Cite for me ever saying any of this?
If Dio could accept that, this thread would be a lot shorter.
All rules are make believe. Don’t wear a hat inside the house? Made up rule. Don’t pick your teeth at the table? Made up rule. Don’t talk in a theater? Made up rule. Don’t type in all-caps on the internet? Made up rule. There’s a word for these made up rules. It’s called “etiquette.” Different cultures have different sets of etiquette. One of the rules of the BDSM culture is, “Don’t argue with the dom in the middle of a scene.” You’re not a member of that particular culture, so that’s not a rule you have to worry about. But to people who are a part of that culture, the rules are important.
Phony is having a contract which includes something as lame as ‘don’t top from the bottom’. Phony is not having any idea what to do when a bottom acts up other than pointing to the contract and kicking them out.
Phony is a scene where submissive men apparently have to prove their worthiness (er, I mean worthlessness) to so called pro-doms to be one of the lucky few to be abused.
I’m laughing at the thought of a woman who thought that all she needed to be a dominatrix was to have a good line in leather clothes, know some abusive terms, and have an airtight contract enforcing the power that she has no ability to enforce herself. I hope she never finds herself in a job or situation where unexpected things can come up at any time which she’ll have to be on top of, like being an air traffic controller or a parent.
Is this for real?! I mean, I certainly agree with that being the first part of a sentence, the second part being something like “if you don’t want your ass kicked”, but who has this as a hard limit?
What’s wrong with arguing wth a dom in the middle of the scene? How does that hurt the dom?
It means they actually have to act like they’re dominating someone, rather than just having the word ‘dom’ on their business cards.
My knowledge of BDSM is only what I’ve gathered from being on the extreme outer edge of things. My knowledge of advice column snark, on the other hand, is vast and voluminous. I regularly make fun of Dear Abby, The Ghost of Ann Landers, and Amy Dickinson’s columns but I don’t touch Dan Savage because he can skewer his own questioners without any help. Having said that, let me analyze this letter from a “read between the lines so I can mock it” POV.
but our last session ended abruptly when She told me that She wanted to start dildo training me.
As others have pointed out, it looks like he started complaining in the session itself without safe-wording out or waiting until time was called. That, as the more knowledgeable people above have pointed out is a huge no-no.
*but I asked Her, politely,
I then asked, politely, *
The repeated use of the word “politely” seems a bit pointed here. Just how polite was he?
(Also, and this is an honest question, is it really a good idea to wash a dildo in bleach right before using it? Isn’t that kind of risky in case you get bleach in parts where no bleach should go?)
I signed a “contract” with Her that said I would not “top from the bottom,”
No idea why the scare quotes are around contract. Top from the bottom = don’t be a passive aggressive jerk in-scene, correct?
I know I won’t be seeing Her again, but it would be nice to know if you thought I was out of line. She reads your column.
This is pure passive-aggressiveness at its finest. This cinches SHEESH as a smug jerk who must have the last word because he’s just that precious, yanno?
Savage managed to skewer the guy and the dom pretty well in the first paragraph of his response. He also shredded his carefully capitalized feminine pronouns. However, as others have noted, he did completely ignore the importance of cleaning for that type of situation which may have been due to space constraints.
Ultimately, I’d say that we really don’t know enough about what actually went on because we’re only getting one extremely biased side of it, but SHEESH’s letter gives a lot of indications that he’s a controlling twit who can’t take rejection or obey the rules because he’s a Special Snowflake.
No, they’re not fake rules being role played for his gratification. They’re the terms of service. He violated those terms, and now he gets no service. Just like if I register lots of footwear and go around calling people names in GD, they’ll throw my ass right the fuck out of here. Surely you’re not arguing that no one should ever get banned from this place just because we’re paying customers and thus always right?
“Terms of service?” The terms of service are that her pays her to boss him around for his sexual gratification. He gets his rocks off, she gets paid. It’s all just a game. It makes no sense to say he has to follow whatever she says if it doesn’t get him off. He’s not there for her gratification, she’s there for his (which, preemptively, is not to say that she has to do whatever he wants, but that her own kinks are for her own time).
Umpteenth verse, same as the first.
That’s not a lame rule, it’s common sense.
Imagine that we’re talking about a manicurist. She has a client who is constantly moving her hands while getting her manicure. So every time this lady comes, she ends up with a shoddy nail job. Now assuming that this manicurist is immensely popular and isn’t worried about filling the time slot, why choose to suffer the annoyance of a customer who won’t let her do her work professionally?
And in the case of a dom, it’s worse. When your sub countermands you, your only choice is to beat them into submission. That is the job. That is what you are getting paid to do. But being a good dom is knowing when you can break someone and whether they will enjoy it. If neither of those is a yes, then you’re at an impasse. You can’t do your job properly and if you try to do it, you’ll piss off the customer. So the only thing you can do is send them packing and make a mental note to not try to make the person do that thing again. But after three or four times of having had to cut a session in half because the person wouldn’t submit, you have to assume that they’re not really looking for what they said they were looking for when they contracted you. At that point, you really just have to say sorry but whatever you’re looking for, I’m not it.
But what difference does it make if they won’t submit to everything? The prostitute is getting paid the same regardless.
You seem like the kind of guy who gives prostitutes PTSD, Dio. Lovely.
But no, dominatrices, as you’ve been told, aren’t prostitutes. The job is much nearer to writing erotic fiction. The goal is to be creative and evocative, which are both intellectual goals not physical. You’re paying someone to play with your mind. Certainly this (occasionally) involves physical touching, but there’s no particular requirement for that. A session could easily look exactly like a police interview of a suspect.
Imagine though that George Lucas hires you to write a screenplay for Star Wars VII, giving a general outline of what the story should be. That’s fine. But then imagine that as you’re writing, Lucas is coming in and replacing every page you write with his own and telling you to sign it and declare it yours. That’s not really acceptable behavior, regardless that you’re the contracted party. You can choose to knuckle under and accept it, but anyone who faults you for stepping out of the agreement is frankly talking out their ass.
And as a dom, if I’ve got someone who appears to have problems taking orders, you’ve got to remember that we’re in a room full of equipment for tying people up and hurting them. As a woman it’s likely that the client is physically stronger than me, he’s sexually charged, and appears to really want to be the one doing to domming. There’s no guarantee that if he tries something that he’s going to stop anywhere reasonable. And either way, having a sub get the upper hand could ruin my business.
Once the sub tries to get the upper hand in a session (to top from the bottom), you really do have to kick them out. They’re not going to get what they want, and trying to push them into submitting is fraught with danger.
If they want to change the scenario, like George Lucas, there’s ways for the client to provide feedback in acceptable ways. Going in and raping the scene isn’t one of them.
Spoken like someone who takes no pride whatsoever in doing his work well. :rolleyes:
Some of us take our jobs seriously and don’t half-ass it just because we get paid the same either way.
Besides, if you half-ass stuff, you DON’T get paid the same as someone who gives it everything they’ve got. If you take your job seriously, and give it the sort of effort something you take seriously deserves, your services are far more valuable than those of someone who schlumps in and gives minimal effort. That’s why I make almost twice as much as some of the other techs I work with.
I have never in my life patronized a prostitute, nor any other kind of sex worker, nor will I ever do so. I think it should be legal and I have no problem with them, but personally, I’ve never so much as been to a strip joint.
We’re going around in circles on this. If you get paid to shove a dildo up somebody’s ass. That’s prostitution. I’m not going to buy into any of the precious distinctions that people are trying to sell, so that’s a waste of time. I’m far from the only person on earth who feels that way. The definition is subjective, not objective.
Fine by me. He’s writing the checks, what do I care?
Why not? It’s his money. How does it hurt me?
I’d knuckle so fast, Mr. Lucas’ head would spin.
I’d say that anyone who doesn’t take the money and write whatever Lucas wants is an idiot.
That can happen regardless. If the prostitute doesn’t have any kind of security nearby, she’s got shit for brains in the first place.
Who says he’s not getting what he wants. He should be able to tell what’s working for him and what isn’t.
“Rapoing the scene?” What does that mean? The scene is for the John’s benefit, not the prostitute’s. Why can’t he “rape” his own scene? How does that hurt HER?
In any service industry, the “job” is to satisfy the customers. I spent a lot of years cooking in restaurants. If a customer wanted me to destroy a filet mignon by cooking it well done, that’s what I did. That’s professional. That’s taking a job seriously. If I refused to cook filet mignon anything but medium rare, I’d be putting out technically better work, but if it isn’t what the customer wants, I’m not doing my job. If I throw the customers out of the restaurant because they want something cooked differently than what I feel is ideal, I’m not “taking my job seriously,” I’m being a dick who doesn’t understand my own job.
Alright so I’m now paying you $50 to take a dildo up your ass (no lubricant) and post a photo of this to the Dope. It’s free money. And there’s no contract saying that you have the right to decline me paying you to do it.
Huh?
It’s your argument. Paying someone to do a sexual act makes them a prostitute with no option to decline.
So? Like I said, it’s free money. Your argument is that free money that doesn’t harm you in any real way should be taken and the act done.
I have never been a cook. But if I were, and if I had a customer who wanted to come into the kitchen and watch me scrub my pan before I began cooking the filet mignon, I would tell him to find another restaurant. Just because you work in a service industry doesn’t mean you have to do anything and everything that your customers ask for.
As I said in the other thread, the dominatrix had every right to refuse to continue serving a man who wanted her to do things she apparently didn’t want to do. If SHEESH was unhappy with her job performance, he should be delighted that she’s relieved him of the burden of having to break off their professional relationship himself.
And frankly, I find it a bit hard to believe that you’ve carried on so long and with such vehemence in two different threads because you’re disappointed that there’s some dominatrix out there who isn’t living up to your standards for professional behavior and excellent customer service. What’s it to you if this woman doesn’t take her job seriously enough? I think you just don’t want to admit that your initial reaction was something of an OVERreaction. If she’s a lousy dominatrix then at least she had the decency to cut SHEESH loose rather than keep charging him for sub-par work.