Exit The Void

Reading this entire article made me want to fucking throw something:

The glaring omission of aftercare in James’ story is another indication of Christian’s failure as a dominant. “Aftercare,” for those unfamiliar with BDSM, is the essential and immediate follow-up that occurs after play of any sort (“play” is the consensual session during which any previously agreed-upon aspect of BDSM may be acted on). Play can be incredibly draining, and may engender intense emotional or psychological turmoil — especially in the case of people who have only just started their journey into BDSM. Most people who practice BDSM, regardless of their level of experience, require some level of aftercare and leaving someone who is only experimenting, someone who is not only new to the lifestyle but to sexual experience in general, alone after play is unconscionable.

Unfortunately, this is not a one-time situation. The pattern of immediate abandonment is repeated frequently. After Anastasia finally has a go in Christian’s “Red Room of Pain,” a Rococo dungeon Christian keeps in his massive Seattle apartment, leads to another instance of it. Upon the conclusion of their session, Anastasia nearly collapses from exhaustion and her inability to suppress a yawn causes Christian to bark at her, demanding to know whether he’s boring her.

This is the man who’s supposed to be able to read his submissive’s body language to see how much further he can take her during a session — and he doesn’t know that after a scene she has every right to feel exhausted? What next, chastising her for not saying the safeword because she wants so badly to please him? Going further than we should because we don’t want to disappoint is a very real, very human problem, and in BDSM it is crucial to have a dominant who understands a submissive’s body language and can read her nonverbal cues for this very reason.

I cannot even begin to articulate how irresponsible and vile this fucking is. The fact that Christian Grey is some unhinged woman’s idea of ‘romantic’ and the fact this book is on The New York Times Bestseller’s List pretty much from word of mouth is fucking disturbing to me. I am by no means a ‘professional’ or ‘expert’ dominant by any stretch of the imagination but the importance of ‘aftercare’ cannot be understated. To leave your submissive alone after a session (especially new or particularly intense ones) is a level of sadism that borders on sociopathic.

There’s nothing ‘romantic’ about this character or his actions and if this is the kind of bullshit that millions of women find ‘titillating’… fuck… I don’t even fucking know how to respond to that.

Seriously, Big Think is one of the reasons why the internet exists:

New revelations in quantum physics suggest that our conception of nothingness—a vaccuum in which no matter exists—does not really correspond to reality. “According to the probabilistic dictates of quantum field theory, even an apparently perfect vacuum seethes with particles and antiparticles popping into and out of existence.” The implication of this revelation, says prolific theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, is that the famous question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is turned on its head. Infamous firebrand Richard Dawkins claims that the remaining trump card of the theologian has shriveled up.

Click through the link and read the next paragraph. It’s not long but it’s awesome…

I want this book:

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously proclaimed. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. Some stories become so sticky, so pervasive that we internalize them to a point where we no longer see their storiness — they become not one of many lenses on reality, but reality itself. And breaking through them becomes exponentially difficult because part of our shared human downfall is our ego’s blind conviction that we’re autonomous agents acting solely on our own volition, rolling our eyes at any insinuation we might be influenced by something external to our selves. Yet we are — we’re infinitely influenced by these stories we’ve come to internalize, stories we’ve heard and repeated so many times they’ve become the invisible underpinning of our entire lived experience.

That’s exactly what F. S. Michaels explores in Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything — a provocative investigation of the dominant story of our time and how it’s shaping six key areas of our lives: our work, our relationships with others and the natural world, our education, our physical and mental health, our communities, and our creativity.

Sounds fucking fascinating…