Even more spite week! Today I’m talking about how utterly fucking ridiculous it is to think that any supposed “friend zone” is a real phenomenon.

Some people really seem to believe women have a mental category called “the friend zone”, and once you’ve been sentenced to it, you can never escape and claim the sex you so clearly deserve for going through the motions of being her friend while secretly waiting for her to put out already.

I hate to break it to you all, but there is no such thing as a friend zone. “But Stabbity,” you cry, “what else can it mean when a woman I want to fuck says something like ‘I don’t want to ruin our friendship’?”

Here’s a handy translation table:

What she says	What she means
I don’t want to ruin our friendship	I don’t want to fuck you
We’ve been friends for so long, dating you would just be weird	I don’t want to fuck you
You’re such a sweet guy, I’m sure the right woman is out there somewhere	I don’t want to fuck you
You’re like a brother to me	I don’t want to fuck you
I like you too much to go out with you	I don’t want to fuck you

 

Do the translation in your head, and move the fuck on. The so-called “friendzone” is a strictly imaginary place created by the way our society vilifies women for saying no, just like the word “slut” is used to vilify women for saying yes. Yes, that does in fact mean that there is literally no way for women to win. We’re either frigid friend-zoning bitches or dirty sluts.

Guys, it if was safe to just say no, we’d fucking do it. If you want women to be honest about not wanting to date and/or fuck you, make it physically and emotionally safe for us to do so. We only lie about having a boyfriend or an early shift or a parent who’s waiting up for us because you force us to. Disgustingly often, the only way to make some douchebag leave you alone is to tell him you have a boyfriend. Your personal lack of interest doesn’t matter, the other things you need to do don’t matter, the only fucking thing some of these worthless sacks of shit care about is that another man (read, actual person, unlike women) has already laid claim to this life support system for a pussy.

So shut the fuck up about the “friend zone” and stop fucking lying to people who have tits about how you’re so interested in their lives. You’ve the fucking liar, Mr. I’m owed sex because I lied about being her friend, not the person who innocently believed you were actually her friend.

I know, I know, that title totally looks like spam. But spite week continues, and today I’m talking about getting oil stains out of clothing. Why? Because fuck you, that’s why. Also, because I am trying to make it as obvious as possible that I am a human fucking being with normal human being problems like spilling salad dressing on a sweater I like.

So here, have some links about getting oil stains out of clothing. I haven’t actually gotten the stain out of my sweater yet, but I’m hoping those links might help someone else. As well as, you know, reminding people that I have interest that have absolutely fucking nothing whatsoever to do with kink.

More spite week! Today I’m talking about a particularly awesome trilogy by Kameron Hurley called either the God’s War Trilogy or the Bel Dame Apocrypha.

To quote the description of the first book from Amazon.com:

Nyx had already been to hell. One prayer more or less wouldn’t make any difference…

On a ravaged, contaminated world, a centuries-old holy war rages, fought by a bloody mix of mercenaries, magicians, and conscripted soldiers. Though the origins of the war are shady and complex, there’s one thing everybody agrees on–

There’s not a chance in hell of ending it.

Nyx is a former government assassin who makes a living cutting off heads for cash. But when a dubious deal between her government and an alien gene pirate goes bad, Nyx’s ugly past makes her the top pick for a covert recovery. The head they want her to bring home could end the war–but at what price?

The world is about to find out.

And to quote the author:

It really is true that when you have nothing to lose, it’s easier to give yourself permission to do anything. So that’s what I did. Bug magic? Sure. Bisexual heroine? Why not? Matriarchy? Of course! Non-white protagonists? YES! Old-school biblical violence? You betcha! Also… aliens and spaceships and sword fights and organ dealers and boxing, oh my! BECAUSE I’M DYING AND LIFE IS SHIT, PEOPLE, SO WHO THE HELL CARES?

That level of “fuck it, I’m going to write whatever the fuck I want” just does it for me. It’s also pretty fucking awesome that the books are about mostly women, and mostly non-white people at that, who aren’t Christian and who live on another planet in a not remotely North American or Western European climate.

Holy fuck, it’s like it’s possible to write a worthwhile story about a person who isn’t a man! It’s even possible to write a war story that isn’t about men! And about bounty hunters who aren’t men! And magicians who aren’t men!

Kameron also writes essays like as We Have Always Fought, which should make it entirely clear why I think she’s awesome. To quote a small snippet of her essay:

When I sat down with one of my senior professors in Durban, South Africa to talk about my Master’s thesis, he asked me why I wanted to write about women resistance fighters.

“Because women made up twenty percent of the ANC’s militant wing!” I gushed. “Twenty percent! When I found that out I couldn’t believe it. And you know – women have never been part of fighting forces –”

He interrupted me. “Women have always fought,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Women have always fought,” he said. “Shaka Zulu had an all-female force of fighters. Women have been part of every resistance movement. Women dressed as men and went to war, went to sea, and participated actively in combat for as long as there have been people.”

Show me someone who says that’s not awesome and important and I’ll show you a lying, woman hating, sack of shit. We have always fought, we have always been worthwhile, we have always been a part of history. Fuck yeah to Kameron Hurley for pointing that out.

Spite week continues! Ranai reminded me how fucking cool Astronomy Picture of the Day is, so let’s talk about that. In one of my old apartments, I used to have a rasterized version of the first colour image of Mars’ surface over my couch. We sent a fucking robot to another planet and it sent back pictures! Of another planet! There is nothing not awesome about that! We’ve also seen pictures of Titan’s (one of Saturn’s moons) surface, as well as Venus‘ surface and Mercury’s.

Okay, so I’m easily excited. There’s still nothing not cool about seeing pictures of the surface of other planets. We might even send human beings to Mars in my lifetime. Tell me what’s not amazing about that. We even put a lander on a comet! Do you know how carefully the European Space Agency must have had to calculate the path the Rosetta craft and Philae lander had to take?! FYI, comets rotate really fucking quickly. And the lander was a long, long way from Earth when it landed. At it’s worst the communication lag was 50 minutes. To a certain extent the lander could be controlled from the ground, but 50 minutes is an enormous chunk of the approximately seven hours it took Philae to land on 67p/C-G.

As a programmer myself, I can assure you that is a triumph of both programming and planning ahead. If something had gone horribly wrong with the landing on the comet, by the time that signal got to Earth and new instructions got back to the lander it could easily have been far too late to fix anything. Considering how many things could have gone horribly wrong at so many stages of the mission, it is seriously fucking amazing that we put a lander on a fucking comet!

In the spirit of spite, I’ve got a whole lot of shit to say that has nothing to do with kink. So let’s talk about one of my many, many pet peeves. The idea that the term “cis” as in cisgender (which describes people whose gender identity matches the gender they were assumed to be at birth) is a slur is completely fucking ridiculous. I will mostly be talking about trans women and cis women here because I’m a cis woman and I never agreed to be used to make trans women feel shitty about themselves.

The term cis was created, as far as I know, to work around the binary created by calling people with trans histories (that is, people whose gender identity does not match the gender they were assumed to be at birth and who may or may not have taken steps to make their bodies better match their identities) trans women and trans men, but calling cis women and cis men just women and just men. The reason calling trans people trans women and cis women just women is a dick move is because it implies that trans women aren’t really women.

So calling people trans women and cis women puts us on a more even playing field. Using those terms doesn’t imply that I’m normal and trans women are weirdos, it makes it clearer that we’re just women with different histories.

Speaking of histories, the idea that all trans women’s childhoods are somehow vastly different from all cis women’s childhoods is complete and utter bullshit. I will bet you any amount of money that my childhood was more similar to a North American cis boy’s than to a girl, trans or not, who was born in India or China or Thailand or Russia or Korea or Brazil or Nigeria or Egypt. Not to mention the fact that although my parents fucked plenty of things up, they never ever told me or my sister that we couldn’t do something because we were girls. We moved firewood, we mowed the lawn, we helped bleed the brakes when the car needed fresh brake fluid, we played in our sandbox, we built huts in the woods, and we helped build a fucking house. Not to mention neither one of us regularly wore skirts when we were kids or worried much about our hair or obsessed over fashion or whatever. If there really is some sort of shared girlhood that makes all cis women similar, I’ve already failed. Not to mention that both my sister and I have ended up in extremely male dominated fields. I’m a programmer and she’s a construction worker. If you have to be girly as a child to be a woman, neither my sister nor I are actual women.

…It’s obvious that’s ridiculous, right?

Another reason it’s fine and dandy to use the word “cis” to describe me and other cis people is that nobody gets hurt because someone found out they were cis. Slurs like tr***y and n***er are slurs because they are used to remind people that they are considered less than, that people can hurt them without facing any consequences, that they will be denied jobs and housing and medical care and nobody will do a goddamn thing about it. Cis, on the other hand, is nothing more than a reminder that shit is easy for me. I won’t be denied a job because someone found out I was cis. I won’t have a date mysteriously stop returning messages if they find out I’m cis. I won’t have anyone ask massively inappropriate questions about my genitals if they find out I’m cis. I won’t be beaten or raped or murdered if someone finds out I’m cis.  In short, nothing bad happens to me if somebody finds out I’m cis or calls me cis.

So go the fuck ahead and use cis, it’s not hurting anyone and might conceivably help trans people by helping break down the supposed binary between trans people and non-trans people.

Happy Valentine’s day everyone! Let’s talk about how much love sucks!

More precisely, let’s talk about how much the common definitions of “love” suck. Usually when somebody says “I love you” they mean “I feel a feeling!” That’s nice, I guess? The problem I have with the “I feel a feeling!” definition is that I’m not fucking psychic. How you feel inside your own heart does not affect my life. How you treat me does. If the way you treat me makes me feel loved, I don’t give two shits what label you choose to put on your feelings for me. If the way you treat me makes me miserable, I don’t give two shits what label you choose to put on your feelings for me.

To me, the word love is only meaningful as a verb (not like that, pervs :)). If you can’t treat me in a way that makes me feel loved, you don’t love me in any meaningful sense. I have had entirely too many people say the words “I love you” and then prove that they didn’t. As an aside, if you’re going to come crying to me in the comments about how you can’t prove a negative, fuck all the way off. If someone consistently acts like they don’t give two shits about my happiness, they have proven that they don’t love me. And if someone supposedly loves me but expresses it the way they like instead of the way that actually makes me feel loved, they don’t love me in any meaningful sense. They might feel a feeling, but they can’t care about me very much if they’re not willing to do the stuff that actually makes me feel loved.

Here’s an example: if you love using pet names but you’re partner doesn’t like being called anything but their actual name, either come up with some kind of compromise you can both live with (maybe a non-traditional endearment or a nickname) or just deal and don’t fucking call them things they don’t like being called. If you insist on calling them sweetie or honey or whatever when you know they don’t like it, you’ve made it entirely clear that you don’t care about their feelings.

Sadly, when people say “I love you” my first thought is “stop flapping your lips and prove it.” It’s easy to say you care about someone, and much, much harder to do the work of actually making my life better. Some people seem to think just saying “I love you” means I magically feel loved and they don’t have to make any real effort to treat me well. That is not even remotely how it works, assholes. If you don’t treat me the way I want to be treated your “I love you” is nothing more than a series of mouth noises.

Speaking of actions, grand romantic gestures aren’t fundamentally loving either. They might be loving if your partner enjoys them and you treat them well even when you’re not trying to sweep them off their feet, but if you casually blow them off and disregard their feelings the vast majority of the time (or any of the time, actually), and then suddenly fly across the country to see them, you don’t fucking love them. Skip the plane tickets and spend some time thinking about whether you actually want to be in a relationship with someone you can’t be bothered to act like you care about. It’s consistency and little things that really matter, not how well you can orchestrate some magical moment that has more to do with your love of spectacle than about the person you supposedly love. There is no cheat code to relationships. If you want one, you have to do the fucking work. And if you don’t want to make your partner’s life better, then what the fuck are you even doing with them in the first place?

Another definition of love I have issues with is the idea that infatuation is love. No, infatuation is an intensely pleasurable altered state that has nothing to do with whether the object of your infatuation is actually romantically compatible with you. You might grow into meaningful love with the person you’re infatuated with, but you might also find out that they’re kind of a jerk once the infatuation wears off and you try to have an actual day to day life with them in it.

Love, aside from being a verb, isn’t meaningful if you’re trying to apply it to someone you barely know. How can it be when you have to know what actually makes someone feel loved to love them in any meaningful sense? Infatuation is nice and all, and makes it easier to get to know someone, but it is absolutely not a substitute for learning about someone and caring about what you learn. Infatuation can make it easier to do the work of caring for someone while you’re in the throes of it, but it’s how you act when the infatuation wears off that really counts. Do you still treat your partner well when you’re working extra hours to get a project done? Do you take them to the movie they’ve been looking forward to for months, the one that isn’t really your thing, even after you stop getting butterflies in your tummy every time you see them? Do you make time for them even when the laundry is piling up and you have to spend half your weekend running errands? If you don’t, then don’t fucking kid yourself that you love them.

If you “love” someone, love them. Treat them like they matter to you. Do things that make them happy. Make them a priority in your life. Love is great and all, but don’t kid yourself that you love someone when you really don’t give a shit.

This may come as a terrible shock to some of you, but kinky people ARE STILL PEOPLE. We have interests that have nothing to do with our kinks. We have opinions that have nothing to do with our kinks. We have hobbies that have nothing to do with our kinks. We interact with lots of people in ways that have nothing to do with our kinks (pipe down, Lord Captain Sir Domly Dom. You are as polite as everyone else when the cops pull you over).

It just makes me want to throw things when people act like all I am is my kinks. I’m a human fucking being, assholes. I am more than my kinks. I AM MORE THAN MY KINKS. Assuming that everything I have to say, even on this blog, is related to my personal kinks or to the fact that I’m kinky is dehumanizing bullshit. You are literally treating me like I am less than fully human if you act like I have one and only one interest, that I could never possibly have an interest in or something to say about anything that isn’t directly related to kink. Only badly written characters are that one dimensional, literally all actual humans care about more than one thing in their lives. Even the most dedicated activist sometimes just goes for lunch with her sister to catch up on her life. Even the most driven attorney sometimes listens to a comedian’s podcast. Even the most obsessive nerd takes a break from the machine learning code they’re working on and plays a game with a friend. So why the fuck can’t I have more than one interest? Why the fuck don’t I get to be a person too?

It’s not as if I’ve never talked about anything unrelated to kink on this blog. I’ve yelled about blackface, about racist violence, about violent misogyny, about not as violent misogyny, about how ridiculous it is to assume women “aren’t visual” when mainstream porn might as well have been designed specifically to turn us off, about how women should have the right to have sex for money if they damned well want to, about why people who think there should be a straight pride parade are ignorant douchebags, about how much I hate being told that I need to forgive, about people being bad at polyamory in multiple ways, and about how utterly pathetic concern trolls are. I’ve also talked about games, web comics, and how much I miss my kitty. Sure, that’s a small subset of all my posts, but it’s obviously not unusual for me to talk about things other than kink.

So again, why the fuck can’t I have more than one interest? Why the fuck don’t I get to be a person too? How come non-kinky people get to have interests that have nothing to do with the way they like to have sex but I’m treated like a one-dimensional kink bot?

In case you’re still not getting it, here are some more examples. I like wine. I’m a hobbyist wine nerd – I like going to wine tastings and I get excited about fancy multi-course dinners with wine pairings. What the everloving fuck does my interest in wine have to do with me being dominant? What does my love of dry rieslings have to do with me being a sadist? What does my general dislike of lighter reds have to do with my knife kink?

Oh that’s right, NOTHING. Because I’m a human fucking being with more than one interest.

I also like food (I’m sure that’s shocking to hear from someone who likes wine). I like trying new restaurants, I like finding ideas online, I like enabling my husband when he has ideas about delicious things we could make if we got some new equipment, and I just like food a whole lot. What the fuck does my love of sushi have to do with me being dominant? What the fuck does the unreasonable amount of smoked salmon I eat (the smoker was so, so worth it) have to do with me being kinky?

Oh that’s right, NOTHING. Because I’m a human fucking being with more than one interest.

I also like fantasy novels. I love reading about what it would be like if fairies really existed or if magic was actually a thing. I love reading about worlds and about people who are nothing like anything I encounter in my daily life. I love reading about people saving the world, or saving their city, or just saving themselves. What the fuck does any of that have to do with my kinks or my d/s orientation?

Oh that’s right, NOTHING. Because I’m a human fucking being with more than one interest.

Are you all seeing the theme here? Acting like I only have one interest is treating me like I am less than human. If you’re going to do that, fuck all the way off and take your ridiculous dehumanizing bullshit with you.

In  the spirit of showing that dominant women have interests that have nothing to do with kink (and because my brain is tired), I’m going to ramble a little bit about webcomics I like.

Right now I’m catching up on Questionable Content (not as questionable as it sounds!) by Jeph Jaques, which is about, to quote the FAQ “romance, indie rock, little robots, and the problems people have. For a more detailed explanation (including spoilers, beware) why not check out the WikiPedia page?” The world it’s set in is almost like ours except for the occasional robots. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s sad, but the characters are so vivid and relatable that you can’t help caring about them.

Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell is also excellent. It’s a fantasy story about a girl named Antimony Carver who attends school at Gunnerkrigg Court. The world it’s set in is fascinating, but I don’t want to say too much and spoil it. I will say that I really like how the author is comfortable letting the world be mysterious and doesn’t explain everything right away.

One of my favourites is A Softer World. This one doesn’t have an ongoing narrative, each comic is a set of photographs by Emily Horne captioned by Joey Comeau. A softer world often has a black humor that really does it for me. Here are some of my favourites.

Chaos Life and Finding Chaos are both done by A. Stiffler and K. Copeland. Chaos Life is an adorable semi-autobiographical comic about A, K, and their cats, and Finding Chaos is a really good urban fantasy. I have to laugh at myself for this one because I’ve been reading Chaos Life for quite a while and only just realized that if Chaos Life is at chaoslife.findingchaos.com, maybe there’s something else interesting at findingchaos.com. Bad nerd, no twinkie!

Oglaf is mostly a charmingly weird sex comedy, and sometimes just charmingly weird. Don’t forget the mouseover text when you read this one, it’s amazing.

Lackadaisy Cats by Tracy J. Butler doesn’t update very often, which will make perfect sense when you see it. Each page is incredibly detailed, it must take ages to create one. Lackadaisy Cats follows the story of a group of prohibition era rum runners in a world populated by anthropomorphic cats. The art in this one is amazing, you should check it out for that alone.

YU + ME: dream by Megan Rose Gedris is, in her own words: “a surreal love story. It is part high school romance, part journey/adventure story, and part total-mind-fuck. It is a complete story, so you don’t have to wait for updates!” Or to give you a little more detail “Fiona Thompson goes to Catholic high school. She doesn’t have much in the way of friends until she meets Lia, a new girl at school. The two begin a relationship. Meanwhile, the people in her life begin acting strangely, and her parents are hiding someone from her past from reaching her. Just when she thinks she has it all figured out, she discovers that the past six months of her life were just a dream while she was in a coma. It’d be very cliche, if that was the end of the story. But Fiona finds her way back into the Dream World, ruled by a mysterious girl called Sadako. Now she’s literally searching for the girl of her dreams.”

Templar, Arizona, by Spike is also a fun read. She says that “Templar, Arizona is a story about a town that doesn’t exist, and the people who live there. I alternately describe it as speculative fiction, an alternate timeline, and an alternate history.” Spike also runs Iron Circus Comics, a small publishing company that puts out comics like Smut Peddlar, which is an amazing (and award winning!) anthology of woman friendly erotic comics, Poorcraft, which is a really informative comic book about living well on little money, and Sleep of Reason, a horror anthology which I haven’t read but can safely assume is awesome given everything else Spike has done.

Go forth and read!

Every once in a while I get an email or a comment from some pathetic fucking mouthbreather who has some absolutely shocking news for me. I would never in a bazillion years have guessed what they told me.

Are you ready? Make sure you’re not eating anything, you could choke on it when you gasp in shock.

Okay, here goes: I’m not very nice!

It’s okay, it was a huge shock to me too. I don’t know how I managed to write over 90,000 words (according to the Word Stats plugin, anyway), without figuring it out, but you know, I am only a girl. Clearly I can’t be all that bright.

The truly sad part is why these snivelling manchildren felt compelled to tell me what a big meanypants mcpoopyhead I am: apparently if I were just nicer, more people would listen to me. That’s some idiotic bullshit for so many reasons.

First of all, people who don’t like what you have to say will always, always find an excuse not to listen to you. There is absolutely no level of niceness that will make a racist shitstain, for example, listen when you say that maybe cops should stop murdering black people. It’s not your level of niceness that’s preventing them from listening to you, it’s their racism. Given that simple fact, where exactly is my motivation to tiptoe around asshole’s poor hurt fee-fees? If you don’t like the way I write, don’t read my blog. There are only around 74 million other sites on wordpress alone (not all of those are necessarily blogs, but it seems pretty likely that a large portion of them are).

Also, it’s just funny that (so far) I’ve only heard this particular brand of whining from men. I thought women were supposed to be the emotional ones, and here you little shits are crying that reading a few swearwords is so awful that you couldn’t possibly be expected to see my actual point. Which one of us is being emotional again?

Second, I fucking know my writing isn’t for everyone. If I gave a flying fuck at at a rolling donut about this wider audience that I’m supposedly alienating (you know, the ones who wouldn’t listen to me anyway), I would already have changed the way I write. People, I’ve been writing this way since 2011. You can safely assume that either I’m happy with the results I’m getting or that I’m too stupid to understand the connection between cause and effect, in which case nothing you say is going to make a difference. In both cases, it’s pretty fucking clear that your message is about you, not about me. You know where things that are about you go? That’s right, on your own fucking blog!

Third, it’s like none of these people have ever read the goddamn blog they’re whining about. How on earth do you read a post like “Forced” Feminization and think that I’m going to give a shit if you don’t like me? Or my post about cuckolding? Or my post about how there are clearly too many women on Fetlife? Or my post about dumbinants behaving badly? Or basically anything I’ve ever fucking written? If you’re going to waste time whining and crying about a blog post, actually reading it first is literally the least you can do. If you paid any attention to the awful nasty words on the page, you would be able to figure out that I’m not here to be liked. My blog is for me, not for you. I allow comments because most of my commentors have interesting things to add, not because you have any sort of right to squirt your verbal diarrhea on my blog and expect me to leave it there.

Finally, it’s just unbelievably pathetic to whine about my tone and pretend it is, ever has been, or ever will be about some imaginary failure to get my point across. That particular flavour of horseshit is well known as concern trolling, and it is fooling absolutely no one. Honestly, I’d respect you little shits more (not much, but more than I do now) if you would just fucking admit that I make you uncomfortable and you want me to shut up. We all know that’s what this is really about. You’re talking about what a big poopyhead I am because you don’t have anything even vaguely resembling an argument and you fucking know it. If you really care about my point getting out to people who are such pathetic little babies that they can’t deal with a woman who won’t kiss their asses, you are absolutely free to write your own “nicer” (read, watered down to the point of blatant asskissing) post inspired by mine. We all know you won’t, because that would imply I have something worthwhile to say, but there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from posting your own “niceified” versions of my posts.

Again, for the those in the back: I know not everyone will like my writing style. I don’t fucking care. Neither do you, if you’re honest. Just admit I make you uncomfortable and if you absolutely have to whine about it, do it on your own blog and don’t waste my time.

I cannot fucking believe the bullshit some sadists pull. A reader going by the name Sean left kind of a horrifying comment on my post “Submissive != Masochist, Dominant != Sadist“:

Yes! Great post and this is a huge problem. I am NOT a masochist. Personally I am an anti masochist, I am really really really turned off by someone intentionally inflicting pain on me. I see it as someone harming me on purpose. I AM submissive and would love to find a dominant partner – but I can’t. I live in SF Bay area so you would think I could. Finding a dominant non sadist female is nearly impossible.

So then the problem boils down to getting a dominant sadist female that is willing to put limits on themselves during our sessions. This turns out to be very hard. I have ‘hard limits’ which are written and spoken and reviewed prior to any session. So far they have been violated every single time I have had a session. The dominant usually has a very dismissive attitude about these violations. They are sadists after all so it is logical that they don’t feel bad about inflicting pain or marking my body even though those activities are not consensual.

At this point I have stopped having sessions because I can’t find a partner. Not sure what I should do, and it is very frustrating.

I already left a ragey reply, but I’d like to go into more detail and I’d like to publicize my feelings on this bullshit as widely as possible.

It is absolutely never okay to do anything to a person that they didn’t consent to before the scene started (consent alone is not necessarily enough, but that’s a separate post. The short version is that ideally everyone should feel good about what they did after the scene, regardless of what they gave permission for). Sadism is not, never has been, and never will be an excuse to ignore people’s limits. Sadists are human beings, not the kinky version of boner werewolves. We absolutely can and should be expected to control our own behavior or to remove ourselves from situations where we may not be able to maintain control. This is literally the least you can expect from a decent human being.

It doesn’t fucking matter if you’re kinky, you do not do anything to anyone without their consent. The idea that it’s normal or acceptable for sadists not to respect your limits is ridiculous. There is absolutely nothing special about sadists or about any other kinky person that somehow magically makes it okay for them to act like complete assholes.

It just makes me so angry that people have outright lied to this poor guy about what it means to be a sadist. Being a sadist only means that you derive some sort of pleasure (not necessarily sexual) from inflicting pain. It absolutely does not mean that you lack the most rudimentary set of ethics that would prevent you from hurting people without their enthusiastic consent. The word for that kind of behavior is sociopath, not sadist (which is not to say that sociopaths are never sadistic). It is unbelievably creepy to hear that this commentor has been playing with people who don’t see him as a human being and don’t even see anything wrong with their obviously reprehensible behaviour.

What the hell is going on in the kink scene that makes anyone think this is okay? As a community we have profoundly failed Sean, who should never ever have thought it was reasonable for people to ignore his limits. We have failed everyone else who has come into contact with the kind of assholes who ignore people’s limits if they’re not convenient. We may have even failed the assholes in that there is some chance they mean well but have been told that real doms do x, real subs always want y, and not to pay too much attention to what any given person actually says about what they want. I still think you’re a jerk if you ignore the actual human being in front of you in favour of some bullshit you’ve been told about how to treat s-types, but there is a lot of terrible information out there and even well meaning people can fuck up pretty badly if they’re told they need to act a certain way to be acknowledged as a real dom.

Just to be totally clear, here is how a sadist who is also a decent human being behaves when they want to play with someone who isn’t interested in receiving pain for whatever reason: they don’t inflict pain on that person. It’s that simple. Either you negotiate a scene involving some of the many many fun things that don’t involve pain, or you decide the two of you are not a good fit and don’t play.

If you like inflicting pain and don’t care to have scenes without it, that’s totally fine. I personally don’t do a lot of scenes that don’t involve pain because I really fucking like hurting people who want me to hurt them. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have the kind of scene that best suits you, but godfuckingdammit you respect people’s limits when you have that scene.