The harsher nature of the non theatrical sadist.

Saturday I went to a short seminary in basic shibari(1) techniques - the base knot, the takate-kote box-tie, pelvic harness and a semi suspension.

A basic takate-kote.
The skewers are a dabotzian addendum, you don't use them IRL

It has been extremely nice, and fun.

Being the kind of semi-reclusive oddball that I am, I didn't manage to get a hand on a model but, luckily, there was one fine woman that wants very much to be  tightly bound and had no rigger at hand, so we got paired. 

To be honest, the fact that she is going to move out of the area soon, to find her forever domme (... yes, domme (2) )  was a bit of an help, because... I really am one horny dog.

In more than a couple of moments, a very unprofessional and a bit unethical hard-on went in the way of the ropes (3).

Fear not, my reader... I managed to maintain a shade of decency.

However, this was not my main mistake during the event.

My partner - blessed be her heart - looked pretty serious most of the time.

Me being me, I read that as being bored, which is quite unusual - the mean time between an half mile and a full laugh, around me, is measurable in minutes.

I am, after all, an intelligent human being affected by a sometimes sulphurous sense of humour and a lingering fear of being a bother to the world. I make people laugh, because so I know that they are at ease with me around - I do not take it as a given.

She, instead, went on in serious mode for what are - for me - unnerving stretches of time.

In the end, I asked her, and she said that she was psyching herself in the role of the victim.

Unfortunately, my ideal victim is giggling, outside of the moments of rough play, so it kind of messed me up a bit.

Meanwhile, the instructor (Sr. Interior) explained that, in reality, shibari is more about "service and satisfaction", and humiliation, than anything else. I didn't really understand, right then, so I had to sleep over it.

When I refuse to go along and play the part of the terrible kidnapper, in a way I am failing my part of the show. The shibari action is also a bit of theatrics that allows the rigged person to let her ego go, for a while. The rigger has to take the responsibility of strip that  ego from the model to fully fill his role, and I really am not much into this part. 

Maybe, because I can't seem to be able to shake the grip of my bothersome super-ego on almost everything I do, and I am somewhat envious of someone that manages to do it? 

Any way, I realize my mistake, now. 

I hope I'll do better next time. 

1) Shibari, or Kinbaku, is a form of bondage play with roots in the Japanese tradition.

2) Domme, or Dominatrix: A female dominant person, to not be confused with dom, which is nowadays almost always referred only to men .

3)Next time, I shall cut the caffeine the day before - let's hope that having a more sedate limbic system will help.

The Singularity

 Note: unscrewing the bottom lap, to access the fake vagina between its legs, voids the warranty.

WowWee Femisapien v2 - because, let's be honest, there is only one kind of  Robot we'd like to see

The singularity is the purported moment when a self-improving artificial intelligence will appear, and likely take over the world.

There is a ton of reasons why this will not happen any time soon.

Most of artificial intelligence research is veering away, as much as possible, from trying to obtain full scale intelligence.

The failure of AI in the 70s - in delivering to the promises - has deeply scarred the field.

Talk about "hard AI" is a sure way to lose grants and financing, so at the best the aim is to reach an ant-like level of intelligence.

Getting the equivalent intelligence of an ant is already hard enough, but it is also enough to create cars and trucks that drive themselves (way before cars, we'll see automatized trucks and auto-buses(1)...) or robots that can be taught how to flip a new hamburger, by the senior staff in a McDonald, in a quarter of an hour.

It is enough to have completely automatized drones - so, it is no surprise that much of the current robotic research is sponsored by the US military - and, over time, passenger aircrafts without pilots (many modern jet-liners are already automatized to the point that the pilots are there only for landings and take-offs; getting the extra mile would cut some hundred thousand dollar-years-per plane of operative expenses ).

The intelligence of an ant is, hence, already more than enough to leave almost everybody out of job.

So, why some think so hard to the singularity?

Well, if the technology keeps improving(3), risk is it will be reached inadvertently.

And a badly chosen prime motive for an auto-evolving intelligence could, indeed, spell a disaster.

The paper-clip maximizer scenario (where such intelligence exterminates the whole planet to get materials to build paper-clips) is not so impossible...

On the other hand, some may hope.

That a humanist intelligence of this kind could take over the world, and made it a bit more just, overcoming the core of greed and egotism at the heart of almost every man that makes so that millions are starving, while hundreds goes around in a Bugatti.

In other words, some hope that a truly altruistic super-intelligence will give the world a socialism that actually works.

Pretty much like others wait for the return of Christ...

---

(1) There is a mine, in a remote region of Australia, where 500 tons robotised trucks are hauling materials even now, with a way dumber than an ant computer as driver. 

(2) Maybe not me, I hope

(3) IF.. the so called "Moore's law" isn't a law, but rather just a business model, a way to force people into buying new computers way before the ones they have are really worn out; the original version of the law, to say so, died already ten years ago. 


.

Time travel snavel

Time travel stories are funny.

The base of a time travel or of a time-cape story is , almost always, that time travel allow to change the past.

I have yet to see a time travel history where the protagonist is an historian looking for info about an obscure period, and some form of "change the things" does never come up (0). 

But it is not actually possible - and that, even if time travel itself was at all possible.

 

If the universe has only one temporal line, it is valid the Novikov principle.

The only time travels possible are the ones that re-enforce the stability of the time-line, as forking is not possible (it would require another time dimension that, simply, is not there).

As an IT guy, I tend to see as an issue of macroscopic quantum mechanics and information...

Trying to change the past makes it, really, a quantum superposition of the original time-line and the new one, the contribution of each one determined by the probability of  the action to succeed.

As a result, when the action goes near 50% of success probability... the information upon which the action has been originally planned had a reliability of 50%.

In other words, the more you try to change the past, the less you know what it was to be changed or why.

Nowm one thing must be clear... which usually is not clear at all.

When tackling time travels, one should remember that he is really using a meta-time to narrate its effects, i.e. a fifth (6th, 7th, 8th etc..) dimension, temporally orthogonal to the space and time dimension(s) of the universe he describes.

The universe  should be seen, then,  as a film reel or - even better - a painting - something static, with no dynamic of its own.

The painting is a better metaphor, because its internal dynamic is actually al a product of its observer, which is situated outside of it.

In a single timeline universe, the action of a time traveller produce very much the effect of an author "pentimento" (1) in a painting... two versions of the painting, usually in a limited area, superposed.

If the transparency of the pentimento  (:= probability of success of the time traveller's action) is 50%, it is impossible to tell which was which.

Which was the action of the traveller, and which the past he wanted to change. 

If the universe allows for multiple time-lines, vice-versa, it just means that what we call time is only one of  a set of non-spatial dimensions, that there is at least a time dimension orthogonal to the one we are used to perceive.

The universe is akin then not a classic painting... it is a stack of paintings, each one slightly different from the one up and below it.

Or, to be a bit more subtle and precise, it is a painting done with the veiling technique. Applied over and over again, each possible variation laid on top of the other with a infinitely shallow layer of paint, till the  resulting painting becomes as thick as it is wide and tall (2).

Every possible outcome of any non mechanically determined action - be it from a time traveller, a man deciding which side to enter his bed, an ant taking a route with a leave, an electron traversing a diffraction grid or a radioactive atom decaying - is a different 4D universe(3).

Is, not becomes nor create. Is.

A time traveller may go back in time and "change" something, then stay in the time-line  and see the product of his actions and have the illusion that he changed history but, as I said, it is an illusion.

What changed, the very moment he moved from his position in the time flow, was the universe in which he resided.

In his original universe, nothing changed at all - the companions of the time traveller, that are waiting to see their universe change around them, or some other SF idiocy, are going to die of old age damning the traveller's name, while nothing happens.

Travel to the past may not be impossible, but trying to change it surely is.

On the other hand, it is maybe possible to go there and have it to follow the story as it is known - the bootstrap paradox. If, and only if, the universe is a mono-time-line one.

 But that is another story...


(0)  To be honest, I read a very good story based on time travel, once, "Universal War One"  by Denis Bajram - if I had to re-read only a comic, this year, I'd say that is the one. You'd probably will have guessed: it uses a bootstrap paradox, and has a character concluding "Time is stronger than what you think. It already is the by-product of all the time travels happened in it. Time cannot be changed by anybody."

(1)Pentimento: in oil painting, it happens relatively often that the artist changes some feature, and paints over it.  However, oil colours can be partially transparent, and it is relatively simple, in many cases, to guess at the shape of what was changed, from the "shadows" appearing below the final pictorial surface.  

(2) Omitting the -light prefix from light year, which in a way doesn't matter, it can be said that the visible universe is 4 dimensional cube with a spatial [3D] area that has a side of some 90 billion years and a temporal thickness of just 13.9 billions years. It appears the painter hasn't ended yet... 

As for the thickness of each veiling, IF space is indeed quantized over the length/time of Planck, that should apply also to the extra, otherwise not-perceptible time dimension where the parallel universes are laid.  A time of Planck is something x 10^-44  , no the number of strata in the painting would be something x 10^62, a number followed by 62 zeros.

(3) Separated parallel universes are, again, probably a simplification - it implies a perceptible discontinuity between one and another. Most probably, a meta-universe would be some kind of continuous mesh, with no hard boundaries between a parallel and the other, the difficulty in going from one to another probably connected to the entropy - information content - differences between the considered 4d space. 4D spaces whose information content grew equivalent, could as well merge back... and fork again.OK, now my head officially hurts... 

How to draw a head.

How to draw a head... well, heads in general.

Katmandu - Nepal? It may be good enough.

"Prendi l'aereo e scappa"

 
-Hi Flower? How come?

    I am at the airport... I see that your plane is going to be late some 45 minutes.
    I didn't expect your call.

- (Inintelligible voice from a young woman) ...

- Yes, I am a fossil. In my time, you had to switch the stupid things off the whole travel.
    Nowadays, you can link to the plane Wi-FI and use that, I know. But I tend to forget this stuff.
    So, aren't you excited? Another summer in Europe, courtesy of your old Uncle B.

-...

- Your mother is on the plane, too? But, I thought her job left her with almost no time for holidays, like all the other years.
   Can you pass her the phone? I'd like to hear her voice!

-...

- It wouldn't be a good idea?
   She is crossed with me, and you are calling from the plane's bathroom, using someone else's phone?
   Sorry, but, I don''t understand-

-...

- You are not a virgin anymore? Ehr... Congratulations? 
   So, who's the lucky guy?

-...

- There is no guy? Who's the lucky girl?

-...

- No girl either? Fascinating, but what has this to do with your mother being on the pla-

-...

- My dungeon? How do you know that the detached house is my dungeon?

-...

- OK, the stream of women that went in and out was clue. You are right. This was clumsy even for my standards.

-...

- OK,

-...

- OK,

-...

- You what? Made a copy of the keys?

-...

- Of course I leave them on the rack, the shed also houses the AC compressors and the heating machinery.
  I was fed of hearing odd noises at night, in the old house.

-...

- OK, so, when I went out for that job, you took the keys to town and got a copy, and with that you had unfettered access to the dungeon, when I was not around.

-...

- And when I was around, you could sneak in and look from...? Oh, God.
  I start to see why your mother may be pissed, and why you were being so haughty with Patricia.

-...

- Yeah, I bet that at at your age, it may be difficult to respect a person, when you see how she loves to use electric drillers in very eclectic ways.

-...

- At my age, we call that being alive, Flower. You are alive, you like this or that questionable thing.
  OK, so, you had complete and unsupervised access to the place. What did you do?

-...

- You tried the chair? So, it's that thingy, the lucky one? Sorry...it's not very romantic, though it has probably fares better than most men would do.

-...

-Your mother, was still looking to get you a traditional Japanese marriage? Is that the problem, now that you have been... plucked?
  That's quite a piece of crap, coming from her.

-...

- Ah, no? OK, I failed at properly supervising you, but I do not see reasons to be angry. You were bound to discover that kind of things, sooner or later. To be honest, I am astounded that you lasted so long before...

-...

- It isn't that either. OK, so, what did you do, that your mother is mad at me?

-...

- You tried the whole set of dildos? The whole set? Flower, those things, the biggies,  those are there just for show!!!!
  I do not know any woman that...

-...

- OK, there were no warning labels, and now I know one woman who can.
   But, then you went back home, you stopped the "training", and things should have gone down to normal.
   You are still Captain Crazy for having tried that stunt, kid, but it's not like you fell ill because of that.

-...

- Bottles? Glass Bottles? Of Lamune, right?

-...

- It was something your mother, once, explained to me... what that lemonade is really loved for, by Japanese girls. What that kind of bottles can be so proficiently turned t-

-...

- Wine? As in, the classic, 75 cl bottles?

-...

- So, she caught you with a bottle of wine up your... two bottles?????

-...

- Front and back... you really don't do things by halves. And you were... in the dining room? I see.

-...

- And you were forced to tell her the whole story?

-...

- She is going to wring my neck like a chicken's, the moment she can wrap her arms around it, right?

-...

- OK, thanks for calling, kid.
  I am going to leave the keys of the house at the Ilberia Information desk, as I fear I am not going to be able to help you to the house, this time.

At the Ilberia help desk,

- Hola, Juan. Puedes darles estas a Anita, cuando llega con el avión? Me ha salido un impeño de repente, y  tengo que marcharme.

( - Hey, Juan. Can you give these to Annie, when she arrives? Something came about, and I've got to go)  


- Claro. Que pasó?

(- OK. What's happened?)


- Mmmhhh, Nada. Por si acaso, hay un avión que salga en la próxima hora, o así, que tenga una plaza libre?

(- Mmmhhh, Nothing. Is there, by chance, any plane bound to take off in the next hour or so, with a free seat?) 

- Bueno, sólo hay uno por Katmandu, no creo que te interese.

(- There is only one, for Katmandu, I don't think you want it)

- Katmandu? Nepal?

- Que yo sepa, no hay otros.

(- No other Katmandus that I know of.)

Vale. Dame esa plaza, es mía

(-OK, give me that seat, it's mine)

.

Ramune Bottle: keeping Japan's girls happy since 1841

"Ramune-lemonade,japan" by katorisi - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons.

Cathodic Girl

 This is a video of me, drawing one of my ... thingies.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Reproductive technology

50% Naomi Campbell, 50% Thylane Blondeaux, 100% technically possible.

Not so much time ago, I read an article on a recent development in the science of human reproduction.

As most readers with an interest in science will know, since some years it is possible to obtain totipotent cells from adult cells, usually from the skin,  by "reprogramming" them.

(It involves starving the cell and then giving them a push into de-differentiating, using some molecular triggers... I suppose the details are much more refined, but as a basic description  it feels enough, for me.)

Some researchers tried to place these cells inside rat gonads, and obtained sperm cells when they inserted them into male gonads, and egg cells when they inserted said cells into rat ovaries.

(And metastatic cancers when they went around in other places...)

This, independently from the fact that the donor was either a man. or a woman.

Of course, the sperm cells out of a woman can carry only X chromosomes (unless she is a XY kariotype with resistance to testosterone), so it is bound to give birth only to other females.

This alone brings the possibility of some interesting "kinky" application, like directly cross-breeding Naomi Campbell and, say,  Thylane Blondeaux (it doesn't take much more than a sample of skin, it appears, which does not require the subject to be even near sexual maturation and, given the quantity of cellular samples the average person leaves in hospitals during a normal life, not even the support or approval of the target... ). 

Or to allow every lesbian-gay couple on the planet to have kids that are, genetically, as theirs as those of any heterosexual mating.

In the near future, five  years or so, the researchers hope to be able to identify the molecular triggers that transform a totipotent cell into a reproductive one,so that they can do all in laboratory, without the unknown variables associated to using a living animal as an incubator.

Now, since some years ago, there are, also,  transgenic pigs developed to be compatible with humans, for transplant purposes. 

Their use in transplants is not going to happen any time soon, and probably it is never to come, no matter the money already invested in creating these animals.

There is a possibility that some of the viruses that are endemic in pigs may cross over to humans, if given the chance provided by a human host with a reduced strength immune system (like is the case for every transplant recipient that has to take anti-rejection medication) to learn and adapt to the human immune systems.

However, one may entertain the idea of using these animals as living incubators for foetuses created  with the aforementioned techniques.

So, even waiting for some other researcher to come out with an artificial uterus - that's a major achievement that will require quite a bit of time, I fear - we are still left with a reproductive  technology that could reduce the value of women wombs to nothing, if it was convenient to society.

On one side, that could be a step forward. 

One of the inherent pitfalls of feminism has been that women's wombs were the bottleneck of human reproduction - this meant that most societies in history had to give these organs even more value than that of the individuals that carried them. 

Had to, in an economical sense.

Medical improvements intervened since the last century meant that the production of every womb need not to be so high as in the past, and the fact that automation is eating away job after job reduced even more the requirement numbers for new generations.

 (No matter the preoccupation for the demographic implosion, one of the analysis of the current European crisis is that we still make more kids than the amount of new workforce the continent really needs, in the middle to top tiers of pay grade that we want for our children when they grow up... nobody wants to see his kid scrub cesspools, even if that is a much more socially useful job than - say - telemarketing, or lawyering).

The rise of feminism is, so, also tied to the loss of economic value of the female womb, which has liberated the individual "around" it.

Society is a crowd of crowds, as ruthless and as pitiless as any of them, when its core interests are at stake.  

If ten kids per woman were still needed, feminism would be a denigrated mania like it was at the dawn of the XX century, entertained by a small number of very courageous women.

In the distant future, though, society may come to need exactly 0 kids per woman, to stay afloat. 

Women will then become as inherently useless to society as men are, whom "exists" only when they  do something useful ( := make money ) .

Of course, I may be dead, by then.

But I may be not.

p.s. for the moment, the research is, really, still in the preliminary stages. The first results point, however, into the direction that it is indeed possible to derive germ cells of any kind from skin cells.

Experts expects it to be possible sometime in the next six-five years... maybe.

Maybe it is just a preliminary stab to get the politics in gear for when they'll manage to do all this, so that panic reactions may be avoided. 

Absurd laws written with two left hands are not unheard of, when it comes to human reproduction techniques.
 

For a view of the current state of the art, you can read http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25609401.

Fargo (A Parable)

Fargo.

Not the city, nor the TV series.

The Coen brothers' movie.

I like that movie, almost as much as "The Big Lebowsky".

For those whom did not see it, "Fargo" is a small parable over the sins of stupid greed, or of the American mania of measuring one's life on how much he earns, and the virtues of just going on with your life, do the work that makes you happy - do it well - and go home to your loved one at the end of the day.

- If you did not see it, you should stop reading now (plenty of spoilers, ahead), and go watch the movie. For once, even by renting it... unlike Uwe Boll and his BloodRayne (I felt so ashamed in renting that crap, I stopped going into video rentals altogether), the Coen merit to earn something, for their work in this film.

The parable is wrapped in a crime story, that of a kidnapping that derails and ends with the death of the kidnapped, her father, one of the criminals, the loss of the ransom and the imprisonment of the whole mess' organizer. In three words, an ugly mess.

I remember having watched it in a cinema, when it came out, some 19 years ago.

Its nature as a parable was evident to me, the characters may be seen as divided in two fields, the money-driven (William H. Macy's incompetent car salesman, Steve Buscemi's inept, logorroic - and chronic backstabber - criminal and his insane accomplice Peter Stormare, the hard-assed father in law played by Harve Presnell) and the happiness-driven side (essentially, Frances McDormand's pregnant chief police, his husband, her colleagues).

Peter Stormare's character is a case apart, because he is part of the money driven plot but all he really wants is just to kill everybody that happens to annoy him, which he very gruesomely does - as soon as he feels the urge. 

This makes him somewhat likeable, to me. After all, he just likes his job (it just happens to be killing people),  and I can relate to that.

The chief police, donning a slightly mystified air all the time (McDormand is marvellous, in this) , unravel the whole plot - not before a chain of stupid decisions and attempted back-stabbings results in three deaths - and arrest Stormare character, right after he finishes feeding Buscemi's to a wood chopper.

She then goes home, to her mallard-painting husband, that has finally won a concourse for the 3 cents postage stamp.

He'd liked more to have his art used in the 29c stamp but, she points out, as soon as postage rates will rise, the 3c is going to see even more usage than the 29 cents.

She's a bit unsatisfied of having missed the organizer of the whole mess, but the husband reassures her - they'll catch him soon. 

And they slept happily ever after... - not really, but soundly, till the day after

Out of the cinema, while going back to my car, I was thinking about it.

It was a beautiful movie, though it convinced me that I will never, ever, ever go to live in Minnesota.

The parable, the moral of the story was a bit 'in the face', but it was right.

Parables are about teaching people something, not showing how smart-ass the author is.

Opening the door of my very clunky clunker, a 1984 Alfa Romeo "Nuova Giulietta" (Type 116 -  I am an hard-core Alfista), I thought that Fargo's message was one that I could like, though a bit self-evident.

As I sometimes do when I am a bit tired, and at 2 o'clock in a wednesday night tired I was (half price feature), I murmured myself "A bit too evident..."

 

Right behind me, two women were coming out of the same cinema, having seen the same movie - it was the last non-multiplex in town.

The two were dressed in some nice fur, and talking animatedly with each other...

-"What a stoooopid movie! It has no meaning at all!"

-"Yeah, I feel bad, that I followed their suggestions"

-"Ah, but our friends [] will hear from me!"

They climbed into their brand new Range Rover, and drove away, while I watched.

I believe I was left with the same mildly mystified expression McDormand used in the movie, when I finally ended my phrase

"... indeed???"

Now, I could be a smart-ass, and leave you the toil of deriving the moral of this small story, but parables are about telling something to your public, not you showing off.

What I learnt, that night, it is not just that the Coen Bros make movies that I like - I already suspected it.

It proved to me that there is no such thing as a self-evident truth, and that where we stand in life can change our perspective so much that we miss what's obvious for someone else - and viceversa.

For me, almost all the money-driven decisions in the movie are pretty much idiotic. And that drives the overall message forward.

For those ladies... they would have done the same as William Macy? Made the same choices? I do not know.

They couldn't see the idiocy of the "money field" and, for this, the parable was lost on them.

And that, in itself, was another parable.

Farewells

I am somewhat active in the local BDSM community.

Well, I used to bitch about the local (North of Spain) community, then I saw how active was the community in the place I come from  - Northern Italy.

Let it be at this: the locals here are a magnitude more active than the locals there.

It doesn't take much, to be active... an account in FetLife, one in whatever-that-is, and showing  your face at the munches. Maybe, organizing a café once a month - not really much.
Was it about High Middle-Age Poetry, not a problem for anybody  being it not, it takes a little more of fortitude, but not that much. Or, if you have ever seen a bunch of PASSIONATE literature lovers fight over the virtues of the  various metrics of the Madrigale Fiorentino, maybe a little less.

Anyway, I am somewhat active and so I made my share of acquaintances, if not friends.

And, every now and then, one of them burns out and disappears.

Usually, they are the ones that tried most to make head or tail of what it is to be into "our stuff", met with more than their fair share of ass-holes (mostly men, but some women too) and decide that, in the end, it isn't worth the crap.

They may come back, after a while, more relaxed, or they may not. It is, of course, a personal choice that nobody can syndicate, beyond a spat of sadness for their loss.


I'd like to say that this will never happen with me, but some day I - too - may wake up, think "Awww, it really isn't worth the crap" and cut it off.

It may happen... my drawings will still be quietly flooding the internet (forever: some of my "fans" "stole" them from the original sites, and reposted them in places unknown or over which I have no possible control), this blog may still be on-line, but trying to write at the address in the drawings will return a "fail to delivery" message.

In this case, I hope that someone around the big web will think the same that I think when my friends send a message to communicate that they are going to drop off, and fix the rest of their life before looking for an SM companion.

"Be well, my friend; May you find your way to be happy"

Excerpt

She likes to shag with men inside huge flurry costumes. If I knew Greek, I could propose a "-philia" for it.

<<

It is probably too much to ask, at this historical juncture, to do with "paraphilia" as Beier does with his neologism of "dissexuality"
—to squarely define it as "a sexual expression of a failure to conform to social norms" (Beier, 1998, p. 134)
and thus to acknowledge that the sex offence is simply a banal battle between a resourceful conspiracy of social conformists ("society") and the incidental erotic dissidents it loves to hate.

Although entertained by anthropologists for decades (Gayle Rubin is one), such an honest admittance will be resisted by most people who derive a career and a daily wage from the formulaic convention that they are working with sick (not just ill-fitting) people.

>>

from "'Paraphilia': Acultural or Anti-Anthropological?"

Diederik F. Janssen, MD

Nijmegen, The Netherlands

[Sexual Offender Treatment, Volume 9 (2014), Issue 2]

I do not remember how I stumbled on this, but I found it oddly comforting.

In the history of the world, societies have condoned - or even considered desirable - almost every kind of [sexual?] behaviour, that has been (or is) considered deviant in some others.

The ways the ancient Greek managed the education of their youngsters springs to mind (not only the Athenians and their curious habit of mentoring promising young males over the points of well doing adult males'... a-hem, but also the Spartans tradition of having their daughters vigorously making athletic exercise in the nude, along with their brothers), but the examples goes way beyond it, and reach contemporary times.

For example, some may feel odd that, while the practice of infibulation is rightfully condemned throughout the whole developed world, in a lot of the same places circumcision (as practised by the traditional Jews) is not so strongly condemned.

OK, I feel it odd.

If one takes a step back, and doesn't consider the statistics about post-operative complications (*) - which shouldn't really count in a moral evaluation - both practices are results of traditions that requires parents to somewhat mutilate their kids, way before these are able to express an informed consent.

Both should be considered abhorrent by a modern society, not just the one that is a tradition of a bunch of poor immigrants from West Africa.

Kissing is another example... theoretically, per Pope Alexander VII's 1666 proposition, it is a deadly sin for a catholic to kiss, out of lust, even if from the beginning there is no possibility whatsoever, for anything more spicy to happen. 

Swingers may seem a modern development, or as a symptom of the debasement of the modern world mores, but Ritual Spouse Exchange and Co-Marriage had been part of the Inuit culture for centuries(**),  before the first swinger club ever opened.


The Pharaohs of Egypt practised and endogamy so strict, that it involved relatively often father-daughter incests and a lot of sister-brother ones,  with offspring (it is a mystery to me, how they managed for two and a half century the kind of generic derive that one can see in the Borbone portrayed by Goya - apparently, the original genetic stock was remarkably good).

In the same line, some thirty years ago a social researcher found, spelunking through Parochial registers and correlating names and dates of the newborns, that in an area of the Northern Italy it was customary for daughters to be initiated to sex by their fathers, the night before the wedding.

The tradition should have died sometime at the half of the XIX century (just some millennia after the act was declared illegal), but God only knows from whence it came - my suspect, the late neolithic.

In some places today, being an active homosexual doesn't make you a posh consumer, to be courted by advertising companies looking for those dimes you are not (were not... times are a' changin') going to spend into raising your kids.

In these places, it makes you liable of death by decapitation, with a cheering crowd all around, or at least of a lengthy stay in mandatory therapy (***).

And the list goes on, and on, and on.

So, whatever is your favoured paraphilia, cool your head and relax.

Sometime, somewhere, in the past or in the future, in the fullness of time, there is a society where it was, it is or it will be considered "cool" (****) .

In the meanwhile, be a good citizen, bide your time and fake believing what the social conformists around you say of the argument.

Don't let them know that you know that they are just ass-holes full of shit.

They usually do not take it as lightly as they should.

* Infibulation tend to produce problems throughout the whole life of a great many part of its patients, usually by complicating urinary processes. Male circumcision, a lot  less so... but, botched circumcisions resulting in lifetime impotence - or complete loss of the penis - are not unheard of.

**  Possibly motivated - at the very bottom - by a dramatic need to keep the genetic pool as dynamic as possible, in some of the less populated regions of the planet? If the -roughly- 10% of illegitimate children that every society seems to produce is indeed a survival need of human groups,obviating to it in a place where you can spend years before meeting someone outside your group can require pretty drastic measures

*** The fact that admitting homosexuality as a normal inclination implies to admit that a lot of sexual mores are in effect arbitrary societal customs, has often been used as an excuse to oppose this recognition ("if we start with them faggots, then bestiality, then incest... where to draw the line?" - I draw it on the SSC border). By the way, I am not sure... is homosexuality still a grave illness, in China, or they finally reached this century, on it?

**** I was going to say, unless it involves some homicides, then I remembered the various moments in history where human sacrifices have been considered more than acceptable. By the way, if you live in a society where entertaining your personal -philia is a problem to you, and know of one contemporary place  where it is no, start sparing money for the plane ticket, kid. Millions did it already.... and, don't worry. The families never understand why. 

On Non-Consensual Themes

What Can I say, I really am an artist-whore; you pay, I draw. And then, I bitch about it.

 

Me and non-consensual themes, it is a bit complicated.

I do not like them that much, but I can manage them as long as somebody doesn't keep rubbing my face in it.

By the way, mine is an aesthetic as much as an ethic objection.

As a sadist, I want to see stories with Masters that lead their slaves through a path of growth as masochist and submissive, till these are happy of being the ultimate pain toy, or living their life in chains - or whatever.

Masters that may force things a little at start, recognizing a woman "potential", but that in the end are ready to let her go if she doesn't grow into the role - I can bear them.

At worst, they may be Masters that accept to pay the price, when their victims do not recognize their good faith.

In many ways, these are the kind of Master that I would like to be in real life though, to be honest, it's a steep and hard climb to reach up there, and I do not start from very much up the ladder.

I really have to draw her crying, pal? All the rest, isn't it enough?

But an idiot that has too much money, some criminal contacts and that does not care tat all about his victims (the protagonists of all too many N.C. stories are like this, and sometimes they also have protections from above shielding them from repercussion, adding moral cowardice to moral laziness)...

Why the hell should I care for such a character?

Even if I had that kind of money and those contacts, why should I waste my time and resources destroying a woman that's not going to appreciate it?

No, really. I mean, it is not like extreme masochists do not exist in the real world.

I crossed path with a girl that wanted her limbs chopped off and to be kept as a dog slave in a cellar, once; she was 21 and quite cute.

Another one was 19, with a 2 yo daughter, and wanted a master for both (1).

It has been enlightening... look for something hard and long enough, and you will find it.

As true non-consensual situations look...

There is no need to "cheat" and go the criminal way.

So, why waste time and effort with someone that is not going to like it?

Out there, there is at least one woman who would be excited at the Idea, whatever that idea may be. Go out and give her a way to rise to the challenge and try it in real life, I say - and if she is not a model with a ass to die for, who cares? Most of those are a boring fuck.

As a real world sadist and intermittent master (you are one ONLY when a slave calls you that, and at the moment I have no such luck), what can a fully N.C. story teach me about how to meet a real life, potential 

slave, and have a relationship with her?

The answer is, really, nothing.

And that is the reason why most "virgins" - on both sides - tend to come out with N.C. stories.

You do not need to really know much (often, not even human anatomy) to imagine a N.C. story.

You do not have to devise any reason, for both parts to act the way they act, or to keep a pace of psychological changes in any of them.

It makes for some pretty lazy writing and an even lazier fantasizing.

And it is consolatory, again, for the "virgins" of both sides.

"Subs" can go on fantasizing, because the risk of ending with monsters is so high, so terrible, that it must be avoided.

"Tops" can go on avoiding the spotlights, because they are better than that and, anyway, subs are so few, you can't possibly hope to cross one in real life without cheating, right?

(N.C. stories should be renamed "Masters-that-cheat-at-the-game Stories").

Cheater at work

So, for me, N.C. means - mainly - lazy storytelling.

This is my aesthetic objection to the genre.

And then, onto the ethic one.

As they say, "Been there, done that".

When I was a kid, I was a virgin, and as such I was choke full of non consensual fantasies.

After all, I really believed that women hated EVERY form of sex (blame a late Victorian education, a whole century and 2000 km out of place), so any sexual fantasy I could have was, literally, a male-on-female rape fantasy.

Cue in a massive amount of resentment against girls, for not sharing natural male's desires (indirectly making me "a monster"), a glorious misunderstanding on female's anatomy (more or less, I thought they were born trans and had to be liberated from their dicks surgically at puberty – I picked the wrong porn comic when I was 8, and it took me a while to get more accurate information), and you'll understand why my fantasies where Bloody Rape and Deadly Torture.

More deadly torture than rape, really... I didn't really have a good idea of what sex is.

I know, fantasies are fantasies, so I should attach no particular meaning to it.

But...

I can't really become like Him, I know.

A man (or a woman) can become only what (s)he can dream to be.

My "dreams" presented me no outcome that allowed me both to follow my instincts, and yet to be a happy and honorable man (in my worldview, these two words are almost synonyms - you can't really be happy, if your first impulse in the morning is to spit at the asshole in the mirror).

My fantasies were almost my only space of freedom, but in the end they were also a mental cage that I needed to get rid off – and I am still in the process of shredding it – to actually be free.

And this is the base of the ethical reason why I do not like N.C. themes...

I fear that, by doing them, I may be helping some other virgin digging himself in the same trap.

In a couple of cases, I am pretty sure that I already did it.

And that is not good, not at all.

___________________________________________________________________

1. I stayed the hell away from them, of course... a small voice in my head kept saying "entrapment, entrapment, entrapment {manic laugh}", in both cases - and I wasn't in condition to give them what they wanted anyway.

You got the rules?

So, you got it?

In the rest of the house, on the whole property, you are and always will be a quest.

I am your host, bound to my hospitality duties, and very happy to oblige.

You climb that step, enter this wooden floor, and you are a sex slave, and shall abide by the rules of this... how you called it? Ah, Temple to my overbearing personality.

In deference to both your youth and lack of experience, I will not ask for actual servitude, from you, neither sexual nor sadomasochistic.

I may ask some basic assistance, like having you retrieve a tool from a rack or take the ropes and place them apart, for me to fix them after the session, but nothing more.

You are required to oblige to these simple and harmless chores, as promptly and as dedicatedly as possible - no more than that.

However, in deference to the women whose sessions you will observe, you
WILL never climb that step dressed in a way inappropriate to a sex slave, and you will endeavour on this floor as much as possible as one, or you will dismissed and sent back to your home immediately.

So,before entering the floor, you will undress and then wear the wrist and ankle cuffs, the collar and the chastity belt, the short white socks and, on occasions when the dominée is someone that may recognize you -like your English teacher, what's her name? Mrs. Marksham? Yes, her - the leather hood.

I will not require you to wear the customary dildo, inside the chastity belt; should you try it out, you must be able to not cum before asking and receiving explicit permission from me.

So, you better leave that thing alone, for now - it would make you cum in five minutes, to.

Once over this floor, you will join that corner, sit on your legs like the women in the photos I showed you, and wait for orders.

You will not snickle, giggle or worse laugh, no matter what happens.

These women may have accepted to be presented to a fellow sister slave, for her enlightenment, but most of them could not bear to be laughed at by a bratty girl.

By the end of the month, you should be able to tell if you are effectively interested in this stuff, or not.

If you are, depending on what side you fancy more, I have friends who can take you in and help with your training.

So, 

  You got the rules?

The girl fixes the shortish man for something more than a second, before answering:

 Uncle B., aren't you a tad too serious? Come on? Isn't this a glorified RPG?

The man blushes a tiny little bit, before retorting -

You are the one that wanted to know how this stuff works, Nina.
I was just dumb enough to let you convince ma that it could be fun... Now, get in gear, dear.

The girl is startled -

 Oh... already? Now? Today? I mean, I am not ready! I thought we started Saturday.

Oh, and... put the hood on! And, don't talk, no matter what.

What? Why?... Who is she?

Hurry! Your mother's going to enter that door in ten minutes, max.

What?

Yes, she always comes a bit earlier, when you aren't at home.

Mom? Mom? My Mom? What the fuck, Uuuncle!!!!

The bulky man smiles... The kid is right, after all. This is fun.

Someone knocks on the door, just as Nina fumbles on her own trousers...