#something something rolequeer

[random-thought-depository]

...However, other aliens received more mysterious names: The toad-like alien who hypnotizes Kamen (voiced by Ted Travelstead) is simply known as Hollow.

...

Hollow and his kind feed by tricking other small tree-dwelling creatures into getting them food. They lure these tree-dwellers in with their hypnotizing light-up foreheads — anglerfish, anyone? — before feeding them a dark goo that makes them do their bidding. That bidding is initially just picking fruit from a tree and bringing it back down to Hollow.

However, Hollow's feeding process changes drastically once humans enter the picture. As Hollow's servant, Kamen doesn't just procure fruit. He kills other creatures for Hollow, who begins to hunger for larger and larger prey. This relationship highlights the menacing nature of Hollow's mind control abilities, but it also emphasizes that Hollow is growing into a monster because of human interference.

"You've introduced human greed and gluttony into this animal kingdom, and it's changed the game," Bennett said. "What is the ripple effect of that?"

I haven't watched this, but I'm appreciating the idea of this kind of relationship.

[justifiedsurrender]

Don't tell me what I don't need (a long-overdue response)

You know that thing where something you read gets stuck in your head for way longer than it deserves to? And you can explain up and down why it's wrong but it's still a little bit stuck and you think maybe telling someone else will help? Yeah, this post is probably gonna be weird to read if you're anyone who's not me. It doesn't totally make sense to even post it publicly. You know what, let's just jump in and see how this goes.

I talk a lot about "when I used to get caught up in anti-kink stuff" in the past tense, which is mostly true and partly aspirational. Actually the thing that sticks more lately isn't the fully anti-kink people, it's the kinky people who happen to be against my kind of kink. Oh they're not against kink, just the harmful ones. Just the stuff that reinforces oppressive hierarchies. The "rolequeer" movement had this in spades, back when it was a thing. If you haven't heard of them, I may not be of much help because it's hard to sum up, and also they seemed to keep changing the core argument over the time it was a thing. It was mostly about rejecting traditional D/s stuff as somehow harmful and wrong, especially being a dom is wrong, and wouldn't it better to just both be puppies or something instead of fetishizing oppression? It all seemed to be based on vague notions of symbolic harm and almost all the proponents were anarchists and now basically no one has been talking about it for multiple years. I'm sorry if that's all uncharitable. Every time I try to learn more I just get more confused and also feel like shit, so we're gonna leave it at this.

(Disclaimer: Everything I'm writing here is from my perspective as a sub and why this stuff upsets me, but I don't want to gloss over the idea that everyone with a dom side is bad and acting on those feelings is wrong. It's not true, it's not ok, and it's not trivial. So if I spend less words talking about it, it's not because I don't think it matters, I just don't know what else to say. I think it's complete bullshit.)

Let's back up. One of the first things I remember learning about kink is that different people enjoy things in different ways. That some people like pain stuff because they straight up enjoy it or to get the endorphin high, other people want to feel "forced" to endure it. Some people like the sensation and the sensuality of rope, and other people want the loss of control from being restrained. (And some people like both things enough they don't bother separate them most of the time.) I feel like I was immediately and repeatedly hit over the head with this concept when I started reading "intro to BDSM" stuff, and probably for good reason. It definitely makes negotiation work better when you can get on the same page about what you're hoping to get from the activities you do. So I've done my best to internalize it, though typical mind fallacy sometimes takes over. Some people, I think, never learned this at all.

With that in mind, here is the post, entitled "Submissive people don't need dominants. Period." (Published 2012, read by me 2018, I think.) The argument, to the extent that I can figure it out, is that the kinds of satisfaction submissive people get out of kink can be gotten with types of play that don't involve anyone in the dominant role, but the big bad BDSM community is trying to convince us that's not true. (doubt.gif) The biggest problem with the way the argument is presented is that it conflates "this thing is possible for some subs" with "this is thing should be sufficient for all subs." Like, I can be happy for you that you've learned how much you like non-power-focussed kink and respect that you're in a relationship with another sub... but I'm not you. The second biggest problem with this argument is that it really hinges on already being on-board with the idea that being a dom and doing dom things is bad, which of course I'm not on-board with. Without that context there's a big "ok but why though?" hanging over the whole thing. Just assume that despite that it got stuck in my head anyway.

There's a lot going on here, but I'm going to focus on the example of different ways to frame a similar fantasy. The first is straightforwardly D/s: 

"It’s been a long while since I’ve been allowed to have an orgasm. [...] but every time I get close to an orgasm, you pull [my hand] away. Maybe you’ve tied a short leash or length of chain around my wrist, so when you sense me getting close to an orgasm, you can deny it from me."

The alternative is very different, but presented as just as good (not only for the blogger, but by implication, for the rest of us too):

"I’ve been doing incredibly well keeping myself aroused and orgasmless for a long time. [...] Then I take the end of the leash, hand it to you, and say, 'Would you like to use this to help me stay just shy of an orgasm?'"

That's, um, that's interesting. I mean, hmm, I wonder what that feels like... Ok look, I'll level with you, I have never wanted anything even close to that in my entire life. Under no circumstances do I want to politely ask a person to help me achieve my goal of not having an orgasm, primarily because that's not actually a goal I have? And this scenario contains none of the bits I do want, so why??

These scenarios are presented as interchangeable (?) ways to achieve the "prolonged physical arousal without orgasm" thing. That's implied to be the core thing anyone would be here for, and the other details are incidental. Why worry about replacing a "dominant influence" with a helpful friendly presence when you're ultimately still achieving the same thing? Ok, I can try to understand how that could be true for someone. Up there I was using "interesting" as a euphemism for "oh my god why would you ever want that." But I can stop being a jerk! It is interesting, in the way of wanting to understand someone whose brain works completely differently from yours. I can try to understand, and under different circumstances maybe I'd buy that person a coffee and try to understand even better. But we're not talking about a personal preference post. This is an explicit attempt to convince subs that they "don't need" the first type of fantasy. Under those circumstances, I need to call bullshit. 

By the way, there's brief mention that the original D/s framing is "legitimate" but that "its hegemonic presence so thoroughly obscures the possibility of knowing other frames." That's getting perilously close to "you don't actually want what you think you want, you've just been brainwashed to feel that way." I have a policy against dealing with that kind of thing because it's ultimately not falsifiable. We are also told that the first framing "centers dominance" while the friendly collaboration "centers submission." ("It’s a story of self-control, and of cooperation rather than competition.") This is a statement that seems to be using neither the BDSM definition of "submission" nor the regular world dictionary definition, so I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with it. Suffice to say, only one of them centers me personally having a good time. Which kind of cuts to the heart of the matter, doesn't it?

Here's the deal. The D/s component is not incidental for people like me, it's the core. The feeling of control from the right person, that's the entire reason to do the thing. The orgasm or no orgasm or the restraints or whatever, that's the details. That's what can be swapped out, to an extent. The details don't become the core for me just because someone else says so. This person knows that's how it works for so many of us, but doesn't believe that preference is real. They can claim I only want this because I don't know any better, but I've been learning since the very beginning that people are different from me and no possibilities are being revealed to me I didn't already know. I know my own mind and I know what I'm here for.

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That seems like it could be the end of the post, but I have a confession to make. I've presented the argument above in a way that doesn't really have teeth. Not a strawman, I think I've presented it accurately, but I've presented it pinned to a board. Not in the form that got it stuck in my head for multiple years. This is the form that it got stuck (not a quote):

Well we all agree that this thing is bad, so of course you'll be glad to learn that you don't really need it. Even if it feels like you need it, I think you can manage without it. Isn't it good news that you're not dependent on them? That you're strong enough to not need this.

And to that I could say all of what I said above. I could say no one's yet managed to convince me that doms are bad. I could say it doesn't matter because I want this and that should be enough. None of that seems to get it unstuck. I think I can't get away from the framing of need. That I should be glad for them to tell me what I don't need. How could I disagree with that. How could I, without saying that I do need it. That I do need them. Without saying, "no I'm not as strong as you say I am." How could I...

Is it weakness to admit to not being an island?

Don't we all need people? Don't most of us need people in specific ways?

I think (I hope) that this is the part where I become unstuck. I couldn't be satisfied to play only with another submissive. I guess that means I lack something compared to someone who can, but that doesn't make it false. I do need the people who want the things I want from the other direction. The good people that I've played with, and the ones I want to meet in the future. My life would be worse without them. And my life is worse the more time I spend trying to twist myself into a different shape, years after I said I'd stop. I hope this is the part where I become unstuck.

[kata4a]

...KM: slash r slash BoredNIgnored

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know

I love this kind of thing.  and it’s got an interesting power dynamic to it: on the one hand, I’m not going to let you fucking me distract me from whatever it is I’m doing right now; on the other, you’re not going to let me doing something keep you from fucking me

normally I don’t really like rolequeer/confused powerplay, but in this case I feel like it plays really well with this bratty submissive/“if you want me you’re gonna have to take me” vibe that I find really fun

[radiqueer]

Queeranarchism is kink critical (thinks D/s is abusive, contracts can't be consented to, and supports rolequeer, an idea that was pioneered by maymay, a person who told doms to kill themselves) and andrewhussiespisskink is an ace exclusionist.

rubs my temples how do i say this nicely. 

I don’t fuckign like rolequeer. I don’t like criticizing kink because critiquing kink has been ruined for me by radfems. 

I am not gonna stop other progressives from doing that, though. I have followed @queeranarchism for months, and I know the kind of thing they generally talk about and you know what? I decided for my own damn self that I’m good with following them. because I can follow people I disagree with and behave like a mature person about it, especially when I don’t consider those disagreements to be all that vital. 

secondly, rolequeer has been on my blacklist since for-fucking-ever, so really I didn’t even think about it until you brought it up, and now for the sake of this ask I went through queeranarchism’s blog twice just to establish for myself that their last post about rolequeer was about two years ago. 

which is approximately the last time Val ever said something exclusionist (if not before), so why the hell am I getting anons from 20fucking17 in my inbox in 2019 is what I want to know. 

and also, considering that I maintain a regular tag for Val (hi @andrewhussiespisskink) on this blog (/tagged/andrewhussiespisskink) and our interactions do a bang-up job of establishing that we’re friends (because I have those, fuck you) and i’m deeply unlikely to be friends with an exclusionist? let alone reblog from them as often as I do?. 

additionally you could have gone through, idk, his about, which clearly states that he -

uses the word queer to identify himself and his community

does not believe in gatekeeping of any kind

which is a pretty clear sign that she’s not an exclusionist. so what fucking gives?

[mitzvahmelting]

Anonymous said:

I think that first definition ("willingly gives up..") is only meant to be Damen's warped understanding and not to be agreed-with. Like, the concept of willing slaves being happily servile is such a long slavery apologia. What we see of the training seems to involve brainwashing from a young age and also drugging with chalis. But even if Damen had received Erasmus and Erasmus was, on the face of it willing, that would not be consensual to me, since he wouldn't feel he could refuse.

Yeah… Actually, that’s something that I probably didn’t clarify very well in my original response. I’m not saying that Erasmus is able to fully consent.  I’m just trying to figure out a way to describe Erasmus’ situation that acknowledges Erasmus’ consent without ignoring all the coercion involved in his past.

But like. Even if we were talking about a modern AU where Erasmus were in a mutual, consensual BDSM Master/slave relationship, it’s not like BDSM relationships themselves are above criticism.  

I guess a problem I’m running into is that I’m trying to lean away from a contractual model of consent, and towards a “consent as a felt sense” model [rolequeer theory is a huge can of worms that i’m not gonna pop open right now, but you can do your own googling. just remember to take some big grains of salt with you]. But one problem is that consent as a felt sense doesn’t address Erasmus very well at all. See… Erasmus doesn’t feel violated. Erasmus has been groomed for this, and because of his grooming, he doesn’t feel any violation in his treatment.  But you and I know that Erasmus is being violated, in some way. It’s just really, REALLY hard to deal with grooming in consent ethics because at what point is a person capable/not capable of giving consent? According to what principles? Should we prioritize making the person happy, like by giving Erasmus to Torveld? Or should we prioritize making the person free, even if that might hurt them, or they’re unprepared for the real world? Blurgh it’s complicated.

But I agree about Erasmus seeming to come from a different story (even Pacat said he came from a first draft) and that his story isn't well integrated with the overreaching ethos. He's just passed on from one slaveowner to another and while it's certainly an improvement in his treatment, he's still enslaved and it's not a happy ending. Having it come up again wouldn't work in the KR plot we have now, but he's still just left there.

thanks for sharing your thoughts! I wonder if some of them will change as you go on but they've helped me sort out my own. especially agreed with how kink and morality are blurred in the story.

Yeah man this is why it’s hard to bring erotic fiction into the romance genre I guess. If this were just erotic fiction then no one would care about slave abolition bc everyone’s too horny to pay attention, but once you start building a story and paying attention to the characters and greater politics at play, you’ve got way more responsibility and I think Pacat towards the end had a hard time reconciling with the choices she made at the beginning.

also I should just add- there is a short story about Erasmus's background (which I still find fairly fetishistic but ymmv) and the author's background is tricky because Australia racializes Italians differently to the US, so it's best not to call her white unless you're ready for another discourse which I think is less interesting anyway.

Ehhh fine. I mostly just meant she doesn’t come from an ethnicity with a huge history of being enslaved.

[random-thought-depository]

This is like the rolequeer version of that "I'm the priest's favorite sacrificial lamb" post.

Somebody once commented that part of the intended horror of A Shadow Over Innsmouth was precisely that the freaky human/fish-person sex was mutually consensual (I'd say they were probably right concerning author's intent; I can see this tendency in Lovecraft very clearly in Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family). This reminds me of that in an interesting way. The black fox suggests replacing a unilaterally imposed non-consensual and often lethal relationship with a mutually consensual relationship in which something that the hunter can't truly kill or seriously hurt absorbs the hunter's violence, and we're supposed to find that scary. Taken at face value, this Devil is a surprisingly altruistic and weirdly Christ-like figure, basically offering to suffer and be killed over and over for the benefit of another.

I mean, it's the Devil, so plausibly there's fine print they're not telling us about, but that's kind of the point, isn't it? Contractualism is a kind of social code; to accept a contract is to acknowledge another being as something like a social person, and a social person can have social rights, including a right to reciprocity. To make an implicit contract with the Devil-fox is potentially to accept an implicit debt to it. Much safer to just kill a dumb normal fox.

(@aksemmi, @hedoughnism).

[random-thought-depository]

More assorted The Sisters of Dorley AU/Glow, Worm vampire stuff:

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I meant to mention this in my original outline for Annaliese but forgot: one of the reasons Annaliese likes Elle is Elle gives her tickets to the opera. Some of Annaliese's past masters and mistresses used to take her to the opera, but it was always to work, to try to use her sense of smell to detect secret feelings in people they were dealing with while they hobnobbed with the aristocracy (human and vampire). Annaliese developed a taste for opera this way, and she likes that now, thanks to Elle, she can just sit back and enjoy the performance without distraction, she can go for her own pleasure instead of to work. Sometimes Elle even buys herself a ticket too and keeps Annaliese company.

Annaliese watches a lot of Great Performances type programs on TV too. And when she isn't watching TV she sometimes has her radio playing and tuned to a classical music station. Annaliese's tastes in music run very heavily toward the classical; the kind of things rich people in central and eastern Europe in the nineteenth century would have listened to.

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I think sensory-related "bullshit vampire powers" would be a relatively common result of transitioning autistic people. Autistic people often process sensory data in non-standard ways, so imagine what might happen when their brains get plugged into sensory data from vampire super-senses.

Annaliese's super-sensitive sense of smell isn't entirely the result of this, she has more olfactory receptors than a human or even a normal vampire, but it's likely not pure coincidence that she started out as a non-verbal autistic.

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Reading this post makes me think I might go with a drinks-through-the-fangs the fangs are like a blood donation needle model of vampirism here. Before I was modelling it as they just use the fangs to open a wound and then swallow the blood conventionally, but "drink blood in a very clean, kind of surgical fashion" feels appropriate for this story - it would feel of a piece with the thing where the Dorley girls are all pretty and super-passing and Dorley has very sanitized practices, like it'd be appropriate if we're also getting a very sanitized, neat, mess-free, superficially gentle-looking version of vampirism. Plus, drinking through the fangs would be a weird experience; the blood goes up through the fangs and through a Y passage to a sort of specialized second vampire stomach they've grown during transition, and they've got taste buds inside their fangs and stuff, it'd be a very different experience from human eating and drinking. I like that; I want to make vampires weird. Though I'm thinking they can also swallow blood more conventionally, with a flap that closes off their regular esophagus while they do this so the blood goes to their vampire stomach instead of the digestive system they use to process normal food; that's probably what they do when they drink blood from plastic bags.

I wonder if maybe they could also use the fangs to inject blood, for thrall and transitioning? I've been modelling it as a sort of extended phenotype of culture thing where they either cut themselves or, if the subjugated person is a vampire, get them to bite them, but there would be a certain elegance if they could use their fangs to inject their own blood into people to thrall them. I'm modelling thrall as a pretty important part of vampire sociality, so it would make sense if they had something like that. Though on a dramatic level I love the rolequeering aspect of, like, in vampire society the ultimate symbolic act of abject submission is biting the person who's subjugating you, so I want to keep that. Maybe it's more efficient that way.

[radiqueer]

rolequeer is basically trying to do BDSM without a dom sub dynamic and without mimicking irl violence, often advocating for subs and switches to meet each other's needs without doms. which i think is a really creative and cool idea! it could help trauma survivors do kink without stepping on common triggers. it's also meant to analyse how kink reflects irl oppression, which i think is also important. 1/???

however, it considers ds dynamics to be inherently abusive and thus demonises all doms as abusive, removes the agency of subs, and tends to push this "your desires to dominate/be dominated are due to socialisation or trauma (which is sometimes true) therefore you must get rid of it or there's something wrong with you (which is not and shaming people for things they can't control, especially the results of trauma, is shitty - i think that's a problem with kink critical points in general.) 2/???

(a lot of kink critical people claim to care about trauma victims but end up shaming them for the results of their trauma, and seem to demand that we look perfectly recovered, when the effects of trauma don't always go away and there's no place in their narrative for learning to live with it. even if my kinks were harmful to me, the only other option is spending the rest of my life at war with my desires. anyways) 3/???

the pioneer of rolequeer, maybemaimed or maymay for short, told someone to kill themselves in the name of - here it comes - being anti abuse. irony aside, when cliff from pervocracy confronted them about it, he excused himself by saying he was just frustrated that no one was listening to him. so basically he got mad that he couldn't control and criticise people's sex lives and thought encouraging suicide was an appropriate response. (salty: he has the gall to call all doms abusive when???) 4/???

maymay also made a tool for avoiding predators on a kink dating site, however, it had privacy issues and there were fears that if the data he had on completely innocent people was leaked, then people could lose their jobs or be discriminated against if people found out that they were into kink. maymay refused to address these concerns. TL;DR rolequeer is a cool idea and i wish we could reclaim it but it's shitty and sex shamey as it is and the creator was a bastard.

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thanks for all the info!! I didn’t know a lot of this myself.