By David Futrelle
Time for some Saturday Schadenfreude. Today, the story of a polyamorous dom who tried to humiliate his subs by making them take an IQ test, only to end up humiliating himself in the end.
A couple of years ago – hey, I didn’t say this was a brand new story — a lovely fellow turned to the Relationships subreddit in hopes someone there might be able to help him out of a little pickle he’d gotten himself into. The 26-year-old “dom” was worried that a little stunt he’d pulled with an online IQ test was ruining his relationships with his two subs.
“A little background,” he began.
I am a Dom in a polyamorous relationship with two lovely young submissive women, whom we’ll call “Sarah” [22F] and “Jane” [19F]. Jane and I have been living together for three years, and Sarah moved in with us in January of this year.
Only a couple of sentences in and already our dear Dom has revealed himself to be an incredible skeezball. He’s been living with a “sub” since she was 16 and he was 23? He’s a predator, and very likely an abuser.
And we haven’t even gotten to the poor fella’s problem yet. Let’s let him continue:
Everything has been going quite well, but an issue has just arisen in our relationship that is making me very concerned.
Do tell.
Whilst perusing the web on Tuesday night, I discovered an online IQ test. I am aware that most online IQ tests are inaccurate, but, having studied psychology, I knew that this test used the exact same types of questions as a professional IQ test.
“Whilst.” Why are these doofuses always so fucking pretentious? This is clearly someone who isn’t quite as smart as he thinks he is. Er, SPOILER ALERT.
I decided to play a little game with my subs. They are very into psychological domination and humiliation, and I thought it would be erotic to dominate them intellectually by outscoring them on the IQ test.
You might have already guessed the punchline here.
While they are bright girls, I had no doubt that my IQ would be higher than theirs. I had them take the test, and Sarah scored 128; Jane, 134. I took the test after them. However, to my chagrin, I scored 112.
DIRECTED BY M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN.
This was, understandably, humiliating. Sarah and Jane didn’t say anything. We continued on as usual afterwards, but these results aroused many doubts in the back of my mind.
Way ahead of you, bud, on the whole doubts thing. I have nothing but doubts about you.
As a Dom, I demand total submission from my girls, and it is my responsibility to control them; I cannot do this if they are able to outsmart me.
How can I continue to manipulate them if they can see right through my bullshit?
I am sure Sarah and Jane know this too. Although they have not disobeyed or disrespected me outright, I am picking up on small aspects of their behaviour that show a loss of respect for me. I am afraid that this could kill their attraction to me.
Oh, let’s hope so!
I am asking for advice from /r/relationships because BDSMcommunity has been disrespectful to me in the past … .
Oh, they’ve been “disrespectful,” huh? Perhaps that’s because you’re a skeezy, manipulative predator who justifies his terrible behavior by calling himself a “dom?” Just a wild guess.
[I]nput from both BDSM and vanilla perspectives is welcome. I would like to know a way to mend the damage this has caused to our relationship.
Happily, most of those who responded in the Reddit thread weren’t having any of his bullshit, and several called him out for his obviously predatory behavior.
I wish only the worst to him. If he’s even real. The story is so perfect in its irony I think there’s a very good chance it’s fake; I certainly hope it is, for the sake of the women involved.
Maybe the OP was just honing a pitch for a new sitcom — Dom and Dommer.
H/T — I ran across this on Twitter, posted by the reliably hilarious and/or awful relationships.txt account.
/r/relationships? Sounds like /r/iamverysmart is the place for you, bud. ?
I would actually watch that sitcom, but only if it was “Dom and Dahmer” and was about a skeezyball living with his two subs. In my mind his name is actually Domminic, who doesn’t love a good pun. Dom decides he needs an addition to his little BDSM family, in his mind this would be a 15-16 year old girl. However, his two current subs, who are obviously smarter than him, convince him that a male sub would be more fun, using psychology. A young gay serial killer, on the run from the cops, sees a Craigslist add and decideds a bi BDSM dom/sub relationship is a great way to lay low and maybe scam some money and a place to live. Hilarity ensues.
I would think that young Jeffery would keep murdering and try to frame the dumb dom for the serial murders. You’d have to make Jeffrey a lot more likable than the real Dahmer, not what I’d call “ready for prime time”, maybe have him just kill other bad people, ala Dexter. Or instead of being on the run, Jeffrey and the girls are actually in cahoots and getting revenge for the “accidental” death of their friend from high school at the hands of Dom. Like the Punisher with a laugh track.
@ Tree Person ;
Worse than that, his princess was in ANOTHER castle, anyway! 🙁 🙁
This sounds like a prime example of someone using ‘polyamory’ as an excuse to abuse and manipulate insecure women. This is not super uncommon. I see some instances glorifying ‘polyamory’, for this reason, this is *very* dangerous.
Also, this IQ thing suggests he is criminally insecure.
In my mind I’m imagining Sarah and Jane trying hard not to do well on the tests just to avoid this guy’s inevitable tantrum.
I’m disturbed by the fact that a 16 year old was moving in with a 23 year old. Either her parents knew and approved, or (more likely) she was living on the streets and needed a place to go. Along came Mr. S-M-R-T with an offer of food and shelter in exchange for complete and utter domination. More evidence that this guy is a total creep.
Maybe he’ll have better luck demonstrating his superiority with one of those Buzzfeed quizzes. “Which ‘Real Housewives’ Character Are You?”
I don’t know how to insert a picture into the comments, so I’m not sure what that says about me, but when reading this, I kept picturing Bugs Bunny saying “wotta maroon” about this fool.
@anonymous:
Oh, for sure.
(content warning for abuse, suicide)
There is an internet subculture that I’m aware of that intersects somewhat with the manosphere but which doesn’t really get discussed much around these parts, based around a Web forum called LessWrong and the writings of one Eliezer Yudkowsky. At its most benign, this movement is a bit too obsessed with the notion of making a friendly artificial intelligence who will upload us all into a computer to live forever in Virtual Reality Heaven and not, say, a Skynet/ Cthulhu hybrid who will torture simulations of us forever in Virtual Reality Hell for not giving Eliezer Yudkowsky all our money to bring about its existence most expeditiously (yes, really); at worst, it’s a Silicon Valley tech-bro personality cult with links to the odious Peter Thiel (the PayPal billionaire who isn’t Elon Musk and spends his money on ethically dubious vaccine trials and creepy spook technology instead of rockets). Long story short, a number of the men associated with this movement have recently been accused by women of emotional abuse. One of the women committed suicide and there is a link to her note in one of those Twitter threads, hence the CW. Many of the men involved in this claim to be polyamorous but from their own words and actions it is obvious that they see it only as a means to an end: that is, to ensure a permanent supply of easily manipulable young women for them to prey on. They are the dregs of humanity.
Ugh. I’m polyam and kinky, and this guy is… not even the kind of person I’ve learned to avoid, he’s just pure scum. He’s in the category of chronic emotional abusers I like to call mind rapists.
Fuck him so much.
@Cyborgette, plain-old “rapist” works for this sort of a guy, I think. Pedophile as well, in his particular case. eugh.
@Cat Mara, I’ve talked about Yudkowsky and Less Wrong here before – I learned a lot in reading Yudkowsky’s writing, to be honest. The community is hot garbage though, and I haven’t looked that way in over a decade. Yudkowsky himself stopped writing a long time ago out of disgust, to my understanding, but they continue on as the p-zombs they are.
And that community is very much part of the “intellectual” wing of the Alt-Right. Yudkowsky is worshiped as one of the architects of the Dark Enlightenment, and is one of the people who came up with the term. The proudly anti-democratic, monarchistic bugling of the Alt-Right shitlords can be traced back to Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias like a burning line on the ground.
The community always ignored Yudkowsky’s deep insecurity in his own writing. He wasn’t ever sure of anything he wrote, and used his blog posts as a way to explore ideas – some odious, some not. The community latched on like calves, even when he told them how terrible the thoughts were.
At the same time Yudkowsky had some legitimately shitty ideas and was fine with using horrible things as examples purely for their shock value. One of his lesser known stories was a science fiction short that portrayed humanity as having normalized rape in such a way that the main character waxed eloquent about how “the chase” made the eventual orgasm better. Was disgusting. He said he included that to make the society he was writing about a “weirdtopia”, i.e. a place that had ethics orthagonal to ours, but – no, that’s not orthagonal, that’s just revolting.
I have complex feelings towards Yudkowsky, even though my thoughts on the community are crystal clear.
I agree with DW above. This guy is British by the sounds of things, and whatever else he is, his language is not especially pretentious – maybe just a bit middle-class. His attitude, that’s another matter.
16 is the age of consent in the UK – but not too many 16 year olds are leaving home to move in with an older partner, let alone on these terms. In a way, that’s why that particular part of the story that sounds made up to me. His relationship with ‘Jane’ is legal, but oh-so-only-just. What a coincidence… Also, what British teenager in this day and age is called Jane?? It’s a fake name for sure, but really, the whole thing reeks of fiction.
“[I]nput from both BDSM and vanilla perspectives is welcome.”
Here’s my perspective: Chill, dude. If both of your playmates are brighter than you are they’ve probably known it for quite some time, and they’re still around, right? Possibly what they’re looking for in their relationship with you isn’t brains. If you want to project a commanding persona, stop hyperventilating; all this internet-fulminating and nail-biting will only get in your way.
The best thing for you to do (IMO) would be to address what you take to be the symptom and to focus less on what you take to be its cause. Do something about your anxiety, in other words, and the incident which brought it out will disappear into the rear-view mirror. Nothing you’re doing with these two women requires that you have to be able to outscore them on an IQ test — which is why the results of the test can’t be the problem. Address the real problem for the actual win.
Yeah, Fetlife sucks as both a community and a platform. I ran into my current partner and ideal Dom through serendipity after I had given up on fulfilling my desire for kink if it meant taking a not-insignificant risk in sifting through people in the scene. I had enough horror stories, and thought it better to quit while I was ahead.
I feel like I lucked out bigtime finding someone who I love everything about, pulls off punk crossdressing like a total badass, and also happens to be competent in shibari. He’s a keeper. We’ve even started working together on making erotic graphic novels of some of our hotter roleplays. We don’t consider it our “lifestyle” because we only really practice S&M on a session basis, and the rest of the time we have a healthy and very progressive relationship.
I think things often take a turn for the worst when people do it as a full-time role and identity, which seems to be frequently accompanied with super grody views on how the power dynamic between men and women “should be” universally. Inside the bedroom I’m very submissive, but outside of that context I refuse to abide that shit.
I once dated a Dom who expected me to quit doing ceramics because he wanted me to have long nails, and asked me what was more important. Well, that was that. Making sculptures happened to be very important to me, but even if it wasn’t it was just the principal of the thing.
Another guy I was chatting with from OKC who was into daddy kink turned out to be an ancap started talking very seriously about how men should start grooming their daughters at a young age. Cringe.
Isn’t “whilst” just a weird contraction of “while” and “still” across time and space though, as in:
it is difficult to quit while the story is still unfinished = it is difficult to quit whilst the story is unfinished
In which case, using “whilst” as he has done is essentially incorrect.
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes: Forgive me for missing your posts on Yudkowsky and LessWrong. I did a quick search before I wrote my own post but it didn’t turn up anything– maybe the search function doesn’t index comments?
I would agree with you that Yudkowsky would seem to be one of the less actively repellent characters of the so-called “Dark Enlightenment”, certainly when compared to, say, Curtis “slavery is just dandy” Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug. Apart from taking Peter Thiel’s shilling his worst quality seems to be suffering from a case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, an affliction sadly common among autodidacts and Valleybros. But his attitudes towards women as expressed in his fiction are worrying to say the least.
If this were true, he would also realize that even if Internet “IQ quizzes” weren’t pure bunkum, IQ actually means very little and is basically useless to you if you’re not a trained psychologist, and even then is of dubious use. It’s not like a stat in an RPG where a higher number means you’re automatically better at everything than a lower number.
So his girlfriends are better at the onlinequiz than he is, haha, live with it.
(from what I seem of the “Dom” probably smarter, too but I don’t give that much about online-IQtests)
I am not into BDSM, but as far as I know the dom beeing better at anything than the sub, should have nothing to do with BDSM at all. (And BDSM a relationship were one partner has to be smarter or allways better at somethink is a very poor one.) And taking IQ–Test sounds very unerotic to me.
I hope both women brook up with him soon afterwards (or are not existing) because horror. Kudos for both communities the BDSM one and reddit (yeah strange to type) for giving this guy hell.
And good news at the end: Tor has anonced a sequel to THE GOBLIN EMPEROR, yess!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’ve been given IQ tests since I was four and been told how intelligent I am for many decades. Turns out I’m just really good at English, space relations, trivia, and taking tests. Not to mention that I’m a person (white, straight, privileged) for whom these tests are created!
But, I’ve never been able to retain much of what I’ve learned about math* apart from the basics. High School chemistry was a nightmare! So, yeah. IQ tests are bunk.
*As in, I take intro math courses in college, pass with an A, go to another college, take the placement test and get plunked in intro course again. I have come to think that I may have some mild discalcula.
@Hambeast
That’s actually normal and it’s why people have to take those assessments again. We typically lose our math if we don’t use it, and most people don’t use more advanced math regularly.
I’ve been thinking about getting into BDSM, but some of the stuff people do sounds too intense for my liking. I know there’s consent involved and I wouldn’t be forced to do anything I don’t want to do but still, it gives me a bit of anxiety and worry that I wouldn’t measure up to a potential partner.
But enough of the TMI, this guy sounds like a fool. Oh no! Failing at an online test! Subs can wield just as much power as doms can, just in different ways, he should let them have this one, spice things up a bit when they tease him or something.
Of course, that doesn’t excuse the age gap, fuck that guy.
Holy shit, really?! Fantastic! So looking forward to that!! 😀
I think in BDSM (perhaps even more than in another relationship) you should know the other person really well.
I mean the giving up control is scary for me (and the painstuff).
How wrong was my brain working, that it tried to tell me, that he just messed up the women and was together with the 22year old for 3 years? (Okay I am also telling myself a woman stayed with this guy 3 years, barely belivable)
I’ve heard that in a proper BDSM relationship, the sub is actually supposed to be the one with the real power, because as the primary user of the safeword, they get to decide when the scene stops.
Catalpa:
I don’t have an offical link, I seen it on a twitteraccont and independently it is all over File770, so really, what it is about and details aren’t known yet.
@Talonknife : TBH, in an healthy relationship, BDSM or not, both partner have roughly the same amount of “power”. Because it’s only mock domination, the partners are still attentive enough to each other to have an idea of what the other want. A couple is cooperative, it’s not a race for power.
Another way to say it is that the dom *also* get to decide when the scene stop. Just, normally he don’t need any special feature for that because he is unrestrained.
Of course, it’s different for the various abusers who pretend to do BDSM to bully people. But then, in that case, a safe word won’t be protection enough… (and also, the abuser isn’t alway a dom)