Who Is ‘Tiggy Upland’?

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During my explorations of Feminist Tumblr, I stumbled across an online “advice” site called Tiggy Upland. The word “advice” must be put in quotation marks because it’s actually an advocacy site, promoting bisexuality and polyamory (i.e., what used to be called “swinging”). The name “Tiggy Upland” is obviously a pseudonym. At first I suspected the person behind it must actually be male, because there was such a weird “Dear Penthouse Forum” vibe of kinky fantasy to it.

A simple and obvious question: How does a person hiding behind a pseudonym become an online advice columnist? That is to say, where does the adviser get that first advice-seeker? Ah! The self-created “Tiggy Upland” must have invented this seeker and also invented the seeker’s dilemma, you see. Does the phrase roman à clef mean anything to you? Don’t you suspect this first post included some element of autobiography? Whatever your mere suspicions or speculations may be, however, any intelligent person must conclude that there is a self-interested authorial purpose behind the creation of “Tiggy Upland.”

Anyone can see — it’s right there in plain sight, clearly written — that “Tiggy Upland” wants people to believe it is perfectly normal for a man in a heterosexual relationship to masturbate with gay porn and also to want his girlfriend to penetrate him with a strap-on dildo.

Furthermore, pay attention to the backdating of posts, so that “May 3, 2011” was actually posted Jan. 3, 2012. Why would “Tiggy” do this? January 2012 was quite a busy month for “Tiggy” in terms of creating backdated Q-and-A posts, and the similarity of themes is notable. Were any of those questions authentic? Why was “Tiggy” doing this?

Check the “late bloomer” tag, and you find “November 1, 2011” (posted Jan. 10, 2012), “November 15, 2011” (posted Jan. 12, 2012) and “January 10, 2012” (also posted Jan. 12, 2012). So in the span of three days, “Tiggy” posted three Q-and-As with people who were interested in pursuing bisexuality. Some of these questions seemed authentic. But look very closely at this backdated post in which “Tiggy” answers two questions from bisexual women, the second of whom says she “grew up in North Carolina and didn’t really even know what it meant to be LGBT until I moved to Boston four years ago.” The answer to that question included this unusually detailed information:

Since you’re in Boston, I highly recommend that you attend the peer-led group, “Straight Marriage, Still Questioning” on the second Monday of each month. For more information, contact kate.e.flynn [at] gmail [dot] com. . . . They’re in the same position you are and will welcome you into their mutually-supportive space with open arms.

Is that just random and coincidental? Is “Tiggy” simply such a conscientious adviser that, upon getting a question from a woman in Boston, “Tiggy” did some research about support groups in the area and (what luck!) found this monthly meeting advised by Kate E. Flynn?

No, of course not. Here’s your answer: “Ask Tiggy” is a regular column in the quarterly newsletter of the Boston Bisexual Women’s Network. It would seem that the column first appeared in the Summer 2011 issue. Yet if this is a women’s group, and the advice columnist is supposed to be giving advice to bisexual women, why is the “Tiggy Upland” site fielding questions from so many bisexual men?

In the fine print of the Boston Bisexual Women’s Network newsletter, they declare their purpose to provide “a safe environment” for support of “women of all sexual self-identities, gender identities,” promoting “full acceptance” of bisexuality “within the larger LGBT community,” including “transgender people.” Carefully examine Page 16 of the Spring 2015 issue of their newsletter and see if you can’t guess who might have managed to smuggle a penis into their November 2014 brunch.

“Tiggy Upland” made her public debut in October 2011, performing at the Bilicious Boston show, produced “in association with the Bisexual Resource Center.” Oh, what’s the Bisexual Resource Center?

It’s a Boston-based tax-exempt 501(c)3, the administrative director of which was, from 2004-2014, Ellyn Ruthstrom, whose resumé is quite interesting: After getting her master’s degree in Women’s Studies from Ohio State University, Ms. Ruthstrom worked five years (1995-2000) at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., then spent six years (2001-2007) as editor of Teen Voices, “the only national magazine and website written by, for, and about teen girls,” where she “trained a team of college-aged editorial assistants and mentors,” etc., etc. If the dates on Ms. Ruthstrom’s LinkedIn profile are correct, therefore, during the years 2004-2007, she was simultaneously president of the Bisexual Resource Center and the editor of Teen Voices.

(Hey, Teen Voices, let’s talk about your vaginas!)

While Ms. Ruthstrom is too old to be “Tiggy Upland,” she certainly must know who “Tiggy Upland” is, which leads us to the question, “Why the strange masquerade? Why the pseudonym?” Because I stumbled onto this entirely by accident, the why part of this question is as mysterious as the who, and Ms. Ruthstrom’s career is an intriguing tangent. The director of the Bisexual Resource Center is the former editor of Teen Voices, “an intensive journalism, mentoring, and leadership program for teen girls in Boston”? Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

What happened to Teen Voices? Their former website is defunct, but the non-profit tracker GuideStar showed their blog address on WordPress, which hasn’t been updated since August 2012. However, the site had an embedded Twitter feed for @TeenNews — “the girl news site of Women’s eNews that delivers news about teens to a global audience and incorporates teens into the production of news.” In 2013, it seems, the former Boston-based Teen News was absorbed by New York-based Women’s ENews, about which we learn:

Women’s eNews became independent on January 1, 2002. Women’s eNews grew out of a 1996 roundtable discussion conceived and funded by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation and hosted by the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. After additional research on the need for a media outlet to distribute news of concern to women and the opportunity to provide women’s voices to commercial media, NOW Legal Defense underwrote in 1999 the creation of Women’s eNews as an Internet-based news service for all women, with a special emphasis on being a resource for commercial media. . . .

This 501(c)3 outfit gets money from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, United Nations Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Starry Night Fund of Tides Foundation. The editor of Teen News is now Katina Paron, who is director of the NYC High School Journalism Collaborative at Baruch College. From Ms. Paron’s online profile at the Youth Media Learning Network, we learn that her “youth media career began as an editor, mentor and Board of Directors member with the Boston-based Teen Voices magazine.” Thus we return full circle to the publication where Ellyn Ruthstrom was editor for six years, prior to Ms. Ruthstrom’s subsequent position at the Bisexual Resource Center.

Random coincidence. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

All these coincidences were discovered because I encountered the “Tiggy Upland” Tumblr and wondered, “Who is Tiggy Upland?”

Still don’t have the answer to that question, but I imagine it would be a very interesting answer. Only haters ask questions, y’know.

UPDATE: @TiggyUpland on Twitter was kind enough to share this photo of herself speaking at the 2012 Boston Dyke March:

Just so you know, OK?

UPDATE II: What kind of event was this?

Each year, the Dyke March is held in Boston the day before the Pride Parade as a grassroots efforts to remind the public and the government that “they are a movement, not a market.”

You stay classy, Boston Dyke March ladies!

UPDATE III: There modern double standard involves the way in which feminists constantly derogate masculinity and heterosexuality, whereas no one may express even the mildest criticism of women or homosexuals. It is therefore quite a risky enterprise to suggest that most “bisexuals” are either mainly gay, mainly straight, permanently confused, or just hopelessly perverse.

What are we to say, then, of Tiggy Upland’s approving attitude toward the man in a heterosexual relationship who wanted “his girlfriend to penetrate him with a strap-on dildo”?

We can consult the testimony of a woman who wrote to gay advice columnist Dan Savage (second letter), complaining that she was dating “a wonderful guy” who requested this particular practice. “Honestly, it turned me on as much as it did him,” she said. Then the guy said he wanted to try, uh, “the real thing.” She was also OK with that, “having a threesome with a trusted bi guy friend . . . and we all had fun.” Ah, but then she reaches the plot complication: “We never have vaginal intercourse anymore unless I ask. How soon will it be before I am left out entirely? Have I just been the testing ground for a shy gay boy who is now coming to fully realize that he would rather be with men than women?”

Ma’am, you are an enabler to a narcissist. You are a supporting character in a drama in which he plays the starring role. Yet you willingly cast yourself in this role, otherwise why would you think someone like this is “a wonderful guy”? And, as you say, you enjoyed playing your part up until you realized that this would eventually lead to you being excluded from the final scene. What was it that originally made you think he was “wonderful”? Doesn’t it say something about you — your disastrously bad judgment, or perhaps your own subconscious personality problems — that you would have been attracted to this guy, and willingly gone along with his deviant schemes?

Until people are willing to accept responsibility for their own problems, they will never be able to solve those problems, and feminism is all about absolving women of responsibility.

My advice to anyone who wants a normal life is to stop hanging around weirdos. However much weirdness you might have ever indulged in the past, it’s not actually the past until you walk away from it, renounce it, start socializing with respectable decent people, and try to become someone decent and respectable yourself.

 

103 comments

  1. Just GoOgle it as I’ve done… Apparently, it’s actually a thing… I can’t make sense of it myself!

  3. I’m wondering if the woman who wrote to Dan Savage got the cause and effect reversed. Maybe he’s gotten more interested in pegging and cock because the sex between him and her has turned mediocre. I think she should reintroduce him to how amazing heterosexual sex can be and he won’t be so interested in other avenues.

  5. i’m praying for you, Mr. McCain. willfully exposing yourself to this much Tumblr crazy cannot be good for your emotional state.

  6. That is true, but he has also always endorsed pegging, basically because of normalizing sodomy. His way (from the link) of squaring that with his bisexual erasure:

    But at the risk of annoying the bi-furious community, it has to be said that some gay guys do identify as bi at first and will use an indulgent girlfriend as, in POOTH’s words, a “testing ground.”

  7. Our ability to get good answers is limited by both our ability to ask good questions, and our ability to ask good sources. She asked a gay guy whether her boyfriend really just wants dick. WTF other kind of answer did she expect?

  8. That sounds like an uphill battle. The ones who maintain that they are heterosexual usually make a point of always being the “pitcher,” not the “catcher.” So do prison rapists. Once a male plays the part of catamite and people find out about it, his protestations of his heterosexuality are probably in vain.

  9. Ned Flanders spoke the truth when he had his first and last blackberry schnapps:

    “Ann Landers is a boring old biddy.”

  10. As should we all. Unlike the Call of Cthulhu RPG, we can’t just make up another character if RSM succumbs to the madness-inducing non-Euclidean geometries of feminist “logic.”

  11. Dan Savage bought Ann Landers’ desk after she died. This purchase disturbingly and accurately symbolizes what happened. Decades of Ann Landers and other fatuous advice columnists charted this course and guided the gullible to Savage and his doppelgangers.

  13. Female/female scenes are now de rigueur. Almost every female pornographer claims to be bisexual today.

  14. […] much better than the horrors of the White Walkers and their legions of zombie wights. TOM: Sometimes you just have to recognize something or someone might not be good for you. Your gut instincts are often right EBL: There are good leaders and bad leaders (and advisors to […]

  15. I think the best course of action would be to ask their advice, and then do he complete opposite of what they say.

  16. Thanks for your prayers. It’s been a particularly rough week. I’ve started Catharine MacKinnon.

  17. Ain’t I done told you so?

    You see how feminism encourages women to desecrate themselves, to reject all morality, to ignore the voice of common sense, to make an utter ruin of their own lives, and then to blame patriarchy for their problems.

    The more women follow feminism’s advice, the worse their lives become, and thus the “success” of feminism always increases, because there are always more and more of these damaged women whose problems are then argued as proof of feminism’s indictment of “male supremacy.”

  18. All modern theories of “sexuality” are more or less wrong. I remember in the 1970s reading about Freud and going, “Whoa! That’s crazy!” I mean, the Oedipus complex? Penis envy? Are you kidding me? This is another one of those points where I agree with radical feminists, who absolutely hate Freud. However, feminists in rejecting the (obviously insulting) chauvinism of Freud, feminists then developed their own theories of sexuality, which are strangely influenced by Freud, while attempting to reverse his anti-female prejudice. Yet a man-hating theory of sexuality is no better than a woman-hating theory of sexuality and, worst of all, feminism deliberately excludes men from the conversation, so that there is never any sane, normal, decent man’s perspective presented within feminist theory. Not that I would offer myself as an exemplar of sanity or anything, but I can say that what feminists imagine as the basis of male sexuality is quite obviously a psychological projection of unhappy women’s own grievances. One cannot make sex the subject of a Marxist analysis and expect good results.

  19. That’s something I wrote explaining Rule 5: People used to give me a hard time for occasionally including a bikini picture or some old-fashioned “pin up” cheesecake. There is this idea among some conservatives that everything must be so wholesome and “family friendly” that it’s a sort of sin to mention that people have sex, or to describe sex in any way that might imply you actually know something about it from direct experience. This has the effect of surrendering vast amounts of cultural terrain to liberals, and is foolish.

    Therefore, I said, “Look, here’s this photo of a movie starlet (or whatever), and it is NOT PORN. My purpose in showing this woman in a bikini is to make a joke, not to inspire anyone’s carnal appetites. If people wanted pornography, they could do a Google search and find all they want. So stop guilt-tripping me over this, you ridiculous stereotypical Republican fuddy-duddies.”

  20. “… according to leading expert Finrod.”

    Gonna include that in the next edition of the book, because certain I must have some highly qualified authority on male porn-viewing habits.

  21. Gay male porn is a ghetto for the simple fact that any remotely attractive gay male can get all the gay sex he wants — in real life — quite easily. It’s the same reason women are so seldom interested in porn. If all a woman wants is sex, she can get that quite easily. The market demand for pornography is always driven by heterosexual males and this is a symbiotic relationship. Pornography is corrupting and addictive, so that the more of it men watch, the more perverted their appetites become and the less they are able to enjoy regular sex. It’s a wicked habit, and the extreme perversity of the product can be explained by the fact that the market is driven by the desires of hard-core addicts. The pornography addict demands vast quantities of this stuff, and he certainly can’t get off watching “vanilla” sex.

    This was one of the insights I think got overlooked by most people in the “Belle Knox” controversy. Here you had an obviously very bright girl, from a respectable middle-class Catholic family who, at age 11 or 12, had begun watching online pornography. By the time she was 16, she was getting drunk and hooking up with guys at parties. By the time she was 18, by her own admission, she could only “get off” watching a certain very extreme type of gonzo porn, “facial” humiliation. If a nice Catholic girl can be so corrupted by porn …? Like I keep saying: People need to wake the hell up.

  22. Also, that women can be really kinky.

    The female mind is female, but is also human. It’s weird for me, after all these years, to read radical feminists denouncing men as sexists who (allegedly) do not acknowledge women as equally human, when I know my own case so well, and devoted many years of my life to an effort to understand women’s humanity. The fact that WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT FROM MEN — which is allegedly a “sexist” thing to say — is exactly why I do so admire women. Yet the feminist demand, understood in its core principle, is that men should have the same feelings toward women as they have toward men. I’m like, “Are you crazy? Do you have any idea what life is like as a man among men? Do you suppose that any sane woman would want to be treated that way?” Alas, speaking sanity to feminists is an utter waste of time.

  23. In a sane world — i.e., civilization as it existed prior to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s — lesbianism is very rare, far less common than male homosexuality, as the two phenomena ordinarily arise from quite different causes. The impacts of the 1960s and ’70s, however, produced what in hindsight was a predictable increase of lesbianism in our culture. A major factor can be explained quite simply: Men’s sexual behavior became depraved, and women understandably recoiled from that depravity. At the same time, however, the rise of lesbianism was also a consequence of what any careful reading of Humanae Vitae would show: If sex is no longer about procreation, then sex is merely a matter of pleasure. Deprive of its normal biological function, women’s sexuality is … what? Any serious and intelligent person contemplating an answer to that question must conclude that Humanae Vitae expressed a very profound truth about human nature, and I say that as a Protestant.

  24. Looking back on my youth — and keeping in mind the Miranda warning that anything I say can and will be used against me in the court of public opinion — I quite clearly recall the glamorized soft-focus presentation of lesbianism in Penthouse circa 1973. As I grew older and became directly acquainted with actual lesbians (and actual sex, as opposed to an adolescent fantasy of sex), it was rather disillusioning and disappointing to discover the wide disparity between reality and media-generated fantasy. Whatever one’s interests or preferences, the enjoyment of sex is to a large degree related to the physical attractiveness of one’s partner. Extremely good-looking people are much more rare in real life than they are in pornography (or media generally), and thus most people — basically, all people who succumb to the pornographic view of sexuality — are doomed to disappointment, simply because that ideal of Perfect Sex with Perfect People will forever elude them. Even if one is very well suited for this hedonistic pursuit (extroverted and physically attractive), after a while one begins to become jaded, with an attitude of “so what?”

    Again, I remind you that I have the right to remain silent, but let’s just say I am not easily impressed by people’s stories of their sexual adventures. Nor do I judge people superficially. Good-looking people are good-looking, and successful people are successful, but I know damned well they are still people, and am not prone to mistaking beauty and success for virtue, per se. The more you know about human beings, the more you appreciate the Calvinist doctrine of TOTAL HUMAN DEPRAVITY.

  27. my soul, my soul…has anyone seen my soul? Soul sickness on the rise amongst this generation

  28. Precisely! This is I’m wont to refer to lesbianism as a mere “affectation”… The same might be said of the entire modern synthetic “gay” subculture!

  30. If my own limited experience of watching young women sink into the lesbian subculture is any guide, the unattractiveness is often contrived.

  31. Incidentally, I’ve read that Daesh are demanding that their Christian slaves perform “porn-inspired extreme sex acts,” and punishing them with (for example) being burned alive if they refuse.

  32. Yikes! She’s like what, Dworkin with a law degree? You’ll need your wits about you for sure.

  35. Pornography does all sorts of things to mess you up, not just sexually, but also emotionally; it’s one of the most effective ways you can numb yourself to normal human contact and envelop yourself in a bubble of passive disinterest towards the people in your life. I may be speaking from experience in this instance.

  38. Hope you don’t have any drug tests in the offing. The crazy pills you’re having to expose yourself to would probably show up.

  39. Minor point: The Calvinist Doctrine of Total Depravity doesn’t have the meaning you ascribe to it here. It simply means that man can not of himself, turn to God without an irresistible intervention by God.

    I don’t agree with that doctrine because I’ve seen the doctrine of Prevenient Grace in operation my entire life, and anyone alive today has noticed that God does not force Himself on anyone.

    Depravity as a concept, absoposilutely is a fact, and it is growing worse with the approach of the end, just as predicted in scripture.

  43. One cannot make sex the subject of a Marxist analysis and expect good results.

    That goes for a lot more things than just sex.

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  50. I am disappointed at the Daily Mail’s journalistic incuriosity and lack of attention to detail. Does he like FFM? FMF? FMM? MFM? There are vast differences between them. I cannot take a news source seriously that doesn’t bother to distinguish.

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