30 Days of Kink: Days 18 & 19!

Day 18: Any kinky/BDSM pet peeves?  If so, what are they?

Most of the things I dislike about kink rise above the level of "pet peeves," like the fact that we as a community still lack a workable consensus action plan for what we do when we find out that one of our buddies might have committed physical and/or sexual assault.  That's not really an "aw man, this has anchovies on it"-level complaint.

But for a pettier peeve--you know what, I'm going to say the color black.  Like, there's nothing wrong with black clothing or black toys or black dungeon walls or black website backgrounds.  But goodness there are a lot of them.  It gets monotonous, and sometimes has a really cheesy "kink is spooky like Halloween, boo!" feeling to it.  I own green and blue rope, a gray flogger, and wear various colors to parties, because sometimes I'm not Halloween, dammit.

(I also own a shit-ton of black stuff, for reasons ranging from "that was the only color I could get it in" to "I'm not actually that much of a brave iconoclast and sometimes I kind of like being Halloween.")

Day 19: Any unexpected ways kink has improved your life?  If so, what are they?

It's inspired me to do a lot of writing which has, in turn, vastly improved my life. I also met Rowdy at a kink event, and knowing him has improved my life tremendously, because he's a wonderful partner and I completely love him and he has cute freckles.

But honestly, the main way kink has improved my life is... that I get to do kink.  I enjoy it so much more than I first thought I would, and in so many different ways.  It's an integral part of my romantic and sexual life. Which makes this question a little like asking "how has chocolate cake improved your life?"  Oh, I can think of stuff like "it looks nice on my table, I hear it has antioxidants or something" if I have to, but the real answer is because it's chocolate cake.

Maybe the biggest unexpected way kink has improved my life is that I've learned different and much better ways of looking at consent.  Because while kink definitely isn't a magical consent haven, the kink community has popularized some pretty cool concepts around negotiation, safewords, limits, the idea that agreeing to one thing is not agreeing to everything, and the idea that who you are does not imply what you're willing to do.  Even when I'm not doing kink, these are useful.  It's helped me to structure my statements about what I want based on what I want, not on what I think I'm allowed to ask for.  It's helped me put trust in my own limits.

I have not purchased an extended warranty since I started doing kink.

Face beyond beauty.

Rowdy got a new camera (this was a more involved process than most house purchases) and last night he was taking pictures of me and showing me the super-duper high-quality results.

At first, I was a little bit appalled. I'm aware that I don't look like the ladies in the magazines, but the photos made it so painfully obvious how little I look like them. If angular faces with big eyes and graceful expressions and coiffed hair are beautiful, I'm round-faced and narrow-eyed and guffawing and frizzy.

But you know, so I am. Is that why I'm not beautiful, or is it why I look like me and not somebody else? Is a linear scale from "good" to "bad" really a way to fairly describe anything in the world, much less a human being? When you go to the grocery store, you don't shop for "the best food"--you put carrots and potatoes and milk and chicken in your cart, because they're different things. Because the very best carrots are really shitty milk.

So I looked at the photos again, and made an effort to stop seeing them as not-Jessica-Alba for ten seconds and instead see what is there. It's me. It's a combination of genetics and luck and history and choices that exists nowhere else on Earth. I don't look like other people because I'm not other people.

We took some pictures of Rowdy too. One of them came out really nice; the focus is crisp, the pose is cool, and there's a lot of personality showing in his face. But Rowdy also has a weird discoloration in one eye, and this is very visible in the photo. "I'll retouch that out," he said. And I questioned: why would he? That's what his eye looks like. It's kind of cool. (It gives him eyes that are different colors! How awesome is that?) Is it more important to have a picture of the Theoretical Perfect Eye than of his eye?

I mean, there's a reason I took that photo of him and not of somebody else. If I just wanted the "best" possible photo, I would've put a picture of John Barrowman in the album. So is the best photo of Rowdy one that makes him look the most like John Barrowman while still being sort of recognizable--or is it a photo that shows what he looks like?

None of this is a protest that I'm beautiful, or that Rowdy is. (Although he so is.) Instead, it's about looking beyond beauty, as seeing appearances as conveying things in entirely different dimensions than "prettier" or "uglier." Not everything in my life is about who wants to bang me, so not everything in my face is about how bangable it is. (Not that bangability requires perfection anyway, considering what else happened last night.) I've posted about how I'm more than that, but even my appearance itself is more than that.

Am I hot or not? I'm Holly.

Gender smörgåsbord.

I think I've come up with a metaphor that clarifies my view of gender.

Imagine a big table with tons of dishes laid out. Some of them are physical traits, some of them are psychological. There's everything here from "big biceps" to "played with dolls as a child." And there are all traits here, not just things you'd associate with gender--this is a table of traits, not of mixed up boy things and girl things. "Brown hair" and "likes classical music" are on there too.

Go ahead, load up your plate. Load it with anything.

And the really important thing here is that the dishes are not paired off. "Chest hair" and "breasts" are not a dichotomy. You can get one, both, or neither. Ditto "watches pro wrestling" and "sews prom dresses." Certainly some dishes are popularly eaten together--"penis" and "testicles" is a perennial favorite combo, and "penis" and "likes racecars" do seem to have some mysterious association--but they're not locked together. It's possible and acceptable to have one and not the other. Then again, anything that's possible is acceptable. And any combination is possible.

Gender is a prix fixe menu. Pick one of two and eat what the chef serves you. And if what he decides to serve you is a shit sandwich, well--depending where you are and which course the shit sandwich is, the consequences range from trivial to life-threatening if you don't eat it. If you get some or most of your courses off the other menu, the fact that it's "the other menu" is something everyone's explicitly aware of.

But when you eat off the smörgåsbord, it's not really about mixing up gender any more; it's just about mixing up traits. And at that point, I feel that the entire concept of "gender," to even refer to the existence of the prix fixe menus, no longer serves any purpose. To see someone's combination of traits and go "well, yeah, but you're basically a woman then, right?" is to miss the entire point.



Ultimately, though, my cute metaphor doesn't really matter. Because whether you say "wow, it's exactly like that" or you scratch your chin and say "hmm, I see things differently," or even if you say "I'm offended by this because it seems dismissive of certain gender identity issues," you're not the intended audience. (Also if you're some sort of smartass that goes "what, 'has a gender identity' isn't a dish?") The intended audience is the people who are not reading, the people who would go "what is this gay shit" if they did read: the people who will treat people like shit if they feel they're committing a gender violation. Whether the shit consists of tiny backhands like "it's cool how you're a girl but you do guy things" or crappy pseudo-tolerances like "I don't care what you do in your private life, but you have to act like a normal person at work" or outright harassment or attack... it's shitty.

And I don't understand it. I've tried to dissect the thinking behind gender enforcement and I always get stuck. I don't think there is a thinking, at least in the sense of a set of principles that you could lay out logically and defend. I think it's more like a cognitive association. "That person looks funny" may be a shorthand for "that person is making me think too hard. I should be able to label someone in one swoop and know everything about them." There's also a heaping helping of homophobia--if someone isn't a clear gender, then maybe they can't be clearly heterosexual, and OH NO WE CAN'T HAVE THAT.

And there's just no explaining to a certain kind of person that we don't even require genetic heirs for inheritance these days, you can write your will out to pretty much who ever you want, plus most of us don't need to have more children so there will be more help on the farm, so the whole homophobia thing is seriously obselete. Go get a bug up your ass about the essential rightness and God-ordained fact of primogeniture or something.

Broccoli Morality.

When I was a kid, we'd have broccoli for dinner, and my mom would boil it to death with no seasonings (my mom is the worst cook), and I hated it. The answer I got when I complained?

"Of course it tastes bad. It's good for you."

It's a pervasive message in our society, one that goes way beyond dinner: virtue is the opposite of pleasure. Sexual morality is the restriction of sexual pleasure; healthy living is uncomfortable; honest work is grueling; polite living is self-suppressing. If it feels good, it must be illegal, immoral, or fattening.

Obviously, this is not 100% wrong; "if it feels good, do it" can get you in all kinds of trouble. Sometimes grownups just gotta do things that aren't fun. But taken too far, broccoli morality sends some very wrong messages:

"Morality is about avoiding excess pleasure."
Giving up pleasure may be a side effect of making good decisions, but it is never the goal. The mere fact that something feels good doesn't make it wrong. This is a big hitch sometimes in sexual morality--"you're having [nonstandard] sex just because it feels good!" Damn skippy I am.

"Your natural desires are evil."
It's not much of a leap from this to "so yeah, you're evil," and that's just horrible and untrue. It's also not much of a basis for self-improvement. Is it really worth putting that much work into an evil and greedy soul? But worst of all, it makes evil the default--doing wrong is just a slip back into your natural state, instead of something you chose.

"You can never be happy."
If your natural desires are for evil, but you have an obligation to be good, then it follows you're going to spend your whole life in a state of frustration, choking down soggy broccoli until you die. Awesome. Like the last one, this makes evil way more tempting than it needs to be. And it's just not true.

"When you grow up, you're going to have to spend most of your time working and go without most of the things you want" is a half-truth.

The whole truth is "When you grow up, you're going to have to spend most of your time working and go without most of the things you want, but you're also going to have fantastic orgasms and nights you stay up til 5 AM just laughing and books you completely lose yourself in and hugs that seem like they make the whole world right. And you should never, ever feel one bit of guilt about loving those good parts."

Also, when you grow up, you'll discover that there's such a thing as bacon-wrapped broccoli.

Hard on the butt.

I finally feel secure enough in my kinky cred to admit this: I don't like being hit hard on the butt. It's like the quintessential kinky activity, and it's not that fun for me. I like getting hit softly on the butt. I like gettimg hit hard on the upper back and shoulders. And I like gettimg tied up or ordered around and scratched and bitten and cut and clamped and tweaked and humiliated and sexually used in just any way you can imagine. But I do not like to be hit hard on the butt.

In kink circles, this is a bit like being a sushi enthusiast who doesn't like fish. Sure there are other things on the menu and you can make a full meal out of them, but when someone hears you like sushi they think "fish," and if you just ask them for "a sushi pllatter," there's going to be fish on it. And not liking fish can make you (and sometimes others, unfortunately) question whether you're really a real sushi fan. Certainly if the first sushi they serve you is fish and you turn up your nose, they're liable to believe you're a poser.

I am not a poser. Kink is what you want it to be, and while we might (probably obnoxiously) sniff at people saying "we did it with the lights on once, that's pretty kinky," that sure as hell isn't my problem. I am a submissive, masochistic, thoroughly perverse little whore. I just don't happen to like getting hit hard on the butt.

The Beta Male.

NOTE TO PEOPLE READING THIS POST:
1) Yes, it's sarcastic. The things below?  Not actually true. I thought this was apparent to anyone who had spent time on Earth.
2) If you post a bitter trolly comment, I won't let it through moderation unless I have a funny comeback.
3) Go out and make some friends. You might or might not get laid. Either way you'll be happier and know more about how humans actually work.
-Holly Pervocracy, 5/1/2012


There is a frighteningly large population of heterosexual men for whom not getting laid has become a lifestyle and an identity. They're "love shy," they're "beta males," they're "average frustrated chumps," they're "incel," they're "nice guys."

These are the tenets of their belief system:

* The word "woman" refers exclusively to slender, outgoing, fashionable, conventionally beautiful heterosexual white women under 30 who aren't too slutty. Other types of woman aren't undesirable so much as nonexistent.

*With this extreme restriction on female existence, there are far fewer women than there are men, so competition is fierce. Only the rare lucky or skilled man is able to get a woman.

*Women are not, inherently, attracted to men. A woman would certainly never pursue a man or initiate contact with him; at best she accepts applicants and judges them harshly.

*Women get an enormous thrill out of rejecting men. It's like having an orgasm while winning an Oscar and eating chocolate-covered bacon. God it's good. When a man submits his Application To Get Laid to a woman, she looks for any excuse to reject him, because she's just itching for that thrill. A woman's ideal evening is rejecting fifteen men and going home alone, and it's up to a man's luck or skill to break that streak.

*Friendship with a woman is an extremely drawn-out form of rejection, in which every time you meet and she doesn't fuck you is its own little mini-rejection. The only reason some men remain friends with women is that they continue to hold out foolish hope.

*"I love women!" Women are like sports cars you can stick your dick into. They're good to be seen with, good to use privately, and just plain fun to own. Of course these guys "love women"--who wouldn't love an awesome toy like that?

*Some men are alpha males, and everyone likes them and they can get lots of women while acting like total assholes and it's no fair. These men are chosen by random lottery at birth and did nothing to deserve their status.

*The vast majority of men are beta males, and can never ever have sex because the alphas are taking all of the women. Women meet in secret to trade lists of known beta males; this is why a totally unfamiliar man can walk into a totally new venue and all the women will just know they're supposed to ignore him. It's certainly not anything he does.

*As women are not attracted to men, a man's attempts to be traditionally "attractive"--being well-groomed, smelling good, appearing healthy and active, dressing presentably, acting good-natured and sociable--are completely pointless and no effort whatsoever should be made in these areas.

*Talking to women is a totally different skill than just talking to people, which is how someone can have an education and a job and not be a hermit and yet truthfully say he can't talk to women.

*The only hope for a beta male is an intensive course of schooling that will enable him to mimic the stereotyped behavior patterns of the alpha. These behaviors are so diverse and bizarre they merit their own post, or series of posts, or series of posts that I promise to do and then forget about because there was a shiny thing.



Fun fact: wolves in nature do not have "alpha/beta/omega" social systems! This only occurs when unrelated individuals are confined together in a way that never happens in the real world. Wolf packs are actually more like nuclear family units, in which the younger males don't mate because the females are their mother and sisters, not because they're "betas." When the males get older they'll go off on their own and a lot of them will find females and mate.

And presumably the ones who don't spend a lot of time hanging out and telling each other that it's not their fault, it's just those damn bitches.

Fat Acceptance A La Carte.

I've mentioned the fat acceptance movement in passing many times--I'm kinda fat, they say nice things about people like me, sounds great--but I don't think I've ever really dedicated a post to it. There's some things they say that I agree with, and some I don't.

There is no excuse to be uncivil or discriminatory against someone because they are fat.
Completely, 100% agree, and the main reason I read Shapely Prose. The level of schoolyard bullying that fat people are subject to, from grown adults who should seriously know better, is insane. And the media is fully in the "ha ha, fatty" dogpile--when they're not leading it. Professional news sources that bite their nails about using the proper "-American" for every other group post articles about obesity with hilarious "a rapidly expanding problem" puns and undisguised disgust. Even if you disagree with every other thing on this list, even if you think every fat person can and should diet down to a BMI of 20, at least don't be a dick.

Fat people are people and deserve respect, ditto fat people who don't diet or exercise, ditto really super-fat people, et cetera.

Fat hatred is a feminist issue.
Yes. Women are held to far more stringent skinniness standards and subject to far more shit when they don't meet them. Hell, women who aren't even fat are still expected to be obsessed with their weight! And it's all because of the idea that a woman's attractiveness to men is her worth, because what else are broads good for?

The BMI standards are screwed up.
Reserved agree. BMI itself is just a way of generating a number, but the "25 is overweight, 30 is obese" rule is too simplified and too stringent. The ideal weight is way too low for tall people--6' and 185 is considered overweight!--and for muscular people. That said, when I'm 5'1" and *cough* pounds and not a champion bodybuilder, the fact that my BMI is over 30 is a pretty good indicator that I really am fat. BMI is screwy, but that doesn't mean that overweight simply doesn't exist. You can't draw the "this is okay, this is too fat" line with a single equation for everyone--but wide and fuzzy though it may be, there is a line.

Weight loss shouldn't be a moral issue.
Completely agree. Talk about good and bad foods, about being sinful or naughty when you eat, about how exercise is a virtue and cake a vice, is bullshit and makes weight loss way too much of a crazy-making emotional issue. (As does the idea that virtuous food has to taste bad--I realize that I've dropped out of a lot of diets because they demanded I eat bland health foods or horrible food replacement substances. I would rather eat smaller amounts of delicious food.) Nor is being fat a sign that you've committed the Sin of Gluttony--or the related Sin of Needing Healthcare--and should be subject to guilt and shame.

Weight loss isn't easy.
Completely agree. Saying "calories in, calories out, it's simple!" ignores the fact that some people's bodies really screw them over with a tremendous hunger for calories in and a tremendous miserliness about letting calories out. It'll work at extremes, if you starve yourself and run all day you'll lose weight, but you'll also hate your life and possibly end up in the hospital. Figuring out a lifestyle that leads to a healthy rate of loss, doesn't make you intolerably uncomfortable, and that you can maintain for years--not simple.

And saying "just stop eating so many donuts"--dude, you have no idea how few donuts (or cake, or cheeseburgers, or bacon, or whatever) I eat. Like most fat people, I have a problem with chronically eating a little more ordinary food than I burn, not with indulging myself with super-rich reward foods all the time.

Weight loss is impossible.
This is where I start disagreeing. It seems to be an article of faith in the fat acceptance community that it's not possible to lose weight, that your set point is genetically coded and that practically no one loses weight and keeps it off. But I personally know people who've done just that. I think most people do.

Saying "diets don't work" also smacks of an excuse, when not-dieting ought to be, in a fat acceptance framework, something that requires no excuse.

Eating disorders are a serious risk of weight loss attempts.
No. Eating disorders are a risk of self-hating and perfectionist attempts at weight loss, and of pressuring children or teens to lose weight before they're fully developed. But I don't think that an emotionally stable adult following a reasonable diet and exercise plan is likely to accidentally slip into anorexia or bulimia.

Being fat isn't unhealthy.
This is the big one. And I disagree. I agree that being a little fat isn't a big deal and the research is inconclusive, but I think that significant fat--even the amount I have--can lead to health problems. I don't think I'm guaranteed to get diabetes and a heart attack at fifty, but I'm convinced it's a higher risk than if I were at my ideal weight.

And I think the fat acceptance movement really drops the ball when it comes to people who are at very high weights. There's a lot of people out there claiming that "health at every size" encompasses literally every size, and it really doesn't. In my job I saw people who were very overweight and had severe joint, cardiovascular, and blood-sugar problems at very young ages.

It shouldn't matter on the decent-person level, there is no weight that makes a person fair game for mockery, and a 200-pound person going "well, at least I'm not one of those 400-pound freaks" is being a jerk. But physically it does matter how fat you are.

Fat isn't a disease.
I wish fat was treated like a disease. No one hates people with diseases or rubs their nose in how unsexy the disease makes them. Very few people yell "sicky!" at coughing strangers or write articles on how the flu epidemic is all the fault of those fucking stupid flu sufferers who were too lazy to wash their damn hands. Doctors try to help people with diseases, they don't resignedly tsk at them to "be less sick and you wouldn't have all these problems." It's not a good idea to go around with an untreated (noncontagious) disease, but it's not a selfish or antisocial thing to do.

There's no good reason to lose weight.
Disagree. I know that even within the relatively modest weight fluctuations I've been through, I just felt worse at 190 pounds than I do at 170. I tired out faster and I was physically uncomfortable. I like to sleep on my stomach and that's hard to do with a big belly; I like to hike and that's hard to do with extra weight. The sex was worse and--accursed Society and all that--I felt embarrassed of my body more often.

These are all valid reasons, but there's a bigger one: I want to. I want to do something with my body and it's my decision. End of discussion.

Everything's gotta be good or bad for you these days.

iPhone app measures calories burned during sex

I dunno, man. I don't have sex to burn calories. I eat calories so I'll have the energy to have sex.

Also he seems pretty skinny in the photo, so while he might benefit from strength or cardio, he really doesn't have a desperate need to burn more calories.

Also this silly thing obviously wouldn't be very accurate and I'm taking it way too seriously. I guess I'm just annoyed by the idea that everything you do in your life has to be in service of your health and thereby worth. Some things are just ways to enjoy being alive, you know? It's like eating a delicious salad with really crisp fresh vegetables, then having some jerk come up and go "Good for you, that's so healthy!"




I've been reading Kate Harding's blog a lot recently, and while I don't agree with everything she says (she rejects deliberate weight loss entirely and has no problem with indefinite weight gain; I think weight loss is a valid--but not mandatory--choice and gaining weight is more concerning than just being stably fat), I like her and the community on that blog. In a world where I'm constantly being told I'm both the victim and perpetrator of a horrible epidemic, it's a place to hear that I'm really okay.

Man, I'm like a hippie vampire. I don't have nearly the niceness or the loopiness to be "accepting" of everyone, I just like to hang out with hippies so they'll accept me. It's terrible.

Why women have sex.

Because, dude, have you ever tried it? It's, like, amazing.

It's difficult to expand that to book-length, though, so instead we get this kind of bloviation.

"We do bring in men occasionally by way of contrast, but we wanted to focus exclusively on women so that the complexity of women's sexual psychology was not given the short shrift, so to speak," said Buss, a leading evolutionary psychologist.
No, I think you wanted to focus on women because:

A) The reader is assumed to be either a heterosexual man interested in unlocking the secrets to those mysterious creatures, or a functionally asexual woman interested in navel-gazing pop-psych

and

B) It goes without saying that all men need is a warm hole and thirty seconds, right? There's no need to do any research to confirm something that's obvious, duhh.

(I'm fascinated by how many men I know who've told me this, then gone into months-long girlfriend dramas where they expressed very subtle gradations of "I'm still attracted to her, right, but it's a different kind of attracted and there's someone new in my life now and I don't know if I would just hurt her at this point..." So much for warm holes.)

It turns out that women's reasons for having sex range from love to pure pleasure to a sense of duty to curiosity to curing a headache. Some women just want to please their partners, and others want an ego boost.
Humans engage in an incredibly common but societally meaningful activity for multiple reasons, stop the presses.

I'm going to write a book, "Why Women Have Lunch." Hunger is the obvious reason, but as my highly scientific survey reveals, women may also have lunch to socialize, to take a break from work, or even simply out of habit. Some women want the opportunity to try a new food, and others may want warm food on a cold day. Wow, women sure are complicated!

There is also evidence that sexual arousal is more complicated for women than for men, the authors report.
A study from Meston's lab showed a strong correlation between how erect a man's penis is and how aroused he says he is. By contrast, the link is much weaker between a woman's physical arousal (as measured inside her vagina) and the arousal she says she feels, the researchers found. This is why drugs to treat erectile dysfunction such as Viagra don't work as well in women, the authors said.
It's a two-way street, though; the man can see his wiener and go "oh, I guess I'm turned on now," whereas it's harder for a woman to know exactly how her vagina's reading to a photoplesmograph or however they're measuring it.

And Viagra doesn't work in women not because they're nebulously "complicated," but because they don't have wieners. I'm pretty sure you can have a raging little clitoral erection and still not be ready for sex if the rest of your system isn't up for it. It's analogous to saying "application of lubricant to the penis failed to ready the man for sex--men sure are complicated!"

That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, even though men and women may not consciously think about their choices that way, the authors said. If the goal of a man is to spread his genes, he would need to look for signs of fertility in a woman, which are historically associated with physical cues, Buss said.
"The adaptive problem that women have had to solve is not simply picking a man who is fertile but a man who perhaps will invest in her, a man who won't inflict costs on her, a man who might have good genes that could be conveyed to her children," he said.
Oh God, "evolutionary psychology," my favorite fucking thing ever. My question this time around is, why is it subtle? Why would something so key to our fitness be subconscious? When I have a basic survival need--when I'm thirsty or cold or have an injury--I know it. The evolved desires for things like shelter and companionship are anything but subtle. Why would mate selection be the only one that's a wacky subliminal drive hidden even from ourselves?

And it's not like I select mates at seeming random and don't know why I felt that way until some smarty-pants psychologist comes and tells me. I like men who are intelligent, respectful, physically strong, have high sex drives, and share my geeky/kinky subculture--is there any mystery there? These are attributes that make them a better partner, not necessarily a better sperm-donor/investor, and I'm quite consciously aware of that.

(There are also some arbitrary ones, like my tendency to fall for blond guys or for Native American guys, but I don't see what these have to do with fertility or fatherhood either. More likely they're based on past experiences with men who were intelligent/etc. and also happened to look like that.)

A study from Rutgers University found that, during orgasm, women were able to tolerate 75 percent more pain.
I would've loved to be a participant in that study. (Which makes me wonder about self-selection of subjects, actually.)

A 26-year-old heterosexual woman wrote, "When I was single, I had sex for my own personal pleasure. Now that I am married, I have sex to please my husband. My own pleasure doesn't seem as important as his. I believe he feels the same way."
By "the same way," does she mean "the corresponding way," that he in turn values her pleasure more, or literally the same way, that they're both just doing it to get him off? Because the one doesn't fit the "women are so cooooomplicated" paradigm, and the other is a serious problem and shouldn't be looked at as the normal way of the world.



I'm sort of interested in buying this book, but I think it lacks context without a matched set, so I'll wait until "Why Men Have Sex" comes out. Should be soon, right?

I've got analogy to this post.

Here's a question I still haven't quite learned to answer like a grown-up:

"So, uh, what're you into?"

Imagine going to the fanciest restaurant in the world. A single meal costs $1000 and you have to wait months for a reservation, but everyone swears that enjoyed properly it's worth every penny. You get there and find there's no menu, just a waiter asking "So, what'll it be?"

Except that they can't make everything, and they might laugh at you if you order something gauche, and might kick you out if you order something that really offends the chef. Other things they'll make but will be bad or mediocre. Some dishes are the best in the world. You don't know what ingredients they've got, what they're good at, or what cuisines they scoff at. There are some almost-safe bets--they've gotta do a decent steak, right?--but absolutely no sureties.

If your answer is "Well, what do you like to cook?", you look like a total dork and they just ask you again.

Order! QUICK! And sound sexy while you're doing it!




By the time I've dealt with the pressure and the risk-reward trade-offs and the urge to weasel-word them until they give me a clue, I've completely forgotten what kind of food I actually like.

It's so lame when you call it that.

Shove me to my knees, piss in my face, make me call you Daddy, beat me til I cry.


Let's engage in humiliation, watersports, role-play, and corporal.


I hate fetish labels. They distance and categorize everything that's supposed to be nasty and messed-up and visceral. It's like eating pizza with a knife and fork. Labels give a weird sort of legitimacy to things that are only hot because they're illegitimate. They're useful for detached third-person discourse I guess, but trying to "engage in corporal" when you want to be fucking hit is a miserable thing.