You know what irritates the shit out of me? Okay, okay, you know one of the thousands of things that irritates the shit out of me? When douchebags tell people “money can’t buy happiness!” Just to get it out of the way, money can’t buy things like friendship or a sense of accomplishment, there is certainly more to life than the pursuit of money, and only caring about money pretty much guarantees you are a terrible person. Now can we move the fuck on and admit that people who have enough money to live on are happier than people who don’t? Admittedly, studies about income and happiness do disagree. Some of them say that after $75,000 per household more income doesn’t make you appreciably [...]

Some time ago JeffMach posted an excellent writing on Fetlife tearing down the moronic idea that explicit verbal consent isn’t sexy. It’s not terribly long and you should go read it. My favourite part is the last paragraph: If you, as a dominant, can’t make informed consent sexy, that’s not because informed consent can’t be sexy, it’s because you aren’t skilled enough to be dominant with other people. Now, that seems pretty clear, right? So of course the whiny little brat who inspired that takedown came back to comment: I did not say “verbal consent is wrong”, I gave a very specific example of a highly inept form of verbal consent, and said that it was less sexy than a much more natural form [...]

Another rant about people who can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality! This one is inspired by a pretty old Ask Dr. Nerdlove post (I started drafting this post ages ago and forgot about it, good job me!) about some poor bastard who is infatuated with a camgirl. Dr Nerdlove’s answer, not terribly surprisingly, largely boiled down to it being incredibly easy to think you have a real connection with someone whose job is to make you feel special. He also mentioned that “you’ve only seen a very small and carefully curated slice of her life; you have yet to truly see her when she hasn’t been “on”.” and I want to go into more detail about that. For one, it’s incredibly [...]

One of my many, many pet peeves in written profiles is the mating call of lazy little brats everywhere: “if you want to know anything about me, just ask.” What that actually means is “I’m too fucking lazy to write a profile so I’m going to ask you do to all the work based on absolutely nothing, since you can’t possibly tell if you even want to know anything about me from my total lack of a profile.” “Just ask”? How about I just don’t. People, you can only ask someone to meet you halfway. You cannot ask someone to do literally all the work, that’s a) not fair, and b) makes you look like a lazy little bitch. Do you really want [...]

Or, for fucks sake your coworkers obviously do not need to know that you’re kinky. Sometimes I binge-read Ask A Manager, an advice blog by, you guessed it, a manager. Alison (author of Ask A Manager and multiple books) gets some weird questions, but I think this is one of the weirdest: my coworker wants us to call her boyfriend her “master” (there’s also a followup post where, shockingly enough, the coworker leaves that job). To quickly summarize, some asshole with either no boundaries or a thoroughly juvenile interest “freaking the mundanes” decided that it was totally fine and definitely not extremely weird to call her boyfriend “master” at work related social events. Even as a kinky person myself I have no desire to know whether my coworkers [...]

As much as the idea of training as a universally recognized path to Doing Submission Correctly irritates the shit out of me, I do actually think that some parts of submission can be practiced. To be entirely clear, the fetishy idea that there is such a thing as The Marketplace and one correct way to submit and you just have to learn the right way to kneel, the right way to beg, and you’re set forever is completely ridiculous. That is how scenes work, but that is not even slightly how relationships work and I really wish people could keep that shit straight. When I talk about submission being learnable, I am absolutely not talking about anything anyone would ever jerk off to in any [...]