African Women

I know, she is a black lady - from actual Africa, if I remember well. 

Is it in bad taste, drawing her in bondage regalia? Maybe. 

Then again, I am not American. A lot of what would be uncomfortable sub-text for a U.S. citizen is a lot toned down when seen from my Italian Hikkikomori vantage point.

What I know of African women is from the ones that I met. On average, they are nice people that treated me fairly - which may not actually apply to my mother, I can say after enough therapy - and whose only grating characteristic was, usually, an excessive desire to save my soul from hell - when they discover that I am agnostic.

So, to my eyes they are simply women whose physicality I really like and, me being me - ie screwier than a corkscrew, this is my way of showing it. 

It is not like white women are treated any better, in my drawings. 

Ite, Missa Est

Every form of art...

Yesterday, I was listening  to the radio, I heard this phrase:

"Every form of art is a form of Literature".

On the face of it, it seems like a nice and sensible enough proposition... only problem, it is NOT actually TRUE.

Personally, I think that there are two fundamental ways to perceive reality, influenced by the nature of their main sensorial vectors, which in turn spawn two approaches to analyzing and reproducing it  - and, by extension, creating un-realities - and, thus , two extremely broad classes of arts.

The first one is "sequential" perception - its basic sense is hearing and its main art product is literature.

Its most important non-artistic product is... science. Science is, almost inevitably, a reconstruction of the universe in terms of a collection of narrations - the theories and laws found in schoolbooks, as well as every single article published by any researcher, are all small tokens of narrative literature. 

For the very physical nature of sound, its perception is based on sequences of events, that the mechanics of human auditory system makes it to be discrete in nature - notes in music, letters , pauses and stresses in language.

So, my idea is that  "Every form of sequential art is equivalent to every other form of sequential art". 

The other type of perception is "holistic", the object of which is perceived as a whole without a decomposition of it in a sequence of elements.

 Its sensory vehicle is sight but, as far as I can tell, the human mind as we know it is not really able to handle this type of perception any well.

Nor our sensory system is really designed for it - when we look at something, the cone of focused vision we have is about 30º wide.

If the object of our contemplation occupies a visual space any larger, we are forced to move our gaze along its area, creating a mental sequence of something that has no defined sequence of its own.

The object may thus exist as a static image, but we are finally forced to perceive it as a sequence of partial impressions - this objective difficulty is such that we all but forget that things may simply... be.

Be, without an inherent dynamic of discrete elements susceptible of being aligned in a narrative thread. 

More than forget, we are so inured into narration that, when we cross something that could be perceived in a holistic way, we still analyze it through a decomposition into its formative elements - decomposition that may be completely arbitrary - and an argumentative discourse - i.e. a narration - about them.

I think that arts whose inherent vehicle is sight - paint, graphics, sculpture -  are not really bound to incorporate a definite sequential nature, though they may acquire it if so the artist desires.
Which artists all too often do, lest their public bemoans that the piece "does not say anything".
 
Language being the glue that keeps together human societies, and the most important tool available to gain and exert power in them, the arts based around its manipulation have always manifested a disproportionate influence - hence the prestige of  literature, that is at their roots, and the desire for practitioners of arts that are not inherently sequential to emulate the control that writers have over their readers through narration.

In the history of figurative arts, in much of the world, such a control has been produced manipulating the elusive quality called "composition", which essentially means exploiting assumptions and empiric observations about the psychology of viewers to guide the path of their eyes as they explore the piece.

But not all figurative arts are obsessed with it - many forms of sculpture live well beyond its reach, especially those related to product design, like much of pottery, some architecture and many car shapes.

Similarly, a good portion of Islamic art is as oblivious to narration as is it is to the reproduction of the human figure - Possibly because no lay narration should contend the primate of the Holy Book.

All these forms of art are not, really, forms of literature.

Yet they still are, most surely, art.

Some Of The One Thousand Misunderstandings On Darwinism

Or, rather, the manifold ways we manage to get Darwinism -  and, by far and large, a whole host of other concepts derived from "the sciences of life" - wrong.

The first thing I noticed, many - usually, authors of entertainment fodder - seems to treat Darwinism as if it was a kind of "atheist" religion.

Darwin proposed a theory about the mechanisms that allow the natural evolution of the species, based upon the natural appearance of mutations - as a result, we now know, of both casual errors in the DNA replication, as well as some mechanisms that seem designed to introduce massive mutations by the replication or deletion of blocks or "regulative" DNA - and a successive elimination of the variants less apt for the current environment.

Now, a theory is really something like "a scientific explanation of how something may work, that has not been proven completely wrong yet - though it may someday be -  and has some utility in explaining new phenomena as they are encountered".

As a scientific theory, his was a good one, and it has survived many an attempt at disproving it.

However, it is still nothing more - and nothing less - than a successful scientific theory.  It has nothing to do with religion, and shouldn't even inform ethic decisions, as it has no moral relevance.

I argue that the very first act our species did when it conquered sapience, was, in fact, getting rid of much of the parts of Darwin's theory pertaining to the competition among individuals.

The very first thing we did when we became able to exchange ideas, was starting to live together in big groups, opting for various forms of collaborative lifestyle that allowed us to pool the talents of each member of the group.

Of course, Darwin theory gave birth to "Darwinism", an intellectual framework that allowed to expand Darwin's original theory when it became evident, for example, that in social species the competition is not only among individuals but also among social groups.

As an intellectual framework, Darwinism is a decently solid one... as long as one remembers that it does not always apply and that one can't cherry-pick which facets of the theories - it spawn a number of them - to follow, and which to forget.

On one side, casual mutation is not the only mechanism by which a species evolve, as least as far as phenotype (physical body shape) goes. 

Lamarck wasn't right but was not completely wrong either.

We now know that there are mechanisms - called "epigenetic"  - by which the stresses encountered by the parents influence the development of the offspring, usually modulating their base metabolism.

This influence is reversible - which explains why the human population is generally growing taller, in those countries that are accumulating generation after generation of well-fed individuals with access to good quality proteins, nearing the dimensions of the last generations of hunter-gatherers - but impossible to deny.

On the other side, collaboration has a wide importance in the natural world.

We have discovered that bacteria exchange information on how to dominate their environment, not only among individuals but also even across species, and many of the most successful insects have hive structures grouping thousands or hundred thousands of individuals.

In other words, competition may be inevitable, but collaboration often helps a lot. So, when you hear a "Social Darwinist", what you are hearing is - really and usually - just a greedy opportunist.

Another classic case of "cherry-picking" Darwin's ideas to justify arbitrary preferences is, in my view, the "science" called Eugenics.

While it may be appealing to use our knowledge to shape the evolution of our species, the truth is that any such effort's first result would be - inevitably, by the very nature of the idea of Eugenics - to reduce the variability of our species' genetic pool.

And while it may appeal to some petty desires to have taller offspring - to make an example -  it would also condemn them, should some dramatic change of the environment make being taller than five feet a liability.

Proponents of Eugenics may use the name of Darwin but, in reality, the whole idea is rather
Un-Darwinian.

Eugenics points me to another of the diffused misunderstandings that surround poor Darwin and his ideas, one that we indulge pretty often, almost all of us.

Evolution has no actual purpose, nor aim, nor does it have any "moral" value.

When these concepts appear, associated with natural evolution, is a reflection of prejudices, usually of anthropocentric nature and sometimes, even more restrictedly, just Euro-centric ones.

Usually, all it is needed to highlight this is simply an examination of the criteria used to define a species as successful or evolved.

If it is "we recognize the species as well made"... it has no universal meaning worth the name.

If we decide to use the aggregated mass of its components, as an indirect measure of the species prevalence in securing control over its environment, then cows are the most successful multi-cellular species on the planet. However, if one was to consider all bacteria as elements of an extended organism, that one would be twice the mass of cows, or about three times the one of humans.

The most successful super-organism on the planet.

But when we use "evolved", we often really mean "likeable" - which has no bearing on evolution.

If we use number of individuals, flies easily exceed human numbers - they are a hugely successful species.

At the same time, purposeless and aimless as it may be, evolution never stops, even when it may appear so at a superficial glance.

As a result, the concept of "living fossil" is - mostly - a joke that evolutionists pull on laymen.

Take -  if you will - its most famous "example", the shark.

The general body shape of sharks is so well tuned to their environment that it has hardly changed in a couple of hundred millions years. In fact, millions of years later, when cetacean went back to sea they copied the shark general shape (hydrodynamics rocks!).

But, the same can be said of desktop computers and office spaces - Yet, try navigating Internet with an IBM AT, and you'll see what I am getting to.

If it was to come back today, a shark of 200 million years ago would probably starve trying to catch the fish that its somewhat faster descendant has no issue catching, all the while his body would be consumed by hundred of pathogens that its very much alike-looking namesake fend-off on a daily basis.


(Note: Crichton, writing "Jurassic Park", knew it well and used - in an utterly brilliant way - the necessity of modern egg-donors as a clever work-around; the Raptors are at least as much some descendants of their modern - i.e. fit to today's environment - amphibians "mothers" as they are of the sparse reptilian DNA fragments recovered from fossils. Also, from their amphibian parents they got the ability to change sex in times of stress, which is one that many humans would like to have, and made for a great plot point... that guy was good.)

I think that you got the gist of what I was saying, by now.


I leave you the toil of thinking about other ways we mistreat Darwin - there must be more than a few that escaped my fantasy and capacity for  recognition.


So, remember - when you encounter someone using "evolution" as an explication for any policy - and you will - proposal, he or she is likely pulling a scam.

Or misdirected.

Or both.

Cut the "Sluts"

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Great Asses Think Alike

“

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. 

The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. 

The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or a 12 feet  Gray Alien to be in control.

The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless.

” - Alan Moore

Make no mistake, Alan Moore is my preferred comic books' author, so I tend to value what he says highly .

Writing this or that thing, he has also spent his share of times checking some facts about various conspiracy theories, from the CIA misdeeds to the Freemason background of Jack The Ripper.

This is his informed opinion on the subject - I tend to agree.

Yes, a comic book artist is pretty low on the culture's totem pole (or higher, if you subscribe to the "lesser gods go upstairs" version of totem-poles building) but we are talking about the - OK, maybe - best comics writer of the last century, bar Will Eisner.

It still ranks  pretty higher - or, again, lower - than me.

On my part, I tend to agree with him, for slightly different reasons.

Human nature... "three is a crowd" when it comes to maintaining the lid on who screwed with whom at the summer camp, but tens of thousands of persons that should be involved in the "chemical trails" conspiracies manage to keep their mouths shut? Come on, that's as probable as an egg reconstituting itself after falling on the floor.

In fact, the conspiracies that do exist, in the end always find their Snowden.

Also, a lot of what many call "conspiracies" seem to me just other cases of what I call "The Lemming instinct of Assholes".

Usually also called "follow the leader".

Hundred or even thousands, millions of different, unrelated "actors" that behave following the same basic rules, chasing the same "leaders", each one individually free - and convinced to be free - but that, altogether, behave like a crowd.

Or like those patches of small sea fishes that move together in the shape of one enormous fish, so that predators may be fooled by the group's shape.

The same happens in many aspects of human life, first and foremost in the financial markets.

Each of the idiots that writes things like "as long as pays are increasing above the board [for our chaste] things will go well" (in a comment to a Forbes article over the extinction of the middle class, and the world returning to the kind of filthy rich elites - abysmally poor masses that characterized most  of human history, till Marx came around and masses started cutting the throats of the elites... oops, they forgot this) has no relationship whatsoever with his colleagues. More, they are competitors.
But they also follow the same "rules", operate with a similar mindset (or they do not operate long... to pray on herds, predators must still follow the herd) and, seen from afar, they may look like one enormous conspiracy.

But there is no conspiracy there... just thousand of little idiots moving in synchronous ways, projecting the shape of one gigantic, all-mighty ass-hole.

Hundreds of CEO whose primary interest is having money for cocaine and 21y.o. escorts make the same choices, outsourcing every possible part of the production till the company is unable to build anything new on itself, just to discover that their market - mostly people whose job has been out-sourced or automated by other enterprises - has all but vanished.

The world, as a whole, is indeed rudderless - or, rather, it has many hundreds of small rudders pointing in all directions.

If every now and then, some groups of helmsmen do take a coherent route, and people outside their group/social strata may perceive coordination,  it is only because "Great Asses Think Alike".

Nothing more, nothing less.

Now, you can cry over the human condition.

Personally, I'll be eating my ice-creams into oblivion.

The most intelligent species on Earth

Humanity is the most intelligent species on this planet.

Supposedly.

Scientists can list an impressive list of "existential dangers" lingering  upon our head, some of them auto-created.

Of course, there is no money to be found for any serious attempt at tackling the issue of going to space... the human of the street couldn't care less, and it has its reasons.

The species may survive or not, but if you are dead and your kids too, it is not a matter of your interests.

Species have no real existence of their ow, beyond being  a useful tool for scientific discussion... a species does not decide anything, nor it acts upon its needs.

It's the sum of the behavior of its individual components, following mostly similar patterns, that can give the impression of some coherent active will that many science-fiction writers have been so fond of.

Yet, as  a species, we are supposed to be a notable exception to this situation in that our individual members can know the general situation of the world, and hence act upon some kind of intelligent project to address the issues at hand.

Right now, the greatest current danger for our continued existence seems to be the global warming of the planet.

Either it is solely a product of our releasing excesses of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or a combination of this and general trends in the environment  - an hint... by the established succession of warm and glacial eras to date, we should be in a glacial era, now -  our fossil fuels consumption plays a great part in this process.

At the moment, after the "shale revolution", it is the ability of the environment to absorb our wasted CO2 that is posing the main limit to the quantity of energy that we can use to do, say, everything.

We already know that there are some potential energy sources that could cut down on it, "intelligent" nuclear fission, nuclear fusion and renewable energies.

At the moment, the goal of economically sustainable production of energy by nuclear fusion lays some twenty years in the future, that if there are no more snafus along the road.

One such snafus could be politicians cutting down on the funds dedicated to the research in this fields.

The main project on nuclear fusion is ITER, and it has accumulated its part of costs overrun and schedule slips. 

The "shale revolution" has changed the equation of costs and benefits that was behind the drive toward other energy sources that funded its project.

As always, the doubt is that this money could be spent better.

It is quite a bit of money... some 20 billion dollars, over some fifteen years of development.

If we can pull it off, nuclear fusion promises to solve almost every energetic problems of our civilization... its radioactive downfall is a fraction of that of even the cleanest current fission reactor and it would be intrinsically safe.

Someone points out that, with cheap energy, water shortages can be solved - desalinization is an energy intensive process.

Also, many other commodities shortages could be addressed with a more thorough recycle systems, which usually are limited by energy issues.

20 billion dollars are a lot of money, but it should be an investment with plenty of return..

And, it is the revenue of the teams of the NFL for one year.

So, is our species really so intelligent? It can't even devolve half of the "panem et circenses" budget of one country, for one year, to invest in the most probable technology able to solve its most pressing problems for the next century.

We'll never go extinct soon enough.

The schizophrenic science of Star Wars

The best thing in "The force Awakens"

I have just watched Star Wars - The Force Awakens.

 - Spoilers ahead.

It is a good film - although, on some levels it is almost a carbon copy of the first , "A new Hope" (sorry, the "prequels" Do Not Exist, for me).

I mean... how many time The Empire must commit its resources into building a "Death Star", before it learns that with the same money/industrial output they could build an equally  formidable float of starships?
pretty much
A float whose combined fire power would be on par with that of the big base (timing each starship shot so that they reach the target at the same moment would be entirely doable, with current computers - ten thousand years or so of multi-planetary tech development after, it should be of no-consequence ), would have a far greater strategic and tactical flexibility, and it could not be destroyed by a single lucky shot from an X-Wing.


Of course, this would just echoes what happened with the Dreadnoughts at the start of WWII...

Up to the start of the war, every major power in the world had devoted literally fortunes to develop main battle ships, and bigger was better. 

Most of these ships proved almost useless during the war - they were sunk by aircrafts, often before they could engage battle with any other main battle ships, because each admiralty tried to avoid this kind of engagements... but I suppose WWII history is not among the required lectures for Hollywood scriptwriters nowadays.

One would think that a civilization that has starships going from one side to the other of the galaxy - and has got them for quite a while -  should have outgrown such an infantile "bigger is better" obsession.

The "Death Planet" in the new film, though, beyond being yet another example of "Maus-esque" - from the WWII panzer prototype, the Empire being "the Nazis in Space" , I feel that the comparison was acceptable -  dysfunctional appropriation of resources, done for the sake of showing who's got it bigger, it also has a good chance of earning the "Sci-fi writers have no sense of scale" prize for 2016.

333.000- that's the number of times - more or less a couple of thousands - that the mass of the Sun exceeds that of planet Earth.

Hence that is - approximately, let's say, in the ballpark of - the number of times that the gravity acceleration of the "Death Planet" should augment, while it gobbles-up the mass of a nearby star to prepare for firing.

Of course, suddenly weighing some twenty thousand tonnes (Rey... she is very svelte) should make a bit difficult having battles between putative Siths and Jedis.

Also, the scene of the "Planet" swallowing the star... it lasts some seconds.

Good for cinematographic purposes, but, how exactly fast is the matter going down, in the stream from the star to the planet? At usual cosmic distances, such short a time would mean that the matter is falling toward the planet faster than light...

This, without disappearing from normal space like the Millennium Falcon and without looking like it was going backward  (a common expected result of seeing something that moves faster than light, from anywhere but behind the movement direction).

Also, for all intent and purposes, the star is being compressed into a black hole - it is the basic mechanism of a quasar, the compressed matter should convert a relevant part of its mass  - by compression - into high energy X and Gamma rays, that would scorch the surface of the planet. 

But, the fans will say, we do not even have any idea for a functional FTL (faster than light) travel, so it is fair to say that the "technology" of Star Wars is so far out (of the possible) that it has no sense that we discuss it.

In fact, the fans of a Star Wars are right: the "technology" in Star wars is just thinly veiled magic,  which can be condoned, and works exclusively on plot needs, which should not.

So, even as magic, its use in the movies is full of contradictions - in most cases, authors in Star Wars prove uninterested in extrapolating even a bit the consequences of the gizmos they show.

The robots in Star wars have minds and sentiments - a feat well beyond the dreams of all but the wildest of the robotic scientist - and have been seen doing - literally - everything, as plot demands.

Yet, in such an economy - where second hand droids can be bought for cheap even on a forgotten planet et the end of nowhere - there still are plenty of low-paid manual jobs  around - even full blown slavery, and not necessarily of the only kind that could still have a meaning - waiting for characters to conveniently and dramatically walk away from them.

In our world, hundreds of thousand menial and not-so-menial jobs (online AI law counselling, rings it a bell) may disappear in the next fifteen years, unless computers tech really hits a wall with the end of the "Moore's Law", but  - some thousand years later - scrapping a crashed Star destroyer would still be done, piecemeal, by a bunch of near-starvation desperadoes stranded on a shitty planet.

One would think that to feel sorry for a friend is computationally harder than, say, dismantle piece by piece a crashed Star Destroyer...

In fact, dismantling the Destroyer would require something like the intelligence of an ant, so I expect to see something like shipyards with automatic dismantlers to arrive during the remaining span of my life.

Toward the end, if I am lucky.

Again, the equivalent of cars, in Star Wars, seems to be floating all the time - a frictionless skid made by an invisible force field, or some anti-gravity trick - both are way beyond modern physic knowledge, or maybe just plainly impossible - yet they need to be driven, by people or by droids...

All the while, in our world the Google cars are logging thousand mile after thousand mile without human intervention, their main problem seeming to be that they abide to all the rules all the time, where the humans around them skip this or that rule and occasionally crash into the way too observant googlies.  

Again, one would think that some thousand years after them, all but a handful of sporty models of sprinters, requiring a special licence, would have human commands at all.

About the light sabres, I rather avoid adding my  name to the list of the persons that decry their  physical impossibility - mostly because they are used also in Gundam, and  Tomino and Co proposed a somewhat sensed way they could be built, some day... if harder-than-matter force fields will ever be possible, of which there is no indication whatsoever as of this writing - but I would point out that I see pretty incredible to see people bare handedly fixing machines that handles powers akin to a nuclear explosion. 

In all , "Star Wars" is still the fairy tale written in the '70s by somebody that not only has never had much to do with science, but had never even tried to fix his own car... unscrewing a car's suspension radius arm, for example, takes a man's full strength with at least one meter's lever, in my experience.

But the Millennium Falcon's engine can get fixed with just some "wonder" duct tape.

Given these objections, I feel odd that Sheldon Cooper likes the franchise at all, in The Big Bang Theory...

(fixed  some errors of grammar, orthography and logic, October 13 2016)

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.

Ladies of Pain, Pleasure and Grace.

Some people, mostly young guys that reach me through Hentai-Foundry, seems to think that, being a huge pervert with plenty of fetishes and all, I must enjoy talking about them in chat.
And they try to do so relatively often, writing at length in onanistic rapture about their preferred fetish. They bore me to tears.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am a huge pervert, but

I Don't Care About 90% of The Fetishes I Draw.

No, really. I'm not making the "moralist pornographer" speech. It's entirely another issue, a subtler one.
Still, I don't care for amputations, electrocution, body modification, eroguro, death play, pony-slaves, belly suspension etc...
So, why the fuck do I draw this stuff?
Well,

It's all about the Ladies!

Two ladies of mines

 

 - about the Ladies, and what I think is in their Minds.

It may be not all that apparent, but I draw most of my works to imagine a world populated by women - of any age - as much different as possible from the sanctimonious, self serving, sex-denying, egotistical bitches that shaped much of my life (up to date).

I like to imagine a world filled with women willing to endure unbelievable pains for their faith, their friends, the pleasure of their lovers, the dignity of their chaste etc.

Miyuki, from Hokkaido with Love

In a phrase, willing to suffer for something outside and beyond themselves, in truly selfless devotion.

Or, conversely, allowing themselves to be tortured just because pain itself gives them pleasure, and they are HONEST enough to admit they would die for their own pleasure. For that perfect, last, absolute orgasm.


I drawn my stuff trying to convince myself that these women - these very different kinds of women - really existed. That they were just out there, and it was simply a question of time and of searching hard enough to find one for myself.

For long years, mine was more mad hope than rational analysis. But they are really out there; only, they are a little sparser than what I thought.



Lately I'm chancy enough that, from time to time, I get in contact with one of them.
 
Usually, the Lady is an ocean away, she's mainly lesbian, she already has a partner, she has a (too much

Jade, subbing in Galizia

fuckable) daughter, a son etc... or all of these together.

But, these "small encounters" repay me a lot.
Time, luck, and looking for the right one and I will find her. Call me a "believer"; it took me time to become one.

So, when some 20's guy chats me and starts enumerating what he (rather often, the avatar character that's the protagonist of his oniric life) would do to this or that bitch, he loses me. Loses me at the third phrase.

I've been there... at that age, and grown out of it.
It's boring to death, dreaming revenge on "the bitches". Boring and self-defeating.

Even if someone was so idiotic to risk his freedom to do so, the world is so choke full of bitches, looking for poor sods to exploit in horribly devious ways, that one less wouldn't make it any less desolating.

So, I don't care for bitches... they are beneath my contempt.

I care for the ladies.

And in my works I'll always allow them to show, at their greatest personal cost - it would be meaningless otherwise - that they are, indeed, ladies.
Ladies of Pain, Pleasure and Grace.
My Ladies.

It's all about her, I swear