Do your research

Not so long ago I saw a post in that one Fetlife group I like about how bluntly telling people to do their own research isn’t very helpful and that people who are just starting out might not know where to start doing their own research. And just recently I saw a couple more threads from people who supposedly wanted to learn how to be good subs/how to find a relationship/some vague form of guidance but couldn’t be fucking bothered to do the tiniest bit of research on their own, which finally annoyed me enough to finish this post off and publish it.

Yes, lots of people want “guidance” or “tips” or “do’s and don’ts.” But here’s the thing: I don’t care. Bitch, you do in fact need to do your own fucking research. Seriously, you’re in the submissive men and women who love them group and didn’t manage to read a single fucking sticky? They. Are. Right. At. The. Top. Of. The. Page.

Honestly, if you are on Fetlife, you have access to some sort of computery device. That means you also have access to, wait for it, waaaaaaaait for it, GOOGLE. Fucking google it you lazy little shit. No seriously, you can directly fucking google stuff like “how to approach dominant women” or “what is a d/s relationship like?” and get some really useful results. Oh, you can’t absorb information that wasn’t told directly to you? Fuck off. Don’t come back until you actually want to learn and don’t pretend that your utter refusal to read anything that doesn’t start with @yourname means you are in any way willing to learn.

If you want to be spoon fed, fucking pay someone. Hell, I’ll google things for your lazy ass and send them to you with your name at the top if you pay me enough. You have to bring something to the table if you want people to put any real effort into helping you, and a boring question we’ve all seen a thousand times already is not enough unless it’s accompanied by cash.

That said, it is totally okay to read the goddamn stickies and not immediately understand every detail. Just for the love of god tell us what you’ve read already and what part of it you didn’t understand. Do literally anything to prove you put the tiniest amount of effort into learning things on your own and we will meet you halfway, but you have to put in that tiny scrap of effort first.

If you aren’t willing to try because it’s haaaaaaard and you’re lazy and useless, then congrats, you will never have a dom of your own! Do you think “Waaaaaahhhhhhh! Waaaaaaaaahhhhh! But that’s haaaaaard and I don’t wanna!” will fly in a relationship with an actual dominant woman? Honestly, what do you think happens in a d/s relationship? Protip: you don’t sit on your ass all day while your uber-dominant-latex-clad Mistress worships your dick. Why yes, I am here to crush your dreams 🙂

Regular human beings who aren’t getting paid to put up with your shit expect a goddamn grownup who is willing to pull their own weight in a relationship, not a whiny little baby they have to do everything for. Even someone who likes micromanaging and giving orders wants a competent adult for a partner, not a useless lump. It is simply not attractive to insist your partner do literally all of the work.

No, I don’t fucking care that it’s hard. Adulting in general is hard. Getting up and going to work when you didn’t sleep well and the weather sucks and you desperately want to stay in bed is hard. Packing a lunch every day so you can save money and pay off your debts faster is hard. Staying in and cleaning your home when you want to go out and have fun is hard. You fucking do it anyway if you want to be a grownup and not a spoiled child.

While I’m at it, have you sad bastards seriously never once tried to learn anything by looking it up online? Guess what, the same skills apply! Search for a thing, read a bunch of the results that come up. See if multiple sources agree with each other. Iff 5 sources agree and 1 doesn’t, there’s a good chance that the odd one out is wrong. Come on, this is basic internetting 101. If you’re too stupid and/or lazy to do any of your own research, why on earth would any dom ever want you?

Now, it’s entirely possible that I’ve missed out on perfectly lovely people who had a tragic failure of common sense and would immediately have gotten their shit together when they were told that asking people to spoonfeed them information is lazy and pathetic, but you know, that’s a chance I’m willing to take. Past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour anyway, so what exactly am I supposed to be missing out on?

All of that isn’t to say it’s not okay to make mistakes, but there are different kinds of mistakes and some of them are much more tolerable than others. If you make an effort to do your own research but screw it up and get the idea that submissive men are expected to call all dominant women mistress, you can recover from that very easily by explaining why you did it, apologizing, and not doing it again. As much as I loathe being called mistress, I’m willing to give someone points for trying to be respectful as long as they do better when they get better information. Other mistakes, like showing up on fetlife and expecting people to spoonfeed you information, are more of a character flaw (specifically a combination of laziness and entitlement) than they are a mistake, so I’m not at all confident they can be fixed.

And no, I don’t expect this almost 1000 word blog post to fix anyone’s character flaws either. If I could do that, I’d be a millionaire 🙂 This post is just me blowing off steam and making a space for other people who also can’t stand that particular form of laziness and entitlement to say “yeah, that’s incredibly fucking irritating!”

6 thoughts on “Do your research

  1. Thank you, grinning cat lady! 😀

    As a dude, there’s something I can’t really get. The big barrier for me was to find the non-crazy femdom people. Before that I was completely clueless, lost, confused and, to be honest, pretty much uninterested in F/m. After that it was just about following the fucking breadcrumbs of good sane information that people leave behind.

    If they are in group 42 they already found the non-crazy people, so I don’t see what could be holding them besides laziness. Wait.. no! The information they are looking for is really easy to find… so it’s not even laziness.

    Here are some tips for new lazy clueless people from a new lazy clueless person:

    * FL is a social network. Take advantage of that. If you see someone saying something you find interesting or that speaks to you in any way, follow or friend them. They will lead you to more interesting people and more interesting information. You’ve been doing this for a decade on Facebook and etc.; it should be second nature by now.

    * Get a kinky twitter account. Some of the people you find on FL share loads of interesting stuff on twitter. Surprise! Twitter is also a social network so you can use it to find more interesting people and more useful information! Yey!

    * Want more? Some of the people you’ll find on twitter maintain pretty interesting blogs. It’s pretty hard to miss as they usually can’t stop tweeting that they have a blog and that you should go read it. That should give you access to some very good information that isn’t available on FL.

    See? Stabbity is wrong! You can actually have people spoon feed you information without even asking for it! You only have to make the smallest effort in clicking some follow buttons. It might sound more trouble than just start asking questions in group 42… but it actually isn’t. FL discussions are way more useful if you have a grasp of the basics. You don’t need to be a fucking D/s expert, just read a couple of texts on fetlife/blogs and take a look at some of the groups discussions to get a feel of things. Otherwise, you might misunderstand the discussion or end up even more confused, wasting your time and everyone else’s.

    But I guess most people who’ll read the comment have the basic common sense to know all of this so… Yeah, that’s incredibly fucking irritating!

    • The information they are looking for is really easy to find… so it’s not even laziness.

      Yeah, that’s the part that really gets to me. It’s so easy to find information and these peple just… won’t.

      • I think it’s the expectation that it’ll be easy to learn prevents them from researching. The expectation of a ten minute chat would be sufficient.

        For my particular fetish, hypnosis, the information is not easy to find. Expensive books and lectures. And countless hours of practice. One can’t learn from free information on the Net.

    • I could imagine that some of them think their problem/question is that new and special and never asked that they don’t realize that there are ressources and that people have asked this before. I certainly meet some guys who were like this (and yeah, it isn’t impressive^^).
      Maybe that’s why they don’t google shit?

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