Just Your Average Bookish Queer Thing

This post is basically a transcript of a speech I give to newbies to the D/s scene all the time IRL. I figured it might be useful not only to people curious about kink IRL but also to smut writers here on the smut writing website.

For the purposes of this post, I am sending specific physical acts out of the room. Right now they don't matter, because you can meet an emotional need through any number of physical acts. So when I say that there are many ways to dom and many ways to sub, I am not referring to many kinds of physical acts. I mean that there are many emotional needs that doms and subs bring to scenes, and those can change the scene more than the choice of physical acts that will occur in that scene.

I say this to newbies to the scene because they tend to have a narrow view of the motivations and needs that bring people to D/s, biased by both the newbie's own preferences and the depictions of D/s they've seen in media. The same is true of people who write kink fic. Kink fic is very biased to a narrow subset of the wide range of emotional needs that people might bring to this kind of play.

It's really important to understand this in D/s IRL because a mismatch or miscommunication about these needs can lead to a bad scene. For example, let's take the approaches of sub-as-beloved-pet and sub-as-object. If a dom treats a sub as a beloved pet when what they really want is to be treated like an object, then a sub who went into a scene needing to be ignored, or at the very least the illusion of being ignored and disregarded, is suddenly in the spotlight of a lot of intense attention and affection. Again, I will note that both of these scenes could potentially involve the same physical acts, just approached differently. Let's say it's a service submission scene where the sub is naked and cleaning the room for the dom. Sub-as-beloved-pet would get frequent praise and lots of patiently repeated instructions, while sub-as-object would get one detailed instruction at the beginning and no reinforcement except a punishment if they get part of the instruction wrong.

I'm going to go through a bunch of different styles of dom and sub, with the emotional needs that underlie them. This list is not exhaustive. I'm sure there's more I haven't thought of or encountered, so feel free to reblog with additions. It may also be a bit dom-biased because I'm a dom, but I think that might be for the best, because the emotional needs of doms are generally less understood than those of subs.

Various consensual kinks discussed below. Kinkshamers in the notes will be blocked with extreme prejudice.

George Washington: another day volunteering at the betsy ross museum. everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag. buddy, they wont even let me fuck it

John Adams: "ah boo hoo hoo i want to post Foul comments to content leaders" Fat Chance, Dimwit. I will annihilate you under bulwark of the Law and God.

Thomas Jefferson: Q: If your post was proven by a counsil of wise men to be racist, or bullshit, would you bar it from the record? A: I do not delete my posts

James Madison: (sniffing a crumpled up one dollar bill i found on the floor of a dog kennel) ah.. thats greenbacks baby

James Monroe: for decades i have traversed the unforgiving mountains and rivers of south america, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fabled "ass downloader"

John Quincy Adams: "This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender," i holler as i overturn my uncle's barbeque grill and turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit

Andrew Jackson: handing Faves over to my enemies is FRAUD !! base, contemptible FRAUD!

Martin Van Buren: Food $200

Data $150

Rent $800

Candles $3,600

Utility $150

someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

William Henry Harrison: (spends all of 7 seconds skimming some blog posts) yep. just as i knew all along. having pnuamonia is good

John Tyler: fuck "jokes". everything i tweet is real. raw insight without the horse shit. no, i will NOT follow trolls. twitter dot com. i live for this

James K. Polk: thhere is no such thing as charisma, and art is fake. the only metrics by which we must determine the worth of a man are Strength and Wisdom

Zachary Taylor: the doctor reveals my blood pressure is 420 over 69. i hoot & holler outta the building while a bunch of losers tell me that im dying

Millard Fillmore: trying to heal..... please donate to my go fund me... $10 will make me less racist... $100 will make me extremely less racist...thank you...

Franklin Pierce: blocked. blocked. blocked. youre all blocked. none of you are free of sin

James Buchanan: #NationalGirlfriendDay please cherish your gal's.. in honor of us, the single Boys who must sacrifice all companionship to #CarryTheBrand...

Abraham Lincoln: unloading an entire belt of ammo at me with a minigun or some such device will now get you "Blocked"

Andrew Johnson: who the fuck is scraeming "LOG OFF" at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never log off

Ulysses S. Grant: i regret being tasked the emotional burden of maintaining the final bastion of morality and Nice manners in this endless ocean of human SHIT

Rutherford B. Hayes: using the toilet when i hear Our national anthem start to play. i do what i must. i stand tall in complete agony; as shit runs down my leg,

James A. Garfield: too much truth in such little time. feeling the heat cominh down to silence me... signing off........ for now

Chester A. Arthur: i WILL wise the fuck up. i WILL super charge my content for 2017. i WILL get blue check mark

Grover Cleveland: the way i see it, people who come on here and submit content that is not up to par, could possibly be considered the "Villains" of this site

Benjamin Harrison: i help every body, im not racist, i keep myself nice, and when i ask for a single re-tweet in return i am told to fuck off, fuck myself, etc

William McKinley: boy oh boy do i love purchasing large amounnts of Fool's Gold. wait a minute... fools gold fucking sucks. this stuff is no good..!! Fuck !!!

Theodore Roosevelt: IF THE ZOO BANS ME FOR HOLLERING AT THE ANIMALS I WILL FACE GOD AND WALK BACKWARDS INTO HELL

William H. Taft: ah.. the perfect Souffle! cant wait to dig in to t(*EVERY PIPE IN MY HOUSE EXPLODES AT THE SAME TIME, COVERING ME IN SHIT AND BOILING WATER*

Woodrow Wilson: the conflicted supersoldier stares over the horizon as he smokes a cigarette. "war is the most fucked up thing ever." he takes a sip of beer

Warren G. Harding: somebody please Bribe me

Calvin Coolidge: aggressively joyless oaf hhere. painfully obnoxious respect demander checkign in. extremely dim witted frowning man looking for pals

Herbert Hoover: it is really quite astonishing that I have yet to win The Lottery, given how good I am at selecting six numbers and saying them out loud

Franklin D. Roosevelt: ive never heard of this “europe” but it sounds like a big bunch of shit to me

Harry Truman: everybody wants to be the guy to write the tweet that solves racism once and for all because it would look good as hell on a resume

Dwight D. Eisenhower: my "F*&k It!! Let's Go Golfin" t-shirt maintains a tenacious stranglehold on my life. after 1,125 days of Golf my body is twisted, deformed

John F. Kennedy: when you do sutuff like... shoot my jaw clean off of my face with a sniper rifle, it mostly reflects poorly on your self

Lyndon B. Johnson: incredibly handsome , charismatic famous boy credited with ending income inequality after saying that slumlords should be called "dumblords"

Richard Nixon: i attribute the complete failure of my brand to the actions of detractors, oor my “trolls”, as it were, as well as my own constant fuckups

Gerald Ford: shutting computer down until the shitty moods & attitudes can fuck off., if you need me ill be on my other computer, sititng 60° to my right

Jimmy Carter: i warnned you all that bad things would happen if you kept letting your wives wear jeans. AND NOW LOOK! the damn gas prices are up again

Ronald Reagan: spend a lot of time thinking about how sometimes even war criminals can be heroes sometimes... Dont like it? Click the unfollow buttobn

George H.W. Bush: just thought off an idea i believe to be bad ass. lets find the address of the leader of isis, and mail him/ her pieces of our SHIT

Bill Clinton: were at the point now, that when i offer to impregnate my girl followers, people assume my motives are sexual. disgusting, grow the fuck up,

George W. Bush: friday night gathering up together a big pile of things i like to respect (flags, crucifixes ,etc) and just roll around in it ,give kisses,

Barack Obama: my IQ has increased 10 points ever since i stopped tollerating people mucking about, on the time line

Donald Trump: THERAPIST: your problem is, that youre perfect, and everyone is jealous of your good posts, and that makes you rightfully upset.

ME: I agree

At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).

Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.

On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.

At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).

...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).

E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.

(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)

Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.

...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”

In the lead up to the American Revolution, you see newspapers talking about women – many if not most of whom had never spun a day in their lives, either because they were wealthy and didn't have to or because they were poor but didn't have time to among all of the other things they had to do for their families or their jobs, and professional spinster's existed, so why would they? -Getting together "spinning bees" to try and make homespun thread for homespun fabric so they could boycott textiles coming from England. These women were hailed as paragons of patriotic womanhood (never mind the fact that we have no evidence they ever produced scalable amounts of textiles, or even like… High-quality anything. Most of these bees seem to have been one-off events that were almost more about performing femininity and patriotism than actually producing threads/fabric)

And moving into the 19th century, the image of the spinning wheel became ubiquitous here in the US when talking about women in earlier American history. Longfellow's poem about his Mayflower ancestors features the female protagonist at her spinning wheel, even though textile production wasn't really a thing in the new colony at the time when the events he wrote about took place. Popular illustrations showed colonial women spinning at home. In the early 20th century, an art photographer named Wallace Nutting and his wife Mariet Griswold staged images of imaginary colonial interiors that almost always involved some type of antique spinning wheel as set dressing (to the great annoyance of later museum workers, who are forever having to debunk his photos in various ways)

It is very obviously not a fucking siege tower, like 1) in the majority of cases their designs are round and crenellated in the style of western European post-Norman fortifications, which is not remotely what a siege tower looks like, 2) why the fuck would a siege tower be in a pitched battle such as that depicted by the game, what the fuck do you think they're besieging, and 3) do you think a fucking siege tower can cross a battlefield at speed???

“She already beat him in every way that mattered.” She just didn’t know it until she saw him again. She didn’t know he was no longer a threat to other young children and their mothers until she saw for herself that he’d been neutralized. She didn’t know how much she had grown until she stood next to him and realized she was the one looking down instead of up. She never could have known any of it without seeing him with her own eyes, and that’s why seeking him out was her only path to peace.

This episode and Katara’s choices are so misunderstood because people hear Aang’s arguments about forgiveness and peacemaking and forget that’s not what this story is about. This has always been a story about a boy who runs away from hard things.

The context that frames this episode is the final lead-up to a confrontation Aang doesn’t want to have. He’s giving Katara the advice (and permission) he wishes someone would give him. He doesn’t want to face the Fire Lord; he wants to do what he’s always done: dance around the problem then bail. But he can’t. Zuko had to stand up to his abuser and speak his truth, and he will yet have to face and beg forgiveness from the father figure he rejected. Katara has to face the demons from her past. Toph had to reconnect with her parents (via letter while maintaining her boundaries, but she’s not hiding or pretending the Gaang kidnapped her anymore). Sokka had to face his inadequacies. Aang doesn’t get to change the subject and run away anymore.

Forgiveness vs. revenge is a false dichotomy here. Neither was the solution. Neither was the point. The whole argument was Aang’s last-ditch effort to give himself an out. A red herring. A non sequitor. And Katara calls bullshit. Just like Zuko does with the final line of the episode: “What are you going to do when you face my father?” Because unlike Yon Rha, Ozai is a known, very active threat; and Zuko understands from sad experience that Ozai will only view an olive branch as a sign of weakness and an excuse to escalate his violence. “I forgive you on the world’s behalf,” was never a valid option. And couching it as “Air Bending pacifist philosophy” was never going to make Aang “the bigger, better person.” (If you are the only other armed person in the building during a mass shooting, you don’t get to forgive the shooter on behalf of his current and future victims then pat yourself on the back for being virtuous. That’s not enlightenment; it’s just cowardice wrapped in a fuzzy blanket of self-delusion.)

But back to Katara, who has spent her entire life living in the shadow of her mother’s murderer. Until Katara saw Yon Rha as he truly was, she could not see herself clearly. Katara weighing herself against the monster that haunts her nightmares and finding him outmatched and outclassed, understanding that she is no longer the little girl who needed rescue, knowing that she is bigger, stronger, more powerful, and scarier than any demon she could face… That’s what she needed.

She was never going to get that by listening to Aang and avoiding the confrontation. If she had taken Aang’s bad advice (and it was bad advice, no matter how moral and peaceful it sounded), she would have continued being that scared little girl forever. No matter how skilled or powerful she became, that shadow would always loom larger.

who you tappin and who you cappin?

>look north

You see several people arguing passionately about something. You can't make out any words, but one of them is wearing a Steven Universe shirt.

>look east

You see untagged porn.

>look south

You see a featureless gray wall immediately in front of you.

>look west

You see a featureless gray corridor extending off an unknown distance into the darkness.

>move west

You venture forth into the hallway. As you take your first step, your foot bumps into something solid.

>look down

You see a knife on the ground. Though its blade is pitted and dulled by time, it still gleams in what little light remains here.

>take knife

You pick the knife up and put it in your pocket. Its heft feels good in your hands.

Gained 1x KNIFE.

Your stomach begins to rumble...

>check inventory

You are holding: 1x KNIFE, 1x STICK, 1x TINDER.

>use knife on stick

You sit down and whittle the stick to a point.

Lost 1x STICK, gained 1x SPEAR.

>make angsty post

You cup your hands to your mouth and yell out into the darkness. "Man, I'm such a waste of space, even getting drunk doesn't make me feel better any more, I should just die!"

>listen west

Through the overwhelming silence present in this place, your ears faintly begin to pick up the scrabbling of talons on stone.

>look west

Although its gray skin has evolved to blend in perfectly with the gray walls and oppressive darkness of these halls, you can just barely make out the form of a wild Anonymous approaching, drawn by your cries. Its sunglasses-covered eyes glint in the darkness. Although it has no mouth to move, it speaks constantly in a stream of consciousness as it patrols. As it draws closer, you can make out some of what it's saying: "you just want attention, if you actually cared you'd [chewing noises], drug addicts like you are worthless..."

>throw spear at anonymous

Your aim is true: the sharpened stick flies down the hallway and pierces directly through one of the Anon's reflective eye coverings. It shudders, twitches, and gurgles as its pitch-black blood pours out in gouts, never breaking eye contact with you or stopping its rambling until it just abruptly... ends.

>skin anonymous

Sorry, I don't know what you mean by "skin".

>use knife on anonymous

You bleed, skin, and field-dress the Anonymous corpse.

You gained 1x RAW ANONYMOUS MEAT and 1x RAW ANONYMOUS HIDE.

>cook raw anon meat

You can't do that without a fire.

>use tinder on spear

You can't use those items like that.

Your stomach rumbles again, louder this time...

>examine tinder

An app you used a lot in 2015. You were quite the manwhore back then.

>fuck

How London Boy Learned Where Milk Comes From

LONDON.—Ernest Brown, minister of health, read the following essay he received from a 10-year-old London East End boy who had been evacuated to the country: “The cow is a mammal. It has six sides, right and left and upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this he sends flies away so they don’t fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so his mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, milk comes and there never is an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realized but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell and one can smell it far away. This is the reason for fresh air in the country.

“A man cow is called an ox. The cow does not eat much but what it eats it eats twice so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos and when it says nothing at all it is because its insides are full up with grass.”