me: Playing with a Vanilla Partner

Your lover is sweet, your lover is hot, your lover is… vanilla?!? Not everyone is kinky but a lot of vanilla people are kinkier than they know. We’ll talk about broaching the subject, negotiation for beginners, where to learn the basics, what NOT to do and how to deal if your interests simply cannot match. Kink is a wonderful way to deepen intimacy, explore yourself and your partner, and have a hell of a lot of fun. Isn’t it time your lover found that out?

This class is presented by Coraline, former pro-domme and long time pervert. She entered the scene in 2002 and has learned from and played with some of NYC’s greatest players. She has has taught classes for TES, DSF, WHAP and Galleria Domain 2.

Location: 316 Hamilton Hall, Columbia main campus

Right now, our available dates for the spring 2010 semester: February 1, 8, 15, 22; March 1, 8, 29; April 5, 12, 19, 26; May 3. If you’re worried a date has already been claimed, check our continuously updated planning calendar.

If you are interested in presenting for CV, please e-mail us at conversio@columbia.edu with two or three Monday nights you would be available and the subject on which you would like to present.

Thank you-
Elizabeth B.
President, Conversio Virium

Sassafras Lowry has elected to avoid inflicting finals-ridden Columbia students with her ongoing case of H1N1 by staying home tomorrow night, rather than regale us with her presentation on Leather Storytelling. She will be making her debut next semester.

Instead, CV will be throwing a small party; food and drink will be provided, CV’s next semester will be discussed, and fun will be had. We promise.

Lolita Wolf joins CV this week to present on trust.

Location: 316 Hamilton Hall, Columbia campus

How do you achieve intimacy and create an awesome, even sacred bond with a partner? How is it that one person allows another to take control over them? Before such a potent understanding is forged between adults, trust needs to exist. Trust can be built up in a number of ways. Come, learn and put to use the communication skills and honorable actions that go hand in hand on the road to complete and total trust.

Sir Guy will being giving a presentation on BDSM ER, or what to do in case of an emergency.

316 Hamilton Hall

BDSM ER: It’s Not a Scene
Your fire play session was hotter than expected. Now someone got burned. What do you do? Your knife play was cutting edge and your bottom got the point. Now you’re in for some unexpected blood play. What do you do? Your breath play scene took your bottom’s breath away…literally. What can you do to breathe life into the scene? Sir Guy, a NYS certified EMT, will review medical emergencies, show you what questions to ask before you play, what to do when things go wrong, and how to deal with first responders. In addition he will give tips on creating a first aid kit.

We are joined this week by Sinclair Sexsmith, writer of the Sugarbutch Chronicles (http://www.sugarbutch.net/) and kinky presenter. Expect a more extended description of the presentation in the next few days.

Gendering Power, or: How to Spice Up Your Roleplay! An interactive workshop on how the addition of gender to power dynamics in sexual role play scenarios can increase desire, vulnerability, and intimacy, as well as explore deep inner personal gender identities. It will be a lecture with lots of discussion and probably some writing prompts.

LOCATION: 316 Hamilton Hall, Columbia campus

Ray Warman headlines tomorrow night for one of CV’s few forays into the world of art.

“The BDSM-iad of John Van Tuyl,” an autobiographically-based poem (“John Van Tuyl” being my bygone scene-name) in four cantos comprising some 700 lines that are tightly constrained, but that also burst with exuberance celebrating both the journeys on which BDSM can take us and its power to connect us intimately with one another and to transform our lives (as well as, of course, its power to provide plenty of down-home “boner-bringing diversion”). The constraint — quirky, even manic, but surprisingly workable — is that each line contains just four poetic “feet,” each with one or more words (or compound or contracted words) beginning exclusively with that foot’s designated letter (B, D, S or M, in that order). Thus, “stereotypical masters boast drill-sergeant manners,” because “boys denied spankings mature badly”! Or (from the concluding canto, which shifts to a broader, if not elegiac, perspective): “dim-visioned society marginalizes BDSM.”

LOCATION: 316 Hamilton Hall, CU campus

We’re joined by Conrad, addressing questions and applications of topping as service.

I am a sex worker that started first with stripping back in 1995 and since has been a male model, escort, investment banker, squater and now a pro dom for the past 2 years. I also co founded swop-nyc the new york city chapter of sex workers outreach project and swank sex workers action new york, both being sex worker organizing and activism. I have spoken at Desiree Alliance 2008 in Chicago and at Critical Resistance 2008 both on the subject of sex worker activism. I have been in the BDSM community for 2 years and attended as many conferences and workshops as possible. Roughly one per month. And now I want to start to give back what I have learned.

As a prodom in my work life and as a lifestyle service top in my private life, I feel that “Topping as a Service” will be the most beneficial workshop I can give to our community.

LOCATION: 316 Hamilton, Columbia campus