I just got done with some online problems, and had to be talked through something VERY step by step to figure it out, with me saying, “Wait. What do I do next?? Where is that tab? I don’t see it anywhere! Ohhhh, it’s down there at the bottom!!! I see it now!!”, so that’s sort of the mode I’m in. So I apologise ahead of time if the info that follows is too specific or detailed. With stuff I don’t know how to do on the computer, I need it spelled out this way, so I’m just doing it the way it makes sense for me to address those kind of questions.

On the bottom of any page you get that contains that next new message that you don’t want, there should be the content of the new comment inside a greyish box. Under that box there should be a few options–at the bottom of that email, and the middle option should say “One-click Unsubscribe”.

Try that and let me know here if it doesn’t work. I’m still subscribed, so I’ll get the message.

Another way to go about it would be to just go to any friend’s WordPress blog that doesn’t have triggering/upsetting content, and find a benign post there, and put in a comment, and below where you do that should be the “Submit Comment” tab and below that should be “Notify me of follow-up comments via email.” and “Notify me of new posts via email.” Click either, and when something new comes in from there, you should be able to manage all your subscriptions, deleting any or all of them as you wish. But the first suggestion should work fine.

I hope that helps.

Is there a way to unsubscribe from this comment thread? The email updates about people thinking I and people like me should be brutally murdered are really triggering and upsetting.

I believe Andrea Dworkin once said:
“The question is not, ‘Why are some people into S/M?’ The question is, ‘Why isn’t everyone?’”

And she wrote very honestly about her own struggles and transformations in Woman Hating, speaking about utterly misogynistic lies about “the nature of woman” purported to be Profound Truths in “The Story of O”.

The most disturbing person to me was the het dom guy discussing all the many ways he’s helped women overcome this and that trauma through his allegedly therapeutic bdsm practices. But he was called out on it, thank the Lorde.

And the most ridiculous comment was from the person who said something like “being a slave is not really possible”. (Yeah, well, the millions of slaves on Earth right now might disagree, if you care to ask them.)

On the practice of profeminism, I’m of the opinion that a man hurting a women, including if the woman asks or in any way supports being hurt, is in no way profeminist. And him being well-read in radfem lit, and being willing to do the dishes later, doesn’t render the bdsm aspect of his behavior in their relationship “profeminist”.

To the male sadists out there: if you stop being a sadist in practice, no one will be harmed by you making that choice. And if you practice sadism, someone may be hurt, harmed, and/or killed. And it is, after all, “your choice” to be sadistic in your behavior towards women. It’s not just “how you are”. It’s what you deliberately and thoughtfully do. (Some of you even teach others how to do it. You could, let’s say, teach meditation and yoga, but no–that wouldn’t serve your wish to hurt women for your pleasure.) What you willfully do is within the realm of being “in your power”. So please don’t claim otherwise, or pretend you’re a fucking savior for traumatised women by being a sadist.

C. A. MacKinnon:
“As Andrea Dworkin said quite a long time ago, women’s situation requires new ways of thinking, not just thinking new things.”

And Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” remains, for me, the best writing on what feminists can do, in writing and in being, to radically re-imagine, experience, and have a perspective on the whole matter of “sex” and how to determine if one’s actions are in keeping with one’s most deeply held feminist values. If I could marinate my being in an essay and be utterly transformed by it, this would be among the few I’d choose to be transformed by.

To the antifeminist academics:
Where she states, “deeply female and spiritual plane” please read: “deeply human and spiritual plane”. Because too many “anti-second wave” gender theorists accuse her of “essentialism”, and then shut down and stop reading at that point. I’m male, and I get what she’s talking about and am intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally moved by the whole of what she’s saying here.

Sister Outsider, pages 53 to 59:
The Uses of the Erotic essay.

In an interview with Ilford police station on 5 September, Mr Davis described how he was in the bedroom when Mr Tweed started having sex with the woman.

“She would have been screaming, surely someone would have heard something.”

So you didn’t think to ASK if it was ok before you had sex with her? You just assumed that because she wasn’t screaming it was ok? It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out because Tweed, as the jury will know, has previous convictions for non sexual assault. I bet they still get off though.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/8630072.stm

The same is the case in BDSM: look at the hysterical egomania of the dominant, the arrogant presumption of competence and delusional insistence that the “submissive” partner’s dislike of whatever activity is the submissive’s fault. The breathtaking arrogance in believing that it is even possible, let alone okay, to “train” another human being, to re-write that person’s preferences or pain tolerance or whatever, to script someone else’s enjoyment – the profound inability to respect the human rights of others to just not fucking enjoy that. The EXPLICIT REFUSAL to respect boundaries and treat as negotiable what is not actually negotiable regardless of what you “agree” on. And the inability to acknowledge that attempting all this shit makes one a rapist. Regardless of the sex of the aggressor, the one who presumes the authority to re-do another human being to suit themselves? Falls somewhere on a sliding scale between nigh-intractable levels of narcissism and full-blown psychopathy.

Exactly. When I did the online “research” for my BDSM series by writing a personal ad claiming to be a submissive woman, the responses I got pretty much ALL looked like perfect examples of this.

Oh, mos def. Her elegant, careful methodology explaining why the legal system fails to even be able to define rape, pornography, sexual assault can be summarized as follows:

Men invariably try to define their way out of guilt.

The same is the case in BDSM: look at the hysterical egomania of the dominant, the arrogant presumption of competence and delusional insistence that the “submissive” partner’s dislike of whatever activity is the submissive’s fault. The breathtaking arrogance in believing that it is even possible, let alone okay, to “train” another human being, to re-write that person’s preferences or pain tolerance or whatever, to script someone else’s enjoyment – the profound inability to respect the human rights of others to just not fucking enjoy that. The EXPLICIT REFUSAL to respect boundaries and treat as negotiable what is not actually negotiable regardless of what you “agree” on. And the inability to acknowledge that attempting all this shit makes one a rapist. Regardless of the sex of the aggressor, the one who presumes the authority to re-do another human being to suit themselves? Falls somewhere on a sliding scale between nigh-intractable levels of narcissism and full-blown psychopathy.

It follows that if your partner doesn’t like this, they don’t want to do it, which means that regardless of whether you’re deluded enough to believe you can “teach” them to like it sooner or later, right now you’re fucking raping them. Wow, how fucking simple was that?

Hence, my killing of every last one of them in the name of safety.

-Miss Andrist

Not to harsh your pro-rape fantasies, all you BDSM-defenders, but given half a chance, I’d kill every last one of you. Just to be safe. That should cast a lot of aspersion on whether or not you’re as harmless as you need to think you are.