The world of kink is generally made up of things that would not be okay to do outside the context of kink. We build structures around these things to answer the question, “how do you know when it is okay to do that?” The things we do vary in not-okayness, but having an answer to that question is always good. The glovebox metaphor is part of my answer to that question. The very same things that make our kinks interesting — taboo, danger, improbability — are the same things that make them not okay in other circumstances. Like mercury, uranium, or arsenic, we can build powerful and useful things out of them. But also like those elements, we need safety gear or else we will harm ourselves and others.
Also like the elements, our kinks are present around us whether we want that or not. We would not need the glovebox if we could just decide to not have some particular kink. But we don’t choose our kinks. I argue that our lack of choice means we are not morally responsible for having kink desires. What we are morally responsible for, and must diligently hold each other accountable for, are the ways we engage with our desires. We have full agency over our engagement, and therefore are fully responsible for it. We may behave with great responsibility, dismaying irresponsibility, or with a general muddling-through figuring-it-out-as-we go sort of thing — it’s not a binary. So we build a metaphorical glovebox out of consent, negotiation, and safety practices. It doesn’t mean we’re 100% safe or can’t do harm — but it does mean we have some very reliable ways to increase safety and reduce harm.
Right now I’m not here to talk about the implementation of these practices, but rather, to talk about why we need them and what they accomplish. Chattel slavery is outright evil, but there are plenty of people who kink to re-enacting part or all of it. That’s an example of a kink with a high bar for “are you engaging with this responsibly?” Especially for white Americans, the potential to for us to do shitty things while enacting that kink is very, very high. We’re living in a nation with a long and unresolved history of doing massively awful things around slavery and its legacy. To re-enact things of slavery in your kink life without also engaging with the history of slavery in America and the open wounds it has left us with, is to engage with that kink irresponsibly. If you turn to bimbo/ditz kink, there’s a similar issue. Human culture has a virulent, centuries-long misogyny problem. To re-enact the tropes of feminine stupidity, shallowness, vapidity, promiscuity, and vanity in your kink life without also engaging with the history of these ideas being used as weapons to enforce a misogynist, heteronormative culture, is to engage with that kink irresponsibly.
Another facet of the “engage responsibly” framing is that we can acknowledge that we have different responsibilities in different circumstances. When we are in private with our longtime partners, we hopefully can rely on a long track record of negotiation and mutual knowledge and not have to justify everything from first principles all the time. But if we’re in public, we have to have a different set of standards in mind, to be aware of how our engagement affects others. At a dungeon party, yet another type of engagement. We already know there are different social rules for different circumstances, we just need to extend that knowledge. Engaging responsibly is a skill we can practice, can improve at, can learn from our failures at.
Part of engaging responsibly is looking directly at your own engagement. What are you doing to attain, ensure, and enact consent? What in your negotiation, does get you from proposal to resolution? What about your practices makes the thing you’re doing safer? For some kinks, the answers to these are quite easy, but for all kinks, being able to ask these questions and search for answers is a good and useful thing.
I should emphasize here that although I think the bar for engaging with things responsibly is higher for some kinks than for others, I think it’s very reachable. Doing your research, exercising empathy, and minimizing your impact on non-participants' lives, plus 101-level consent, negotiation, and safety tactics, will get you most of the way there, and they are things you absolutely should be doing anyhow just because those are what decent people that others want to get kinky with, do. A particular physical act or circumstance isn’t enough by itself to satisfy a kink. We get our thrill from emotional experiences — we use the acts and circumstances to produce the experiences that satisfy us. Once you identify the emotional experience you want, you can identify more ways to produce it. This too is something that’s good anyhow, because if you identify your own needs more clearly, you’ll be able to more easily guide partners to doing stuff that meets your needs (and little is more delicious than identifying your partner’s needs so well that you can deliver the experience they want via unexpected means).
A major reason I push people to think in terms of “are you engaging responsibly?” is that thinking in those terms gets us away from making moral judgments about people’s kinks based on gross-out reactions. Whether you get a gross-out/squick/revulsion reaction from something is absolutely not a reliable guide to whether that thing is okay. It’s a reliable guide to whether you personally should participate in that thing, but no more than that. Being able to explain whether some form of engaging with kink is responsible or not, is something we can actually have a productive discussion about. We can point to actions, to visible, tangible external things, and talk about what makes those okay or not okay. It is impossible for “that thing grosses me out, therefore it’s wrong” to lead to a productive discussion on this topic; it immediately demands that uninterrogated, unfalsifiable internal factors be the entirety of the discussion.
Here’s my go-to example of using the responsible-engagement model to think about a kink that is a gross-out thing for many people. Zoophilia is a kink some people have. Putting aside the gross-out reaction — how can you tell if someone is engaging with this kink responsibly? Let’s look to first principles. Consensual sexual interactions are okay; sexual interactions are not okay without consent. Consent requires that you communicate with your partner and that they freely give their consent. Even pointing out those two factors of consent, suggests that fucking animals is not going to be a responsible way of engaging. There’s some wiggle room with the first factor. Animals can absolutely express some forms of consent and refusal. A horse that has two or three times your mass, will not be subtle if it doesn’t want to fuck you. But there are unavoidable limits to communicating with animals that mean you can’t reach the sort of sustained, high-level communications that a dedication to consent demands of us. What really demolishes the proposal, though, is the second factor. Animals are not your peers, therefore they cannot freely consent to sexual interactions with you. It’s not about you or them, it’s about the system you live in. No matter how much tenderness you personally feel towards them, you live in industrial human society where you are a person and a citizen, while they are a thing and an article of property. It’s like the magnified version of why bosses shouldn’t fuck subordinates or why Thomas Jefferson’s sex with Sally Hemings couldn’t have been consensual: regardless of the interpersonal relationship, the system in which it happened, eliminated one party’s freedom to refuse. Even if you could perfectly communicate with them, animals would not be able to freely give their consent. So fucking animals cannot be a responsible way to engage — not because of any gross-out factor, but because we live in a system which eliminates the possibility of consent.
There are plenty of kinks like that, where there is no responsible way to directly and naïvely enact them. Fortunately for everyone, “directly” and “naïvely” aren’t the only ways to engage with those kinks. Technologies of simulation have gotten pretty good, and willing partners with clever props go a very long way. So those are good paths towards responsible engagement with such kinks. Engaging with them responsibly still takes effort, but at least those paths offer the possibility of responsible engagement.
One of the bright sides to all this is that when we move towards responsibly engaging with our kinks, we necessarily move towards more clearly understanding both our own desires and others' needs/boundaries. These understandings are inherently good and will make your kink more enjoyable, for you and your partners. Kinks often come with guilt and shame, as well — we Americans, for example, live in a culture that is generally hostile to sexual pleasure, and is particularly hostile to women’s sexual pleasure and to non-heteronormative sexual pleasure. This can leave us pretty messed up about our kinks. Going through the exercise of figuring out responsible engagement, can help us relieve that guilt and shame by shifting the burden to “are we engaging responsibly or not?” Guilt and shame are part of the danger we try to reduce when we use our glovebox techniques. When we use these techniques well and engage responsibly with our kinks, we are building towards a world where kink is accessible and enjoyable to everyone who wants it.
]]>Here’s an excerpt of that piece that I want to talk about:
We used to have a term in the autistic community, we called it ‘cousins’. It started when Xenia Grant was talking to a guy who had hydrocephalus and had a lot in common with autistic people, but was not autistic. She took a look at him and happily exclaimed, “Cousin!” (I like to keep track of who coined terms. It can be meaningful. Xenia is the friendliest person I’ve ever met, autistic or nonautistic. That’s the spirit that ‘cousin’ started in.) Back when NT meant a nonautistic person, another abbreviation cropped, up, AC. AC meant “Autistics and Cousins” and covered autistic people and… cousins. So you’d talk about “ACs and NTs”. But who were cousins? Cousins were people with a neurological condition other than autism, but it gave them important things in common with autistic people. Especially sensory processing, cognitive, and social traits in common with us. Cousinhood wasn’t something that was based on a condition. It was based on how that condition worked for a particular person. So while sometimes we’d talk about ‘cousin conditions’, there was no condition where everyone with it was a cousin. But some common cousin conditions included: Tourette’s, hydrocephalus, OCD, schizophrenia, and AD(H)D. Just as some examples. Not everyone with those conditions was a cousin, but lots of cousins had those conditions or related ones. The cool thing about cousin was that it dealt with the ambiguity of life. It made it so that it wasn’t just ‘us and them’. There was a broad hazy area around autism where people could be considered in many important ways ‘like us’ without being autistic. […] I kind of wish that most identities had this ‘cousin’ thing going, because it would resolve a lot of boundaries that people want to be strict and are not. It deals with people who are a lot like a certain type of person, without exactly being that type of person. And it does so in a really friendly and welcoming way.
For several years, I had an itch in my brainstem about my brain and autism. A wordless suspicion. I didn’t talk about it, because it was just an intuition, and it didn’t fit all the evidence. But I had to guerrilla-teach myself a lot of conventional social skills, I have sensory processing issues, and I have compulsions, lurking tics, stimming. Two or three times I brought it up to people whose judgment I trusted and who were themselves autistic. They laughed at me. It hurt, a lot. Why? Eventually I found out more about the symptom-constellation of ADHD and, coincidentally, read about the “cousins” idea at about the same time. Those two ideas clicked together very helpfully. My friends were right to tell me, “Krinn, it is really really deeply unlikely that autism is what’s going on in your brain.” But my lived experiences were getting dismissed, which is always a shitty experience. So that’s why it hurt. It was interesting to look back and see that condense into a dualform experience of being right and wrong at the same time.
The idea of “cousins” is helping me by giving me a way to conceptualize me over here dealing with my ADHD neurodivergence as part of a loose network of neurodivergences with buzzing probability-clusters of common experience. I am not aware of whatever community of folks with ADHD is out there, and my social graph skews pretty heavily towards autism-spectrum issues. I’d be surprised if there was no community out there, though. One of the interesting things about neurodivergence is this sense that it’s possible to have community around these ways of experiencing the world. These are ways that are basically peers to the neurotypical experience, ways of existing that are just as capable of leading to a happy, healthy, self-actualizing life as neurotypicality. So there are communities of people out there articulating this experience, to themselves and each other and to people who don’t share the experience. This is great!
This is also a contrast to depression, which is also something going on in my brain. I don’t think of my depression as neurodivergence. It’s not another valid way of experiencing the world. It just sucks. A central point of neurodivergence activism is “hey, don’t try to cure us: we’re having a valid experience of the world here, we don’t need or want curing.” That’s a statement I couldn’t make about depression, ever. If I could just tear out the part of my brain responsible for depression and throw it in the river, I’d do it in a hot second. It is just random awfulness shoved into my brain.1 I suspect my experience of depression is average in this regard.
The opening sentence of Anna Karenina is one of the ways I think about depression. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It’s not so much that depression convinces you that happy people are all alike, but rather, it convinces you that you are uniquely unhappy. You are uniquely terrible, it tells you. You are alone. You deserve it. The commonplace that depression is a liar, is true, but a little misleading. Depression doesn’t so often tell you big lurid whoppers — that’s more the domain of panic and anxiety disorders. Depression is good at lying. It also has the advantage of playing both sides: you start to want to believe these horrible things about yourself. You can construct an ironclad case against your own happiness. It feels so reasonable. Everyone is, in fact, special and unique and amazing. It’s just that in your case, depression tells you, you are special and unique and amazing in how horrible and unworthy of love you are.
Depression is more like autoimmune diseases than it is to, for example, a flu. You don’t just “get better.” What depression and autoimmune diseases have in common is that their presence, their main symptoms, prevent you from doing the things you’d need to do to get better. If you don’t know that depression/autoimmune disease is what’s going on with you, it looks like things are just petulantly & persistently failing to work, falling apart. It looks like you’re just broken in some mysterious way that you can’t fix. But these things are actually failing because of a disorder one meta-layer away. Being able to see that that’s what’s going on doesn’t fix things. It does, however, make it possible to cope with things. “Cope with things” is what’s on offer. There is no way to just fix the things going wrong — there’s no panacea, just a bag of coping tactics. It’s a big bag, which is good, because for any given person only maybe half of the tactics work and you don’t know which ones until you try them.
My experience of depression is that it has non-consensually taught me the skill of looking other people in the eye while I have a sucking chest wound in my emotional/internal/personal life and saying —
“Nah, I’m fine. I’ll walk it off. Not nearly as bad as it looks.”
“Krinn… you’re coughing up blood while you’re speaking and it’s dripping from your chin.”
“I’m fine.”
“Krinn, I can see past your goddamn ribs.”
“I. Am. Fine.”
“Krinn. Are you sure you don’t want help?”
“It is okay to not help me.”
On bad days you think of suicide not so much because you want to die as because you feel dead already. The world passes you by. You do not matter. You are forgotten. There is no malice in it — you don’t have enough entitativity to hate. People are simply going on with their lives – nice, clean, livable, tolerable lives. There is no particular reason for these lives to include you.
It’s a lot easier, in some ways, to think about my experience of ADHD. It has many unpleasant parts, but it’s in that class of things that are “just” an alternate way of experiencing the world. There’s also the luxury of having a small cluster of effective life-easing drugs with hit rates in the 90+% region. Drugs for depression never get better than “cautiously optimistic” odds. You can tell if Adderall helps in maybe a week, two tops. If you want to figure out if some SSRI works for you, you’re looking at more like two months to ramp up, figure out if it’s working, and to taper off safely if it’s not, which you will have to do before you can try something else. There’s plenty of room to talk about the complicated results of medicalizing brain shapes, of declaring some brains to be “disordered” in their unmedicated state. The DSM is first and foremost a political document, after all. But the advantage of having psychiatric drugs, ones that mediate your experience of the world in a sustainable way, is that you can figure out for yourself whether your life is more livable with or without them.
Which brings me back to cousins. Life is generally more livable when you’re around people who get you, who share some significant commonalities with you, who affirm your way of experiencing the world. The concept of “cousins” permits us to bring more such people into our lives. As such, I think it’s definitely a Good Thing. I think it’s also useful in the case of depression and related shitty things that can happen to brains. If I acknowlege, say, people with chronic pain/fatigue syndromes as “cousins” in this sense, I at least have more people I can talk to about the shitty experiences I’m having, and who are living through their own similar ones. We are more trying to survive our things for as long as we can deal with, rather than affirm them, but having company still improves things.
Live, as Vonnegut says, by the illusions that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
One of the grim jokes I make is that if my depression has a purpose in life, it’s to make me much more fond of my ADHD-ness and my trans-ness. They’re so much more tractable!↩
This is another installment of this year’s project. It’s centered around a hyena boy with a big ol' kink for sissy-play getting commandingly fucked. Content note: slurs.
When the sun through the blinds woke him, Faije straddled hir belly. Wagging his tail and resting his paws on hir shoulders, he nuzzled up from the top of hir breasts to hir throat and jaw, gently headbutting hir muzzle from beneath as shi batted at him. Quiet laughs rose from Chaiax’s massive chest as shi pushed hirself up on hir elbows, giving him a bite and a kiss in quick succession. Faije threw his arms around hir thick neck, surrendering to hir kiss. Shi leaned on one arm, hir other around the diminutive hyena.
“Someone woke up frisky,” the huge tiger-dragon chuckled, smiling widely. “Last night was really good,” he said with a blush, ears flicking as he sat back, hands in his lap. “Thank you again.” A pause. “Thank you, Mistress?”
The big hybrid stroked his back, smiling and nodding.
“You know, we’ve been doing this for a while and I dig how it’s been working out. So let’s talk about that. Over breakfast, though — I’m hungry as fuck.”
Faije nodded eagerly, wiggling his soft rump against hir and wagging his tail. It struck something, and he looked over his shoulder, then shivered.
“Fuck. I’m still not used to how huge you are. I was wondering what my tail hit that was so heavy and it was your cock.”
“You say things like that and I want to throw you down and fuck you just to make sure you remember!” A smirk, a pointed look. “Is that what you’re aiming for, you insatiable spotty bitch?”
Faije blushed in a way that made hir roll over on top of him for another kiss, hir tongue invading his muzzle. Heavy hands pinned his wrists as shi growled deeply — he closed his eyes and sucked on hir tongue, moaning softly, squirming just a little to confirm how helpless he was under the huge predator. He raised his legs, squeezing them against hir thighs as shi rocked back and forth.
Long moments later, shi rolled off of him, stood, and offered him a hand. He took it, was pulled, stood, and then yelped as shi took another grasp on him and threw him over hir shoulder ass-up and head-down. At hir touch, he cooperatively shook his ass and got felt up all the way to the kitchen.
Shi made breakfast with him quietly, both clad in nothing but aprons. He had to tug a footstool from place to place to conveniently reach the counters of the huge draco-feline’s kitchen. It in turn made it convenient for hir to reach him, intermittent caresses laid on him, the hyena returning the gestures when shi was within reach. Soon they sat side by side, looking out the window, consuming eggs, sausages, and savory roughage.
Chaiax smiled as Faije reached over and absently trailed his fingers down hir densely muscled forearm. Shi turned hir hand over as he reached it, giving his a gentle squeeze.
“Precious puppy,” shi rumbled, leaning over to nuzzle his ears.
“Big strong tigerdragon,” he cooed.
“Would you like to talk more about what you’re feeling, Faije?” shi asked, stressing his name for a moment.
He nodded slowly, hugging hir arm, nosing against it, closing his eyes for a minute to savor the feel of hir fur on his muzzle and against his nose.
“Yeah. I had a dream about Darja last night — did I ever tell you about him?”
“Hmmm — I think I remember that name as an ex-boyfriend or as someone who got you into kink?”
“Both.”
“Ah, thanks for clarifying. What about him?”
“He was the first time I’d run into the idea that some people just choose to be eunuchs, do the needful, and move on with their life. Good role model that way. The dream was about you and him and me. I dreamed that you’d been the one to claim him, rather than him doing it to himself, and he was showing off, telling me how good it was, telling me I should surrender to you.” A shiver. “I begged. It was pretty hot.”
Shi reached around with hir free hand, rubbing his nape.
“Ah. So, lots of thoughts about being your in-scene sissy-bitch-yeen self on more of a full-time basis?”
He nodded, hiding his face against hir bicep for a minute. Shi could feel his blush.
“There was a bit of the dream where he was masturbating in this way I saw him do pretty often when I was living with him: he’d slip a chubby bullet vibe into his sheath, close it up with a little surgical tape, and the vibe would buzz right against his nub and he’d rub over it on the outside.”
A soft, hungry growl.
“Gracious.”
“Yeah. Part of why I saw it a bunch is that he’d do it with me watching, he’d do it at me. Legs spread, showing off, taunting me — I was really into chastity-cage stuff then — telling me exactly how desperate I’d have to be before I got my cock loose.”
Shi gave him a surprised glance. He looked up at hir, then raised a finger, shaking it in realization.
“Oh — I get it! You thought he was someone different because I talked about a dom that got me into kink stuff. No, no, that was him. He went back and forth. There were plenty of people he liked being subby for, and sometimes we’d just cuddle and fantasize about being some stud’s pets together. But he topped me on the regular and liked it quite a bit, he was absolutely the dom in that relationship.”
“I guess I had a blind spot about that,” shi conceded, rubbing hir chin. “Jeeze. Now that I’m looking at it directly, that was goddamn ridiculous of me: whether or not someone wants to top or has dominance urges is pretty damn thoroughly separate from the shape of their body.”
“How much someone wants or needs to be a dom has nothing to do with the shape of their body,” Darja drawled, flexing a flogger in gloved hands.
Faije nodded, making a noncommittal noise through his ball-gag. His wrists were cuffed behind his back, and he knelt with his thighs spread. Darja grinned, swinging the flogger lazily, then letting its tip drift up and tease the gleaming steel cage locked around Faije’s sheath and fat nuts. He shuddered, pulling in a breath and closing his eyes — but the blow to his groin that followed was almost a tap. Still, the spikes inside the cage forced his prick to retreat moments later.
Darja reached down and casually fondled the silicone cock that swayed obscenely from his strap-on harness.
“You know, I’ve been using these for long enough that having a big ol' dick feels pretty normal when I’m wearing it, even though I know intellectually that it’s not part of my body. What I keep getting a buzz of newness from, though, is these.”
He demonstratively jostled the hefty artifical scrotum beneath his cock, noting how the other hyena’s eyes followed it.
“Feels pretty good, let me tell you, pret-ty good, to be able to adjust these big ol' balls any time I please.” A smirk. “Or to have you adjust them — with your tongue, of course. Treat ‘em like they’re more important than yours, because they are.”
Another blow from the flogger, sudden and harsh, leaving Faije squealing and yipping through the ball-gag, his head hanging. With a chuckle, Darja pulled Faije’s head up by the strap of the gag, pushing his nose into the musky divot under the monstrous equine cock, lips on the velvety pouch around Darja’s balls. The artificial cock drooled cum-lube down his back from its internal tube.
“Do you want your mouth unlocked, faggot? Do you want to try and fit this into your throat? Do you want it badly enough to beg for it?”
“Please,” he groaned around the ball-gag, drooling through the holes in it.
“I can’t hear you clearly,” Darja taunted. “Louder, pup.”
When Faije inhaled to try again, Darja shifted around and dragged his flare across Faije’s forehead, the slimy, milky trail it left dribbling down his brow and muzzle. He whimpered.
“Please!”
“There we go.” He loosened the strap, then pulled the ball most of the way out of Faije’s muzzle. “Please what?”
“Please fuck my throat,” Faije panted, feeling the cage’s spikes digging into his cock again.
“The sex was pretty damn good,” Faije reminisced, “but we didn’t click as far as the actual relationship part. Plus, that motherfucker never in the entire time I knew him did his own dishes.”
Chaiax raised an eyebrow at the heated tone in his voice. He laughed hollowly.
“I mean — forgive me for sucking up, but that’s a thing I like about you: you do really well at not assuming that because I’m your sub, I’m your houseboy too.”
“Thank you,” shi said drily. “I do worry about that a bit in the context of turning up the intensity dial, though.”
“About what particularly? Dishes?”
“More about me taking shit for granted. I’m always suspicious of that; I’m suspicious because I’ve fucked up at that a lot in my life.” Shi smiled, leaning down to kiss his ears. “And I like you a lot, so I’m wary at the thought of fucking up when it comes to you and your place in my life.”
He leaned into hir touch as shi scrubbed his back with hir fingertips, then tugged hir hand around and kiss-nuzzled along hir scaly inner arm to hir wrist and palm. Shi casually flexed hir talons.
“Thank you.”
Shi snuffled at the top of his head.
“I’m definitely open to twiddling with the intensity dial. Calling me by kink titles on the regular is a good place to start, even though I do have small hang-ups about it. Easy to turn the dial up or down from there. I like things like that, where you can adjust the intensity real easy.”
“Yeah, totally. So I’ll call you Mistress, like, casually?”
“That, that’s actually the hang-up right there. A bunch of gendered titles don’t quite work for me just because gendered, and then there’s also stuff about them that’s more to do with my particular hang-ups. Without going into the whole thing right this moment — please call me Owner.”
He nodded solemnly.
“Thank you for expressing that clearly, Owner; I’ll do that.”
Flexing hir talons, shi gently scritched his chin.
“Good puppy. You can call me that casually, at your discretion. Once in a while I’ll prompt you. And are there particular terms for you I should use or avoid using?”
“Can you call me your boyfriend?” he asked shyly.
“I can definitely do that.”
He squeezed himself against hir, hugging hir arm, half climbing into hir lap. Shi helped him the rest of the way, wrapping hir arms around him protectively. He burrowed against hir, nudging the top of his head against the furry fringe on hir jaw, kissing the scales on hir throat.
“Please do that.”
“No problem, cute boyfriend yeen.”
Faije was blindfolded and draped over Darja’s lap, face-down on the couch, wrists unbound but folded behind his back again. Darja caressed his ass with one hand, lazily spanking him, watching his rump jiggle and his anus quiver around the thick toy in it.
“Pretty sissyspots,” he cooed. “You are coming along with your training so well, you’ve got such a charming, easily-gaped boi-pussy.”
“Thank you,” he groaned.
Darja reached down and gently squeezed his balls, hand wrapping around the other hyena’s scrotum.
“Mmmm. Bet you can’t wait for someone big and virile to come along and relieve you of these,” he said in a slow, sing-song voice. “Bet you can’t wait for us to be hypnotized bitches together, shooting blanks for a potent Master.” Faije whimpered. Darja leaned down and nipped his scruff gently. “Gonna be lovely to fuck you once you’re properly sissified,” he crooned. “Kiss you, rub my chest against yours, grind our empty sheaths together. Tell each other what we taste when we’re swallowing Master’s dick.”
“God yes. Working his dick over together, getting tongues and lips all over it, kissing around it.” “Three-way makeouts between you, me, and a massive slab of cock.” “Drinking from a bowl of jizz together.” “Tongue-cleaning it off each other’s faces.” “Bent over side by side, tails up, showing off our puffy, perma-gaped assholes.” “Kneeling side by side, gagging on monster cocks together, just able to see each other right in the corner of the eye, hear each other’s voices as they throat-fuck us all rough and savage.” Darja rubbed along his perineum firmly and slowly, fingertips sliding back and forth from the base of the toy to his scrotum and back. With his other hand, he added slow, rough spanks, prompting moans from Faije, the intact hyena relaxing further and further.
“Hnnnnffff. Do you have anyone in mind to come collar us both and make us his bitches?”
“Not really. I might bail for a while and look for one for myself.”
“Wait, what? What the hell?”
“I kinda need that? I need a dom. I like what we’ve got, but no, I don’t really want to settle down in this kind of relationship, I want to have this kind of thing on the side or have some kind of poly thing going that includes this. You know, like we spend a lot of time talking about.”
Faije brought his arms around, leaned on his elbows, and covered his face with his hands.
“No, that is not what I thought we were talking about,” he snapped. “I thought we talk about mutual-sub stuff as, like, a pleasant thing that could happen but if it doesn’t we keep doing what we’re doing and that’s chill.”
“Well… no.”
He turned, weight on one arm, glaring at Darja, and found him glaring back indignantly.
“I don’t hear that title a lot, though,” he admitted, “so I’m gonna ask you to expand on it even though I’ve got a guess. What does ‘Owner’ mean to you?”
Shi leaned back in hir chair, still holding him against hirself, staring into space contemplatively. Their aprons were hung over the chair’s back, leaving their bodies pressed warmly together.
“That’s actually a really good question. Is it okay if I just kinda wander around and poke at it for a while?”
“Go for it.”
“I will. So. Part of why I like Owner/pet as a relationship model is that it’s possible to do badly at it. Or to do well, since they go together. With no hate towards people who are making it work for them — it’s a lot trickier to talk about being bad at, like, Mistress/slave stuff, that kind of relationship. It’s modeled on a coercive power relationship that you can’t really be good or bad at. When I say you’re my pet, though, people have an image in their head of people being good or bad at that. Being good at it means less fear and coercion and more training and affection.”
Faije nodded, making himself comfortable in hir lap, sighing as hir heavy hand slid down his back from time to time.
“Plus it implies, like, this back-and-forth. You’re not disposable to me. I care about you; I care a lot about you. The way some people do it, caring about your sub, being invested in them, having intense emotions about them that you can’t necessarily control, is an intolerable form of vulnerability. That vulnerability is what makes the whole thing click for me, though. What I get out of that vulnerability — which, shit, it’s uncomfortable because that’s just inherent in vulnerability — what I get out of it is a feeling of being secure in owning you. I have plenty of intense emotions about you and I can’t necessarily control them. I crave to own you, to collar you, to have you kneeling and kissing my hands. You can see how much I want you, see my desire to make you a happy, treasured pet. That’s a form of control you have over me, and yeah, someone really hardcore might find that unacceptable. For me, though, it gives me a secure, meaningful sense of owning you that I can’t get by being aloof.”
“I could do some of that right now,” he suggested. “I like kissing your hands, noticing how you can just wrap your whole hand around my muzzle.”
Shi laughed gently, wrapping one hand over his muzzle for a moment.
“Let me think through this, spottybitch boyfriend.” He kissed hir palm and nodded, his ears perking up attentively as shi continued. “I want to own you — and particularly, I want to own you at your best. I want you to be improved by being my pet; I want to support you as you build yourself. I crave to have my collar around your most fully realized, happiest self. On top of wanting that for its own sake, just because you’re a person and you deserve self-actualization, I trust that that version of you is still interested in being my pet, and I know that if you are that self, you can feel safe and happy in being owned because your life is in good order, you have your needs met.”
“Oh,” he said quietly, palms on hir biceps. “Oh, huh. I’m… not used to that.”
Shi nodded, touching noses with him.
“You see how it kinda loops around. When things reach that point, I get to have this really amazing confidence and security in things. I get to have the comfort of feeling like I’m doing a good job and the dom-thrill of ‘my pet is loyal to me and earnestly, of their own will, wants to make me happy and be a good pet for me’. For me, the coercive-model relationships fall apart because of not having that. There’s this fear of, what if I’m actually fucking with them and not realizing it, or what if they’re not into it and just going through the motions. I think that comes from trying to not have an emotional investment in someone you’re in a relationship with. You can’t get that stuff for free, you can’t get a loyal, adoring, eager sub for free. You have to go through the vulnerability, you have to invest yourself.”
He knocked his knuckles on hir shoulder lightly.
“Is that why you don’t like calling me slurs?”
“Pretty much. Even in-scene, I don’t want to say something with the subtext of ‘you don’t matter to me, you’re disposable’ — it clashes hard with this stuff I’m telling you about. I need to tell you that you’re valued as a pet. Which is why stuff like ‘fag princess’ is completely fine.”
“I think I get it.” He nodded, then frowned and looked up. “Wait, you’re talking like you had a relationship where this was going on. Why aren’t you still in that one?”
Shi jerked hir head back, flinching and looking away. Hir hands withdrew in a jerky motion, and shi crossed them over hir chest. A tight-lipped scowl followed.
“Remember, a few minutes ago, I said I’d fucked up a lot?”
He slowly winced.
“Yeah?”
A pause. Shi inhaled, then shook hir head, then spoke.
“That.”
He gingerly touched hir shoulder with his fingertips.
“Do you want me to go clean up the dishes?”
Hir jaw tensed visibly, then relaxed. A sigh.
“No. Just, please let it be okay to not explain my fuck-ups right this moment?”
“It is okay to not explain your fuck-ups right this moment,” he repeated back.
“Thank you.” Shi turned hir face back towards him, grimacing, unfolding hir arms, making a sad laugh. “Did I mention that vulnerability is really difficult?”
“It’s really, really difficult,” he concurred.
“Most days I do okay at believing that I might be able to build something like that again — that I haven’t permanently fucked up.” Shi leaned forward, hir hands on his thighs, licking his muzzle. “Trying to build something like that with you sounds really good. Could we do that?”
His tail lifted and wagged for a moment, and he smiled shyly. He put his hands on top of hirs, squeezing gently, leaning forward to nuzzle into hir licks.
“It does sound really good. I’d really like to be my best sissy-bitch self for you. For my Owner.”
He was panting, sniffling, crying a little. Hir huge hand cupped his head, hir thumb rubbing one ear. Shi leaned in and spoke quietly.
“Need a break?”
He leaned into hir touch, closing his eyes and taking deep breaths.
“Slow down for a bit?”
“No problem.”
Shi pushed hirself up again, shifting forward on hir knees to give him some slack in the short chains connecting his wrist-cuffs to the bed’s headboard. Hir prick flopped down on top of his, drooling in spurts onto his belly-fluff. Shi lifted his legs, caressed his stockings, and smiled archly at him.
“Look at that. Fat, heavy draconic dick lying over yours and just erasing it. Like that little sissy stub isn’t even there anymore.”
His legs quivered under hir hands, tensing and relaxing.
“Goes to show how you just need a proper cock to wrap that lovely tongue of yours around, doesn’t it, princess?”
“Please!”
Shi rocked back and forth, pressing heavy, scaly, twitching nuts against his rump as hir cock dribbled sticky precum, flexing in the air with hir heartbeat. Hir talons dug into him through the stockings, dense and black against the pink fabric.
“Or spreading that charmingly fuckable asshole of yours.”
“Pleeeeease…”
“Oh? Is that the sound of sissy-yeen needing a powerful dracotiger knot conquering his asshole?”
“Please yes, please Owner, tame my asshole, conquer me, bitchify me.”
“Gosh, all that after you’ve just been guzzling down my cock and showing off how it makes your throat bulge? You are a greedy little bitch-yeen. No wonder I like you so much.”
Shi reached down and rubbed hir fingertips over the spearhead tip of hir cock, a strand of precum briefly following hir hand as it rose again. Shi made eye contact as shi reached for Faije, raising hir eyebrows curiously. He nodded firmly, then closed his eyes as shi wiped hir precum across his nose with the pad of hir thumb. Chaiax smiled hungrily as he shivered, hir lips pulling back from hir fangs.
“Owner marks me,” he whimpered.
“That’s right,” shi purred. “Marking my treasured bitch-princess yeen. Letting my scent march right into that nose of his and remind him how much he needs my cum.”
“I need your cum, Owner,” he repeated, nodding.
Shi leaned back, pushing on his legs, one hand on hir cock. Adjusting, shi slid hirself down, head pressing against his asshole, feeling it quiver.
“Need it bad?” shi growled.
“Need it so, so bad,” he groaned. “Please, Owner. Please. Fuck me, make me your impotent sissy, use me.”
Shi leaned into him, one hand on the bed beside him, making eye contact as shi eased heavy, unwieldly, monstrous dracotiger cock into his asshole. His lips quivered and his eyes widened as shi caught his attention.
“Just what you need,” shi whispered.
“Just what I need.”
“A potent Owner.”
“A potent Owner — god, so potent, please Owner…”
An abrupt shove, a snarl. Faije squealed, his toes spreading in the air. Hir cock was deep enough into him to remove hir hand, now on his head, digging fingers into his short shock of hair, pulling roughly.
“To tame you like you need.”
“Tame me like I need! I need to be tamed!”
With a snarl, shi broke eye contact, leaning in and biting the side of his neck. Short, sharp thrusts pushed curved, ridged, knotted dracotiger cock deep into him, hir sheath folding back as shi hilted in him. Hir hands scooped under him, claws digging into his back and making him howl. With hir head getting in the way of his looking down, all he could see were hir thick, curved horns moving as shi bit and kissed his neck. His legs kicked idly in the air. Chaiax groaned happily, savoring the squeeze of his asshole far down hir cock, the soft, sloppy warmth deeper inside him, the feel of hir unswollen knot teasing him. After a minute, shi raised hir head and growled, whiskers brushing the side of his head.
“It makes you want to surrender, doesn’t it? Surrender to that huge, hungry predator cock inside you. You’ve always known you ought to be an impotent, blanks-shooting sissy bitch. I bet you can’t keep yourself from imagining shrinking as I push into you — every inch of penetration taking some size off of you as you feel that predator cock sinking in, deeper and deeper, blatantly huge and potent, so clearly the kind of cock that makes yours disposable.”
He closed his eyes tight and nodded, his ass quivering around hir as he listened. Hir tongue, long and rough, caressed around his ear.
“I’m a sissy,” he groaned. “Owner’s cock is all that matters. I should be an impotent sissy, presenting my asshole and my empty sheath for Owner.”
Shi watched him focus on the image, hir eyes alight with hunger.
“Soon,” shi growled. “Rrrrrrrhhhhhhrrrr. You’re such a good bitch-yeen, such a good sissy-toy. Soon we’ll train you to feel those poor nuts shrinking when you’re in the presence of ultra-virile dracotiger nuts. Teach you what it feels like to have your cock shrinking, recognizing before you do that you’re in the presence of someone with real potency.”
He squealed at the suggestion, his thighs pressing against hir sides, his paws jerking in the air. Shi began to rut him again, putting hir weight on him, taloned toes digging into the bed with hir thrusts. Despite the words, his prick was a mess of thin, drooly precum, smearing it all over hir belly’s scales as shi pressed down onto him. Shi threw hirself into the frantic, bestial fucking for longer than the first time, then pushed hirself up again, huffing, hir shoulders shaking with adrenaline.
Shi made eye contact again, a flourishing gesture commanding his attention. Shi reached down with one huge paw, wrapping it around his prick, squeezing lightly. Hir other held his chin, commanding his gaze.
“Not just imagining yourself shrinking with penetration,” shi rumbled, “imagining yourself helpless to keep what you’ve got, shrinking as you get closer and closer to climax. Do you want to climax for Owner, sissy-pet?”
“Please yes, please Owner, climax for you,” he moaned.
Hir hand moved steadily on his prick as shi leaned back, finding a favorable angle for slow, steady thrusts into him.
“You want to climax for Owner, even though you know you’re going to have nothing but a nub?” shi taunted.
He practically sobbed, his arms waving, jerked back by the cuffs. “I want to climax for Owner! I want to be Owner’s sissy-fag pet!”
“You want to climax for Owner,” shi growled, “even as you feel yourself shrinking, softening, surrendering.”
Shi flexed hir tail smugly at his squealing, babbling pleas, hir hand moving on his prick and steadily picking up speed. He kicked from time to time, arching his back, pressing up against hir touch. Between thrusts, shi rubbed his belly. In hisses, shi reminded him of surrender, of impotence, of how overwhelming dracotiger cock was compared to his.
Arching his back and yipping in a quick, high cadence, he came all over hir hand and his own belly, his eyes still closed, his chest heaving. With a huff of effort, shi pulled out of him, then leaned in, hand on hir own cock as shi stared into his eyes. The panting, dazed hyena whimpered at hir, his eyes not quite focusing, his jaw hanging open.
“Mine,” shi growled.
“Yours!”
“My owned, precious bitch-yeen.”
“Yours, please, hff, Owner!”
He squirmed under hir, feeling hir hand moving more quickly.
“My owned, tamed, impotent sissy-yeen.”
“Yours, owned, tamed, impotent!”
Hir panting kept hir from starting another sentence — shi grimaced, hunched, then roared as shi straightened up, shoulders back, legs tensed. Hir cock erupted, delivering jet after jet of thick, heavy, rich spunk to splatter onto the hyena. Shi started with his belly, lingering there to erase his efforts, then left ribbons of dracotiger sperm on his chest, finally a few on his face, one drooling from the side of his muzzle as he whimpered.
Shi panted for a moment, grinning smugly at him. He nodded briefly, eyes wide, whimpering happily.
“Where’s your cum, sissy-yeen?” shi asked. “You made some really cute noises there; I’m pretty sure you came. Did you climax for me like a good spottybitch?”
“I did, Owner. I came for you.”
He fidgeted, thighs rubbing against hir, as shi smirked.
“Oh? But there certainly isn’t any hyena cum here, is there?”
Shi dragged hir forefinger across his belly, then presented it, wet and gooey, to his lips. As he sucked on it, wrapping his tongue around it eagerly, shi posed another question.
“Of course, there wouldn’t be if you’re a blanks-shooting sissy-yeen. It’d just be gone, wouldn’t it? It’d just be erased by all that heavy, powerful cum from your Owner.”
The vibration of his groan was easy to feel around hir finger. With hir other hand, shi reached around, talons digging into his scruff. Slurping off of hir finger, he panted, nodding shallowly. Shi coaxed him up, smiling.
“Spottypet. Is there anything you’d like to say?”
“Thank you, Owner,” he moaned, shaking.
The thanking continued until well after shi untied him and laid with him, holding him against hirself while adrenaline left his system, feeling him shiver, hearing his happy crooning.
]]>“Hey. Hey, hey. Mommo. What’s that? That’s not orange juice.”
Rynher crouched, then jumped up, catching her mother’s dress in little hands and huffing as she began to climb. Myrtle casually reached around with one hand, nudging her cub upwards.
“That’s a martini, honey. Not for kittens.”
“Why?”
Arabella laughed quietly, her martini glass clinking as she set it down on the sun-warmed glass tabletop amid a few bottles, a large carafe of juice, and a half-shrinkwrapped cluster of juice boxes.
“I see someone’s discovered ‘why,’ haven’t they.”
“A couple weeks ago, actually.” She turned her head back to the small lion. “Martinis are difficult, kitten.”
Rynher hauled herself up to Myrtle’s shoulder, leaning over it, her chest on the lioness' wide shoulder, one paw on her collarbone, the other waving towards Myrtle’s martini. Myrtle reached up with her free hand, rubbing Rynher’s head and giving her a few fond licks.
“Whyyyyyyy are they difficult?” Rynher asked, her toeclaws digging into the back of Myrtle’s dress as she headbutted her mother’s jaw.
“Because they’re complicated,” Arabella replied, sipping her own. “Would you like me to tell you about how they’re complicated?”
Rynher wiggled for a moment, dark-tipped tail flicking.
“Yes please!”
“Polite kitten!” The tigress beamed, leaning forward, elbows on the table. “Okay. Martinis have a lot of alcohol in them. Alcohol has good and bad things in it. The bad things depend on how big your body is: they spread out more in bigger people’s bodies. Your mom and I are big cats, so we can drink some alcohol and we get the good parts with only a little bit of the bad parts. If you drank alcohol, you’d get some good parts, but because you’re a small cat, you’d get a lot of the bad parts like losing your sense of balance, throwing up, and headaches. It would not be fun, and it might hurt you badly. So that’s why alcohol is okay for big cats and not okay for small cats.”
Myrtle put her own glass down as the explanation proceeded, keeping one hand on Rynher’s back to steady her. She extracted a juice box from the clump, speared its straw in, and lifted it for Rynher, who squealed happily, putting both paws forward for it.
“Do you understand that, kitten?”
“Yuh-huh!”
“What do you say?”
She turned to Arabella.
“Thank you Miss Arabella!”
“Good kitten.”
Rynher took the juice box in both hands and sucked on its straw happily. Myrtle made eye contact with Arabella, pointing briefly up at her cub, then away. Arabella nodded, stood, and came around behind her: she gently put both hands on Rynher, picked her up, extracted her toeclaws, and put her down on the patio. She scampered away, both adults grinning after her.
“Thanks for the save.”
“No problem. Mine are just getting there too. Cam’s better at the ‘why’ game than I am, but I’m okay at it. Probably goes with his job.”
“Oh yeah — how’s his quest for tenure going?”
Arabella rolled her eyes and shook her head. Myrtle raised her eyebrows curiously, then turned away, craning her neck to get a look at the four kittens as Rynher rejoined the other three, splashing around in the swimming pool across the yard.
“That bad, huh?”
“I’d rather not get into it, and honestly I think you shouldn’t mention it to him today either. He’s focusing on making us lunch right now, and after that he’s gonna shut himself in the bedroom with a couple of dildos for stress-relief time.”
“You think he’ll want company?”
“Ask him, not me. But if I had to guess, I’d say he’ll want the kind of company that can top the hell out of him. The kittens had a cold recently, so of course we both got it, and that pushed things to an even lower level than normal. So your odds are pretty good.”
“Cool. I might go for that. You okay soloing all four of the kids for a while? I imagine Lilwen is gonna have her hands full already.”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine. After pool time and lunch they should all be a bit tired anyhow; I’ll throw some pillows on the trampoline and have them all make a nest.”
“Great. Thanks babe.”
Arabella leaned over and kissed the side of her muzzle.
“Save some of him for me, though.”
They laughed together, then picked up their glasses and sipped in unison. At the sound of a sliding door, they turned, then grinned widely.
“Lilwen!”
“Heyyyy!”
“Welcome welcome!”
The leopard stepped through the door gingerly, Campbell ushering her out. In a sling against her chest she held a little bundle, a tiny paw reaching out of it and batting slowly at her bosom. Arabella and Myrtle rose together, smiling widely, coming to meet her.
“How’ve you been, babe?” She made a resigned smile as she carefully hugged them.
“Really tired, basically all of the time. I thought I was gonna be done after, you know, birth, but the whole thing is still kicking my ass. Thanks again for setting this up for me.”
“Of course! This stuff’s really difficult. We just wanted to make time for you to sit down and have a breather.”
“And to get introduced to the itty-bitty one, of course.” Lilwen pulled a grin out, standing up straighter, ears perking.
“Her name’s Sinavena.”
“And what a fine little thing Sinavena is!” Arabella leaned in, wiggling her fingers gently at the bundled-up, grey-furred cub. “Hey little terror. How you feelin' today?”
Diminutive paws waved at her fingers eagerly, accompanied by high, squeaky mews.
“Pretty fierce for all of, what, three and a half weeks?”
“Shit, most days she’s got more energy than I do.”
“Oh, that reminds me —”
Arabella straightened up, beckoning to Lilwen with a wave over her shoulder as she returned to the table. She picked up a tall shopping bag, turned around, then chuckled and smiled patiently as she saw Lilwen and Myrtle sharing a slow kiss, Myrtle leaning over the leopardess' shoulder while kneading her shoulders firmly. When they finished, Arabella stepped forward, eyebrows raised expectantly. Lilwen shrugged at her, rocking her cub demonstratively.
“Be my hands for a minute?”
“No problem.” Myrtle stepped forward, taking the bag and holding it open for the tigress, who reached into it. She withdrew a dark blue dress with a flourish, shaking it out to unfold it, holding it by the collar as she gestured to the its palm-wide grey stripes that fell from shoulders to hips to knees.
“Of course Sinavena won’t be climbing age for a while yet, but she’ll get there quicker than you think. Probably quicker than mine — Teruleth’s not much of a climber. Not as active as I’d like at all, really: I have to encourage him to swim, too. But Gadayra is just up and down and up and down all day, she’s the fittest little thing.”
“No wonder you learned to make these yourself. It’s so nice!” Lilwen reached out with one hand, rubbing the thick cloth between forefinger and thumb.
“Well, it’ll have little pawprints all over it soon enough, but that’s its own kind of nice.”
“Yeah, it’s one of those things where if it looks pristine, that’s not good.”
“And little Sinavena’s gonna have strong claws to dig into it soon, isn’t she?” Myrtle leaned over as she raised the question, presenting her own fingers for Sinavena’s inquisitive paws. The kitten grabbed eagerly at her, then chewed on the presented fingers with stubby little milk-fangs. An indulgent smile met the chewing.
“Soon, but hopefully not quite yet. I want her claws in the dress, not in my tits.”
They laughed together, returning to the table.
“So — congratulations! Welcome back. Super happy for you.” Arabella beamed at Lilwen, raising her glass in a toast as she leaned back. “Okay if I throw a nosy question at you?”
“Go for it.” Lilwen shifted her sling, coaxing the kitten towards her breast, hand gently holding the back of her grey-furred head.
“How’d the perineal massage work out?”
Myrtle snort-laughed indelicately, splashing some of her martini on her face, then holding her hand over her muzzle as she snickered. Lilwen chuckled, her ears flicking, guiding the kitten’s paws towards herself with one finger.
“I mean, I don’t have a lot of basis for comparison. I haven’t tried having a kid without it.”
“Did it feel like it helped?”
“Well, it felt like — let me put it this way, I have zero questions left about what I can take. I’m like, okay, I got her out, smaller stuff I’ll be fine with.” They laughed together, and Lilwen leaned back in her chair, sighing. “I’m still pretty sore, though.”
Myrtle nodded sympathetically. “Yup. Took a full month for me before I could sit down to piss comfortably.”
“Worth it,” Arabella opined, jabbing her forefinger emphatically.
“Hell yeah, worth it. But you and I are saying that with the benefit of a few years already behind us to get used to it.” She nodded towards the leopard. “Give her a while before the evangelizing, huh?”
“I’m not evangelizing.”
“Arabella, honey, I have known you for a solid ten years. I don’t doubt your politics at all, but you were always kinda pretty het compared to the rest of us, you were always really clear that you wanted kids.”
“Oh come on. I sucked a lot of dick in college, which is emphatically not the same thing, and then I settled down and married a nice girl. I ended up with a husband and that’s working out great, but come on, I was never that het. That’s actually a thing that makes me and Cam uncomfortable sometimes: we look really het at events compared to you and Iris.”
Lilwen gave Arabella a puzzled look. “Didn’t know you’d had another marriage before Cam.”
“I hadn’t.”
A high, sustained, squeal-yowl interrupted them, along with a chorus of “Mom!”
Arabella swore, lunging up, her chair clattering over backwards, glass falling onto the table. She dashed towards the pool, hands pulling her dress open. Myrtle grabbed Lilwen’s shoulder hard as she soothed Sinavena’s upset at the noises.
“You: chill. We’ll handle it.”
She rose and briskly jogged after the tigress, turning aside to come through the gate in the low fence that Arabella had simply vaulted directly over, leaving her heavy dress behind. There was a brief splash as she dove into the pool headlong, submerging as she moved towards the splashing, thrashing kitten on the other side. Myrtle forced herself to move slowly on the wet concrete around the pool, approaching Rynher, Terandil, and Gadayra as they huddled worriedly in a knot. She fell to a crouch and her hands shot out, grabbing the two smallest ones by their scruffs, her head dipping to pick up the remaining cub by her teeth.
Turning around and putting them down again, she growled, fangs bared demonstratively. “Stay here.”
She heard a wet splat and wheezy coughs as she turned around. Arabella had dove under the kitten in the pool and lifted him out by rising directly under him, her head and one hand shoving him up out of the water. He curled up on his side, shaking as he coughed. The tigress rose from the pool, dripping all over, panting. She nodded wearily as the kitten cried, sitting down cross-legged and holding him against her chest.
“Shhhh. It’s okay, Ruru. Mom’s here. I got you. Keep breathing. You’re gonna be okay.”
He clung to her as Myrtle ushered the other three away, herding two of them and carrying the third in one arm. When she returned to the table, Campbell was there with Lilwen, frowning in concern.
“What happened?”
Myrtle coaxed the trio onto a bench together and chuffed encouragingly at them as she distributed juice boxes and thin, soft strips of jerky.
“Ruru fell in,” Terandil volunteered.
“Uh-huh?”
“And he fell in the deep part, he was scared.”
Campbell stood on his tiptoes to get a look at the pool, then visibly relaxed, nodding and prompting the kittens to continue with a wave. They looked back and forth among themselves, recounting it slowly.
“He was trying to climb out.”
“We tried to help him.”
“He couldn’t grab hands.”
“And I was telling people not to fall in more,” Gadayra piped up.
Campbell dragged out a smile. “Oh yeah? Being a clever kitten and remembering the rules?”
“Yeah!”
He stepped forward to kiss the top of Gadayra’s head.
“Good job, Gada.”
Myrtle looked expectantly at the three of them. “Everyone remembers that rule, right?”
“You can’t help someone out if you fall in,” they chorused, nodding.
“Good job!” Campbell nodded firmly. “You kept that in mind and made it so Mom could come and help. That was the right thing to do.”
Arabella returned, holding Teruleth with both hands, curled up with his arms around her neck. She wrapped Teruleth in a dry towel, then sat down.
“Okay. Okay. Emergency over.”
Campbell draped a towel over her shoulders in turn, leaning down for fretful licks and cheek-rubs. She leaned up to kiss him briefly.
“Ruru fell in and got scared. He’s okay now.”
Myrtle spoke up.
“Kids, please go grab blankets and pillows from the closet and set them up on the trampoline, okay?”
The kittens nodded and trotted off, Campbell following them after a nod from Arabella. Myrtle sat down beside her, stroking her back up and down.
“You doing okay?”
“Give me a few minutes for my heart rate to settle down. I’m just glad this guy’s okay.” She nuzzled down at Teruleth, who made a quiet, shaky mew and hid his head under her chin. “You’re gonna be okay,” she repeated to him. “You forgot to be careful for a minute, but now you’re okay, and you can learn to be more careful. Everyone forgets sometimes; that’s why we practice things. So we’re gonna practice that again later, carefully, so you don’t have to be scared like that again. Okay?”
The small tiger nodded, still curled up against her. She gave him a warm squeeze.
“And right now we’re all gonna have a nice lunch together and you’re gonna take a nap in the blanket fort with Gada, Tern, and Rynnie. How’s that sound?” Another nod, slightly more energetic. Arabella carefully put him down, draping the towel over his shoulders like a cape. “Good. Okay: go help Gada with putting the blanket fort together, all right?”
“All right.”
He trotted off with increasing steadiness, and Arabella slumped in her chair, putting her hands over her face.
“Criminy.”
“You keep breathing too, babe,” Myrtle said, coming around behind her and rubbing her shoulders.
“Yeah, that looked like three quarters of a heart attack,” Lilwen concurred.
“Maybe just one quarter of a heart attack, but yeah.” She chuckled ruefully. “What I got from him was that they were roughhousing, he tripped and fell into the pool, swallowed some water, and panicked. So once I got him out, he was fine, just shaken.”
“Honestly, you look more shaken than he does.”
“I probably am: I’m old enough to be fuckin' terrified of mortality — especially my kids' mortality.”
Lilwen grimaced. “Yeah, that’s reasonable. I had that scare at six months, I was telling you about the one set of ultrasounds.”
“That was pretty horrible.”
“Right, and until they figured out what was actually happening, I was a wreck. So I feel you on that.”
Myrtle leaned forward over Arabella’s shoulder.
“How about I drag out the air mattress and the three of us just cuddle on that out here while the kids are napping?”
“That sounds like a good plan, yeah.” She smiled at Lilwen. “Plus it’ll let us fuss over you for a while — you sure look like you need it.”
“I am completely okay with this plan,” she laughed.
Campbell returned, and they cleared space on the table for the tray he carried, called the kittens for lunch, and all sat down together.
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I have monsters in me.
As a woman, my navigating the world requires me to be aware of how heteronormative femininity is a very specific narrative that very many people are willing and able to violently enforce, even though those people generally regard women who depart from heteronormative femininity as unnatural, bizarre, or fearful: as monstrous.
As a trans woman, my surviving in the world requires me to be aware of how many people regard my selfhood as unnatural and my body as something to be punished: again, as monstrous.
I’m confronted with people, media, and structures in the world (lots of them!) that either treat my personhood as debatable and optional or outright take for granted that I am some kind of lesser being.
Sometimes I have the energy and desire to demand to be treated as a peer, as a full person, as a normal person instead of as the Other.
It’s impossible for me (or anyone else in marginalized communities) to sustain that desire and energy all the time, though.
Even when we do have the desire and the energy, sometimes the mechanisms that enforce marginalization coerce us into compliance — yet coercion, however violent, cannot force us to regard ourselves in our hearts as fundamentally unworthy, as not being full people, as deserving only the scraps of dignity and justice that they choose to allow us. Brief digression: structures of marginalization often inflict trauma and mental health problems on us that can make us hate ourselves like that, but despite bearing scars and pain, we have good days and flashes of strength in which we can once again perceive clearly that we are just as fundamentally worthy of health, happiness, safety, and kindness as everyone else in the world. I send my solidarity and love to everyone bearing those scars. You have that strength, you are worthy, and the system is what’s broken, not you.
When we’re in those situations, though, whether we’re coerced or weary or simply don’t give a fuck today, we’re presented with another question: “who am I, then?” We can’t just assert “I really am a person!” directly because it’d require the energy, desire, or freedom that we don’t have in those situations. At the same time, we do know in our hearts that the situation that denies our personhood, is doing us an injustice. How, then, do we express to ourselves a resolution between the external situation that demands suppression of our selfhood and our internal knowledge of its reality and importance? There are many tactics for resistance that focus on cultivating the energy and desire to assert ourselves more often, or on helping us muster resistance against coercion. Such tactics are good and important, but there are limits to the help they can give us. Beyond those limits dwell monsters who can lend us their strength.
We can answer the question “who am I?” with “I am a monster,” with a self-image that neither requires us to externally demand acknowledgement nor to internally regard ourselves as unworthy and abject. The way we are treated as Other can become an affirmation of monster-ness, rather than a sign of unworthiness. Even when we can’t escape mistreatment, a monstrous narrative of self lets us resist the demand that we think of ourself as deserving mistreatment. Building our own monstrous narrative of self lets us choose alternate explanations, instead of being forced into the explanation offered by those who mistreat us.5
The explanation that Monsters Of Our Own offers, about monsters and trans-ness, is a good place to start:
For some trans people, monsters represent the way society sees them. It is a reclamation of a title given to their existence, forced on them for being who they are. For others, they represent the factors of their bodies and the conflict they experience. They may also represent the escape, the strength, needed to deal with a society that views you as other, grotesque, terrifying, horrific. Monsters represent how society sees trans people [and reflect trans people’s] own experiences of violence, rejection, and exclusion, [creating] an empathetic tie to monsters.
As a furry, I’ve spent a lot of time using nonhuman images of self as a way to ask “who am I?” and “who do I want and need to be?” as well as using those images as tools with which to build answers. The furry subculture not only cultivates conversations about nonhuman images of self, but also creates spaces where participants can adopt those selves as primary and expect to be treated accordingly even if a participant’s embodied-world presence diverges widely from the self they adopt. After years of participating in the conversations and the spaces, the selves that I now use for almost everything are the anthropomorphic tigress who is my avatar-self, together with werewolf, space alien, and gorgon layers on top of that core self (visual reference: here we are together). I’m going to talk about how these identities6 are important tools for me, about the monster archetypes they embody, and about how they co-habit with the rest of my selfhood. My personal usage of these tools is only a fraction of what’s possible, but I hope that its example can point you towards ways of using the tools that will be most productive for you.
The werewolf version of me is a combination of tiger and wolf, outrageous and Dionysian (visual reference: in this photoset, right-hand column, light green swimsuit). I draw my idiom of werewolves less from Universal horror movies and more from the sexualized werewolves that Internet-mediated fandom communities have made prominent: there’s a specific experience that the latter are helpful for taking on. Part of the experience of living in a marginalized community, is the experience of the dominant community’s willingness to coercively regulate your sexuality. For women, especially trans women, this coercion is a central feature of our experience.7 The dominant culture regards mass-media broadcasts, individual conversations, and everything in between as appropriate venues to speculate about our appearances, our sexual tastes, and our fuckability. Taking on this monstrous aspect lets me reverse heteronormativity’s demand that women be sexually submissive, meek, and undemanding of our own pleasure: when I’m in tigerwolf mode, I am sexually dominant, I assert my autonomy, I gleefully enjoy sexual pleasure. Because I am a trans woman, the dominant culture considers my genitals dangerous and unnatural despite that the idea of penetrating someone with them makes me flinch with discomfort and revulsion. When I’m in tigerwolf mode, I proudly have and take pleasure from monstrous, non-cisnormative genitals, unconcerned with disguising them or with passing as a cis person. My tigerwolf self has the privilege of universal acceptance when I assert that my body is feminine and enjoys the luxury of only having conversations about my appearance, my sexual tastes, and my fuckability when they’re conducted on my terms.
The tigerwolf also incorporates some elements from the Maenads. Werewolf narrative skews towards being male-coded, but it also overlaps with accounts of the Maenads, who are somewhat more obscure. For all that the Maenads are definitely human women, they are still portrayed as monstrous: like werewolves, they’re stereotypically bloodthirsty, irrational, and dangerous. However, when we notice that our knowledge of this group of women is entirely mediated through writing by men (not very much of it, either), we have to question the accuracy of our “knowledge”. What would they have to say for themselves? Given that there are many feminine monsters (especially ones from the ancient Mediterranean like the Maenads) where our knowledge of them comes only from accounts by men, this is a question that we should ask often. It’s certainly not good that other accounts didn’t survive (or never existed), but at the same time it’s an opportunity.
The Maenads' voicelessness is an overwhelmingly common experience of marginalized communities. We are required to understand the dominant group in order to survive, but dominance lets them shirk the emotional labor of understanding us on our own terms; further, others know us not by what we’d like to say about ourselves, but by what’s said about us by the dominant group.8 Because of this shared experience, members of marginalized communities in the present are well-qualified to reconstruct alternate accounts of such monsters9 by asking “what did the dominant group say about us when we were kept from speaking in our own voices?” In answering this question, we triangulate from the known accounts and approach the missing ones: once in their neighborhood, we reconstruct what the monsters might tell us about themselves if given the chance to speak with their own voices. Even though it’s impossible to forensically or archaeologically verify the accounts that we reconstruct, we can verify immediately whether or not they resonate with our experience of being made voiceless, whether they have the same relationship to the dominant group’s descriptions as our accounts of ourselves do. Accounts that resonate, are ones we can use when we become monsters. Personally, I’m guided by the way that both werewolves and Maenads are beings of the wild, outside of and feared by the “civilized” world (presumed to be ruled by men). When I inhabit my tigerwolf self, I am enlisting these monsters' help in resisting the way that today’s “civilized” world treats me.
The space alien version of me is a xenokitty, a mix of familiar and unfamiliar (visual reference: this picture, (exposed breasts, login required)). Like E.T., Ford Prefect, and similar aliens in media, she’s a friendly, curious outsider.10 Where the tigerwolf embodies a pointed rejection of the “civilized” world by someone from a neighboring area who’s capable of complying with its demands despite rejecting them, the xenokitty is from far, far outside that world. She explores, confidently and actively seeking new experiences even in distant and unfamiliar surroundings. She takes it for granted that she is dramatically different from the people around her, and is thoroughly comfortable with that status. It leads her to value her differences with others as things to be learned from, as opportunities to explore, and as entertainment.
Sometimes, people enacting marginalization aren’t so much aggressive as they are uncomprehending. Members of the dominant group may be unaware of even extremely basic parameters of our lives. When this lack of understanding surfaces, we sometimes can take the opportunity to teach, to explain our experience in our own voices to someone who may be open to hearing something other than the dominant group’s account of us. Teaching takes significant effort and the expectation that we will exert ourselves happily is also part of marginalization, but the opportunity is real. When these opportunities come along, it’s a good time for me to be a space alien. When I’m in xenokitty mode, I’m eager to explore difference and novelty. I am okay with others not understanding my experience: it’s not theirs, and they don’t need to understand it for it to be healthy, good, and valid. This reduces the pressure that comes with the teaching: it’s stressful to be a de facto representative of your entire community, especially on short notice. Being a space alien gives me the confidence to fluently explain myself and to teach people about my experience without apologizing for it. It also helps me defer the anger that comes from how explaining one’s experience of marginalization inevitably calls to mind the injustice of that experience: the anger is a valid and relevant response, but it’s very difficult to use it helpfully for the work of teaching. Finally, being in xenokitty mode is helpful specifically in trans and queer contexts: I delight in finding siblings and other explorers. Some of them need reassurance that their homeworlds are okay places to which it is possible to return, that there exist places that are safe for them, and that there are other voyagers out there who know what it’s like to be far from home.
The gorgon version of me is both feline and ophidian, a creature of earth and stone (visual reference: this picture). Gnomic and obscure, she’s focused on her creative and investigative work, avoiding the dominant culture because interacting with it would be a time-consuming tedium unworthy of her attention. Unlike the xenokitty, she is uninterested in explaining herself. Instead of an explorer, she is a hermit — like the gorgons or their siblings the Graeae, not a particularly safe one to seek out. She can be found, but the kind of person capable of finding her is already halfway outside of the orthodox world. Finding her may result in the seeker’s transformation.
The triangulation mentioned earlier with the Maenads is particularly fruitful with the Gorgons of Greek myth. As with the Maenads, the various accounts we have come to us through men, but unlike them, one account is distinctly strongest and foremost: the Perseus myth. In it, Perseus feuds with King Polydectes, who sends him to dispatch Medusa in the expectation that the Gorgons' petrifying abilities will result in Perseus' death: instead, with help from Athena, Perseus shields himself from petrification, beheads Medusa, and uses her severed head to petrify several other men in various tales. What would Medusa and her sisters have to say for themselves?
To me, the Perseus story has some very familiar elements. I can read the Gorgons as women whose appearances stunned the men of their world, leaving them unable to process what they beheld, paralyzed by something about these women that they were deeply afraid of: a metaphorical petrification. These men reacted with violence. Perseus' story includes not only his aid from Athena, but his coercing aid from the Graeae and the Hesperides. He seeks out the Gorgons, inflicts deadly violence on them, and uses the result of this violence to raise his status among other men. Even in death, Medusa is denied her own account: Perseus' account goes unchallenged and gives him much glory. It is a very small extrapolation to say that Perseus exploits the Gorgons: instead of having their own voices, Perseus' voice is substituted for theirs in a way that gains Perseus great worldly profit (on top of the harm he inflicted in his encounter with them).
When we look at the story this way, trans people, women, and queer people can’t help but recognize our own collective experiences. Many are the men who have reacted to our appearance with violence, and then sought to justify the violence by claiming that we are a danger to them. Many are the men who have sought us out and then interposed themselves between us and others, silencing us by claiming to speak for us and collecting profits for their speech. Many are the men who have done us harm without even acknowledging us, like Perseus and the Graeae/Hesperides, on their way to work some harm on our siblings. Many, too, are the men who regard their desires as more important than our autonomy: even though the author of How To Talk does a smaller harm than the deadly violence Perseus used, they are on the same continuum.
In gorgon mode, I turn my face from the world that calls me dangerous and worthy of deadly aggression. I am a calm recluse, focused on my creative work: I am unconcerned with being understood by the “civilized” world. I expect that my body, my desires, and my self will be incomprehensible to them, and I proudly become an enigma. When people receptive to my work find me, I welcome them, but I make no effort to be easy to understand or find (rather, the opposite). Keeping in solidarity with Medusa, a tragically slain sibling, I stay mindful of the violence that may be enacted against me based on my appearance, and do what work I can to shield myself against it.
Like anyone else in a marginalized community, I sometimes resist the mechanisms of marginalization in ways the external world can see, but I don’t always have the energy, desire, or freedom to do so. Together, these three alternate selves are extremely helpful to my internal resistance. They give me strength to reject the demand that I internally submit to marginalization by regarding myself as deserving to be treated as less than a person. Importantly, the archetypes that work for me aren’t the only ones. I’m acquainted with genies (tapping into the juxtaposition of power and powerlessness as a way to grapple with heteronormativity’s paradoxical accounts of women’s sexuality), with fae (alien creatures, beautiful and dangerous), and with robots (extending the idea of our bodies as artificial to explore the possibilities of truly being able to choose an embodiment). There are many, many monsters to choose from. Go, and become monstrous.
Ursula Vernon’s “This Vote Is Legally Binding” is also wonderful, but does not contain monsters.↩
They generously invited me to contribute, but “meet a deadline” is by a pretty wide margin my worst skill as a writer. Sorry, Lucian!↩
My favorite example of these narratives' strength comes from a post by Fred Clark: “Ask most people, ‘Do you believe in vampires?’ and they will answer No. But ask those same people if vampires can be killed with a wooden stake and they’ll tell you Yes.” Even when we deny the literal truth of stories, they have important effects on us.↩
I am a trans woman and I’m writing this piece primarily for women (for every kind of woman). If your life experience is something else, I unfortunately can’t promise that this piece will be helpful, but I send my well-wishing and solidarity for any monster-narrative-reappropriating work of yours and also encourage you to notice and support others when they’re using the tools I’m writing about.↩
I’m not an academic and I don’t know of any scholarly/Theoryville work about marginalization and monster identity — but I’d be completely shocked if none exists. If you know of work like that, please do tell me about it.↩
These three identities are ways of being that I actively put on and take off. They’re part of me, but they’re much closer to being the kind of self-extension that an actor who plays the same part many times develops than to being part of a multiple system. For more information about what multiple systems are and aren’t, I recommend listening to what they have to say for themselves.↩
To reinforce, though, it’s a universal aspect of marginalization. For example, black men are portrayed as sexual predators, physically disabled people as sexless, and poor people as sexually irresponsible.↩
Here I’m leaning on the discussion of “interpretive labor” in David Graeber’s Dead Zones of the Imagination.↩
Consider Creature From The Black Lagoon and its portrayal of a monstrous Other with no voice, present in body but narrativized only by statements from the emissaries of the orthodox world.↩
Jon Carroll’s “Near Life Experiences” also has an excellent story about a space alien: “She has considered the matter carefully; she has talked it over with a few trusted friends. And her conclusion: I am not crazy. I am only a space alien.” It is a compassionate story.↩
Basically, I like to think that when I talk to people I’m fond of (I try to also do this with people I dislike, but I do not always succeed), I default to taking you seriously, listening as a peer, and assuming that you matter. You deserve safety, health, and happiness. We all deserve that.
My ideas here are heavily informed by Alice Miller’s notion of a “helping witness,” but going into detail about that is another post (and a rather grim one, at that).
]]>So after 18 months, I think we can safely say that no, Cory [Doctorow] and I were not “canaries in the coal mine.” There are not hordes of fed-up consumers rejecting Apple’s vision of cryptographic lock-in. There are not mass graves where people ceremoniously dump their crippled, non-general-purpose computing devices. Outside of Planet Debian and my own personal echo chamber, nobody gives a shit about Freedom 0.
Since then, things have only gone further in the direction that Pilgrim and Doctorow despaired about. Apple has sold a preposterously large number of iPhones and iPads, large enough that it’s actually a bit difficult to get a grasp on how much the game has changed. I’m just gonna quote Marco Arment, since he absolutely called it:
Smartphones were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws. … Other manufacturers had neglected touchscreens for years, but Apple figured out how to do a touchscreen well, and did. Fans of the former types of smartphones and much of the tech press declared this smartphone useless or not capable enough because of its lack of a keyboard, its non-removable battery, its lack of expansion slots or ports, and other hardware features in which Apple chose differently from what most other manufacturers were doing. That ended up not mattering. Now, most high-end smartphones look like [the iPhone]. … [Criticism of the iPad] ended up not mattering. And now, other manufacturers are scrambling to build tablet products as quickly as possible. How do you think the subcompact, inexpensive computer category will look in three years?
Now, I’m willing to take some cheap shots at this: it’s what I do, I snicker a little cruelly when I imagine Cory Doctorow in the role of Iron Eyes Cody, a single tear rolling down his cheek as he realizes that there are untold billions of people who don’t care about “Freedom Zero.” His tear is the tear of the modernist project, the realization that whoops, Western European affluent-white-dude values are not in fact universal, and there may have to be some difficult negotiation in the future to figure out (a) what values people advocate (b) what values they actually live by and © whether people can get along within the self-imposed constraints of (a) and (b).
I can’t get genuinely angry at Doctorow, though. I’m pretty bummed out when I think that billions of people don’t share my values, because I’m as egotistical as anyone else and still have a nice little candle in my heart of “If I was running the show you’d see some changes around here pretty darn quick!” At worst I think he’s kinda naïve. It’s borderline tautological to say that people outside the engineer/hacker culture and professions do not share its ideological concerns. If you walked up to an attorney cold and asked her what “Freedom Zero” was, you would probably get an answer that has nothing to do with “screws, not glue.” The phrase might register as a complete non-sequitur to a scuba dive instructor, a barista, a social worker, an undergraduate working the register at a gas station, a costumed worker at Disneyland.
I acknowledge the counterargument of “if people were more informed about the issue, they’d care,” but you have to note that that’s an argument you can make about anything and it’s perilously close to the fallacy of “if people were better informed they’d agree with me!” So I think that it’s to be avoided. What I think is that people care about themselves first—thinking as our rational-logical selves, paying rigorous attention to our professed ideals and to how our actions fit them or fail to, is difficult and we’re usually half-assing it. Yes, all of us, because we’re all fallible people prone to thinking more about what we want than whether getting it is worthwhile or having it will actually make us as happy as we think.
One of my favorite jabs at this human tendency comes from the San Francisco stand-up comic Will Durst, who had a great riff on it in the early Bush years:
Don’t get me wrong, man. That 300 bucks last August—that rebate check came in handy. I live here in town, I paid off two parking tickets with it. But we had this windfall, we could have done anything with it. We could have paid for every hot lunch program in America through the year 2054. We could have put in a down payment on prescription drugs, which they talked about last November and now we haven’t heard Word One of. We could have done a lot.
“Oh no, no, you can’t do that. Uh-uh. No.” “Why?” “Well, the American People want tax cuts.”
Well duh! The American People also want drive-through nickel beer night! The American People want to lose weight by eating ice cream. The American People would chew off their own foot if Oprah told them there was liquid gold in their ankle veins! The American People love the Home Shopping Network because it’s commercial-free.
Humanity has a long and illustrious track record of wanting things that aren’t particularly good for us. I’m not saying that Freedom Zero is one of those things. I’m actually with Doctorow in that I think that more people tinkering, exploring, and creating, is inherently a Good Thing. I just think that Freedom Zero is a bit too narrowly defined, and thus Doctorow tends to undervalue good things produced by people who don’t care as much about freedom-to-tinker as he does. At this point I think it’s very safe to say that the “iPads are for consumption” canard is dead, but it’s not just that. The deal with iPhones and the Apple ecosystem in general, is that they’re a trade-off. It’s fine for Doctorow to reject that trade-off for himself, but I think that he’s in error with his rationale for encouraging others to reject it; I think he’s projecting his values onto them. That’s an error. If you go and look at what people are doing with their devices, you’ll find that they’re doing things that are valuable to them, which is unrelated to what’s valuable to Cory Doctorow.
If you want to persuade others, to talk them into changing their behavior, you need to figure out what’s important to them and avoid assuming that what matters to you matters to them. That’s part of what makes persuasion hard—that and the massive disconnect between what we profess to want and what we are actually happier to have. That’s my vote for what people should care about: being clear on our own desires.
Permalink]]>Old-Timer 1: Oh the city! Chillin' on the stoop in the future.
Old-Timer 2: You said it, space friend!
Old-Timer 1: Boy, I tell you things these days move too fast! Makes me wanna crack wise about how it was back in the day. Yo, homeless robot! Drop a stupid-ass beatbox.
Homeless Robot: Shit is not going well for homeless robot 235
{old-timer 1 raps}
Before a best seller meant your record went interstellar
Before the impeccable smeller
Before they banned Old Yeller
In the wake of the Presidential dogfucking scandalWhen astronauts rocked sports sandals and didn’t have expandable mandibles
And granules of Jack Daniels didn’t heal the wounds of animals
When botanicals still weren’t a biological weapon
In the war with the tarantulasBack in the day before time travel was easy-peasy
But now I go back, re-rap to make it sound repeaty
Back in the day before time travel was easy-peasy
Back in the day before time travel was easy-peasy
Now we change history like the feat is measlyStars these days don’t know how good they have it
We used to have plutonium in our jet pack and
We had to take the supertube before it had hyperdrive
Makes me wanna holler! Unh! But we’re still alive!{miscellaneous robot-abusing chatter}
It’s an interesting bit of world-building, especially since it encourages us to mistrust the narrators a bit - “back in my day” is already a tall-tale genre, and what might people who think it’s acceptable to abuse synthpersons be ignoring about the past?
]]>And they’ll see you like this:
Ultimatums are almost never the right tool. Use them as infrequently as possible, or a little less.
]]>I want to talk about this problem, though, partially because it’s a failure of thought-rigor that we’re all prone to. I just see it more often in the Tumblr crowd—I have ideas about why that is, but certainly they’re not the only people capable of this fallacy. The fallacy goes like this: given that The Patriarchy and other toxic power systems exist, as unavoidably widespread and oppressive forces, and given that they are a member of a class that those systems do harm to, too many people behave as though the partiarchy (or power system du jour) is a conspiracy that is out to get them particularly.
This is fallacious in both its halves: part of why the toxic power systems are so hard to deal with is that they are not conspiracies, and that they are not after you in particular: it is enough that you are there and you are a member of some disfavored class. Ignoring your individuality is a feature of the system.
I am of course indebted to an older exploration of the matter:
So, there is no one Patriarch, leastaways not outside of Constantinople. There’s no single dude in a nifty hat at the top of the power structure, surrounded by scantily clad women whom he feeds to tigers for his kicks and giggles. If it were only that simple, we could off the old wanker, free the women and give them some trousers, find loving homes for the tigers, and have a great party around the bonfire of his palace (after salvaging all the good art, books, and chocolate). Alas, because the patriarchy is instead a very very old system that has warped everyone’s thinking right down to the sub-rational, axiomatic, non-verbal ideological level, it’s much more difficult to overthrow. (We’ve seen how well wars against ideas work.)
[…] The Gentleman complained that calling the androcentric system of how things are, or male privilege “the patriarchy” personifies it, and makes it seem like a conspiracy theory in which all men are agents of this big conspiracy to keep women down. He said that saying that “the system serves to perpetuate itself,” further personifies something that is, after all, merely a structure put in place by people, and something that not all men support.
The patriarchy is not a system in the way that the Library of Congress system of cataloguing is a system. It’s not spelled out anywhere, no single person or group of people sat down and dreamed it up, and people don’t usually debate its merits over those of any other system that does the same thing. I don’t think even Men’s Rights Activists get up in the morning and think “Dude! I’m so glad I live in a patriarchy! I’m gonna go subjugate me some women today!” Instead we all live in a system that exists on patriarchal premises.
Let’s talk about conspiracies. Conspiracy theories are a mode of thought that we’re all prone to, in varying degrees. This is because as humans, we are pattern-finders. Apophenia is our life. Further, we’re all self-centered—necessarily, for your life should be about you, it can’t healthily be about someone else. This has the side effect, though, that we’re prone to believing that events in the world around us are also about us. Very little that is happening around you in your life is about you, though.
Conspiracy theories, then, are a natural outgrowth of this: they propose that something important is being hidden by malicious actors working in concert. The combination of pattern-finding, self-centeredness, and the simple fact that not all events in the world are comprehensible and few are controllable, can lead any of us to explanations for those events that range into the conspiratorial. A recent incident illustrated the tendency in what I find a grimly humorous way: the 2010 paper “NASA faked the moon landing–therefore (climate) science is a hoax: an anatomy of the motivated rejection of science” tentatively identified that people who think climate science is a giant hoax or a conspiracy, also tend to have other conspiratorial-type beliefs. Unsurprisingly, the rejecters of climate-change science had many criticisms of the paper—which led to the same authors' 2013 paper “Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation,” whose subtitle basically sums it up (cheap shot interlude: “Recursive Fury” is my punk-covers-of-Douglas-Hofstatder band).
A 2012 paper from the University of Kent uses a different way of illustrating the point:
Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: A self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs. The present research shows that even mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively correlated in endorsement. In Study 1, the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered. In Study 2, the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive. Hierarchical regression models showed that mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively associated because both are associated with the view that the authorities are engaged in a cover-up. The monological nature of conspiracy belief appears to be driven not by conspiracy theories directly supporting one another but by broader beliefs supporting conspiracy theories in general.
Recursive Fury, meanwhile, uses a six-point set of criteria for conspiratorial thinking:
Nefarious Intent: Assuming that the presumed conspirators have nefarious intentions. For example, if person X assumes that blogger Y colluded with the New York Times to publish a paper damaging to X, then X presumes nefarious intent on the part of Y.
Persecuted Victim: Self-identifying as the victim of an organised persecution.
Nihilistic Skepticism: Refusing to believe anything that doesn’t fit into the conspiracy theory. Note that “conspiracy theory” here is a fairly broad term and need not involve a global conspiracy (e.g., that NASA faked the moon landing) but can refer to small-scale events and hypotheses.
Nothing Occurs By Accident: Weaving any small random event into the conspiracy narrative.
Something Must Be Wrong: Switching liberally between different, even contradictory conspiracy theories that have in common only the presumption that there is something wrong in the official account by the alleged conspirators. Thus, people may simultaneously believe that Princess Diana faked her own death and that she was assassinated by MI5.
Self-Sealing Reasoning: Interpreting any evidence against the conspiracy as evidence for the conspiracy. For example, when climate scientists are exonerated of any wrong-doing 9 times over by different investigations, this is reinterpreted to imply that the climate-change conspiracy involves not just the world’s climate scientists but also the investigating bodies and associated governments.
I think it’s crucially important here to avoid saying “oh man those conspiracy buffs, they’ll believe anything.” Conspiracy theories are a pattern of thought that we are all vulnerable to. In varying degrees, true, but all of us are vulnerable, and a feeling of certainty is no defense. This is part of why we feminists, we activists, we strivers for a better world, need to especially beware of conspiracy-theory thinking. The patriarchy is not a conspiracy.
We encounter the patriarchy and related toxic power systems most often in a context where they are likely to do us personal harm: of course we take it personally! But you will go grievously wrong assuming that the system (as opposed to individual actors) dislikes you personally. You are a wonderful person but conspiracies, as Mr. Assange tirelessly reminds us, are needy beasts and you are not worth the effort of keeping a conspiracy running. Instead, the patriarchy is a system of interlocking systems, which long ago passed the point where the beneficiaries and those hoping for their table-scraps needed only act in furtherance of their self-interest, without conspiring with anyone else, for the system to be perpetuated. When we are harmed, when we are in pain, it is difficult to believe that it is not about us, but it really isn’t.
Another face of this system is the United States' mainstream media—or to call it more accurately, the propaganda system by which Official Facts are distributed (I am drawing heavily from Chomsky here). This system is harmful to many of us, and has the effect of maintaining elite power at the expense of the common good. It too is not a conspiracy and it does not care about you, the news-consumer, personally. It is just the same: the system is rigged such that actors pursue their own self-interest independently and perpetuate the system in that way. That is precisely why the propaganda system, and the patriarchal power structures in general, are so difficult to push back against: they are in a sense decentralized.
No matter how much power he may personally wield, it is vanishingly rare that a beneficiary thinks of himself as blessed with the power of a system backing him. Indeed he generally has had to expend considerable effort disposing of rivals for that benefit, and takes this effort for evidence of merit. He who reaches the VP suite or the Senate or the upper echelons of an important bureaucracy, has had to do a great deal of work and apply a great deal of ingenuity. What he generally resists seeing, is that someone who did as much work and applied as much ingenuity, but who did not have the benefit of a system of power behind them, would not be rewarded in the same way (they may in fact be punished: there’s a strong argument that lynchings were more an economic crime than a hate crime).
Of course there are still further complications. The baneful power systems that we’re trying to disrupt operate as interlocking systems and at the most abstract level, they are systems of interactions between classes of person (not just class in the economic sense, but in just about any way you can divide people into Us and Them). But the operation of these large systems is to spawn smaller systems, which may repeat the process, until actual work and reification-of-hierarchy gets done at the margins. I am not a class of person unto myself, nor is a police officer, but together we operate the system whereby the state asserts a monopoly on the use and definition of violence.
The reason that it’s important to note this fractal nature of systems is that if you follow it down far enough, you will find conspiracies. Small, petty, cruel conspiracies that ruin lives, bodies, and minds, they are nasty operations—but they are not the system that they are embedded in, rather they are a product of it. However, they are rarer than you might think, because the secrecy criteria is important. Remember that we’re not counting the Family Research Council as a conspiracy: they are actors colluding to do harm to queers, women, and pretty much everyone, but they’re not doing so in secret: they are quite clear about their goals, membership, tactics, etc. They issue press releases. There are plenty of subsystems like them, including some that do target individuals, but we need to resist letting those lure us into conspiratorial thinking.
The six-point scale from Recursive Fury can be useful for pushing against this tendency: it’s not a panacea, but it is a useful reminder that we’re talking about big sloppy human systems, not against powerful, malicious schemers. Thinking in terms of systems is an important part of the activist toolkit, because individual actions don’t happen in a vacuum. They have antecedents and causes. Even on the interpersonal level, a person is not any of their actions: they are at the very least actions and discourses over time, which is very different. For groups, likewise. Conspiracies are rare enough that you should assume that events in the world around you are not the result of a conspiracy, even if they cause you pain and are difficult to understand. Perhaps especially then.
Now, I know a bunch of people who spend a lot of time in the security mindset who’re going to want some caveats to be attached to this. So: there certainly are situations where you’ll want to worry about conspiracies, and some of those conspiracies will have an agenda that amounts to “kill you if you get too inconvenient to entrenched power systems.” The best example is how police departments and the FBI routinely employ agents provocateur against anyone with a remotely anti-hierarchical agenda (to the point of being assholes to Food Not Bombs, wielders of one of the most innocuous activism tactics imaginable). However, these situations are both rare and illustrative that conspiracies are expensive and difficult. The big-picture system being resisted and disrupted, is not a conspiracy.
I started out by talking about Tumblr, but this is a problem that’s specific to human cognition, not specific to Tumblr. Tumblr just happens to be full of young folks, who are normal young folks and thus charmingly overconfident and full of anger, not yet scarred in the specific way that produces a certain pragmatism, a parsimony of causes, and a cynical optimism about others' actions. Age is no guarantee that a person will come around to a productive approach—which is to say, eschewing dramatic first resorts, patient in proportion to how they hope for their own (inevitable) follies to be treated with patience, and always curious as to whether there is some item of mutual agreement that could be worked towards rather than having yet another argument.
That’s the real sin of conspiratorial thinking, if you ask me: by presenting tempting-but-wrong explanations for the world, it will very effectively keep you from getting things done. As you make your way through the world you cannot avoid encountering the painful, the inexplicable, and the unjust. Working against them is difficult—and conspiratorial thinking will sabotage your work. Perhaps we could consider inverting the checklist from Recursive Fury:
Selfish Intent: Assume that other people primarily care about themselves. They’re not stupid, they have a whole life to live, but that life is about them and not about you.
Bemused Observer: Be deeply conservative in assumptions about whether or not people are out to get you, especially in an organized manner. People generally organize for themselves, not for you (see 1).
Judicious Acceptance: Systems made up of humans are messy, not neat, and almost never elegant. Dramatized stories about them almost always leave out the screw-ups, friction, and dawdling. If a conspiracy looks excellently efficient, slick, and deft, it might not exist.
Acknowledgement Of Accidents: Plenty of things happen by accident or without planning. Account for impulse and coincidence when you account for people’s actions.
If There’s No Plan, It Can’t Be Going Wrong: Acknowledging that much of the world is not just beyond your control, but beyond anyone’s control, undermines the idea that a conspiracy is bending events towards their ends. Of course the world is not quite as you would like it—but you are just like everyone else in percieving that the world is imperfect.
Open-Ended Reasoning: Avoid at all costs becoming locked into non-falsifiable patterns of thought: if you have a belief that can neither be proven nor disproven, you have a belief that needs to be harshly examined. This is especially true of deciding that people you interact with are malicious or untrustworthy: once you commit to that belief, you commit to a pattern of actions that will make it extraordinarily hard for them to behave benevolently towards you or extend trust to you, and your confirmation bias will carry the day.
Of course this is just a sketch towards the general plan of resisting conspiratorial thinking, but it’s a starting-place and that’s important to have. The point of a starting-place is that you don’t remain there, that you make a concerted effort of getting to somewhere else. The metaphor of travel also gives us this: look at the whole journey from time to time, not just the next step. Cultivate a flexibility of perspective. After all, one way of looking at patriarchy is to call it the conspiracy theory that women are all out to get you.
]]>You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.
Total spoilsports. How am I supposed to work on my mad-science supervillainess world domination plans without my Genius mix?
(via)
Permalink]]>All of this is on my mind because I recently encountered a Eurogamer article, “The Quest for Shadow of the Colossus' Last Big Secret,” pointing out that a game pushing ten years old is still drawing a small crowd of searchers determined to find everything that can be found in the game. I’m pleasantly reminded of how the executive-meddling-crippled KOTOR II was the beneficiary of a fan effort to restore cut content and fix outstanding bugs. The story of the searchers here is a compelling one, and I recommend it to you along with other fan-made amplifications of the game.
If you’re feeling particularly nostalgic, you may wish to watch this playthrough of the HD version of the game as you read:
Permalink]]>There are a few, and I’d love to be made aware of more. Things that so far will not work:
I love how, at best, the form is a way to make critical thinking cheaper. Of course it may also fail to do that—but on a good day, it’s a way to repudiate bad ideas by contextualizing them, by adding relevant information instead of by shouting. Snowcloning it into different contexts is also at a sweet-spot difficulty level: easy enough to be tempting, but hard enough to be a bit of serious work worth respecting. It’s a great way to summarize “here is the bar to entry for new techniques, this problem is in fact hard.”
Another amusing thing is how often the “Asshats” and “No-one will be able to find the guy or collect the money” objections appear verbatim. Some things cross many, many fields of human endeavour.
For bonus points, here’s someone making an interesting argument that the original form was wrong, “Users Of Email Will Not Stand For It”, and a MetaFilter user who claims to have come up with the original.
]]>Permalink]]>Maya Weinstein has created a DIY kit for making your own HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup). You may have already guessed that it’s an art project and that the artist lives in Brooklyn.
Those are broad strokes, though: there is a specific thing I’d forgotten, that Adam Lee ably points out:
Of all the businesses Rand could have chosen for her heroes, I always thought that railroads were a bad choice to show the superiority of laissez-faire capitalism. After all, railroads, like other forms of infrastructure, almost always take major government support and investment to build. […] In reality, the first American transcontinental railroad required major government financial support—to the tune of $16,000 per mile, rising to $48,000 per mile over the Rocky Mountains—plus extensive land grants. Modern engineering projects of similar scope, like the Keystone XL pipeline, have been embroiled in court fights with dozens of private landowners who don’t want to sell, and Keystone’s builders have been extremely aggressive about invoking eminent domain.
The story proceeds from merely unrealistic, as Lee notes here, to gleefully barbaric. It is part of a pattern where every time I think “well, I should maybe give Atlas Shrugged another chance, as literature if not as dogma,” some excerpt or another comes along and convinces me that Rand was definitely the predecessor to L. Ron Hubbard: promulgating a con-job religion on the backs of some awful sci-fi novels. Ugh.
Permalink]]>Okay, so The Empire Strikes Back ends with the heroes failing miserably. They win, but they do so failing. Han basically dies, keeping Chewie from losing his temper and getting Leia killed in the process. Luke basically suicides but he doesn’t join the Dark Side. And Lando, I’ve realized, gives up everything rather than being a nice little stoolie.
Think about this for a bit. Han has nothing to lose other than his life, two friends, and a ship which has already been impounded. Luke would lose his ethics at the price of very probably helping Vader kill Palpatine and at some point killing Vader and becoming Emperor himself. It makes me grind teeth to realize that Leia is sort of The Obligatory Woman and doesn’t really get a character moment like that. Lando loses the most. He’s been hoping this whole time that if he plays nice with the legal authorities (and note here, he’s one of three Black guys you ever see in that universe, so he’s the minority made good in a system run by crusty white rich people), they’ll let him have his business and his friends can make bail, and then the deal gets worse and worse and worse. Lando could potentially accept worse and worse and worse and he’d still come out of it with a retirement plan, health care, stock options, and enough income to keep himself in Colt 40 and awesome capes for the rest of his life. Things which he probably didn’t have quite that much of before when he was Lando scraping by on gambling. And boom, it’s all gone because being Lando freaking Calrissian is at the end way more important to him.
Lando Calrissian has always complicated the Star Wars universe, and that’s a good thing. I like Paka’s reading here quite a bit.
Permalink]]>Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge—how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip—from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can even see the desperation spread over such a man’s face as he listens to himself speak.
Men of the other type, the ones who use speech as a tool of their work, who are confident and fluent, aren’t necessarily more intelligent, or even more educated. It took Shaftoe a long time to figure that out. Anyway, everything was neat and tidy in Bobby Shaftoe’s mind until he met two of the men in Detachment 2702: Enoch Root and Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. [He began] to suspect that there might be a third category of man, a kind so rare that Shaftoe never met any of them until now.
“I don’t like the word ‘addict’ because it has terrible connotations,” Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. “Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as ‘Morphiumsüchtig.’ The verb ‘suchen’ means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as ‘morphine seeky’ or even more loosely as ‘morphine seeking.’ I prefer ‘seeky’ because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shaftoe says.
“Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to ‘addict,’ because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe.”
“So what’s the point?” Shaftoe asks. He asks this because he is expecting Root to give him an order, which is usually what men of the talkative sort end up doing after jabbering on for a while. But no order seems to be forthcoming, because that’s not Root’s agenda. Root just felt like talking about words. […] Waterhouse never gives direct orders, so men of the first category don’t know what to make of him. But apparently men of the second category fare no better; such men usually talk like they have an agenda in their heads and they are checking off boxes as they go, but Waterhouse’s conversation doesn’t go anywhere in particular. He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he’s already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you’ll join in. Which no one ever does, except for Enoch Root.
There are two things that I find compelling about this incident. One is that people’s relationships to words and meaning is a leitmotif of the book, and this moment makes explicit (as opposed to demonstrating) that as Bobby Shaftoe does, you can live a satisfying life without getting deeply into word-games and syntactic manipulation. The world around you is available to you directly: abstractions are not the only valid way to engage with it. Randy, another protagonist, by contrast worries that he’s “too much of a Platonist” and spends a lot of time introspecting as he participates in a plot to build a digital currency founded on cryptography—on meaning selectively obscured.
The basic setup of the book, where one set of characters are attempting to jumpstart a digital, crypto-based currency and are harassed by the US Government, should definitely remind you of BitCoin, other digital currency experiments, and the particular tactics which the 2000-2013 government of the United States uses to retain power. That part’s easy. A government that demands ability to participate in every aspect of civic and private life, necessarily reacts with great hostility to the idea that people might have real privacy at all, let alone a right to it. There has been plenty of ink spilled about this, so I’ll leave off for the moment.
The other way in which this passage sheds light is the spiel about being “morphine-seeky.” I have come to find that very important to my views, or at least to be a good way of articulating them. It’s pretty much pure Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis stuff: the way that you describe the world has a feedback loop with how you percieve the world and how you act on those descriptions and perceptions (notice again the connection to the book’s themes about constructing meaning). This is why I bristle when someone uses the shorthand “illegals” for anyone (in practice, anyone brown) who is in the United States for an extended period of time without having gone through the Wagner-length tragedy that is our immigration bureaucracy. “Illegal” is a noun that obliterates the actual person—and a certain political persuasion likes little better than an excuse to do violence to the person of immigrants or suspected immigrants.
It is also a good principle to keep in mind when we describe one another. I share a community, the furry subculture, with a lot of people with mental health problems. We have a bit more practice at dealing with the problem of integrating everyone in the community healthily, but we are just people, and so we fail as often as anyone else at coping. One of the pole-stars for me in this situation is Root’s advice: adjectives, not nouns. Don’t reduce people to their disabilities, their tropes, their health problems, their kinks, their politics, or to the last thing they did that hurt your feelings.
Of course it is also a good guideline for life in general: if you are reducing people to conveniently dumbed-down nouns, you are refusing to acknowledge their full personhood. This is a reliable way to rationalize harmful behavior. I buy into the notion that one of the roots of evil is treating people as means to an end, rather than as ends in themselves—as fully realized beings with their own aspirations, plans, and flaws. There is no simplification of a person that stands up to great scrutiny, that works in the general case.
]]>We have been taught that meritocratic institutions and societies are fair. Putting aside the reality that no system, including our own, is really entirely meritocratic, meritocracies may be fairer and more efficient than some alternatives. But fair in an absolute sense? Think about it. A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate—these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others.
That is a deeply surprising and encouraging thing to hear one of the mascots of capitalism saying. It is perhaps the case that saying this mostly accomplishes making him and the rich white (mostly) kids he’s addressing feel good about themselves. But it is still a true thing said straightforwardly and firmly, and I applaud that.
Permalink]]>And now for something … completely different: a spherical automobile.
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