revelrymaenad

[revelrymaenad]

more people need to give themselves permission to write and draw pornography

[revelrymaenad]

For a long time 

I have thought of devotion as a giving over

As becoming other, else

To serve another's needs

My first correction was

"What of my own needs? Need I not sustain myself to be devoted?"

Then

"Do I wish to be devoted to one who would ask such a thing?"

But then

Oh

Iron remains iron when it is forged

The soil that holds a tree is still dirt

Perhaps

Devotion is not giving over myself

Perhaps

Devotion is giving myself

[revelrymaenad]

First thought: There is nothing wrong with a repetitive prayer! Repeated words are cross-culturally common. I don't know exactly what deity you're reaching out to, but there are probably short prayers that practitioners repeat.

Second thought: Prayer is many things. Dancing can be a prayer. Crafting can be a prayer. Deities are part of our communities, and prayers are a way to reach out to them. If the way you have been trying to pray hasn't worked for you, try alternatives.

Greetings witchy people!

Today's question is: What's your opinion on prayer?

I think it's really important, and should be the heart of the practice, there's just one little problem...

I find it extremely difficult.

My ADHD brain just can't seem to like it, I tried really, but I either forget to do it or am repetitive, saying the same things over and over like a little robot.

I had this same problem when I was a JW previously, I just feel so disconnected from my deity and alone.

Any advice?

[revelrymaenad]

Fancy tricks

[revelrymaenad]

more people need to give themselves permission to write and draw pornography

[revelrymaenad]

[revelrymaenad]

[revelrymaenad]

This is a great lens! I ended up with a period in my life where to relax I was consistently either reading books or taking walks outdoors. Great! These are solid patterns, good for mental stimulation and physical exercise.

Until I ended up sick with a fever and was too tired to walk or focus on books.

I had to widen my range of happiness. I found podcasts, and TV shows with lots of reminders about what had happened last episode, and music, and then I kept going.

learning that addiction is a progressive narrowing of the range of things that make one happy was kinda life changing for me. i apply it to everything not even just addiction i am always checking to ask if i am narrowing my range of happiness or widening it

[revelrymaenad]

Leaving shit you really ought to have looked at unaddressed because you didn't notice the symptoms is only half the chronic pain puzzle. The other half is when you do notice something and have to play the "okay, is this a new thing, or a long-standing issue I've gotten so good at tuning out that I literally forgot it existed?" game.

[revelrymaenad]

This is all a worthwhile read; I particularly like the way OP delineates two types of brat. "Brat" is one of those terms that I find needs a bit of pre-scene care. It's really easy for two people to think they agree on what it means and have completely different expectations.

Much like dom/sub, in fact!

D/s and Emotional Needs

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.

Dom-as-control: This may seem obvious or even trivial, but it shouldn't be dismissed: many doms are motivated by an emotional need to have some part of their life where they have total control over what is going to happen. Something that I love about this style of domination is that I always know exactly what will happen next (except if there's some emergency, safeword, or other issue to address.) There are no wild cards in a controlled D/s scene except for those I explicitly allow (like if I ask a sub to choose which whip I'll beat them with.) This is also a reason why I personally have a very hard time switching; I have difficulty with the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen next. It should be noted that this style of domination is fairly incompatible with the bratty style of submission, as the brat is constantly throwing wild cards into the scene.

Sub-as-blankspace: The other side of this coin is the sub who needs to not have to think anymore. They've spent all day deciding what to wear and what to eat and which toothpaste to buy and they just want to stop. This is a very common motivator. This sub needs specific and clear commands from a dom, without too many steps, or else needs to have a well-established protocol of kneeling and service that they can do by pure muscle memory. This sub does not want the dom to offer them a choice of whips they can be beaten with, because that forces them out of the blissful blankspace of not needing to choose.

Dom- or sub-as-service: The same emotional need can sometimes motivate domination or submission! Many people dom or sub out of a desire to please their partner. It's about taking on a defined role that you know will meet your partner's needs. It feels good to be needed, after all. This motivation for D/s is generally the best understood by the public, especially as a motivation for doms. It's generally more socially acceptable to want to control and torment people if you're doing it selflessly in order to please them. A big part of my motivation for making this speech to people, and for writing this post, is to point out that this is far from the only style of domination, and pleasing their subs is far from the only emotional need that doms might have.

Dom-as-whumper: I'm using this terminology because of the website I'm on. I'm not into whumpfic, but I recognize in people who have a visceral need to see their blorbos whimpering and bleeding the same need I have to tear apart a cute kitten with my bare hands, or to crush a sub beneath my booted foot. It's the cuteness aggression approach to domination: sometimes your sub is so cute your hands itch with the urge to destroy them. This is where domination and sadism bleed into each other; this style of domination does not work well for the sub who wants to submit without being hurt or humiliated.

Sub-as-object: Subs who like to be treated as furniture, robots, or objects are often motivated by a need to enjoy a sexual or kink situation while being free of attention and scrutiny. Obviously, some baseline level of attention is needed for BDSM safety; the dom needs to be able to notice if the sub is injured or upset. But beyond that baseline, it can feel very freeing for a sub to be turned on, blissed out in subspace, crying, drooling, whatever, without anyone closely watching or listening to them, so long as they fulfill whatever their purpose as an object is.

Sub- or dom-as-flex: Both doms and subs can be motivated by a need to feel competent. I definitely feel awesomely powerful and competent when I do a style of domination that requires specialized skill, such as hypnosis. Submission can also provide a feeling of competence: look how long I was able to stay kneeling on the hard floor! Look how perfectly I cleaned the room, exactly as Mistress told me to do it!

Dom-as-troll (or mad scientist): The sibling to this kind of dom is the writer who thinks "wouldn't it be fucked up if....?" and then writes a freaky nasty little horror story about it. A great thing about D/s is that you can have a thought like "wouldn't it be fucked up if I tied up my sub and then ate their favorite snack right in front of them?" and then you can just do it (provided you know your sub likes to be tied up and tormented.) Then you can find out how your sub would react to your terrible ideas and laugh evilly at the results. The emotional need being served here is the goblin part of your brain that wants to break things just to see how they shatter. All you need to do is find someone who wants to be broken.

Sub-as-brat: Brats are often discussed as a single type of sub, but in my experience, there are two rather different emotional needs that drive brats. Some people are brats because they need the assurance that they can act out all they want, and it won't derail the action; the dom is strong or skilled enough to subdue them no matter what nasty tricks their goblin brain gets up to. Other people are brats out of a need to live in a predictable and fair moral universe. Those brats want a very clear system of rules and punishments for those rules. Then they test the rules, and they get meted out exactly the punishment they were promised. Within the world of this scene, the world is fair, and the same misbehavior will always face the same consequences, something that rarely happens in the real world. These types of brats are rather different, because the first kind of brat doesn't care as much if the consequences of their misbehavior are inconsistent, while the second kind cares a lot.

Sub-as-beloved-pet: Or beloved child, if they're an ageplayer. I find that subs that like to be a beloved puppy are driven by an emotional need to be loved, treasured, and supported unconditionally, even if they make mistakes, even if they behave messily or clumsily, even if they look silly, because that's how a good pet owner should treat a pet. There might be discipline involved, but the discipline is very supportive and patient.

Dom-as-nurturer: Some doms are motivated by a need to be in a nurturing role that their non-D/s life may not allow them to fulfill. For example, a man who wants to express affection and tenderness to his partner but has a hard time doing so because of the way he was raised may be able to unlock that ability if his partner plays a sweet puppy and he's playing the puppy's doting owner. Basically, the D/s scene creates a little world and a set of roles in which it's expected and normal for the dom to be nurturing, even if that's not true for the dom outside of that scene.

Dom-as-enfant-terrible: The other side of the coin is a dom who needs to be in a role where they can be unreasonable, demanding, and selfish, a role that their non-D/s life may not allow them to fulfill. For example, a mother who spends all day thinking about her family's needs may relish the opportunity to center her own desires without worrying if she's being "too much." She can be impatient and fussy and demand the sub do things over and over until she's satisfied, all of which she can't do when she's working as a teacher or other caring role.

Dom-as-artist: I think this is a hugely under-appreciated motivator for doms. Many have a need to be creative and imaginative that they fulfill through domination. I've been to workshops and demos at kink conventions where I've been awed by another dom's fiendish creativity. I once watched a hypno dom with a sub who got off on being afraid, and he hypnotized her and crafted an extremely elaborate horror scene in the room, filling it with menacing shadows and phantasms. This is where I'm contractually obligated to link A Dom DM because this is where domination overlaps a lot with game running and game design.

Sub-as-aesthetic-object: The flip side of this coin is that many subs enjoy being an aesthetic object or canvas for a dom's art. Very often these are subs chasing a need to feel beautiful, or at least enjoyable to look at. Subs who want to be aesthetic objects may enjoy wearing special outfits during scenes, or being posed in sexy or appealing positions. Subs in this kind of scene may enjoy letting go of worrying about whether they look good to the dom, because the dom is shaping them to their own preferred aesthetic, whether that's via poses, makeup, shibari, or something else.

Sub-as-sexual-creature: A lot of subs enjoy being called sluts, offered up for free use, or otherwise being hypersexualized. Why is that? Well, our society has a lot of shame and repression around sex, and it can feel much easier to relax and enjoy sex if it's couched in the fantasy that you have no choice because you've been reduced to a purely sexual creature. The sub has an emotional need to give up responsibility for choosing to have sex and be sexual, because that responsibility is a heavy weight to carry.

Dom- or sub-as-taboo-breaker: This is a huge motivator for both doms and subs. We all live in a society, and sometimes we feel a need to break the rules of that society. Both domination and submission provide opportunities to do so. It's taboo to piss yourself as an adult, but a watersports scene creates a space where it is acceptable or even desirable for a sub to break that taboo. As a dom, I personally get a huge taboo-breaking thrill from slapping a sub across the face. There's something about the sheer disrespect of it, and the memory of being scolded for doing it as a child, that fills me with impish glee.

Dom-as-hunter/sub-as-prey: For the hunter to catch the prey, there must first be a chase, or at the very least an ambush. This need not be a literal chase (we sent physical acts out of the room, remember?) but it is a dynamic to hunter/prey-flavored BDSM: the hunter has to earn it. This fulfills an emotional need for both dom and sub: a dom who struggles with feelings of unworthiness can feel like they've earned their partner's submission, and a sub can feel that the dom cares enough to put in the effort to catch them. Hunter/prey also allows dom and sub to explore some pretty dark emotions within the safety of consensual kink, such as fear, obsession, and consumption.

Dom-as-shadow: I mean shadow here in the sense of shadow work. Many doms take inspiration from people who bullied them in school (and many subs enjoy re-enacting scenes of childhood bullying in a safe and consensual context.) There is a real emotional need served by claiming the power of those bullies for yourself. Those childhood cruelties can be utterly transformed by the change of context. For example, the catty whispers and sneers of straight girls who bullied me for being queer comes out very different when I perform those same catty sneers as a genderfucky adult.

Sub-as-lesser-being: While some subs like to be beloved pets, and others like to be disregarded objects, some like to be pond scum. There can be a real freedom that comes from occupying a role of being disgusting and horrible. Nothing good or useful can be expected of you, and nothing you do will ever earn praise, and so you're free from worrying about or pursuing any of those things. Sub-as-lesser-being is also a space to explore difficult emotions like shame and humiliation in a safe context.

[revelrymaenad]

contrary to popular belief not everyone has an innate sense of internal gender or care to have one or seek a name for it, some people go their whole lives without questioning their occupation in one of two gender roles, but for some people, if pressed, they don’t feel that internal sense of ‘i am a woman’ or ‘i am a man’, and in that case i feel the switch over to transgender vs cisgender relies on active identification of a gender other than the one they were assigned. if someone’s like ‘idk dude I just work here’ then that’s valid

[revelrymaenad]

We are all telling on Goody Proctor while the Devil is still giving the sacrament

The essential Tumblr experience is talking about what's happening on Tumblr as though you are not also on Tumblr.

[revelrymaenad]

I died drowning.

Not a near-death experience. Not "died on the operating table". Died like I'm the man who stood in a swamp and was struck dead by lightning, and like I'm the pattern of atoms that matches him, suddenly made ex nihilo across the way.

A cornered creature will reach for any tool. I was (am) a mage. As I scrabbled for air, not knowing which way was up, I didn't have the presence of mind to cast.

I just reached --

-- and pulled.

I was not myself. I was the riptide, the fish and the seafloor. I wasn't myself for the same reason I am not a knucklebone. The reason a house isn't a hinge.

And then I was myself again. Many think I lost an eye when they first see me, the strange witchlight glowing in my pupil.

Medics and mages understand that it's my once oxygen-starved brain that has mended itself into mimicry. If my skull ever splits, light will spill out before blood.

I am myself.

But I remember dying drowning, and I remember being more.

When a mage is badly injured, magic sometimes "fills in the gaps"—growing an arcane hand or leg. You suffered brain damage that would have killed most. Magic filled in your mind.

[revelrymaenad]

Kink & Madness

I've been thinking of madness a lot. My scene name is Revelry Maenad, a maenad being a specific type of follower of Dionysus, who is a god of madness and drunkenness among other things.

Madness is hard to define, and I firmly believe that some of that is on purpose. I've been engaging not just with madness in the present day but in mad history--shout out to The Center for Mad Culture for letting me know that was an option to dig into. Now the thing is. Once I started engaging with mad ancestors I gained a new understanding of myself.

My madness is obsessive tendencies. It's also being in pain when there's no reason for me to be in pain. (Do I have a diagnosed physical reason for my chronic pain? Yes. I also grew up with people around me insisting I must be faking because that is the response to a four year old in constant pain.) It's also my anxiety, and my queerness. And people sometimes push back against queerness as madness because there's nothing wrong with it.

You may notice something immediately in that last sentence. If queerness isn't madness because there's nothing wrong with it, what is true of my anxiety and depression and obsession? What is true of my occasional hallucinations? These are not wrong; these are how I engage with the world. Yes, they make my life more difficult sometimes. So does my queerness. And if we engage historically, these are all things that might have gotten me dropped in an asylum. (Not a complete list of them, in fact.)

Because I obsess, I need that handled in a kink space. That can be done in several ways. One of the most soothing things I've ever had a dom say in response to me asking if I was doing what she wanted was, "If I want you to change what you're doing, I'll change what I'm doing." I don't need to be constantly reading her. She'll handle it.

Or we can go fully the other way and trend into worship. My job is to track everything about them. I'm good at it because I already do.

I began writing this in response to someone asking about neurodivergent superpowers and struggles. I think a lot about how much I can talk about that outside specific diagnoses, and I think a lot about the child I was who had undiagnosed asthma and chronic pain, who was a "slow runner" and "breathed so hard they must be exaggerating" and was "overly sensitive" to physical impacts.

[revelrymaenad]

i guess i'm not as despairing as many people about the future of the planet simply because the fact that we're not in way worse shape today suggests the earth is crazy resilient

Reading anything about environmental history is like "and by 1956 the river was so full of uranium and bubonic plague that the only living organism found in it was an single amoeba which died immediately after being documented" and I'm like okay maybe today's problems aren't necessarily uniquely disastrous and unsolvable

[revelrymaenad]

replace AGAB language with what you actually fucking mean 2025

"AFAB/AMAB bodies..." -> say what body part(s) you're referring to or that are directly relevant to the conversation you want to have

"as an AFAB/AMAB..." -> is the gender you were assigned at birth actually relevant here? do you actually mean "as someone who was raised as a girl/boy"? are you sure that this experience is AGAB-specific?

"AFAB/AMAB presentation of [neurodivergence]" -> firstly I assume you probably mean "high-masking/low-masking" or "early/late diagnosed". secondly shut the fuck up

"AFAB/AMAB socialised people" -> "I have bought into terfism and am actively speaking terf language"

[revelrymaenad]

Yup. My sexual characteristics are mostly neutral with two notable exceptions (a mid/high-voice and a beard) and people are way more chill about me Existing than my friends and partners with more mixed signals.

I want to talk about how there are two distinct forms of androgyny;

Neutral trait androgyny: possessing sex traits which cannot be categorized as "female" or "male" individually. (example, having a middle-pitched voice, small almost-flat breasts/pecs, a nondescript build that is not read as "feminine" or "masculine", a unisex hair style, etc)

Mixed trait androgyny: possessing traits which individually can be categorized as "female" or "male", but in 'wrong' combination. (example, a very low voice + large breasts, facial hair + curvy build, etc "confusing" combinations of traits generally read as "feminine" or "masculine")

I find personally that these forms of androgyny are generally met with a very different reaction from society generally.