Bakugou has never cared much about whether or not his partner is experienced, or less experienced. Never had much of a kink or fetish when it came down to how much sexual experience someone had, but—there’s just something about you. You with your unsure lip biting and lowered eyes, your twisting hands and nervous little chuckles.
“I don’t really know how to kiss,” you share with him, a secret, a whisper passed from your hovering mouth to his own. It’s been an odd some amount of dates you two have been on by now, and this time you went back to his apartment afterwards. You sit on your knees beside him on his too big couch, his legs facing you, arm around your waist, yours around his shoulders.
“Really?” Bakugou asks, doesn’t mean to sound as teasing as he does, as breathless. But, he’s surprised more than anything—you, as sinfully seductive as you are, don’t know how to kiss someone? He leans back to take you all in, a tiny little smile lilting the corners of his mouth.
“No, not really,” you murmur, running a hand through the hair on his nape, eyes bouncing all over his face, yet avoiding his eyes. “Will you teach me?” You ask, and who is Bakugou if not a weak man?
So he shows you the proper way to kiss somebody, a hands on demonstration. He pulls you in real close, guides your head to tilt to the right, purse your lips like this, run your tongue over his like that. Now suck on it, let out all the pretty sounds if it feels good, kiss him just like that. And before you know it, you’re a pro.
The next time you see him, you ask him the proper way to give someone a hickey. I don’t wanna give you a blood clot, you had laughed, sitting on his lap this time. And Bakugou, ever the great teacher that he is, shows you how. Demonstrating on your neck, your collarbone, your tummy, your inner thigh, the curve of your ass. You don’t give him nearly as many hickeys as he gives you, but the big purpled one sitting over his pulse point, he wears proudly until it fades. And after that, he’s asking for another, and another.
And after a few months into your relationship, do things finally start getting real hot and heavy. He sits at the island in his place, tired, arms folded, back leaning against the island and his head lolled over on his shoulders. He’s surprised when you sink to your knees in front of him, all doe eyed and incubus smile, hands resting on his thighs.
“Can you show me how?” You don’t even have to specify what you’re talking about, but you eye the way his cock already jumps to attention under his shorts. If this were anyone else, he’d bat them away and tell them that he didn’t feel like playing teacher. But with you—he’d gladly show you any and everything your heart has ever yearned to know.
“Breathe through your nose, baby.” He instructs you, hand gathering your hair in his fists. Your mouth stretches wide around his cock, eyes watering, but you push through it all. He tells you to wrap your lips around your teeth, to swallow whenever his tip brushes the back of your throat. Shows you how to stroke whatever you can’t reach, rub his balls in your palm whenever he starts getting close.
He doesn’t have to teach you how to swallow.
When you ride Bakugou for the first time, you don’t even have to ask for instructions. Just give him that look, all pouty and pitiful, hands on his chest as you grind against his cock resting against your lower belly. Barely any words are spoken as he guides you, lifts your hips, teases his tip against your hole, stomach fluttering in anticipation.
After that, you feel like a pro when it comes to doing anything with Bakugou. But, he doesn’t mind playing teacher whenever you need a little bit of guidance.
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When the app tries to make you robo-scab
When we talk about the abusive nature of gig work, there’s some obvious targets, like algorithmic wage discrimination, where two workers are paid different rates for the same job, in order to trick occasional gig-workers to give up their other sources of income and become entirely dependent on the app:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
Then there’s the opacity — imagine if your boss refused to tell you how much you’ll get paid for a job until after you’ve completed it, claimed that this was done in order to “protect privacy” — and then threatened anyone who helped you figure out the true wage on offer:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app
Opacity is wage theft’s handmaiden: every gig worker producing content for a social media algorithm is subject to having their reach — and hence their pay — cut based on the unaccountable, inscrutable decisions of a content moderation system:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen
Making content for an algorithm is like having a boss that docks every paycheck because you broke rules that you are not allowed to know, because if you knew the rules, you’d figure out how to cheat without your boss catching you. Content moderation is the last place where security through obscurity is considered good practice:
https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563
When workers seize the means of computation, amazing things happen. In Indonesia, gig workers create and trade tuyul apps that let them unilaterally modify the way that their bosses’ systems see them — everything from GPS spoofing to accessibility mods:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek
So the tech and labor story isn’t wholly grim: there are lots of ways that tech can enhance labor struggles, letting workers collaborate and coordinate. Without digital systems, we wouldn’t have the Hot Strike Summer:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to
As the historic writer/actor strike shows us, the resurgent labor movement and the senescent forces of crapulent capitalism are locked in a death-struggle over not just what digital tools do, but who they do it for and who they do it to:
https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/
When it comes to the epic fight over who technology acts for and against, we need a diversity of tactics, backstopped by tech operated by and for its users — and by laws that protect workers and the public. That dynamic is in sharp focus in UNITE Here Local 11’s strike against Orange County’s Laguna Cliffs Marriott Resort & Spa.
The UNITE Here strike turns on the usual issues like a living wage (hotel staff are paid so little they have to rent rooming-house beds by the shift, paying for the right to sleep in a room for a few hours at a time, without any permanent accommodation). They’re also seeking health-care and pensions, so they can be healthy at work and retire after long service. Finally, they’re seeking their employer’s support for LA’s Responsible Hotels Ordinance, which would levy a tax on hotel rooms to help pay for hotel workers’ housing costs (a hotel worker who can’t afford a bed is the equivalent of a fast food worker who has to apply for food stamps):
https://www.unitehere11.org/responsible-hotels-ordinance/
But the Marriott — which is owned by the University of California and managed by Aimbridge Hospitality — has refused to bargain, walking out negotiations.
But the employer didn’t walk out over wages, benefits or support for a housing subsidy. They walked out when workers demanded that the scabs that the company was trying to hire to break the strike be given full time, union jobs.
These aren’t just any scabs, either. They’re predominantly Black workers who rely on the $700m Instawork app for gigs. These workers are being dispatched to cross the picket line without any warning that they’re being contracted as strikebreakers. When workers refuse the cross the picket and join the strike, Instawork cancels all their shifts and permanently blocks them from new jobs.
This is a new, technologically supercharged form of illegal strikebreaking. It’s one thing for a single boss to punish a worker who refuses to scab, but Instawork acts as a plausible-deniability filter for all the major employers in the region. Like the landlord apps that allow landlords to illegally fix rents by coordinating hikes, Instawork lets bosses illegally collude to rig wages by coordinating a blocklist of workers who refuse to scab:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-makes-rent-setting-software-for-landlords-sued-for-collusion/?comments=1
The racial dimension is really important here: the Marriott has a longstanding de facto policy of refusing to hire Black workers, and whenever they are confronted with this, they insist that there are no qualified Black workers in the labor pool. But as soon as the predominantly Latino workforce struck, Marriott discovered a vast Black workforce that it could coerce into scabbing, in collusion with Instawork.
Now, all of this isn’t just sleazy, it’s illegal, a violation of Section 7 of the NLRB Act. Historically, that wouldn’t have mattered, because a string of presidents, R and D, have appointed useless do-nothing ghouls to run the NLRB. But the Biden admin, pushed by the party’s left wing, made a string of historic, excellent appointments, including NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has set her sights on punishing gig work companies for flouting labor law:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/10/see-you-in-the-funny-papers/#bidens-legacy
UNITE HERE 11 has brought a case to the NLRB, charging the Instawork, the UC system, Marriott, and Aimbridge with violating labor law by blackmailing gig workers into crossing the picket line. The union is also asking the NLRB to punish the companies for failing to protect workers from violent retaliation from the wealthy hotel guests who have punched them and screamed epithets at them. The hotel has refused to identify these thug guests so that the workers they assaulted can swear out complaints against them.
Writing about the strike for Jacobin, Alex N Press tells the story of Thomas Bradley, a Black worker who was struck off all Instawork shifts for refusing to cross the picket line and joining it instead:
https://jacobin.com/2023/07/southern-california-hotel-workers-strike-automated-management-unite-here
Bradley’s case is exhibit A in the UNITE HERE 11 case before the NLRB. He has a degree in culinary arts, but racial discrimination in the industry has kept him stuck in gig and temp jobs ever since he graduated, nearly a quarter century ago. Bradley lived out of his car, but that was repossessed while he slept in a hotel room that UNITE HERE 11 fundraised for him, leaving him homeless and bereft of all his worldly possessions.
With UNITE HERE 11’s help, Bradley’s secured a job at the downtown LA Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, a hotel that has bargained with the workers. Bradley is using his newfound secure position to campaign among other Instawork workers to convince them not to cross picket lines. In these group chats, Jacobin saw workers worrying “that joining the strike would jeopardize their standing on the app.”
Today (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork
[Image ID: An old photo of strikers before a struck factory, with tear-gas plumes rising above them. The image has been modified to add a Marriott sign to the factory, and the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' to the sky over the factory. The workers have been colorized to a yellow-green shade and the factory has been colorized to a sepia tone.]
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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‘Oh my God’, Porchay thinks. This man is perfect: Music, terrible jokes, gorgeous face. Arms.
Porchay goes to press the super like button, but the app blocks him with a message about how he's used up all his free likes and that he can subscribe to get an unlimited number or wait 24 hours for more.
Shit.
Porchay really needs to stop liking every guy's profile.
He hovers over the message.
Chances are, this guy will be gone if he waits and he will need to cycle back around to find him again. What if he turns his profile off between now and then? Or he meets some other guy?? Porchay may never get another chance to let this man know that he's extremely interested.
Well… he might not be interested in Porchay… but it's worth a shot, surely?
Fuck it, he thinks. He can afford one month’s subscription, even if it is wildly expensive for a dating app.
He has to let this guy know that they're soulmates.
Meanwhile - Kim matches with no one even though he gets a decent amount of interest. Khun bullied him into this and he's making a stance. He's immediately enamoured by Chay's cute face and interest in his guitar and ends up breaking that stance out of “pure curiosity”. Chay remains the only person he ever matches with.
Khun is very smug when Kim finally admits how they met.
Companion piece.
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