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.
@Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Maybe ignoring her is a form of punishment in their dynamic?
Like a neglect fetish or something?
Where’s the humor in that?
The more obvious reading is the funnier one.
The cat is the real dom in the relationship.
When Canada raised the age of consent to 16 they included a close-in-age exception, because most people don’t seriously think we should arrest seventeen-year-old for dating fifteen-year-olds. I believe many parts of the US have a similar exception (iirc it’s sometimes called the “Romeo and Juliet”exception)
The trouble is when it’s unevenly applied— I remember seeing a lot of news stories in the late ‘nineties about same-sex teenage couples where some local authority had the older-by-one-or-two-years kid arrested and added to the sex offender registry.
@Knitting Cat Lady linking age of consent and age of criminal responsibility wouldn’t work in Canada, because the age of the latter is 12. Most people in Canada would consider an age of consent of 12 too young.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_Criminal_Justice_Act
There was a famous case around the turn of the century in Canada when a 12 year old got caught under those rules after she and some 11 year old friends (also girls) were found playing doctor, basically. It set off a big discussion. I don’t remember all the details – I think there might have been some question that she actually had been a bit coercive, but maybe the coercive one was one of the 11 year olds, which made it even less defensible that the 12 year old was deemed a sex offender and the others weren’t? Mainly I remember friends of mine pointing that out except for one detail, it was nothing they hadn’t done when they were around that age.
(The one detail was the bit about the dog. Canadians who were aware of the case at the time will know what I mean.)
12 for criminal responsibility????? Presumably Cat Lady meant that the ages should be the same and make sense. 12-year-olds do not distinguish right from wrong well enough for us to hold them criminally responsible!
The ages are actually the same here, both 15, but I’m open to an argument that they’re both to low and should be raised a bit…
WTF? Age of criminal responsibility in Canada is 12?!
That is too young.
Are people campaigning to raise it?
The age of criminal responsibility is pretty low in most countries. The USA, for example, has it vary state by state, with 33 having no minimum age, and the oldest age of criminal responsibility being 11.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_infancy#Ages_of_criminal_responsibility_by_country
Seems like the age of criminal responsibility doesn’t mean “being tried as an adult” but means “is old enough to face some kind of legal repercussion for criminal acts”. Age is probably still a mitigating factor in those sentences.
That’s true, Caralpa, but 11 or 12 is STILL absurdly young.
@Dvärghundspossen
You won’t hear an argument from me against that being incredibly young. I know approximately nothing about child psychology, so I can’t speak with any great authority, but I’m really not a fan of the criminal justice system in general. Can’t imagine how many more problems get involved when it’s kids getting tossed into that meat grinder.
I suppose a 15 year old could be held more or less legally responsible for raping someone, regardless of the victim’s age*. They can also (though many individual teens of that age wouldn’t) consent to sex without being necessarily exploited or without being hurt by their own choices.
Meanwhile, they’re still too young to negotiate sex with adults. Or rather, you can’t expect them to guard themselves against sexual predators to the same effect you’d expect from an adult. You can’t apply normal standards of rape vs. expression of consent. A teenager expressing sexual consent (by the usually loose legal standard) with an adult partner could be genuinely consenting, or they could be coerced/manipulated.
I think it’s a good idea to err on the side of caution and blanket ban adults from having sex with 15 yos (and maybe 16-17 yos). Obviously, some common sense leeway needs to be applied between two teenagers. Plus, if the older partner themselves is under 15 or so, they can’t be held much legally responsible. Depending on circumstances, parents/guardians should exert guidance and seek professional help with necessary.
*I suppose it gets tricky when adults suspected of statutory rape argue they’ve been raped, or pressured but not quite legally raped by the adolescent in question.
I read it in a blog that a sub woman who was part of a kink scene writes. I wouldn’t just say it, but cannot cite it as it was a while ago and I cannot remember the name of it. I would suggest that the kink community protects itself in some ways.
I know the lesbian community (as another eg) really closes rank around sexual assault by women against women.
@ellesar
Re that last paragraph, I see this in the trans community too. And in two cases I have personally made sure that info about people who abused me stayed in community whisper networks and did not go public.
It sucks. It completely sucks. But relying on the justice system is a) throwing individual trans people to the police, who will probably rape them; and b) inviting even more police, government, and public retaliation against the entire community, including victims.
So yeah it wouldn’t surprise me that the lesbian community is similar on that.
And yeah, we need better ways of dealing with abusers in our own communities. Very very badly. But even whisper networks can sometimes be better than dealing with the police and courts.
Wow, I just rewatched the movie Twins which I haven’t seen in like decades. I had completely forgotten that Vincent, Danny De Vito’s character, “had sex” with his biology teacher when he was freaking twelve – and this is presented as just another piece of evidence of how depraved he is. I think the moviemakers basically thought “ok, De Vito’s character and Schwarzenegger’s character are supposed to be really different in all respects, and since we made the latter a virgin, the former should have lost his virginity really early” – but come on, freaking twelve?
It’s a pretty cute movie otherwise (I guess exept that Linda should have dumped Vincent’s ass ages ago instead of just giving him one second chance after another), but this part really hasn’t aged well…
Welp, OT, some random asshole on Discord decided to try to defend that bakery discrimination case in my PMs and then got mad and blocked me when I got tired of his bullshit. He said I got mad about him throwing “facts” at me when it was very apparent that he didn’t understand the first thing about Constitutional law and I didn’t feel like explaining it to him.
The weirdest part is that he is, or at least claims to be bi. “Fuck you, got mine,” I guess?
good stuff
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/movies/kelly-marie-tran.html
@Cat Mara, Scildfreja Unnyðnes, Kitting Cat Lady:
Yes, we’ve discussed LessWrong before; I don’t think it was an article, just came up in the comments. (And I will admit to bringing it up once during a discussion of AI to see how badly Scildfreja would twitch.) There’s also one ‘A Voice for Pierre’ comic on them: http://pierre.thecomicseries.com/comics/24/
Elizabeth Sandifer wrote an entire book called ‘Neoreaction a Basilisk’ a couple of years ago, and in one post called Neoreaction, Rationalism, and Eliezer Yudkowsky noted that Yudkowsky was very much the odd man out in most of the discussion, as while much of his discussion helped boost the neoreactionary movement, he is not himself a neoreactionary. Just the LessWrong blog was one of their primary breeding grounds. (Mencius Moldbug is also mentioned in that article.) One of the notes in the article mentions that a charity assessment organization noted that contributing to Yudkowsky’s group would actually harm their stated mission.
My own comment on Yudkowsky was pretty much ‘Exhibit A demonstrating that we need to teach more philosophy to STEM students so they stop trying to re-invent it badly.’ There’s a good chunk of Dunning-Kruger there. As Knitting Cat Lady said, LessWrong ended up reinventing several concepts from philosophy and AI research, using their own rather idiosyncratic names and definitions with the result that they couldn’t really talk to other experts in the fields.
Yudkowsky may not be an actively horrible person, but it obviously did not occur to him how other actively horrible people would use his ideas. Even while they were already doing so. Partly I suspect that’s an ‘apex privilege’ thing; he couldn’t see how the ideas could possibly harm him, so he didn’t see them as causing any harm.
By now he’s had his face rubbed in just how harmful the community has become, which is presumably why he doesn’t write there himself much anymore.
@ Ivory Bill Woodpecker, Tree Person:
This is “the one about the masochist and the sadist; the masochist says ‘hurt me’ and the sadist says ‘no’ “
Michael Cohen’s all
I expect to be roasting marshmallows off Trump’s twitter feed shortly.
All in one day, Cohen pleads guilty, Manafort is found guilty on eight counts and to top it off there’s a new Omarosa tape dropping on Hardball tonight
Isn’t Trump supposed to be at a rally today? ‘Cause I guess that’s what Presidents in the US do now?
That place is going to explode, sink into a swamp, and catch on fire.