I keep seeing people suggesting that the fact that (sub/dom) drop and aftercare are things in BDSM and kink that BDSM and kink are inherently abusive?
And like… I’m not going to claim to be an expert on kink or BDSM, because I am so very far from it. But the way I’ve seen it explained is that sub/dom drop and subsequent aftercare are the result of people coming down from the adrenaline and endorphin highs during a scene.
Like, yes, the symptoms described in drop definitely can be symptoms of abuse too but they’re also symptoms of coming down from any extremely elevated mood state. It’s an adrenaline/endorphin crash. People experience it for all sorts of reasons outside of kink and BDSM.
I guess I just feel like if someone says to me, “Yes, I experience drop sometimes, and yes I require aftercare sometimes, but everything I do with my partner is 100% consensual and I truly love and enjoy our scenes.” I’m not going to go, “Actually sweetie, it seems you just don’t know what’s good and bad for you, allow me to tell you.”
That’s just. So patronizing and infantilizing to assume that someone just can’t determine these things for themselves. And I’m not saying that abuse can’t or doesn’t happen in kink and BDSM or that none of these scenarios ever actually involve abuse where the person doesn’t realize they are being abused. But I feel like it’s not for me to decide which cases fall under that and it’s definitely not for me to decide that they all do. I think it’s up to the BDSM and kink community to spread important information such as warning signs that things have become abusive or unhealthy so that people can self determine whether what they’re engaging in has become unhealthy for them or not.
I’ve been meaning to make a post about this but my notes never got sufficiently organized. But I just want to add my autistic two cents:
* Needing aftercare is a common effect of sensory overload or cognitive/emotional overextension. I sometimes need aftercare after noisy conversations at completely G-rated parties.
* Doing something that causes sensory overload or cognitive/emotional overextension isn’t automatically unhealthy or abusive!
* If so, slow vanilla sex with lots of eye contact would also be in that category for many people.
* Being pushed to overextend yourself by doing a thing past your limits day after day can be unhealthy, which is why I’ll believe anti-kink people earnestly mean well when I see them coming out to protest the fluorescent lights in retail stores. By any statistic these are a more common source of forced sensory overload than kink, and not only for adults.
Anyway, a discourse that assumes everyone responds the same way to the same physical stimulus is a discourse rooted in ableism, and you cannot meaningfully support the rights of neurologically and biologically diverse people and also assume we all have the same sexual needs as everyone else, or punish us for sexual behavior that isn’t a close emulation of abled neurotypical sex.
Day: August 21, 2018

hey i need $20 by tomorrow (8/22) to see my therapist, and could use like $10 for gas as well if anyone can help
paypal.me/lizardsister, venmo is @lizardsister, and cash.me is $lizardsister
via reddit.com
Given that I loathed being a child and was also not a fan of being a teen/young adult (or the sort of person I was at that time, TBH), this also explains why I utterly abhor reminiscing.
Those were some of the worst years of my life and I remember them with very little affection. If this is real and didn’t just skip me, I hate to think how bad it must have actually been.
I do experience a sort of wistfulness about my younger years, now that I’m old enough to know I don’t have 40 more left in me. But it’s not about events, it’s about wanting that time back. It’s wanting to feel that much future ahead of me again, only without the hideous and miasmatic cloud of untreated mental illness, trying to attend high school with all that going on, then moving out and instantly becoming poor, the mental illness getting worse, and all of it, for my whole life up to that point, spent surrounded by verbally abusive and/or toxic individuals. And it foes back to early childhood, which sucked, too. I literally cannot relate to people who are able to look back on their childhoods. I actually have a hard time trusting them at all.
So, hi, I hate to bother y’all again but I’m like down to my last $19 (no joke). I got rent paid (hooray!) but I’m seriously lacking in the whole “feeding the kids and putting gas in the car so you can get to work” department.
I could seriously use some help. If you’re feeling generous and have the means, you can help in one of these three places:
Digging this out the crates again because bills are paid! Yay! But now there’s no gas in the car, minimal food in the fridge, and I really need to go to a laundromat and wash our clothes. Please help!!!
I got clothes washed and gas in the car! Yay! Now I need food for the kids!
Good news: I was able to put gas in the car and some food in the fridge.
Bad news: I have to attend a mandatory meeting today so I have to use the drop-in daycare center again. It’s $11/hour and I’m gonna be in a meeting for approximately 3 hours. Please help.
So peoples, I’ve got just about all my bills caught up and in two days I’ll be THIRTY and in six days my bi boy will be a SECOND GRADER!!! I wanna do something special on my one day off to celebrate those milestones, however catching up with bills has meant I’m down to my last $20 again. If y’all could help us celebrate some cool ass milestones, that’d be great!

File under ‘Vintage Cat Photos, One of the Best Ever.’
This is what I want my life to be like
the problem with the monogamy polyamory discourse imo is the focus on identity. you let monogamous or polyamorous be who you are instead of a mere description of the way you form relationships. people aren’t hardwired one way or the other, at the end of the day you’re making choices about your boundaries. why don’t you just let life surprise you sometimes so it’s not a full on identity crisis every time you want something or someone you didn’t expect
👆☝👆☝ “what do I want right now?” “What am I comfortable with right now?” “What do I feel safe doing right now?”
One of the many reasons why I identify with descriptive rather than prescriptive language, and not just around relationships.
Some people feel identified by their relationship style. Cool. Some don’t. Rad. Some change many times over their lifetime, or even over a few weeks? Go you. Take care of yourself, be honest with yourself, and the haters can pound sand.
Help Carrie attain life saving surgery before it’s too late!
Carrie is almost half way to her goal to get the £100k she needs for life saving surgery, but if she doesn’t reach her goal by September 1st then her surgery will be cancelled, and given the extremity of her condition it’s likely she’ll die before it can be re-arranged.
If you’re able to help financially, then you can do so at her GoFundMe. But if you don’t have money to spare there’s still a lot you can do to help prevent Carrie dying from an easily preventable death.
Reblog this post! Obvious and easy but for some reason posts I’ve made for Carrie seem to have much less luck than any other donation posts I’ve ever made.
If you play Fallout 4, then you can help with an extra effort that is being made on Tuesday the 14th. Carrie’s Fund is organising a
Fallout 4 Flash Mob with the hope of spreading awareness and also getting the attention of Bethesda. Disabled and chronically ill folks are a huge customer base for games companies, and Carrie’s Fund is hoping that Bethesda might help advertise their need or help directly.
Do fund raisers of your own! I know that’s a lot to ask but Carrie’s wife is essentially unable to spend any time campaigning now as Carrie’s condition deteriorates and her care needs become more complex. (If you do raise a substantial sum then please contact the campaign for the best way to get the money to them – they lose a portion to fees if it’s done through GoFundMe). Her situation is desperate and this is her last chance.
Please, please reblog this.
Posts for Carrie seem to do badly and she is running out of time.
If you’re able, please donate or reblog. She has lost an incredible amount of functionality in just a few more months and is very literally on death’s door. If you can share on other social media, that would be amazing, too. At times, I work myself sick with anxiousness because I think she won’t make it, but I have seen strangers on the internet achieve incredible things. Please, please help.
We are over the halfway point! Please, please keep this going! Time is running out and without this surgery she WILL die.
the most fucked up thing about married straight couples in paranormal reality shows is that the husband is almost always the skeptic and the wife will be like terrified to exist in her own home and she’ll beg her husband to believe her and she’ll be crying every night and he’ll straight up look at the camera and be like “I don’t know I guess I just thought she was imagining things.”
like this is beyond belief in ghosts what it comes down to is one member of these couples was so distressed they were in tears nightly or at least weekly, BEGGING their partner to listen to them, and their partner was like “whatever this’ll blow over.”
how does your relationship survive that?? how are these people still together?? if my wife came into the room crying and told me she’d seen bill watterson, author of acclaimed comic calvin and hobbes, manifest in our kitchen and tell her he didn’t like our wallpaper, I’d like. obviously have some questions. but I’d fucking address her distress and take steps to make her feel better lmao???
these husbands are all garbage and they feel justified bc they weren’t the “crazy one” who believed in ghosts.
they were the good, logical, “sane” spouse who did rational and good things like, completely and purposefully ignore their partners’ growing and life-altering distress for months.
reblog if you want bill watterson, author of acclaimed comic calvin and hobbes, to manifest in your kitchen and roast your terrible choices in wallpaper
this post caused [reads smudged writing on hand] bill watterson? to physically manifest in my house
As a skeptic, I find these kinds of scenarios just as irritating, because in my book, and those of the skeptics I associate with, the idea is that one doesn’t doubt there was an experience, its what that experience is that’s in question. “I don’t doubt you saw something, but saying what it is will require investigation” and all that.
If anything, the skeptic is the one who should be pushing for them to go to a hotel for the night, because carbon monoxide poisoning produces the effects of a haunting.
So if your spouse, who is spending more time at home than you are, is reporting scary inexplicable shit, then the first place a skeptic’s mind is going to go is something in the environment causing it. Probably carbon monoxide, but there’s all kinds of gases and molds that can cause hallucinations, not to mention infrasound if the acoustics are just right. Regardless, anything that can cause you to see Bill Watterson materialize in your kitchen is probably dangerous, and the solution to that problem, be it a legitimate ghost or an infestation of ergot in the wallpaper, is to leave the dangerous area until the problem is identified and dealt with.
None of the creepy stuff from hauntings is really stuff you’d want to ignore even with its mundane causes. Even if it does come down to a 100% ‘in your head’ kind of thing, that means the house is causing a sharply negative psychological reaction and you shouldn’t stay there.
I’d totally dig the reverse film, though. Believer spouse is too stubborn to be chased out by the ghost, while the skeptic spouse is pulling their hair out because they’ve bought this money pit that just develops one problem after the other.
In my 10th grade English class, we we’re put in groups and assigned a house-based Gothic horror story project of original short story, coordinating illustration, and presentation. My group’s story flipped the gender roles, with a high-strung, haunted husband and pragmatic skeptic wife. It was fun.
My auditory processing may leave a lot to be desired, but I just couldn’t help but laugh my ass off at some misheard lyrics not presented as such. At a level where “billy club” got turned into “Philly glove”–and it went downhill from there.
I guess it’s very possible that whoever tried to transcribe that doesn’t speak English as a first language, which certainly might help explain getting some fairly common phrases that far off. It still struck me as funnier than it maybe should have.
Mostly just had to share that “Philly glove” 😊 Which sounds like some kind of terrible euphemism for I don’t know what.
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