ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα...

From the OP: "If you sit at a desk or stare at your phone all day, this is for you. Here's how to undo the damage: - Banded Chin Tucks - Strengthen your neck flexors and fight forward head posture - Banded Pull-Aparts - Target your rotator cuff and improve shoulder stability - Banded Abduction - Activate the midline of your scapula for better posture - Lateral Deltoid Raises - Build shoulder stability and control - Banded Up-and-Overs – Boost scapular mobility and range of motion These simple banded drills will help you stand taller, move better, and feel stronger - even after hours at a desk."

but I'm hearing there's a NSFW-friendly ko-fi alternative built on atproto that's actively in the works, and being vetted by lawyers right now. as torrent-princess (OP) says, you should be able to swap out payment processors while keeping your account intact. this matters since even if stripe removes support, you'll still have a shop and all of your links intact. (ATproto is an infrastructure that bsky is built on, but is far bigger than bsky with far more opportunities.)

additionally, the Free Speech Coalition is working on a credit union specifically for adult work (including kink art) - here's the link so you can add your interest & support. Since this will be built by sex workers, there'll be far less risk of being debanked for spurious and puritanical reasons.

on a domain TLD level, there's an initiative here for a .furry domain built from the ground up by seasoned furries; it's unclear whether they'll support NSFW, but it's yet another promising turn of events for a group that's been similarly affected by censorship.

The poem frames "him" as subordinate in several ways, not just to the narrator ("i fuck him on the floor": not that getting fucked is inherently subordinating, but the narrator has all the agency in the phrase, "he" doesn't decide what happens or where) but also to "his wife". She has filled the house with chintz, meaning it wasn't his decision or his actions. "Filled" is also a choice of words that suggests that there is no space for him in the home: the only place left for him, not already filled, is the floor. To me this framing invokes the trope of the henpecked husband, whose wife has taken dominion over the home and who has ceded its control to her because it, as the domestic space, is "supposed" to be hers.

This trope, of course, is misogynist in its normative rendition: it reinforces gender essentialism, it erases the significant material benefits such "henpecked" men derive from the domestic labor of their spouses, and it dismisses women's expressions of suffering and attempts at negotiating terms for their relationships as "nagging." In the narrator's dismissal of the wife's possessions as "chintz" (frivolous, feminine, contrasted with what is "real") we can see this same misogyny at play.

The narrator's misogyny, and the central fact of the poem which is that the husband is getting fucked by someone other than the wife, quite possibly flip the power dynamics of the poem on their heads. The wife is now subordinated: both by her social marginalization based on gender (a marginalization which drives her into the home and confines her there, like OP so cogently points out! As "he" has run out of room in the home and can only get fucked on the floor, so has she run out of room socially; the only place she can control and make decisions like filling it with chintz is the home), and by the narrator who is fucking her husband in her home.

There's an additional dynamic in reading the narrator as male, which most readers seem to have done: it invokes the particular, bitter misogyny that men-loving-men sometimes direct at women expressing femininity. There's an envy to it, of course--straight and straight-passing women get to (are forced to) express desire for men, have sex with men, marry men, love and be loved by men. His wife gets to be his wife: the narrator gets to fuck him, in their home. Straight and straight-passing women also get to (are forced to) perform femininity: they can buy chintz and decorate with it, without being devastatingly punished for it like people presumed to be men are from the time they're babies. The envy mixes with misogyny to produce disdain, disgust, dismissal. We can read the narrator fucking him on the floor of their home as an expression of power and dominance (again, not that the fucking has to mean the narrator is topping, or that topping is inherently dominant, but the phrasing is stark: "i fuck him", the narrator acts upon him as an object/recipient), not just over him but over the wife in absentia as well.

Noting that "to keep it real" is AAVE, we can also introduce race as a potential lens; is the narrator, despite their dominant language, subordinated based on race in this dynamic? Is the narrator not just claiming a dominant role, but perhaps also stereotyped and limited into it as a Black person? Is the disdain of the chintz also an expression of class difference, of a rejection of the display of white wealth on the part of the wife? This is pretty speculative, of course: the use of AAVE could also be appropriative, which would suggest another tactic by the narrator to lay claim to masculinity and toughness, since non-Black people often use AAVE to try to invoke racist stereotypes of strength, violence and resilience.

I think one of the things that makes the poem so compelling for being so short is the struggle at the heart of it, this complicated jostling for power between three people and their actions over time (the wife "has filled" the house, in the past: the narrator fucks him in the present, perhaps in the habitual). Who controls the house? Who controls "him"?

Do you have full length photos to show off the entire outfit?

This is the full body picture:

It’s a separate cotton sateen shirt and skirt from (the now defunct) eshakti. Both are under a custom made waistcoat made for me by lunar rose costuming, I asked her to use a pattern from Black Snail Patterns #0220 which she did, but she said in hindsight she wished she had just drafted her own pattern for me. I’m wearing a combination chemise, petticoat and corset underneath it all.

I altered the shirt torso to be more fitted and altered the sleeves and added internal support to them to emphasize The Puff™️. For the vest, I made a little fit adjustment with darts on the back waist because I got a much better corset since commissioning the vest. (See stock photos of vest and skirt below).

I paired everything with an antique chemisette/dickey that didn’t like to stay put, and an antique top hat. the thing you’re thinking of is a chatelaine but what I’m wearing is an antique watch fob, without the watch. It has a similar function in that it clips onto my waistband and holds something that I would like to easily access, but in this case I don’t have a pocket watch. I put a broken off stick pin jewel on there to replace it.

cost of education acting as class barrier

exploitation of graduate workers

colonialist past and present

ties to military industrial complex

danger of power structure entrenching and justifying orthodox views on social issues

criticisms of academia that get made:

Gwendoline Christie in Giles Deacon, homage to The Viscountess of Poilloue of Saint-Perier by John Singer Sargent

Luke Evans in Alejandro Gómez Palomo, homage to the works of Tom of Finland

Amy Sherald in Thom Browne, homage to Miss Everything by Amy Sherald

Venus Williams in Swarovski, homage to Venus Williams, Double Portrait by Robert Pruitt

Hunter Schafer in Prada, homage to Mada Primavesi by Gustav Klimt

Gracie Abrams in Chanel, homage to Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt

Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo in Jean Paul Gaultier, homage to Winged Victory of Samothrace

Angela Bassett in Prabal Gurung, homage to Girl in a Pink Dress by Laura Wheeler Waring

Rachel Zegler in Prabal Gurung, homage to The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche