#if you are not even willing to admit to and identify basic personal qualities because a character is a woman then like I said

[musical-chick-13]

"This fictional woman has no personality or features outside of her relationship to this male character!"

How she speaks is a feature. How expressive she is is a personality trait. How outwardly emotional she is or which emotions she displays to what intensity, and whether she moves around a lot and how tactile of a person she is are all personal traits and qualities. These will still be apparent even if all she is ever allowed to do within a story is talk about a man. Skill issue.

[aperrywilliams]

Pour Some Sugar On… Me? (Spencer Reid x Fem!BAU!Reader)

(Not my gif!)

Masterlist

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Pairing: Spencer Reid x Fem!BAU!Reader.

Summary: What if Reader and Spencer want to try something new in bed?

Word Count: 6522.

Warnings: Smut (NSWF); 18+ (please respect that!). Sexual talk. Fingering. Oral (male/female). Spanking. Penetrative and unprotected sex. Food play.

A/N: This fic was written to my dear friend @spencers-dria in the 3rd Fic-Swap from @imagining-in-the-margins Discord Server. For reference, the song alluded here is this one.

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Days off are a blessing and a curiosity in your job. It's not that you hate it; on the contrary, you couldn't be happier doing what you do, but there are times when you need to take a break. Working at the BAU is something you always dreamed of, and once you got it, you were still willing to give your 100%. But the last few months have been intense and stressful. So having a day off was welcome. Most welcome if you could spend time with your now-boyfriend Spencer. Wow, how weird that feels to you. After working at the BAU for almost five years with Spencer, it was only four months ago that you dared to confess your feelings for him. To your delight, he also admitted that he had feelings for you. Of course, the whole team already knew that, except for you two. But hey, as they say, better late than never, right?

The first date was almost dreamy. Like a real gentleman, he picked you up at your apartment. He took you to dinner in a nice and quiet place where you both could talk. You guys had a lovely time chatting and laughing at how blind both of you were for so many years being friends and not admitting that you liked each other. At the end of the date, at the door of your apartment, you saw how nervous he was, and you took your chance: you kissed him first. After that, things flowed the way you always wanted them to. Spencer was the most caring, loving, and amazing boyfriend you've ever had. All of your previous relationships didn't even compare to this. You were sure you loved Spencer, but neither of you dared to say the three words until the first time you both had sex. It took you longer than people say. You guys didn't do it after the fourth date or the fifth. It was after a case. At that time, you had already been dating for almost two months.

It had been a difficult case. It took more than eight days to find the unsub. The entire team made superhuman efforts to identify and catch the killer. But you were one of the most affected because the case was in your hometown. You knew some of the victims or their families. That had you on the brink of collapse, but you managed to stay focused, and it was even you who managed to connect the dots and arrest the unsub. All the case tension showed in you when you guys flew back to Virginia, and you burst into tears.

Spencer was the one who sat next to you and hugged you, holding you in his arms throughout the flight. Whispering words of reassurance to you and stroking your hair and back. That night you asked him if he could stay with you. You didn't know if you were okay enough to be alone. He, of course, accepted. Neither of you both was thinking about anything other than being with each other. Still, the kisses on the forehead became kisses on the cheek, then kisses on the lips, neck, collarbone... that's when the three words came out.

"You're the bravest woman I know. You're the best in your job, you care about people. I'll never stop to amaze by that quality of you. I love you, (Y/N)," Spencer whispered, his lips brushing yours. And maybe you kissed him for the first time, but he was who said to you 'I love you' for the first time, and you lost your mind.

You said it back almost instantly, throwing yourself into his arms to kiss him and repeat those three words over and over again. You got up from the couch and took his hand, guiding him to your bedroom. That first time was slow, loving, gentle. It was the living definition of 'making love.' It was unique, and you never felt more loved in your life.

Spencer could agree with you on that. He always told you that accepting the fact he wasn't a man with a lot of experience in sex, he felt that time was the first time he knew what it was like to make love and not just fuck someone. Maybe he didn't use those identical words, but it was basically what he meant.

After that first time, many followed. And saying 'many' may even be an understatement. Not long after, you realized that Spencer was always eager to touch you and to have sex with you every time he could. It wasn't something that bothered you, quite the opposite.

Sex with him was always great. He always cared to satisfy you and make you come before him at least once or twice. Even when the time was limited, Spencer never allowed himself to leave you without an orgasm.

Thinking about that, there was something about that passion on him that led you to wonder what the limits would be for Spencer in bed - if he really had them. Sure, everyone might have thought that sex with Spencer was mostly vanilla and innocent - if the word 'sex' and 'innocent' were allowed to be put in the same sentence. But something inside told you that he could be into other things, that he maybe could be into experimentation in bed. You didn't know if Spencer could be a kinky guy. He never talked about that. But you could feel that maybe he had something like that in him. You promised yourself to find out.

But that afternoon of your day off, you weren't exactly thinking about that. Instead, you were focused on replicating a recipe that Rossi had shared with you last week. The last time you went to his house for dinner, you fell in love with the dish he made on that occasion. Spencer had offered you to call for some take-out instead of cooking, but you were hell-bent on replicating Rossi's recipe.

While you were cooking, Spencer was in the living room reading a book. He had offered you help, but you decided against it. You'd rather make a mess in the kitchen without him seeing you, and besides, he had the right to spend his afternoon off without having to cook.

You liked to cook. You didn't do it frequently for lack of time. And because you weren't a very efficient person at cooking: you always used more utensils than necessary, spilling as much as could be spilled on the floor and on the counters. That meant every time you embarked on something in the kitchen, you had to spend a lot of time cleaning everything afterward. But it was your day off, so it didn't matter. Thus you connected your phone to the speaker you had in the kitchen, put on your favorite playlist, and got to work.

You lost track of time when you realized you were almost ready. Tasting the sauce at its temperature and flavor, you were satisfied with the result. So satisfied that you started dancing and singing as you began the arduous task of cleaning up your mess. Coincidentally, one of your favorite songs started on your playlist. That encouraged you to dance and sing more animatedly.

You have always been quite eclectic for your musical tastes, but you can't deny that your guilty pleasure was the '80 glam. Which you have only allowed yourself to enjoy in the privacy of your home, doing tasks as domestic as cleaning the kitchen, in this case. The best part of the song was playing, and you couldn't help but pick up the broomstick to dance around it.

[You got the peaches, I got the cream. 

Sweet to taste, saccharine.

'Cause I'm hot - hot, say what, sticky sweet

From my head -head, my head, to my feet

Do you take sugar? One lump or two? 

Take a bottle - take a bottle - shake it up - shake it up - 

Break the bubble - break it up - break it up 

Pour some sugar on me. 

Ooh, in the name of love. 

Pour some sugar on me. 

C'mon, fire me up...]

Singing wasn't enough, so you didn't save energy to put a show dancing into the music's rhythm. You were at it when you turned around and saw Spencer watching you from the kitchen entrance. The blush rose to your cheeks immediately, you stopped dancing and singing, but you still didn't let go of the broomstick.

Spencer stood up from the couch because he wanted to check on how you were doing and if you needed any help. He could hear the music and how you sang, but he didn't think he would find you dancing using a broomstick as a pole. Because that's what you were doing, an authentic pole dance in the kitchen.

Moving your hips sensually, up and down, with sweat running down your body. Your wet shirt clinging to your body accentuating your nipples - because, of course, you weren't going to wear a bra on your day off. The scene itself made Spencer freeze staring at you. Worse yet, when you added the music to the stage, it brought Spencer into the hot dimension. He could feel beads of sweat accumulating on his forehead and how his lower half began to reveal a particular need for attention.

"Spencer, oh my God. I didn't see you here," you apologized. But he didn't say anything or moved from where he was. Because undoubtedly he was lost in thoughts. About what? Well, not of you sexy dancing in the kitchen. Not him imagining you dancing naked in front of him. Not him imagining you naked over the kitchen's counter whit spread legs. No, he wasn't thinking about how your body could taste with sugar on it.

"Spencer?" you repeated.

Shit. What's that? Someone is calling his name. Oh yeah. You.

"Uhm?" he barely replied.

"Something is wrong?" you asked hesitantly. You didn't know if Spencer was shocked in a bad way.

"Uh- no. Everything is okay..." Spencer assured you.

"You zoned out, you sure are you okay?" you insisted.

"Yeah. Perfect. More than okay," Spencer said, trying to regain some composure.

"Did you want to ask me something?"

"Oh. I - just if you needed help," Spencer offered, remembering why he was there in the first place.

"No baby, I'm okay. Thank you. I'm sorry for the show by the way," you stated with a grimace and a blush in your cheeks.

"What?"

"I'm not a good dancer as you could see," you joked. He smiled and looked at you from head to toe.

"I wouldn't say that... I wouldn't say that at all," he stated with a minimal perceptible smirk. You took his response as a cue to relax.

"Okay, well. I'm done with dinner and cleaning. I think I need a shower now. Could you set everything in the dining table?" you asked.

"Sure," he replied. You passed by his side, stole a peck from him, and headed to the bathroom.

Spencer stood in the kitchen doorway for a few more seconds before reacting. His mind wandered into the world of possibilities of things he could and want to do to you. His erection agreed with each and every one of them. He was amazed at himself at the things that went through his mind. Not that he has never thought of 'different' things to do in bed, but he had never been motivated enough or found a partner to do them. Maybe you were the one for that. Why not? Spencer promised to test waters with you when he got the chance, but for now, what he was clear about was that he wanted to fuck you hard after dinner.

Not only were you satisfied with the result of the dinner. Spencer congratulated you for replicating Rossi's recipe so well, even giving it your own special touch.

After the dishes, you both sat on the couch to watch TV. But Spencer was distracted enough to pay attention. You were curled up next to him with your arms around his torso. He had an arm around your neck, stroking your arm. Slowly he began to kiss your head while his free hand caressed your cheek. You raised your head to look at him and found his eyes fixed on you. You smiled at him, and he leaned to kiss you. You kissed him back. As the seconds passed, the kiss became more intense and passionate. Without thinking twice, you changed position to straddle him. Thus you guys started a making-out session. You could feel Spencer's eagerness matching with your own. That intensity transformed into moans and dancing hands on both of you.

"God (Y/N), you feel so good," he whispered in your ear.

"Uhm. You too, Spencer. So so good... so so sweet," you added.

Spencer couldn't help but bring to mind the moment he saw you dancing in the kitchen.

"Like sugar..." he mumbled in your neck, grabbing your ass with both hands.

"Sticky sweet..." you said offhand, grinding your hips forward, looking for some kind of friction.

Your intention was not to bring the song you were listening to previously. Still, it was in your unconscious and apparently, in Spencer's too, because when the words left your mouth, he emitted the deepest groan you have heard from him in a long time.

"Oh, you liked that, uh?," you teased. Spencer nodded.

"Yeah... that show of yours in the kitchen did something in me," he confessed.

"Uhmm... and you think you would like to try something like that?" you probed, biting his earlobe.

"Try what?" Spencer replied, massaging your breasts over your shirt.

"Pouring some sweet on me?... and taste me?" you asked, and another groan left Spencer's throat.

"Yes. Yes. Surely yes," Spencer hastened to reply with his lips nibbling your collarbone. You smirked. Spencer Reid was showing the experimental side that you wanted.

You were about to suggest the first experimental activity when both of your phones started ringing at the same time. That only meant one thing: a new case. A growl of frustration came from both of you. Spencer looked at you with longing eyes, and you could only shrug.

"We'll have to put this on standby until we get back," you said after a sigh, pecking his lips.

"Okay, but I need a quick cold shower anyway," Spencer replied. You agreed.

The case took the team to Alabama. You and Spencer sat apart on the jet, both of you still feeling frustrated by the sudden interruption.

You tried to focus on the case and managed to do so. However, Spencer had a harder time doing it. Not that he was repeatedly thinking of you, imagining you naked in your bed, inviting him to taste your sweet body. Of course not. Damn, these days would be torture for him.

One of the first things you guys noticed once you got off the jet was the infuriating heat in the area. It was summer, and the town where you landed seemed to be the driest in the region.

Worse was realizing that the air conditioning was under repair at the police station. The entire team in a room trying to focus on the case, trying not to think about the place's heat.

"How uncomfortable! I feel so sticky and we haven't even been here four hours," you complained at one point. It was just you, Spencer, and Emily in the meeting room, going through files.

"Yeah, this heat barely allow to work," Emily agreed.

"Indeed, I'm sweating as I were in a sauna," you added. When you looked at Spencer to ask his opinion, you saw him flustered, with pink cheeks. You frowned, but you didn't want to say anything to him. His eyes barely met yours.

In Spencer's mind, only one verse was repeated over and over: 'Cause I'm hot - hot, say what, sticky sweet. From my head - head, my head, to my feet'. 'Fuck' he thought when he realized where his brain had gone. That was one of the moments where Spencer Reid hated his eidetic memory. He roamed your body with his eyes in the most subtle way he could. Spencer fixated on the sweat running down your forehead and down in your throat. That clearly wasn't helping the erection that began to show under his slacks.

By the second day, you guys had barely managed to get a few clues to locate the unsub. The good thing was that at least the air conditioning was fixed. You were with Morgan and Spencer in the meeting room. At the same time, Spencer wrote something on the board to illustrate a mathematical formula. Suddenly the marker stopped writing.

"What...?" Spencer wondered in frustration, looking at the marker.

"Baby, shake it up," you suggested. Spencer turned to face you, mouth agape.

"What?" he asked. Again you could see his cheeks all flushed.

"The marker. You need to shake it up," you replied. Morgan furrowed. He didn't know why Spencer was suddenly so nervous. But you started to find it out, and the thought made you smirk.

In Spencer's mind, another verse was repeated again: 'Shake it up. Break the bubble - break it up.' Along with that, he could see you in your apartment's kitchen, lowering your butt to the floor and moving you sensually. His mind went beyond, and he remembered the first time you gave him a handjob. Spencer froze when he saw Morgan and you looking at him. Then he turned, shook the marker, and kept writing. Jeez, what's wrong with me? he thought.

By the third day, you guys had already managed to deliver the profile and were in search for the unsub. After a round of interviews, you were in the station's kitchen making yourself a coffee. Spencer arrived with the same goal, apparently. He smiled at you, moving his mug in your direction since you had the pot in your hand. You put the precious liquid in his cup and left the coffee pot in its place. Spencer was adding his usual unhealthy amount of sugar to his coffee, and you couldn't help but make a comment to teasing him.

"Do you take sugar? One lump or two?" you teased. Spencer's eyes almost popped out of their sockets when he recognized the verse coming out of your mouth. You couldn't help but laugh, confirming your theory. Spencer was about to say something when Hotch came into the kitchen to put coffee in his mug as well.

"Are you two okay?" Hotch asked. You nodded yet chuckling. Spencer just nodded, focusing on his coffee.

You took the cream and put some into your coffee. Before you put it on the counter, you made the last move to finish off Spencer.

"Oh, sorry. I got the cream, do you want some? This one is so sweet to taste," you offered. And Spencer gave you a look that could have knocked you down right away.

If another day had passed, Spencer would surely lose his mind. Fortunately, on the fourth day, you guys managed to arrest the unsub and fly back to Virginia that afternoon.

You arrived at the BAU almost at dinner time. You hadn't had a chance to tease Spencer that day, and you thought it was for the best because as soon as you grabbed your things to go to the elevator, Spencer followed you from behind. You both entered the elevator without anyone else from the team. As soon as the doors closed, Spencer's lips were on yours, kissing you like he imagined doing it for the past four days.

"Tonight we are not going to cook, we are going to order take out, but after catching up, understood?" he clarified. You only nodded, feeling the heat between your legs.

As soon as the door to your apartment closed, Spencer dropped his go-bag and cupped your cheeks to begin kissing you. Almost as passionately as in the elevator. You moaned and dropped your go-bag as well. Your arms around his neck bringing him as close to your body as possible. Spencer began to kiss your neck while his hands danced between your sides and your hips.

You would have accepted that Spencer to fuck you in that moment and place, but you had an idea in mind and wanted to put it to test, no matter how eager both of you were at that minute.

"Baby, wait," you breathed out. Spencer stopped and looked at you with concern.

"What's wrong? Did I do something wrong?" He panted.

"No, no. Quite the opposite, but... I need you to ask you to wait a moment, okay?, could you do that for me?" you asked. Spencer let out a sigh.

"To wait?, yeah. I can do that. But, are you okay?" Spencer asked again.

"Yeah. I promise you this will worth it," you replied, pecking his lips and heading to the kitchen. Spencer looked at you confused, but he didn't say anything. He sat down on the couch, waiting for you.

You took your time, and Spencer started to worry, but you called him from your bedroom before he could ask something.

"Baby, can you come to help me?" you asked. Spencer stood up from the couch and walked towards your bedroom. The door was ajar, and he pushed it open. He wasn't ready for what his eyes found. Oh boy, he wasn't prepared. Or maybe he was. Too much prepared, you could tell: four days prepared.

You were lying in bed, your body barely covered in matching black lace. And even 'barely' could be too much. But to Spencer, that wasn't a problem at all. He enjoyed every time you took your time to surprise him with those details. He scanned all your body at the dim light of the bedroom.

"Wow... (Y/N). I thought - I, you... needed help?" Spencer stuttered. He couldn't move from his spot in the bedroom entrance. You smiled and played along.

"Yes. I do, actually. You can come closer?" you asked flirtatiously.

"Yeah. Yes. Of course," Spencer replied, taking a step forward, feeling his heart pumping hard. That wasn't the only thing he wanted to pump hard, though.

"Would you help me with something here?"

"Any- anything." You grinned at your accomplishment: Spencer in awe and speechless. So you pointed to a white bowl with honey in the nightstand. Spencer tilted his head.

"Would you... pour some sugar on... me?" You kept your voice seductive.

And... he lost it. His brain stopped working. All his bloodstream focused on that part of his body that wouldn't stop shrieking until its complete satisfaction. Like a small computer, his remained neurons only could process a simple string of commands: clothes off/ jump to the bed/ taste you / eat you / fuck you. Simple.

The first command was successfully completed in no time. You never saw Spencer peeling off his clothes so fast before. You couldn't deny how much his eagerness turned you on. You felt your wetness coating your panties. So warm. So hot. You didn't know if you would be capable of ending this foreplay without coming. But, who cares anyway? You surely would enjoy this.

Spencer was kneeling in front of you on the bed. You didn't think twice and started putting on a show. Still making eye contact with him, one of your hands took the bowl from the nightstand. You put two fingers into the bowl and took out a little amount of honey, which began to drain through your fingers. You slowly brought those two fingers to your mouth and started to suck the honey from them. A moan of satisfaction came from your throat at the sweetness. But what really made you lose your mind was seeing how Spencer, with his lips parted, licked them with his own tongue without taking his eyes off you. Another thing that worked perfectly as motivation for you was seeing his hard cock twitching at the sight of you. What a confidence boost.

When you finished cleaning all the honey from your fingers, you repeated the same. Putting two fingers inside the bowl, removing a little of its content, but now you offered the delicious treat to your excited boyfriend.

"Do you want to taste it, doctor?"

Spencer couldn't release any word but nodded and leaned, catching your sweet fingers with his mouth. Both of you leaving scape a deep moan when Spencer started to suck your fingers to remove all the honey from them. You closed your eyes, feeling his hot tongue around your fingers.

When there was nothing left to remove, Spencer's mouth released your fingers in search of your lips. When his lips found yours, he began to kiss you as if the world was going to end. It was a passionate, lustful kiss. You moaned into the kiss. He took the chance, and his tongue started exploring your mouth. The taste of honey on him was intoxicating.

When both parted for some air, you opened your eyes to see Spencer looking at you as you were the most gorgeous and sexy woman on earth. Well, you were for him. You blushed a little, his gaze was intense, and he hardly blinked. Spencer leaned to kiss you again, and when you parted, the only words that came from his mouth were...

"Did - did you know honey is associated with love and sex in both the Bible and the Karma Sutra? At traditional Indian weddings, the groom is often offered honey to boost his stamina," Spencer explained. He reached your cheek with one of his hands and stroking it. His lips latched in your neck. You chuckled mischievously.

"Well, it's good to know that. But I was thinking of using it in another way, you know?" you coyly stated. Spencer parted and saw you, smirking as well.

"Oh yeah?" You nodded as you get some honey from the bowl and spread it slowly onto your stomach. You took some more and smeared it in the column of your throat. You left the bowl on the nightstand and beckoning to Spencer to step closer.

"Do you want to taste it, doctor?"

"Oh God, yes," he hastened to reply. His hands roaming your legs.

"Then taste it, all of it," you invited.

Just a second took Spencer latching his mouth on your stomach. He started sucking and licking the honey from your body. His hands grabbing your hips and yours tugging his hair.

"You taste so good," he said, muffling his words on your skin. "I thought about this all-time we were in Alabama," he confessed.

"Did you? What did you think about? Tell me..." You asked. Spencer now nibbling and licking the column of your throat. A load moan escaped your mouth, feeling Spencer's hot tongue against your skin, moving to your neck. That sweet spot that drives you crazy.

"I thought about kissing your soft skin, about brushing you with my tongue, about... the sounds you do when I touch you, and you're aroused," you let out a moan, and Spencer smirked in your neck.

"Yes, those moans that I love so much. I thought about your breasts. God, your breasts..." he muttered as one of his hands unclasped your bra, taken and tossing it to the side. With your breasts on display, his mouth moved from your neck to the south. Before stopping in your bosoms, Spencer reached the bowl with honey, grabbing some with his fingers, and smeared it in your nipples. The substance was cold, and you hissed a little.

"Easy love, I'll take care of it," he said. His voice low and sexy. God, you sometimes had a hard time trying to understand that the shy guy you pinned for years was so hot in bed. You don't complain, though. You love it.

Spencer put his fingers in your mouth, and you wasted no time sucking them. He let out a groan of satisfaction and clasped his lips in one of your nipples, swirling it with his tongue and flicking the nub up and down, removing all the honey from them. You let out a howl, muffled with Spencer's fingers in your mouth, pressing your tongue.

"Fuck (Y/N), you indeed taste so sweet," he praised, letting out his fingers from your mouth and moving it, tracing a slow path to the hem of your panties. He slid them under the thin fabric, searching your clit massaging it gently.

"Spencer, oh God. That feels so good." He moved from one breast to another one, repeating his motions.

"Yeah, you feel so good. Your are so good for me (Y/N). I could stay here all night. You have no idea how much I thought about that stupid song and doing everything on you," he whispered, releasing your nipple to move his lips to your navel.

"Please, please Spencer..." you whined. If you teased him before, now you just wanted him to fuck you mercilessly.

"What do you need sweetheart?" he asked.

"You. I need you to fuck me," you replied, feeling Spencer's tongue in your navel traveling south.

"Yeah. And I need to fuck you. That's I'm going to do now. You want that dirty girl?"

"Yes!"

"So... you teased me all these days. You knew what you were doing. Don't you think I need to repay you for that?" Spencer said as toying with your panties' waistband.

"What? Are you going to punish me? Doctor?"

For those who said kinks don't fit in all relationships, maybe they were right. But in Spencer's view, this was not the case. In the most pleasant way possible, he discovered that the kinky side of him fitted perfectly, and you seemed pleased too.

"Oh, do you want that, my dirty girl?" And before an answer, Spencer slid your panties down your legs, tossing them to the floor. Now, his goddess laid naked on her bed, ready for him, waiting for him.

Spencer grabbed your thighs and pushed them open, revealing your core for him.

"What a beautiful pussy we have here," Spencer coed. Picking some more honey from the bowl, he smeared it in your inner thighs, tracing a path to the spot where you needed him most. You wanted to scream. Before you do so, Spencer started washing the honey from your thighs. He did it from down to up, brushing your clit with his tongue in every licking.

"Fuck Spencer, I know I teased a lot these days but please..."

Spencer smirked between your legs, but he kept doing what he was doing. When he was sure he removed all the stuff from your thighs, his tongue focused on your clit.

"Yes!... oh God," you cried.

He moved one of his fingers between your folds, coating the wetness, and the pleasure was indescribable. His tongue still focused in your clit, circling and licking. Spencer put a second finger, curling them and reaching that spot inside of you that had you whining in no time. Your moans encouraged him to speed up his motions. Your hands were on his hair, eyes fluttered shut, lost in pleasure. Moans filling the room while his hands kept your hips onto the mattress, stopping you from buck forward.

"Spencer, oh my God. Please, don't stop!" you begged. His fingers never stopped thrusting you in and out, and his tongue having a feast with your clit. You could feel the knot down in your belly about to explode.

"Cum for me, dirty girl," he mumbled yet with his mouth on your clit and his fingers thrusting mercilessly. Then you cried, feeling your orgasm hitting you like a train.

When you descended from your highs, you propped yourself in your forearms to look at Spencer. His mouth coated with your arousal and smirking at you.

"C'mon baby, I need to taste you too," you demanded with a lazy voice, still dizzy from your orgasm.

"As you wish," he replied, sitting on the mattress with his back resting on the headboard, looking at you. Eyes full of lust. You kneeling in front of him first admiring his big-hard cock, tip coating with precum. You replicated his same motions: grabbed some honey and smeared it into his cock. Spencer moaned at the simple sight.

"Now I'm gonna taste how sweet you are baby," you announced. 

Resting on your elbows, you took the tip in your mouth, tasting it slowly. He groaned hard. Of all the times you gave him a blowjob before, for Spencer, this was undoubtedly the most amazing of all.

You moved your tongue, swirling around him, making sure of licking the pounding main vein. Spencer's breathing was sharp and unsteady. 

"Oh shit (Y/N)… you take it so well, your mouth feels so good," he groaned. You keep your task hollowing your cheeks and bobbing your head. You set a steady pace that made Spencer jerk with each movement. He tried to keep his eyes open to see how you were working on him, but when you speed the pace, he couldn't help throw his head back, closing his eyes in uncontrollable pleasure. Spencer was sure that if you kept doing that, it wasn't going to last much longer, and he was aiming to cum in another part of your body, not your mouth.

"(Y/N)… I need to fuck you right now," he panted. You released his cock and looked at him with a full satisfaction grin. "Knees and hands on the mattress," he commanded, still gasping. You happily complied. With your ass on display, Spencer hardly thought about it and instinctively spank your buttocks with his open hand.

You hissed to the sharp feeling, but it was pleasant. Spencer had never spanked you before, and the very fact had you turned on. Spencer hesitated a little when he realized what he did, but your words lifted any doubt he can have.

"Again! please!... do it again," you begged, and Spencer complied, spanking you again now in the other buttock. You moaned, and Spencer groaned.

"You like that, uh?" he teased.

"Yes!" And he did it again. The sharp pain was nothing compared to the pleasure that followed. You could feel the head of his hard cock in your entrance. Slowly but with no hesitation, he pushes into you. You could feel every inch of him, and it was glorious. A loud wail left your mouth. Spencer hissed, feeling your walls clench around him. Spencer bottomed out, and he took a moment to catch his breath.

"(Y/N)… shit. You're always so tight. You feel so good," he praised.

"Yes, baby, all for you," he grabbed your hips tighter, pulling out his cock almost to the tip and then pushing again into you as he started a slow but intense pace.

As you searched for the perfect rhythm, only moans, praises, and your names came out of your both mouths. Spencer pounded to you harder and faster. You were both a bundle of moans and sighs. You could feel beads of sweat running down your body. The skin-to-skin slamming sound was lustful and wild but delightful. You were both lost in the single goal of pleasing each other and reaching your orgasms.

"Fuck Spencer! I'm gonna cum!" you cried.

"Yeah, sweetheart, me too. C'mon, give me your sweet cum, and I'll give you mine," he commanded.

Spencer moaned, on the edge of his own pleasure. His words did the trick. He thrust you once, twice, and in the third one, your impending orgasm exploded in you, running through your entire body. You curled your toes at the pleasant feeling, moaning Spencer's name and another sort of lost words. Your walls clenched around him tightest, you still in your high, feeling his cock twitched before he expulsed his warm release into you. Your eyes squeezed shut in delight, feeling how he rode out your both orgasms.

You guys stilled for a moment, trying to catch your breath. Spencer was the first to move, pulling out of you, as you turned to your back in the mattress. He rolled to your side, both of you looking at each other with a huge grin, still panting.

"Wow... that was..." he trailed off, setting a strand of your hair behind your ear.

"Yeah... I know. Amazing," you replied, giggling.

"Why we didn't do this before?" Spencer wondered.

"Well, I don't know. But I wanted to," you confessed.

"Why you didn't tell me then?" he asked, stroking your cheek.

"Maybe I didn't know if you wanted to try things like these?" you hesitantly replied. Spencer looked at you lovingly. He could stay and admire you forever if he could.

"I must confess I didn't know exactly if this kind of thing could like me, but with you... I'm sure there is nothing that could dislike me. If you want to try anything, I'm more than willing with you," he replied, leaning to kiss you. You smiled into the kiss. 'How could you be so lucky to have someone like him?' you thought. The funny thing is that Spencer believes the same about you.

"Well, I think this experimentation went quite well, don't you think?" you said, beaming.

"Yes, I do. But now we're sticky, we need a shower," Spencer acknowledged.

"Sticky sweet," you corrected. Spencer chuckled and offered his hand to you to stand up.

You both went to take a shower. Needless to say, the shower served not only to clean up the remnants of your previous activities but to add new ones. You guys came out of the bathroom exhausted, changed the sheets, and plummeted onto the bed.

You snuggled into his side, resting your head on his shoulder. Spencer hugged you and kissed your forehead. Both ready to fall into a deep sleep.

"Please, remind me tomorrow emailing to Joe Elliot to thank him," you mumbled, nuzzling into Spencer's neck. Your eyes flutter shut and dozing off.

"Who?" Spencer asked, confused. You chuckled, almost falling asleep. Of course, Spencer didn't know who he was.

"Let's say we both practiced today what is pour some sugar on me, thanks to him," you giggled. Spencer breathed a laugh.

"Oh. Okay. Thank him for me too," Spencer said, smirking.

"I will,” you replied, snuggling more close to Spencer. “Spencer?" you asked him, a few seconds far to fall knock out.

"Yes, sweetheart?" he mumbled, almost in the same condition as you.

"I love you," you blurted out. Because it was true. Your love for that man grows any second passed, and you didn't care to admit it now.

"I love you too, (Y/N)... sticky sweet," Spencer replied. You both giggled, groggy with sleep. "And (Y/N)?" he added like he forgot something important to tell you.

"Uhm?"

"Can we listen to your playlist tomorrow? I'm curious about what are we going to do next." You didn't remember if you replied to him, but you surely would think of something new to try next in your dreams.

———————

AN2: I’m sorry but I’m a sucker for 80′s music.

I’m tagging some moots around here!: @andiebeaword @blameitonthenight21 @dreatine @sierraraeck @paulaern @calm-and-doctor @spencers-dria @safertokiss @hopefulfangirl24  @reverdevivre  @matthewstiles1912 @goldentournesol @psychedellic-phase @psychicdonuts​

[rosemary-is-in-pesterquest]

I am. SO. frustrated. that they keep fucking up davekat. like I just wanna go off. just wanna go the fuck off, man, I didn't even ship them that hard at first but god damn I do now and it's pretty much because the epilogues and HS2 have fucked them up so bad and I know they are better than that. let me just.

okay so originally, davekat is built on themes of mutual defensiveness in response to insecurity. when Dave is first introduced, he portrays himself as a cool guy, and gives us the concept of Strider irony. where a normal person might claim to love something shitty as an ironic joke, or maybe the ironic joke masks sincere enjoyment... Strider irony, according to Dave, has a billion more levels of sincerity and insincerity, to the point where you have no idea what the real intent is. in part, this is due to teen pretentiousness... but in some ways this is a reflection of him genuinely finding his Bro unfathomable, and wanting to protect his own genuine thoughts, opinions, and interests from criticism, without actually coming off as insecure. as time goes by, you can watch him and figure out what is sincere and what isn't... he doesn't actually keep that tight of a lid on things, but that's partially because the game allows him more freedom than he usually has. he at least isn't living in his Bro's shadow anymore. some might extrapolate this to mean that he's experiencing more physical and mental security than usual, while others might just say he's coming into his own via this journey, but the fact of the matter is that he felt the need to hide behind this facade in the first place. and the tricky thing with Dave is that it isn't all fake. it's a weird mixture of who he is, who he wants to be, and what he thinks others will respond well to. his development isn't so much discarding the mask, as it is reconciling what it's made of, and incorporating it into his true self as he matures. he accepts it as a piece of him. it's very subtle, and natural, and true to what growing up is really like. I think this is why so many people like Dave and relate to him so much.

for Karkat, insecurity manifests in the form of being hyper critical of everyone around him. to be honest, this also comes from a deep sense of concern for the people around him, and the fact that his friend group is made of a bunch of loose canons who do destructive shit for fun, and people who are easily dragged into that sort of thing. but the thing that keeps Karkat's hyper critical nature from irritating people too much is that he's also super extra critical of himself. he admits it when he's done something wrong... though admittedly often after it's made people angry at him, and he has a good amount of very sincere apologies that he delivers so that they come off as very sincere and actually work in terms of reconciling with people. Karkat's biggest issue is that criticizing your own internal flaws and actually fixing them are two different things. and while Karkat can identify many problems with himself, he's not always the best at making them go away. it takes him a long time to learn how to change himself, because in order to change yourself, you have to accept the flawed parts of yourself and work with them, rather than just trying to push them out of your sight. this is why his anger at his past and future selves is ultimately unhealthy. it keeps him from truly addressing the fact that his current self is just as subject to those same flaws. for example, if he's talking to a past self and a future self, and his future self is condescending to him, and his past self is naive, then his present self is both of those things to his conversation partners. but he's so repulsed by his own negative attributes that he's not really dealing with them. his saving grace is that everyone can see how hard he's trying, and how worried and scared he is. ultimately, Karkat doesn't want to be the reason for screwing everyone over, and that's more concern for others than anyone ever asked for. it gains Karkat a lot of good will, without him necessarily even realizing what he's doing.

what's excellent about davekat is that they come out the gate fully critical of one another... but neither is willing to back down either. somehow, these two insecure idiots trick each other into defending themselves. and it's brilliant, because they get all their critical bullshit out of the way immediately. they don't fear criticism from one another. they already criticize one another all the time, and it's fine. like, their worst complaints about each other are right out there in the open, and how freeing must that be for a couple of guys who worry about other people's opinions of them so much? Dave has nothing to hide and nothing to prove. Karkat defends his own positive qualities. it's good for them. eventually, they just kind of run out of material... and there's something comforting about knowing that they've said every bad thing they can think of about each other, and none of it was a deal breaker. they're still in each other's business constantly. and that's when they start to learn from each other. see, Karkat is really blunt. he wanders into the thick of things, yelling at people and making mistakes all over the place... and Dave is just more cautious than that. his whole cool guy persona is made to keep that kind of raw emotion from leaking out, and to make every mistake seem like he meant to do that. but Karkat makes mistakes all the time. and apologizes all the time. and he comes out okay. Karkat is sincere. but Karkat is also high strung... and Dave isn't. Dave knows how to chill, and he plans things, and he can sit down with people and calmly talk through a plan. get it in simple terms and hash things out without panicking. Karkat often exhausts himself trying to run around and manage everything, and while it can be kind of endearing to see how much he cares... it's not exactly healthy. Dave has more of a level head, beyond just his cool kid persona, and isn't afraid to make people walk things back and take it from the top. and actually, what Dave and Karkat have in common is that they try really hard for the people around them, and feel great concern for the people they love. when the chips are down, they value similar things. and once they've run out of ineffectual ways to badmouth each other, that's what they have left. probably the thing that bugs them the most about each other is how much they actually have in common in terms of priorities. and while I do think that in their relationship, they'll probably always bicker with each other, that's the core foundation. they're caring people who look out for their group and try to help wherever they can. in essence... they're both knights through and through.

and then HS2 fucks it all up. legit why even confuse anything about their relationship? just let them uncontroversially date, keep it lowkey and tasteful, realize the wonderful potential of their friends razzing them about it a little, and write a better story for them to exist in. god damn. like, seriously, just give them more people to actually care about, because Dave and Karkat feel out of character if they aren't constantly in the lives of a plethora of friends who are important to them. look at them in homestuck. look at everything they do best. of course they wouldn't thrive in HS2, none of the cast even likes each other anymore!! Dave and Karkat were basically instrumental in setting up rosemary, which fits so well with all of their characterization its insane. I just want everyone to periodically go back, and reread homestuck, and remember when these characters were good people.

BASED WENDELL COMING IN WITH THEIR ANALYSIS BETTER THAN WHATEVER THE FUCK THE HS2 WRITERS SHIT OUT 

[alyazirr]

So let me talk about the Dame Event story for a hot minute here

Another long one sorry,

In my last text wall rant that I was sleep deprived as hell writing I went over the events pretty much as a whole as well as just explaining that the event dissapointed me, now I’ve had some time to digest the story as a whole and really think on it I’d like to dive into the story and what really got under my skin.

Let me just preface this by saying clearly that we as the fandom were absolutely baited with this event, many players are members of the LGBT+ community and I myself identify as bi. This entire event and how it was handled in my opinion was not done well and has left many feeling like they used the premise as a quick cash grab from that part of the fandom – I absolutely believe this to be the case.

Now the story, the first issue I had was the reason the boys had to dress up as ‘dames’ to begin with. The idea that this queen we have never met have no reason to care about and wasn’t even given 3 lines of characterisation just shows up and demands that everyone dress like ladies because ‘down with all demon men’ is incredibly concerning to me. Diavolo the prince seemingly got out of her requests, he is after all royalty himself but I think a lot of the time we forget just how high ranking in society the brothers are. This ‘I hate all men’ attitude is incredibly childish and a toxic mindset that has literally set the feminist movement back for years. It’s equally concerning that I’ve seen fans take this ‘queen’ and raise her up as this absolute bad bitch who is awesome and death to all men when she is in fact just a bitch in my eyes.

The reason why they need to dress up aside Lucifer’s handling that they all have to ‘act like dames’ had me flashing back to visions of ‘ladies finishing schools’ and a stepford wife type situation. The way their personalities had to be obliterated in the process to fit Lucifer’s notion of ‘the perfect lady like behaviour’ is incredibly demeaning to me. As a fashion major I’ve read and researched my fair amount on the psychology of clothing and how it can both confine or embolden us. I hoped that the dames event would be handled better, Asmo is obviously our number one candidate to cross-dress and throw ‘gendered’ clothing out the window and I love him for it but I have to agree with Mammon’s wording that he ‘doesn’t mind dressing up but doesn’t like the performance with it’. The ‘perfect personality’ that had them all walking the same, eating the same and using the same etiquette stripped them of any individuality and just had me thinking back on how women were ‘expected’ to act in society and still are to a degree and it was pretty uncomfortable and I’m not surprised that by the end of it even Asmo who loves any excuse to steal the show and dress up was exhausted by all the ‘etiquette’ he was forced through by Lucifer to seemingly appease some queen.

There was no need for the etiquette, Satan is arguably one of the most refined brothers having many friends in high places, artists, directors and so on. He’s well connected and established and he clearly knows how to handle himself with dignity, asking him to abide by all these rules was overkill when he could’ve put on a dress and acted completely acceptably all by himself. Not that there were even many interactions with the brothers to begin with. Typically there is always a brief moment of affection with each brother but this event was just ‘Beel can’t walk in high heels, neither can Satan pick one to cheer on and screw the other one’. I hate how any interaction was boiled down to ‘praise’ or ‘you aren’t trying hard enough to act like this dignified lady’.

Clothing is an extension of our personalities it is part of who we are and how we are perceived. It is COMPLETELY valid for people to wear whatever they want, for women to dress more ‘masculine’ and men to dress more ‘feminine’ but there is nothing wrong with men dressing like the ‘societal men’ and women dressing as the ‘societal women’ if that is what empowers them and has them most at ease. Satan was clearly not comfortable in heels and Beel really struggled, clothing should be enjoyable not a trial to get past with pain and brute force. It is also incredibly important to point out that it is canon that Levi and Asmo do cross dress and therefore enjoy it it’s not like these boys aren’t down for it but it should be THEIR CHOICE and what makes THEM COMFORTABLE. Not the same old ‘Diavolo said so and god help you if you don’t’.

Honestly the whole putting them in dresses came across with a strong element of fetishization which I didn’t like, the mc only able to babble on about how beautiful they looked, stare or say the ‘wanted to see the boys as dames more’. In concept this event could have been EVERYTHING and in the end it was a let down that borders on uncomfortable. I don’t appreciate the undertone that if they want to wear a pretty dress then they HAVE to act like a dignified lady. As I touched on the choice should have been theirs, it should’ve been an empowering situation and not a constricting one. Lucifer actually had me holding my head in my hands in anger with how he was acting in this event and you don’t even end up with the very typical ‘romantic event ending’ with him. You just tell him he looks great and he totally brushes you off. Not even mentioning the fact that as soon as they arrive at the demon castle the ‘bomber’ has been stopped and the queen is suddenly ok with everyone just being themselves because ‘haha I don’t hate you demon men you can dress like men from next year 😊’. So as Levi said literally what was the point in all that work when they just defaulted to acting like themselves anyway. It would’ve been completely understandable if Lucifer had lectured them on behaving at the event, Mammon not trying to steal something, Beel not eating everything etc but wasn’t.

All I wanted was 2 crumbs of attention from Solomon in this event and despite the SSR card he basically may as well not even be there. Not to mention I was super excited to see what Mammon and Satan looked like but I guess I’ll have to draw that out myself. What was the point solmare, seriously what was the point.

I guess we confirmed that Mammon is literally the only one we can trust since he runs to your aid screw the queen which was the only moment I really enjoyed. 

Basically this event has me feeling several kinds of fucked up and it’s clear to me that the devs are just pushing out events to sell cards and grab cash off the audience. I love this game I really do, I’ve played more otomes than I care to admit and this is honestly one of the best I’ve come across main story wise but if they keep pumping out there half assed events to grab cash off players then I’m sorry but it’s gonna turn the majority of players off. People will be willing to spend that £10 on your in game currency to support you when you put out a quality product you worked hard on, I’ve been playing this for a year now and I still love the boys and the half main story line I’ve got through. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying I would far rather wait much longer on events and enjoy a good fleshed out well written event instead of these lazy cash grabs that honestly have ended up really missing the mark and with the angel and now this event really rubbing me the wrong way.

[highladyluck]

Here, have 4.5 pages of rambly Tuon meta. I wrote this to try to get a handle on Tuon’s character, and to develop the theoretical framework for a redemption arc for her. I’m hoping posting this doesn’t cut my motivation to actually write it...

Who is Tuon? Tuon Athaem Kore Paendrag, High Lady, Daughter of the Nine Moons; now the Empress of Seanchan (at least on the westlands side), Fortuona Athaem Kore Paendrag. To borrow some phrasing and framing from @websandwhiskers: She’s the pinnacle of Seanchan culture and an extremely functional tool of the state; responsible (both personally and institutionally) for psychologically and physically torturing people and enslaving them; she also has some compelling moral and personal qualities that she and the state have not yet managed to quash, which kind of makes it all worse, ethically speaking. She’s a villain whom the original narrative neither sufficiently condemns nor sufficiently redeems, married to one of the Big Damn Heroes in a match that’s both very odd couple and very complementary.

She respects people who stand up to her, as long as they aren't 'disrespectful' in the process- and the 'disrespect' is very situational, she'll accept things in private or in non-court settings that she can't let slide in court without losing face and therefore power. She cares very much about the legitimacy of authority, because it correlates positively with stability and is ingrained in her self-image, but she has an autocrat’s idea of what is legitimate. She assumes you know your own self-worth in relation to hers and are prepared to both display it and back it up. She has also internalized that other people's challenges of her are opportunities for her to prove her strength and fitness to rule, and she probably low-key seeks to provoke reactions now as validation/training, for herself and others.

She has rigid moral standards within the context she was raised in, and punishes herself first for perceived failure because if she does it first, perhaps she can avoid someone else doing it, with deadlier results. She has never been allowed to be less than perfect by her culture's standards- she can be (and has been) odd, but she cannot be flawed- and possibly expends all of her natural empathy on others instead of herself, because she can't afford that kind of indulgence herself, but she knows she owes it to lesser beings?

And as @websandwhiskers pointed out, she does have a lot of empathy within allowable contexts, and I think she is willing to push the envelope compared to her peers as long as she/the empire isn't directly threatened. That's what the kiss after Mat let the poisonous snake go was about. The snake was poisonous but not attacking, and not likely to attack unless someone escalated the situation, and Mat deescalated it. No harm, no foul. Mat responded to a fraught situation both logically and mercifully, in the way she imagined she would have if she had been in his shoes and known he same facts he did, and she rewarded him.

She’s competent and charismatic; I hesitate to say that she inspires loyalty in underlings because honestly with the damane it’s brainwashing (eurgh). But Selucia and Karede are both really into her, personally, even when there are societal inducements not to play favorites. Mat is loyal to her, though honestly Mat is loyal to like... anyone he’s responsible for, so maybe it’s more relevant to say that Mat genuinely likes her; at least, he likes the person he thinks he can coax out of her, and in terms of the persona she has more typically, I think he responds well to her competency and self-possession. The ability to project those things is probably a big part of what goes into charisma.

She thinks that the people who oppose her just don't have all the facts. She doesn't like to admit she's changed her mind; it looks like weakness; she's fine identifying it in others but not herself. Ideally she would pretend things have always been the way she now knows they are, and if she can't, she goes for the "Yes [fact], but [here's what I've decided is now germane to the argument at hand]." redefinition of the problem. She always thinks she’s right, though she does tend to leave some space between when she’s decided something and when she promulgates the decision, to allow for opposing arguments.

I think the original relationship Tuon has with omens is that she uses them to look for external justification from the universe for decisions she's already made. (I mostly like Sanderson's Tuon POVs, but I also I think Sanderson sometimes used omens as a 'make Tuon do OOC things for the plot' card.) Tuon's running dialogue with omens also shows that she's always observing the world and interpreting her effect on it and its effect on her. She loses her composure with omens when they are more concrete and less subject to her control (via interpretation), as with Lidya's fortune.

It makes sense that she's super controlling. It was how she was raised, and aside from having loyal/brainwashed companions (who are, themselves, a form of distributed control), being controlling is obviously the only thing that makes her feel safe. It's still interesting how it extends into a dialogue with the Pattern itself. Like Mat, she wants to survive and she wants to go her own way, and also like Mat she's caught up in the Pattern a little more tightly than others. I think she and Mat have both subconsciously decided that the only way to deal with what the universe wants you to do, when the universe is that powerful, is to say "Fine, I didn't really want to do that other thing anyway, let's learn how this path works and play to win."

She knows she makes bad decisions when angry, and I think in general she distrusts strong emotions, or at least tries to hold them at arms' length so they don't form part of her judgment. She's very very good at compartmentalizing, but as a result sometimes emotional stuff will come up and blindside her a little because she doesn't prioritize it or see it as a natural part of her decision-making. I think her emotions do influence her, usually subconsciously, but she's obviously a Thinking type. (Mat is also a compartmentalizer, but more somatic/emotionally focused; he's got his feelings directly wired into his body and together they make decisions that his brain then evaluates a second later, with running commentary that he never expresses to anyone else. They are both comedically un-self-aware, although Tuon is even less self-aware than Mat is, since at least on some level Mat knows he's been repeatedly traumatized even if he tries to pretend he isn't, while Tuon still thinks that her childhood was completely fine.)

Within the original narrative, I think her POVs are always a bit mysterious and her actions are always a little surprising. What’s impressive about that is that this is basically *always* true no matter what setting she’s in and what she’s doing. When you’re in her head you see her thought process ticking away, but RJ and Sanderson both have her constantly withholding important contextual details in her POVs, like Lidya’s prophecy (the hints are there and come out in bits and pieces, but she doesn’t reveal everything and slot it into context until 2 books later). Like with reading Mat, you’re aware that she obviously has reasons for what she’s doing and you even see her decision-making process, but because you’re missing the details, she remains opaque even though you’re in her head. (Mat’s decision-making process is more clear to the reader, but somewhat opaque to himself and definitely opaque to those around him.)

Meanwhile the things Tuon does share via narration or via action are always kind of buck-wild for the reader because her entire deal is such a culture shock. She’s obviously surprising Mat & co, but what’s weird is that she also seems to be constantly surprising her fellow Seanchan. Her scenes with her peers are usually punctuated with shocked murmuring in the background. They have trouble anticipating her, both because she keeps her cards close to her chest, and I also think because she’s a slightly different person from the one who lived her entire life in a cloistered murdersphere in Seanchan, and if she wasn’t a different person after leaving home, she’s definitely one after her kidnapping. But I think she is a fundamentally different person after leaving home, because of the structural parallels she has with Mat.

In Mat’s first POV chapter, he wakes up in Tar Valon with partial amnesia and a much stronger sense of self-preservation than he had before. As everybodyhatesrand points out (crediting but not tagging them since I feel like they wouldn’t appreciate being tagged in Tuon apologia), we have never been in pre-dagger!Mat’s head. We have never been in dagger!Mat’s head. Everyone in the books, throughout the books, is like “At least Mat’s still the same!” and yeah, he does do and say more or less the same things before and after the dagger. But we had to take it on faith that his personality is more or less intact pre- and post-dagger because we, the readers, only know post-dagger!Mat’s inner monologues. The Mat we inhabit in book 3? He’s been broken. The continuity between his old life and his new life has been disrupted (and will continue to be disrupted, including with an actual literal timeline reboot!) He immediately starts off to fix himself, others, and then eventually the world, so it’s motivating, but the hits really just keep coming...

Like Mat, Tuon’s first POV only appears after she’s left the traumatic environment that shaped her. We don’t know what travelling across the sea did to her sense of self (and we can’t really know since we don’t have that in-Seanchan-baseline), though we do know she’s changed after travelling with Mat (aside from catching feelings, I think she learned that the Seanchan are not always in possession of all the facts), and we know what becoming Empress did to her (she doubled down on duty and lost a lot of personal flexibility). I think there are major structural parallels between Mat and Tuon’s POVs because they’re both broken people who try their very best to act as if they are not broken. In Tuon’s case I think she just doesn’t know how broken she is. In Mat’s case, he knows, but he’s doing a weird balancing act of integrating lessons learned (healing!) while also, like, frantically trying to ignore or drown out the emotional cost of trauma (not healing!)

By the end of the series I think Tuon knows, but is not letting herself actually think, that being made damane is a) a real possibility for her, specifically, and b) that it is not, in fact, something she would willingly choose for herself even to serve the empire. I think this is different from the more intellectual disgust of the idea of herself channeling; that's abstract, and she imagines there's an actual choice for the person with the spark between channeling and not channeling, or possibly that there's an actual choice between learning to channel vs not learning to channel if you have the spark inborn. (We know that the actual choice if you have the spark is 'learn to channel properly or die'.) Tuon's out there like "If I were a marath'damane I would simply choose not to channel. RIP to marath'damane but I'm different".

She's never been a marath'damane in the sense of someone who started channeling involuntarily, and isn't interested in imagining herself as one, at least not when confronted by someone who is succeeding in making her angry. So even if you made her choose, as a theoretical marath'damane, between dying and learning to channel properly, I think she'd consider 'learning to channel properly' as 'becoming a murderer' and therefore the choice would be between dying and becoming a murderer. There's a clear argument to be made in that idiom that the marath'damane is 'becoming a murderer' in self-defense, which would have a different moral tenor (manslaughter vs murder). But Tuon strikes me as the type to say in an argument (and probably believe) that "The end result is the same & I would die before compromising my principles.”

I think in the confrontation with Egwene she probably internally justified not putting the collar on because there was a Seanchan audience and because the taunt came from an escaped damane, even though the actual reason was fear that it would work. She’s letting the circumstances invalidate the argument so she doesn’t have to think about it. I think if she were to let herself think about the authentic emotional response- and she probably has, I feel like she does a postmortem on all of her public discomposure- she would consciously know that her instinct was that it would work on her, and furthermore she would know that she does not want to be damane, even if the Empire would require her to be.

If she followed out the chain of reasoning, she’d know that if she were a damane, if she were actually leashed, she would be forced to channel. She’d know because she’s taken great pleasure in training and breaking damane, and she knows how to get damane to channel and how to break them. Therefore, if she were damane, she would know that she would need to be broken, and she knows how she would go about breaking herself. She probably thinks that her last act of free will would be to suicide if she possibly could. But I think that what she’s AFRAID OF is that she would actually convince herself that being the very best damane is all she wants out of life. And that's the scary, universe-ending thought she's avoiding the consequences of, because a) it’s about breaking herself (as Cadsuane points out, no one can easily think about breaking themselves) and b) the fact that she would need to be broken and that she doesn’t like the idea is a sign that she’s not the perfect avatar of the Empire that she thinks she should be.

I think becoming damane has been added- in the bare abstract- to her mental list of the price of failure. It's a very fundamental loss of control and identity, where all she has is resignation and brainwashing that- best case scenario- she does to herself. She's scared of it in a way she was not before, now that it's been made personal. Like Mat, she's going to shove that down deep and ignore the bad scary implications as long as she can, up until the point that they actually disable her or otherwise bleed out into her intellectual or physical world in ways that aren't as ignorable.

But while Tuon thinks she would die before compromising her principles, and even more secretly is extremely afraid that she *wouldn't*, I also think that like Mat, if it came down to it she would transform herself radically to survive *as herself*.

She’d realize that she has other principles, more human ones, underlying her socially acceptable and externally imposed principles of enforcing hierarchy and maintaining personal integrity. (Parallels to dagger!Mat being exorcised?) I think her basic motivations are that she should survive, that she should retain as much control/power over her own fate as possible, and that she should make decisions from a place of empathy rather than anger or fear. I think she would also realize that she does in fact value some principles over others. She would redefine the meaning of ‘personal integrity’ to separate it from what the state wants.

If she knew what was really driving her socially acceptable principles, and that there was a difference between what she really, fundamentally wanted & what she had been told to want, with encouragement she could prioritize the organic, primal ones and apply those to the external world. If she is a person, then everyone else is a person, and she should want for them what she wants for herself. I think she might get to the point of realizing there is an alternative path (of what looks like selfishness) but I don't think she's going to let herself be selfish (in this healing, positive way) without external prompting/confirmation, so this is probably where friends, positive role models, and finally omens come in.

[technicallyfadingdreamer]

Laser and Light Treatment of Acquired and Congenital Vascular Lesions

IPL treatment of PWS

IPL devices are broadband filtered xenon flashlamps that work based on the principles of selective photothermolysis. The emission spectrum of 515–1200 nm is adjusted with the use of a series of cut-off filters, and the pulse duration ranges from approximately 0.5 to 100 msec, depending on the technology. The first commercial system, Photoderm VL (Lumenis, Yokneam, Israel) became available in 1994, and has been used to treat vascular anamolies. Another, IPL Technology (Danish Dermatologic Development [DDD] Hoersholm, Denmark) with a dual mode light filtering has also been used to treat PWS. Many other IPL system have recently been developed, and the appropriate parameters for congenital vascular lesions are being developed. The IPL has been used successfully to treat PWS (Fig. 39.7),78–80 but pulsed dye laser remains the treatment of choice.

IPL technology has also been used to treat pulsed dye laser-resistant PWS. In the study by Bjerring and associates seven of 15 patients achieved over 50% lesional lightening after four IPL treatments. Most of these patients had lesions involving the V2 dermatome (medial cheek and nose), which are relatively more difficult to lighten. Six of seven of these patients showed over 75% clearance of their PWS. A 550–950-nm filter was used with 8–30-msec pulse durations and fluences of 13–22 J/cm2 to achieve tissue purpura. The 530–750-nm filter can also be used with double 2.5-msec pulses, with a 10-msec delay and fluence of 8–10 J/cm2. Epidermal cooling was not required. Treatment resulted in immediate erythema and edema, and occasional crusting. Hypopigmentation was observed in three patients, hyperpigmentation in one patient, and epidermal atrophy in one patient.

The basics of body fat

Let’s start with the basics. Not all fat is created equal. We have two distinct types of fat in our bodies: subcutaneous fat (the kind that may roll over the waistband of your pants) and visceral fat (the stuff that lines your organs and is associated with diabetes and heart disease).

From here on out, when we refer to fat, we are talking about subcutaneous fat, as this is the type of fat that cryolipolysis targets. A recent study showed that the body’s ability to remove subcutaneous fat decreases with age, which means we are fighting an uphill battle with each birthday we celebrate.

From popsicles to freezing fat

Cryolipolysis machine — which literally translates into cold (cryo) fat (lipo) destruction (lysis) — was invented, in part, by observing what can happen when kids eat popsicles. No kidding here. The cofounders of this process were intrigued by something called “cold-induced fat necrosis” that was reported to occur after young children ate popsicles that were inadvertently left resting on the cheek for several minutes. Skin samples taken from pediatric patients like these showed inflammation in the fat, but normal overlying skin. Thus, it appeared that fat may be more sensitive to cold injury that other tissue types.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Coolplas Fat Freeze Machine uses rounded paddles in one of four sizes to suction your skin and fat “like a vacuum,” says Roostaeian. While you sit in a reclined chair for up to two hours, cooling panels set to work crystallizing your fat cells. “It’s a mild discomfort that people seem to tolerate pretty well," he says. "[You experience] suction and cooling sensations that eventually go numb.” In fact, the procedural setting is so relaxed that patients can bring laptops to do work, enjoy a movie, or simply nap while the machine goes to work.

WHO IS IT FOR?

Above all, emphasizes Roostaeian, CoolSculpting is “for someone who is looking for mild improvements,” explaining that it’s not designed for one-stop-shop major fat removal like liposuction. When clients come to Astarita for a consultation, she considers “their age, skin quality—will it rebound? Will it look good after volume is removed?—and how thick or pinchable their tissue is,” before approving them for treatment, because the suction panels can only treat the tissue it can access. “If someone has thick, firm tissue,” explains Astarita, “I won’t be able to give them a wow result.

WHAT ARE THE RESULTS?

“It often takes a few treatments to get to your optimum results,” says Roostaeian, who admits that a single treatment will yield very minimal change, sometimes imperceptible to clients. “One of the downsides of [CoolSculpting] is there’s a range for any one person. I’ve seen people look at before and after pictures and not be able to see the results.” All hope is not lost, however, because both experts agree that the more treatments you have, the more results you will see. What will happen eventually is an up to 25 percent fat reduction in a treatment area. “At best you get mild fat reduction—a slightly improved waistline, less bulging of any particular area that’s concerning. I would emphasize the word mild.”

WILL IT MAKE YOU LOSE WEIGHT? "None of these devices shed pounds,” says Astarita, reminding potential patients that muscle weighs more than fat. When you’re shedding 25 percent of fat in a handful of tissue, it won’t add up to much on the scale, but, she counters, “When [you lose] what’s spilling over the top of your pants or your bra, it counts.” Her clients come to her in search of better proportions at their current weight, and may leave having dropped “one or two sizes in clothing.”

Although the mechanism of cryolipolysis is not completely understood, it is believed that vacuum suction with regulated cooling, impedes blood flow and induces crystallisation of the targeted adipose tissue with no permanent effect on the overlying dermis and epidermis. This cold induced ischaemia may promote cellular injury in adipose tissue via cellular oedema and mitochondrial free radical release. Another theory is that the initial insult of crystallisation and cold ischaemic injury is further perpetuated by ischaemia reperfusion injury, causing generation of reactive oxygen species, elevation of cytosolic calcium levels, and activation of apoptotic pathways.

Whichever the mechanism of injury, adipocytes undergo apoptosis, followed by a pronounced inflammatory response, resulting in their eventual removal from the treatment site within the following weeks. The inflammatory process sees an influx of inflammatory cells at 14 days post treatment, as adipocytes become surrounded by histiocytes, neutrophils, lymphocytes, and other mononuclear cells. At 14-30 days after treatment, macrophages and other phagocytes envelope and digest the lipid cells as part of the body’s natural response to injury. Initial concern was that cholesterol, triglycerides, low density lipoproteins (LDLs) and high density lipoproteins (HDLs), bilirubin and glucose levels were affected, however these have been shown to all stay within normal limits following the procedure.

Four weeks later, the inflammation lessens and the adipocyte volume decreases. Two to three months after treatment, the interlobular septa are distinctly thickened and the inflammatory process further subsides. Fat volume in the targeted area is apparently decreased and the septa account for the majority of the tissue volume.

Patients and treatment areas

Although all studies show reduction in every area examined, it is still unknown what areas are most responsive to cryolipolysis. Various factors may play a role in the degree of fat reduction observed after cryolipolysis. The vascularity, local cytoarchitecture, and metabolic activity of the specific fat depots in questions may play a role.

There is lack of substantial research to identify the ideal patient or even the ideal area to be treated. Given a modest (yet significant improvement of up to 25% reduction in subcutaneous fat), it is thought that the best candidates are those within their ideal weight range and those who engage in regular exercise, eat a healthy diet, have noticeable fat bulges on the trunk, are realistic in their expectations, and are willing to maintain the results of cryolipolysis with a healthy, active lifestyle.

New design Cryolipolysis is safe for all skin types, with no reported pigmentary changes, and is safe for repeated application. Ferraro et al. suggest that patients who require only small or moderate amounts of adipose tissue and cellulite removal would benefit most from cryolipolysis treatment. Contraindications include cold-induced conditions such as cryoglobunaemia, cold urticaria, and paroxysmal cold haemoglobinuria. Cryolipolysis should not be performed in treatment areas with severe varicose veins, dermatitis, or other cutaneous lesions.

HIFU Decide Guide: Which Device is for you?

High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound also known as HIFU machine is a non-surgical, non-invasive treatment procedure that tightens and lifts the skin using ultrasound energy. It is taken to be a safe and effective procedure for tightening the facial skin.

HIFU treatment procedure has loads of advantages over the traditional means of facial improvement: painless, zero incisions, scarring, and recovery time. In addition, it is far less expensive too.

Granted, HIFU is a popular means of looking better. Little wonder that there are tons of clinics and spas that offer services they claim can make you look better. However, that's not enough reason for you to jump on the bandwagon of folks searching for ways to look better

Why Choosing The Right HIFU Device is Important?

Be sure to get a professional assessment before you start your HIFU treatment. This is because a professional and objective assessment from a specialist will help you discover the best form of treatment using the right multifunctional HIFU that is suitable for you.

Ultrasound technology is completely safe and has been used in medicine for decades. It works by contracting and shortening muscle fibers, thus causing the lifting and tightening effect that makes the skin look better.

Lifting, tightening, and fats melting are natural processes that result in a slimmer face, reduced jowl line & facial tightening. Confused about how to go about the HIFU facelift treatment in Singapore?

You will be able to decide on the best HIFU device to use when you finally decide to undertake the treatment. Let’s look at some of the most common HIFU devices in Singapore.

What is the working principle for HIFU vaginal machine?

The vaginal HIFU machine uses an noninvasive ultrasonic focusing technique to focus on the mucous membrane fibrous layer and muscle layer directly. Using ultrasonic waves as the energy source and taking advantage of its penetration and focus, the system will send out ultrasonic energy focusing in the the lamina and muscle fiber layer in a predetermined depth. A higher intensity of ultrasonic region, called focus region, is formed. In 0.1 second, the temperature of the region can reach to above 65 ℃ , so the collagen is reorganized and the normal tissue outside the focal region is undamaged. Therefore, the desired depth layer can obtain the ideal effect of collagen concentration, reorganization and regeneration. Ultimately, the mysterious effect of vagina tightening is achieved.

What is the functions for each cartridges?

1. Vagina tightening head

4.5mm heads produce the energy directly to the SMAS , make it thermal coagulation , make the SMAS tighten and lifting, improved the muscle structure from deep to shallow, make better to help the muscle layer restore elasticity and  tighten.

3.0mm head the ultrasound penetrates to the skin under the depth of 3.0mm, aim at  activating the dermal layer’s collagen, effectively enhance the effect of the consolidation of the outline, but also shrink large pores and reduce the appearance’s wrinkles.

Knowing that you are interested in 3D Hifu machine, we have listed articles on similar topics on the website for your convenience. As a professional manufacturer, we hope that this news can help you. If you are interested in learning more about the product, please feel free to contact us.3D HIFU is ultrasound energy distance of width, length and depth, which more Comprehensive, three-dimensional. Directly delivers heat energy to skin and subcutaneous tissue that can stimulate and renew the skin's collagen and thus consequently improving the texture and reducing sagging of the skin. The high quality handle with German imported motor can be used for life. Total 8 cartridges supply treatmetn for whole body. 1.5mm is for the forehead and around the eyes, 3.0mm is for the dermis layer--face treatment, 4.5mm is for the SMAS layer--face treatment, 6.0mm/8mm/10mm/13mm/16mm for body fat layer. Every cartridge can reach 20000 lines lifetime.

4D HIFU machine uses the power of High intensity focused ultrasound to safely lift and tighten skin. High intensity focused ultrasound is a form of energy that is significantly different than light such as IPL and Lasers or Electrical (Radio-Frequency) energy. HIFU, protects the skin surface, whilst precisely penetrating at deeper depths and higher temperatures than Radio Frequency for example, treating beyond the Dermis and Foundation layers, where structural weakening starts.

Tissue at the target point is heated to 65°C, Thermal Heat is created with the skin tissue creating both spaced ‘wounds’ and cellular friction - which in turn promotes healing, immediately contracts collagen and stimulates a rapid production. Over the next 90-180 days, the wound-healing response stimulates long-term tissue and leads to further lifting and tightening, with results that can last years.

4D HIFU also helps to improve the tone and all the features of your face such as your eyes, cheeks, mouth, chin and skin also making it a viable alternative to Botox, with the benefit of being able to maintain facial expression. Excellent for post surgical face lift to maintain the lift and treat blood stasis, scarring, and numbness.

This mode could minimize treatment time achieves the great anti-aging result. It will be leading the new treading in the market, and help you to expand your business.

[rittz]

thoughts about being trans, idk where else to put them so here u go

it’s not like i don’t have trans guy friends to talk to about this, it’s just usually in the form of jokes or passing comments rather than an actually serious conversation. also, the transmasc people that i’m closest to identify more with the label “nonbinary” than i do-- it’s not like they couldn’t understand or relate to things i’m saying, but i’m just assuming that they probably don’t feel the exact same way i do

anyway, as a trans person we get often asked “so why do you feel like a [gender]?”, and the answer is usually some variation of “i just feel like it”. this is the most accurate but also vaguest possible answer, so i kinda wanted to break down my personal answer to that question?

basically, i identify as a man because i identify with men. in a general and also personal sense. gender stereotypes are something that trans people by necessity both embrace and reject. i relate to gender stereotypes about men more than those of women-- i’m less outwardly emotional, i like being handy, i don’t like kids, i have questionable personal hygiene, etc-- but obviously these things alone don’t make someone a man. however... you can’t deny that there is some general truth about behavioral differences between men and women (bc of society, not biology). men and women both experience different problems in the world, and each have trouble understanding the experiences and problems of the other. generally, i can relate to the experiences and problems of men more than those of women, even if it seems like i shouldn’t (for example, i am not afraid of walking alone at night, even though i am very tiny).

i, from a young age, have had a constant yearning for more male friends. i would occasionally choose to play video games as a male character. i was upset that i couldn’t be in boy scouts. i have been jealous of my younger brothers being treated by my parents the ways i wished i was treated. when i imagined myself older, i pictured myself less like my mom and more like my dad. when i’m around men, i want them to treat me like one of them. i want to be seen as a man.

and i think that’s what being trans really boils down to. wanting to be seen as someone other than how everyone sees you. wanting what you see on the outside to match how you feel on the inside. this obviously extends to nonbinary individuals, who face their own struggle when it comes to presentation. but at the end of the day, i think that presentation is equally important to gender identity as internal feelings. i mean, i think we’re all familiar with the research proving that transitioning makes trans people happier. surgery is an invasive, expensive, painful process that i DON’T think is necessary for every trans person, and HRT isn’t always easy to get. but changing a name, getting a new haircut, dressing differently, binding, etc. counts as transitioning. you don’t have to hate your body to be trans, but wanting to alter it in order to better connect your internal identity with your presentation, i think is necessary in order to consider yourself to be trans. 

i will admit i am confused by “GNC trans men” i see on tumblr and insta, who use he/him pronouns but exclusively present femininely. i’m not talking about trans guys who don’t yet pass, i mean trans guys who don’t want to. i don’t harbor any ill will, i’m just confused. if i understand being trans to mean “wanting what you see on the outside to match how you feel on the inside”, you can see how. doesn’t that make you feel dysphoric? don’t you want people who see you to read you as male? how is your life different from when you didn’t identify as male but presented the same way? this isn’t me trying to gatekeep on who’s “trans enough”, and especially when it comes to nonbinary identities it’s arbitrary to harp on presentation like this. but like, what’s going on here?

taking a turn here that will come back around, an extremely key component to why i identify as and with men is my sexuality. i have always idolized, envied, and evoked various queer icons from media and real life. the hunky, grunting, macho, hetero version of “man” never appealed to me the way that the fashionable, artsy, flirty, homo version of “man” did. drag queens, my mom’s hairdresser, glam rock stars, i could go on. associating my more feminine qualities with GAY stereotypes instead of FEMALE stereotypes suddenly made more sense, and made me feel less dysphoric. it’s also something that took me a long time to realize, because i had surrounded myself with queers who were mostly attracted to women. transmascs and butch lesbians historically have a lot in common, but personally, i didn’t relate as much to lesbians as i did to drag queens. in dating and loving men, i developed my understanding of them. but my attraction to men was why it had taken me so long to realize i felt more like a man-- i thought i was just some weird straight girl.

now, am i calling these “GNC gay trans men” with long pink hair and poofy skirts and conventionally attractive bisexual boyfriends “weird straight girls”? ...well, not to their faces. but i have to admit that i’m thinking it. these people would never go to a predominantly-male gay bar, these people would never be harassed on the street. i’m not saying i know someone’s identity better than they do, but i don’t agree with the liberal utopian ideal of “let everyone do whatever they want as long as they aren’t hurting anyone” when taken to mean that we can’t question other people’s choices. “why do you feel like a man?” is a question that, coming from another trans person, isn’t inherently transphobic. it’s not “forcing” someone to “prove” their “transness”, no one “owes” me an explanation of their identity. i’m just confused. i don’t disapprove of the way these people live their lives, i just want to know why.

a straight girl being feminine is different from a gay man being feminine, because it has less to do with personality and more to do with society’s historic view of gay men as closer to female than male because of the loving and fucking men aspect. an AMAB gay man wearing makeup and a crop top probably just wants to look good, but he is also signaling to other men that he’s gay via gender non-conformance. by being AFAB and female-passing, wearing makeup and a crop top is not GNC. in fact it’s pretty GC, and gay men will not recognize you as a gay man.

it’s easy to say “gender is fake so do whatever you want”, but like, we have to acknowledge reality. time is a social construct too, but we still use days of the week when talking to each other. strangers will treat you differently depending on what gender they interpret you as. different people will be willing to date you or not. you have to choose which public bathroom to go in. if being misgendered doesn’t bother these people, then who cares? but if it DOES, which it usually does, wouldn’t you want to take steps to prevent being misgendered in the future? if your desire to present femininely is stronger then your desire to be seen as male, then like... why call yourself a male at all? ultimately nothing these people do will really affect me in any way. it just makes me wonder if these people will eventually go on to present as male, or if they will later ID as nonbinary or even cis. i encourage people trying out different labels and exploring their identity, so it’s not like i think these people SHOULDN’T identify as trans guys. it’s more like, i wish they were able to articulate WHY they identify as trans more than “because i said so”. not wanting to be a woman doesn’t automatically make you a man, it just makes you not a woman.

maybe i’m particularly cynical because of the MULTIPLE times that people with larger online followings who identify and present this way have later turned out to be lying, manipulative people. hopefully it goes without saying that i do NOT think that everyone who identifies and presents this way is a toxic liar. the reason i bring it up is because some people genuinely can’t understand the possibility or purpose of misleadingly claiming a marginalized identity, but it can and does happen. an analogy could be made here about white people claiming indigenous heritage. we all WANT to believe what people say about themselves, and asking for “proof” is a social no-no. but we shouldn’t just... automatically trust everything someone says about themselves, right? and as bad as i WANT to live in a world where gender doesn’t matter and everyone default uses neutral pronouns and there are no divisions in clothing stores and bathrooms, we don’t live in that world (yet). when you are AFAB, /extremely/ femininely presenting, and have little to no plans of transitioning, saying “i am a man” will not make other people see you as one. and if you don’t want to be seen as a man, then maybe you aren’t one.

[samwise-though]

Sabrina’s Top Ten

This is a little bit (a lot bit) out of my blog’s wheelhouse, but I ask you guys to bear with me! For one of my seminars, I have to do a Top Ten project, in which I talk about ten different things relating to Pop culture, music and/or theory. So, if you don’t want to read this, that’s fine! I’m putting the bulk of the post under the cut!! This is basically just me commenting on how weird pop culture is, and fangirling about Taylor Swift.

(Sorry Dr. Burke, you’re absolutely going to have to read about Taylor Swift, and I am realizing that after Adorno I’m incredibly cynical about popular culture now)

#1: Taylor Swift: Archive, Collecting and Identity

I think as I began this year, there was this feeling of necessity to blast off with the song “22” from @taylorswift​’s album Red. All the way back in 2012 little fifteen-year-old Sabrina knew that when she turned 22, she would be playing that song All. Day. Long. 

Here’s the thing though: while yes, I did listen to “22” more than any of the other songs on Red that day, I also spent a lot of time listening to the rest of the album as well. I came to the realization that I could identify with the album better than ever. There was something so profound about the way @taylorswift​​ captured that moment in time, in her life, and have it still remain so relatable. I spent a long time considering this, but it wasn’t until I encountered Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects that I really began to find a way in which to understand what was happening for me (and undoubtedly many others, considering Swift’s success). In chapter two: “A Marginal System: Collecting” Baudrillard references Maurice Rheims’ ideas of collecting for children, “For children, collecting is a rudimentary way of mastering the outside world, of arranging, classifying and manipulating”. Ultimately, collecting is a way in which we learn to form identity - and what is an album, if not literally a collection of music that in and of itself acts as an ultimate tool of identity construction? I’ve been listening to @taylorswift​​’s music since her official 2006 debut. That is a lot of time spent self-identifying with a musician and her music. Constructing even part of your identity from something that is a collection that is very much a large part of someone else’s identity is such a weird concept. Why do we do that? 

Even more interesting though, is the fact that Taylor has said on multiple occasions, that her albums are like diary entries (not to mention the great number of other people drawing that particular comparison). Thus making each album that she has released up until this point a small archive, collecting and ordering that point in time. Either way, @taylorswift​​ continues to find success in creating archival collections that are reflective or refractive of her own identity.

With the release of Lover and the inclusion of her diary entries as an addition to the deluxe versions of the record, it follows in the history of including controlled snippets of her life in the physical copies of her albums. From the first five albums, she included secret coded messages within the lyrics of each of the songs. In 1989, Taylor included copies of polaroids with lyrics written across the bottom of them, each numbered - so you knew you got certain ones, and not others. As well, starting from 1989 @taylorswift​​ has also included voice memo recordings from her writing and recording sessions, so that fans can have a better understanding of her creative process. 

All of these details add to the personal feeling that @taylorswift​‘s albums seem to emanate. This feeling is only magnified through the additions of the diary entries in Lover (deluxe). Each album is a carefully constructed archive of @taylorswift​‘s life, that her fans then go on to add to their own ‘Taylor Swift collections’ and continue to alter their identities through the new piece of the collection that she has created.

#2: The Reproducibility of Childhood

If there is anything in recent memory that should be considered with Benjamin and mass-reproducibility in mind, Disney and the company’s capitalizing on re-making all of their old animated films should be discussed.

They did this really clever marketing tactic in which they pretty much re-do the original trailer they released for the original movie, shot-for-shot with the new film footage:

I will admit it didn’t work quite as well with the 2015 version of Cinderella, in which they altered a greater amount of the story, as compared to The Beauty and the Beast. Obviously, the trailer that has found the most success thus far with this tactic, was the most recent release of The Lion King.

What is the most intriguing thing is that Disney is embracing the past iterations of the movie, basically just repackaging the old story in (for most of the movies) live-action acting rather than animation and selling the audience very nearly the same exact thing. And not only are they very blatantly reselling the masses the same thing, but they are also saying, with these side-by-side trailer comparisons that “hey, look, we're doing this thing exactly the same way” and without question, we buy into it because it is familiar and feels of childhood. Having read Adorno’s Culture Industry Reconsidered, I feel as though we should really be taking a moment to question why we are allowing Disney to amass so much capital from movies that we have already seen. By drawing on our cultural memory of these movies that were so fundamental to many children in Western society growing up, Disney is literally monetizing our childhood memories. It is just as Adorno says, “The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality.”

While these movies get a shiny new paint job, it is still blatantly the old and familiar.

But I guess Disney has always been about capitalizing on memory.

#3: The ‘Classics’ and Aura

I have spent a lot of time over the past year, shaping my identity. I made a lot of life-changing decisions, one of which was to go to grad school. It was not a quick decision, and it more or less happened over the span of a year, during an English course I took. The class was a lecture on Victorian and Edwardian literature. I found myself really fascinated by the Victorian novels that we started the class with. When we got to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles I was a goner.

I fell in love with Hardy’s story and my love for the Victorian and 19th-century studies only solidified further throughout the semester. However, my entire experience at the university has been plagued with serious imposter syndrome. Thoughts of how “I don’t belong here,” and that “I don’t really know what I am talking about” were the soundtrack playing in my head every single day. I was always worrying that I had grossly misunderstood the texts we were studying, my interpretations were wrong, and that I would make myself look like a fool. All of these feelings, when analyzed at a later time, were all rooted in the idea that we were studying ”The Classics,” narratives that were part of the Western Literature Canon. How could I possibly understand literature that was considered “Great”?

There is a constructed aura around the literary canon that is also extended to the place in which that canon is taught. A very elitist feeling that has been cultivated since the beginning of higher education. For me, when making the decision to continue my university education by taking the leap to apply for Grad schools, this aura only grew - to the point in which it almost feels that it will be impossible for me to get into a graduate program. It feels as though Graduate programs are meant for a specific group of people - and somehow I am evaluating myself to not fit into that group. 

But what exactly is it that still continues to be such a fundamental influence over the population that University is considered elite, and those narratives should be the ones to makeup Western Literary Canon? Is the legacy of Colonialism still so etched into our ideas that we literally still believe that the novels that a bunch of white dudes agreed were good are the be-all-and-end-all of good literature?

What’s bothersome about this is, I didn’t get to start asking those sorts of questions, and experiencing a wider array of literature until I reached my upper-level seminar courses, for my honours degree. 

Courses that you cannot take unless you are a part of the honours program.

Ironic isn’t it? The elitist aura can only be questioned from well within the elitist institution.

#4: The Avengers: [Streaming]Game

Marvel’s first cycle has now come to an end with Avengers: Endgame. It’s odd to think just how emotionally attached the fans (myself included) have become to the superheroes that, many of which will not be returning after this installment in the Avengers franchise.

(Loki Gif included because bae deserved better - and a TV show that I have to pay for absolutely does not make up for it)

Marvel is now going to capitalize on certain character deaths (see above), by giving them TV series and prequel movies to help entice the masses that have been so invested in their stories up to this point in the cinematic universe. The problem is, though, any character receiving a show, it will only be aired on the Disney + streaming service.

The Disney + streaming service comes long after Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other streaming services have already established themselves. The issue that arises out of this system of individual streaming platforms, is that subscribers have to either subscribe to every new platform that arises or else to pick an choose which content they are willing to not have access to. It's a ridiculous system, and it will make it nearly impossible to have conversations with those around you because it should be a safe assumption at this point - ad if not now, certainly in the near future, that no, they probably haven’t watched it, because they don’t have access to it. 

This is obviously just a new way to control the products that companies produce. But it also brings to mind Benjamin and his ideas regarding mass production (”Work of Art”). Has the aura of the film been diminished because of the sort of re-producibility that come out of easy access (watching it any time you want), or, has there been a new mutated aura created for these films and tv shows because of the lack of access people may have to multiple platforms?

I guess we got what we wanted, easier way to access the tv shows and the movies we love, but at the cost of having to choose where we are willing to spend our money. It's a very Adornian thought, in that we wanted something, it was produced to the best possible economic value for the companies creating them, and then we continue to buy into the product. 

#5: Sparknotes and Memes

If you have a twitter account, and like literature, you should really check out SparkNotes’ twitter account.

They have become more and more popular over the last few years due to their use of the relatable internet language we know as memes. They, of course, are not the first company to engage with their users in such a way, many companies have been using social media to brand themselves in a very personable (and personified) way.

By doing this, they are making themselves appear more accessible to today’s youth, who are primarily influenced by what they see and interact with on the internet. 

There is something less sinister about SparkNotes utilizing the internet and memes to direct themselves to the younger audience - they are after all an educational aid group in which they are providing texts in more manageable and understandable terms. 

Other companies, however, like fast-food restaurants who utilize social media as though they are an individual rather than a company... That is quite a bit more insidious. 

 #6: Concert Movies

I want to return to music once again. But not in the traditional sense. I want to discuss concert movies.

There is something so weird about concert movies! They seem to exist in a separate space from actually attending a concert with live music and listening to the album. There is something very artificial in the sense that most of the time it feels very engineered, because of camera cuts and camera changes, and the difference in going from a front-row perspective to the camera shot cutting away to a wide shot so that the stadium is in full view. But then it also fulfils its purpose as “live music”. There is this sense in which it feels like you can’t look away, in case you miss something, even though you can pause it! 

It is a heavily controlled, or perhaps, curated experience. Realistically, there are so many different cameras that are recording the same moments, that in post-production they are able to choose the best possible moments to cut together to provide to the viewers (I avoid the word audience here, because there is, in fact, a physical audience that we as viewers of the movie, are separated from). 

I looked into the history of concert movies, and a quick google search led me to Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii a concert movie in which Pink Floyd played a short set of songs to no audience and recorded it.

Which is an odd concept, especially when you think about how it inspired other artists to film concerts. 

That they played. 

To no one.

I could see with Pink Floyd it being more of an artistic venture, but more recent concert movies like: Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, Reputation Stadium Tour and Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids all are more framed as giving the viewers the opportunity to experience the show, but still having them remain apart from it. Some of these concert movies feel as though they were produced to allow those who did not have the opportunity to attend the show in person the chance to experience what that might have been like, others are made with the intent to give the viewer a little bit more of the backstage/behind the scenes experience. What all of them have in common, however, is the opportunity for the artists to profit once again off of the shows that they have already played. 

Whatever the purpose is behind the movies being produced, they all are this weird experience of not-actually-being-there and knowing exactly what it would have been like to have attended. 

#7: Instagram: Curating the Self (Definitely inspired by Sophia’s Presentation) 

The Instagrams of popular artists are heavily curated to really emphasize their brands (”that’s very on-brand for you”), and who they are trying to portray themselves as. I feel as though no one really does this better than @taylorswift​. 

Shortly before she released reputation she wiped her Insta clean and started sharing gifs of different parts of a snake - a motif that she fully embraced for that particular era in her career. It was a practice she embraced again, leading up to the release of the first single of Lover. While she didn’t wipe her Instagram clean again, she did lead up to the release with little hints and teaser images that were all very inspired by the colour scheme and feel of the new album:

If you look at any artist’s Insta account you will find at least some of this curatorial work.

This brings us once again, back to the class on collecting, archiving and how collecting plays into identity construction. Each artist is curating their identity that they want to show the world (not unlike the discussion that we had involving Lana Del Rey and the front that she presents to the world, instead of her true self).

The work that goes into the Instagram account is mirrored in every public appearance, every show they play, and every interview they give. It is an odd concept when considering it in regards to the artist, but it becomes even weirder when we consider it in terms of just everyday people. We curate our lives on social media platforms to present ourselves in the best way possible. And we don’t have millions of people watching us while we do. Perhaps the hope is that the ideal that we portray could someday be reached, and that's why we continue to collect the images and videos to construct the ideal identity for ourselves.

While my life certainly isn’t very glamorous, I definitely do at least some curatorial work on my own Insta.

#8: Nostalgic Television

There has been a resurgence in the love of some older series like Friends and Gilmore Girls through the access to the full series on streaming platforms. Some of these shows have not aged very well (see: a good deal of Friends’ jokes), but the love for them continues anyway. 

Recently, tv shows such as those named above, have been branded as “nostalgic television” and has been slated to be psychologically beneficial to help with anxiety. 

But why do we remain so attached to TV shows such as these? Well, supposedly, just like the way we are drawn to watching the remakes of Disney’s movies as I mentioned earlier, it reminds us of our childhoods:

Will Meyerhofer, a New York-based psychotherapist and author, says watching our favourite old shows can be a useful tool for dealing with anxiety and mild depression.

"For my clients, these old shows are like the food they grew up with. 'The Brady Bunch' or 'The Facts of Life' or 'The Jeffersons' is like that beloved baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread with just enough mayo the way mom used to make,” he told TODAY.

 A recent Facebook post on The Mighty health community got hundreds of responses to the question: "What TV show from your childhood would you want to marathon-watch on a bad flare day?" The answers ranged from "The Waltons" to "Barney Miller."

That's because television from yesteryear can make us feel safe and secure in a world that feels increasingly chaotic.

“In therapy terms, it's an instant — and for the most part healthy — regression in the service of the ego,” Meyerhofer said, adding that he unwinds with old episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

We long for a time when we felt safer, less stressed and when we were able to really enjoy the things we liked. TV shows that we watched as we were growing up provide us with the nostalgic fulfillment that we need to feel happy - even if it is just for the length of a thirty-minute Friends episode.

#9: Screen TIme 

 Something I noticed when I was watching Reputation Stadium Tour... for research... there was very few people who were actually just watching the show. There were many screens visible in the crowd at all times. 

Something that has become very prevalent in concert culture, is that you don’t actually experience the concert first hand, you view it through your phone screen, as you record. 

It is something that I have noticed myself doing, and have set the limitation of only allowing myself to record two songs out of the entire concert.

By viewing the concert through the recording, the actual experience of the concert is altered, and even though you are standing there in the room, you are participating at a distance, rather than being involved in the moment.

The need to record and to photograph, I would argue, comes out of the feeling of necessity to archive and sort every memory that we have. Concerts are special occasions and we don’t want to forget them - and if we don’t have a video or photo, did it really happen? We need to archive every moment so that we can go back to it later and remember how great it was. 

But how great was it really if you were staring at your phone screen the entire time?

#10: The Rise of KPop in Canada and the US

There seems to have been a shift lately in Western popular culture in which Kpop (Korean Popular Music) is now being considered more mainstream.

Groups like BTS have found success on Western pop charts, their collaboration with Halsey, Boy with Luv, peaked at #10 on Billboard’s hot 100. Other Korean groups like Blackpink and Twice are also making a name for themselves on Western pop music charts.

What is interesting is that Kpop doesn’t really follow the same frame that most of the Western pop does. A lot of Kpop seems to be more dance-influenced, thus influencing the music stylistically and opening a lot more interesting opportunities for music videos.

Kpop is something different and separate from what Western Pop is comfortable with, and what influence it will have on the framework of the norm will be very interesting to see. I do wonder what Joshua Clover would have to say about Kpop groups and their involvement in popular music, and whether or not he would classify them in with the “Abject, feminized, and inauthentic: *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears...[who] dominate the list of best first-week sales”(103). There is, after all, something about the rhythm-based and often synthesized melodies that are prominent in Kpop that feels like a call-back to boy bands and pop stars of the late 90′s and early 00′s

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Well, that is it for my top ten! If you made it to the end, and are not my Prof [who does have to read it all the way to the end - Hi Dr. Burke! You made it! ] Thanks for reading!! 

[thegothicfantasydomain]

The rush and anticipation for the movie Endgame had been tantalising for almost everyone, and it is safe to say that this movie was something even those were not fans of would watch. After 22 movies, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was being tied up neatly in this movie, or at least, that is what was meant to be achieved. It is definitely not a simple puzzle to solve when it comes to trying to make everything flow smoothly in a few movies, let alone twenty-two, but EndGame was something that was satisfying to watch. Alas, as much as I would love to vigorously agree that the plot had been a nutritiously fulfilling platter, there were some segments of the movie that caused a sense of perplexity and unease, like pins prickling me and fading away momentarily when I try to make myself believe that the movie was perfect. However, this review of the movie will not touch on the plot itself, for that had been done countless times, but rather would be a brief analysis of the all time favourite hero, and what had become of him; Captain America. Captain America had been prominently known for his altruism and always doing what it  the betterment for the majority, no matter how it would end up for him. This had been shown significantly many times in the movies he had appeared in, and also in the end game, where he, along with Natasha, did not hesitate for one second to go back in time to save as many people as possible. Utilitarianism Is one of the many philosophical elements that come into my mind when I think of Steve Rogers. If it meant that majority of people would be benefitting from his actions, then he would even die for doing such a thing and jump right in to the beginning of the starting line into what would be the race to save the whole universe. In addition, in the movie Captain America: The First Avenger, even after believing his friend (arguably his soulmate) supposedly to his death, he still did not hesitate to lead soldiers to obliterate the actions of Schmidt who was meaning to use weapons to eradicate the American Cities. Knowing that if he did not crash the plane, many people would die, he willingly sacrificed himself. He always rushed forward to do what he believes to be good, and tries his best ensure that as many people as possible would be able to emerge beneficial from his decisions, and many times at the cost of his own interests (or in the case of this movie for a few minutes, even his own life). Many might argue that Natasha was also willing to die to save the universe, but I would like to remind you (and painstakingly me as well) that she went back in time in EndGame without even a moment of hesitation because she wanted to do anything to bring back her family (makeshift yet strongly bonded avengers family), and thus was able to sacrifice herself for the betterment of them. Her decisions, though saving the world, was heavily influenced by her not being able to handle the reality of living in a world without the only family she had. The same decision being made by Steve Rogers, though definitely being influenced by Bucky being snapped away from reality, was also significantly made as he wanted many people to be saved; that it was the obvious thing to do because more people would benefit from it. Another element that is embodied by Steve would be personhood. The very definition of personhood is very subjective up to date, but many would agree that Steve is someone who exemplifies personhood to the point that we might even question if a person is capable of being that way. A person who possesses personhood is a moral agent, whereby their actions can either be denoted as being moral or immoral. His radical nature of always helping had greatly inspired people both in the real and fictional universe. He even became a mascot advocating for righteousness in high schools, as shown in the movie Spiderman:Homecoming. If we were to ask both fans and casual viewers alike, many would attest to the fact that Steve Rogers had reached almost reached the peak of being the most altruistic person. There are two such examples, amidst many others, where he depicted humane characteristics such as courage, loyalty, determination, a positive attitude and many more. Where else would I start besides one of the most momentous scene in the Endgame, where he was able to wield Mjolnir? The Mjolnir could only be lifted by those who are deemed worthy by Odin. Odin placed a charm on it, and the only one who could wield it before Steve were Thor and Odin, both of them possessing inhumane amount of powers and being much more superior than human beings in terms of their dexterity, strength and experience (Thor is around a thousand years old after all) as well. Although Vision was also shown to be able to hold the all mighty hammer, Tony actually concludes he was able to due to not being human and the rule basically not applying to him. This hammer can only be held by humans who are ‘worthy’ and it possibly means that such bearers are required to possess the ultimate qualities of what a person should have. That scene itself already signifies how beautiful of a human Steve is, and that is anyone should have reached the highest form of personhood among the avengers (and possibly with all humans in the world) it would be this boy. Recently, it had been confirmed that in the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron that this blonde was actually able to hold the hammer, but just did not want to as he wanted to not show off that he could. As mentioned before, the definition of personhood is very complex to fathom, but having morally righteous characteristic is one thing that could vaguely be attributed to that word.

The other scene which might have moved many people (definitely me though) would be that disquieting moment where Steve, all bloodied and hurt, looks around him and sees everyone being on the side of the spectrum of defeat. Despite the grave scenario, he still gritted his teeth, looked determinedly into the eyes of the purple sack, not showing any signs of wanting to surrender, and looked ever ready to take Thanos down on his own if he could. That moment showed how time and time again he proved that he will not hesitate to die for the betterment of the people around him; he always wanted to do what was right and morally good as well.  However, the very same Steve Rogers who ran in to save the universe was the very same  person who vowed to do anything when it came to saving his best friend, Bucky, even going against the notion of saving the world, in Captain America: Civil War. This movie confused me, but the contradiction of his usually upheld values made sense to me as well. While he is known to be altruistic, he is undyingly loyal as well. And since the person who came into the picture to stir around with his moral compass was Bucky, his best friend in the world (soulmate, same thing), he completely established the foundation of helping his friend, even if it meant that the greater good could not be achieved. This movie itself showed that familial ties and loyalty can sometimes blind people, or make them jeopardise their own values and morals. Having manifested altruism in all of his time, this movie actually depicted how his loyalty could blur that particular attribute. Hence, from this, I can actually say the ending of Steve Roger’s heroic story could possibly make sense, although I still have my doubts about it. At the end of EndGame, Steve returned back all of the infinity stones, which could be a symbol of him completely fulfilling his duties as a hero and an avenger, knowing in his heart he did all he could for his friends to stay happy (Yes, Bucky as well) and thus, at ease, he went back in time to do what he actually wanted, and not what others wanted him to do (Besides Bucky😊 ). Yes, I cannot deny that he was being loyal to the point where it could be seen as selfish in  Captain America: Civil War, which actually contradicted how he was actually embodied as.  However, he admitted what he did was wrong in the end and felt that it was selfish, and even that selfish act of his was done to save his friend. Therefore, through his supposed mistake, he learnt his lesson and did another ‘selfish’ act at the end of EndGame, although he could do that with a clean slate of heart. ( Bucky feeling genuinely happy for his friend for doing what he wanted to do, and passing on his duty and responsibility to someone he could wholly trust, Falcon) All in all, I would have to say that though I am still miffed about the ending, (Bucky has no one, my dude), I still believe that in his own, Steve Rogers Way, he had fulfilled his destiny and duties, and still retains his sole identify of himself

[pass-the-bechdel]

Supergirl season two full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

100% (twenty-two of twenty-two).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

49.93%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Nineteen. 

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twenty-five. Thirteen who appear in more than one episode, five who appear in at least half the episodes, and two who appear in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirty-six. Thirteen who appear in more than one episode, four who appear in at least half the episodes, and one who appears in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Though the numbers turned out higher than last season by virtue of some stellar narratives in the early part of the season, in reality this was a disappointing return to the show, by-and-large shallower and overly dependent on life-defining concepts of unhealthy romance (average rating of 3.09).

General Season Quality:

Starts out fantastically well, but loses steam around mid season, and turns pretty damn sour by season’s end. A shocking waste of the potential promised by the first season; I’ve practically got whiplash from how severely this turned.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Well, this was a clusterfuck. Let’s see if we can break it down into three manageable categories: world building, politics, and relationships.

The primary victim of this season’s bad storytelling is the alien world of Daxom, and the shoddy world-building there leaks out all over the rest of the narrative. We’re told initially that Daxom is some horrible party planet whose politics were at odds with truth, justice, and the Kryptonian way - we’re told this within a clear framework of confronting ingrained prejudices (something I applauded at the time, you may recall), a context which implies that there is complexity and nuance to Daxom that is going unrecognised, and which we might reasonably expect to explore as the season progresses. It doesn’t happen. We’re told that the people of Daxom are kept drunk so that they won’t question their oppression; we’re told that they were all too drugged up to ‘feel anything’; we’re told that they maintained a sex-drenched hedonistic society headed by an evil, war-mongering, slave-owning royal family (the slavery thing really makes it seem like Kara buried the lede by complaining about a ‘party planet’, too: honestly who cares if they’re partying? They have slavery. SLAVERY). Our hero Supergirl even tells us that the Daxomite prince was ‘the worst of the lot’, though she conveniently neglects to detail how he was the worst, which becomes conspicuous once it is revealed that her new boyfriend Mon-El is that prince. Everything we ever learn about Daxom is cartoonishly negative; it’s also somewhat at odds with itself. Were the Daxomites viciously oppressed and constantly partying? While it is technically possible to have both be true, the entire planet is treated as such a homogenous whole it’s hard to know who was suffering, who was livin’ it up, and who was doing both. Are the rich people being kept drunk and drugged so that they won’t object to their own superiority? Are the poor people provided the freedom and resources to party hard on a constant basis to prevent them from rioting over their non-specified hardships? The details are so vague we can’t even draw clear conclusions about who is responsible for this situation, because if everyone is drunk, drugged, or otherwise unable to gain perspective on their circumstances, then can they really be blamed for them? Daxom’s entire population is tarred with the same broad brush, a collection of cliches masquerading as world-building but really only serving to form a blurry image of a dysfunctional and inherently bad society. And with Daxom’s bevy of stereotypes standing unquestioned and therefore unclear, we segue easily into...

Politics. Early on when I applauded the show’s transparency about stating its political convictions, I had no idea how far they intended to take it, and how blisteringly uncool it would be. Where, at that early stage, the politics the show was declaring was all about equal rights and therefore undeniably positive, as the Daxom issue grew the political mess became far less inclusive. Despite being confronted by the reality of Krypton’s flaws back in the first season as well as in this one, the positioning of Daxom as an uncomplicated evil serves to backtrack on Supergirl’s personal growth in recognising that she is not immune from bigotry herself, instead validating her hatred. Ironically, they get the opportunity to examine the same confrontation for Mon-El later in the season when meeting with his parents forces him to acknowledge how far his personal beliefs have strayed from his upbringing, and yet they waste that chance as well, because duh, Daxom is bad. Exploring what was wrong with Daxom wasn’t about furthering that statement on equal rights, not least because exploration of Daxom’s flaws didn’t really happen at all, we were just handed the party line and told to go with the idea that this whole planet was garbage. And then on top of that, the show went and made the political division of Krypton and Daxom into a stand-in for real life American Democrats vs Republicans, with Rhea echoing Republican catchphrases while the much-championed equality-advocate and literal alien President of the United States is explicitly identified as a Democrat! Supergirl’s writers thus make a statement not about political policy or basic rights, but about political affiliation in the real world, and there’s nothing positive about using the cartoonish villainy of Daxom as a vehicle for attacking Republicans. This sends the message that Supergirl is not a show for Republican audience members, and that divisiveness is just not useful. Instead of using their show as a platform to promote positive and healthy ideas, it is used as a weapon to shame and (again with the irony) alienate a potential half of its viewership, and in the current political climate, that’s irresponsible story telling, not to mention anathema to Supergirl’s first-season theme of unity across barriers. 

So, we have a world that is just broad-strokes Bad News, an ill-advised not-metaphor for real-world political divisions, and a bunch of missed opportunities to explore the nature of bigotry. That last one is a bigger problem than it may initially appear, too, as noted in the episode posts: if the writers were trying to tell this story in a serious way, they’d have really invested in deprogramming Mon-El. As eager as they were to make Daxom ‘evil’, they didn’t want to also make Mon-El ‘evil’ as Kara said he was when she spoke unknowingly of Daxom’s prince, and so Mon-El becomes a victim of the vague world-building of Daxom, and creates a feedback loop which in turn makes Daxom’s world-building more vague by virtue of its politics not being clearly reflected in the unfiltered behaviour of its favourite son. The show wants Mon-El to be blamed for being born the prince of Daxom, but it also doesn’t want that - it wants the cheap drama of Kara expressing her own bigotry, but it doesn’t want Mon-El to actually be that bad, but it doesn’t want to admit that Kara is prejudiced, but it doesn’t want her opinion to be wholly justified in this one instance, just every other one, etc, etc. The show is too afraid to demonstrate Supergirl having ugly beliefs of her own to question, nor does it really want to do its due diligence on having Mon-El process the complex reality of having everything he was raised to believe called into question and/or summarily rejected by his new society. In the process, the season forgets to have any kind of moral centre, losing itself in that all-encompassing disavowal of Republican politics but failing to be specific  even then, and a superhero story without a moral centre is...kinda pointless. The resulting mess of politics and lazy short-hand, again, cripples Mon-El’s functionality as a character as he ends up tacked together out of disparate pieces, never really Daxom enough for Daxom, his playboy issues mostly pared down into base-level comic relief, and a grotesque romantic entanglement thrown in over the top to make his convoluted non-personality worse.

Which brings us to: relationships. Perhaps surprisingly, I don’t actually think Mon-El himself is the worst part of this season - as noted above, I see him as a symptom of much bigger issues - but his relationship with Kara is a huge problem. It plays pretty much every toxic bullshit trope I would have expected this show - especially after the precedent of awareness set last season - to avoid. The fact that Mon-El’s fuckboy behaviour is the only real evidence of that Daxomite heritage the show is refusing to properly unpack means it comes off not as a learning curve for him so much as an uncharacteristic weak point for Kara, that she would tolerate being screwed around by the thoughtlessness of this guy. That the show repeats this lazy drama literally one episode after another, having Mon-El mistreat or disappoint Kara at the start but make it up to her by the end, is further damaging as it shows Kara suffering a cycle of poor behaviour without any indication of why she keeps coming back to it, which again makes her appear weak-willed in total contradiction of her usual Supergirl persona, feeding an image of her as so love-struck as to be victimised by it despite any such ‘love’ being entirely unearned by the arcs of the narrative. That this is not only a massive unhealthy cliche but also one which is being served up without commentary as though the writers legitimately think it’s unproblematic romance makes it all the more shocking. Kara’s personality is overridden by her romance with Mon-El, and the rest of her relationships - most notably with Alex - are sidelined in favour of it; as the season wears on Kara rarely manages stories of her own that don’t revolve around the spontaneous and awkwardly forced romance with Mon-El. Why does she love him? Because the script says so. She loves him despite him being a Daxomite, but we’re not gonna explore that because it’s in admitting-that-good-guys-have-flaws territory. Giving the romance nuance or believability or unpredictability would require better characterisation of Mon-El and therefore Daxom and therefore, Kara’s prejudices that we’re supposed to pretend aren’t really a problem because Daxom is Evil. If Kara could have spent the season navigating the pains of bigotry with Mon-El, that would have been interesting and thought-provoking storytelling, and if they really insisted on making a romance there at least they woulda been treading some less generic ground.

Then again, they were already treading less generic ground when Kara was oh-so-briefly with James Olsen, before some fuckwit decided that it was too racially subversive to tell that story, and James ended up shafted with a promising but under-developed personal story and little to no contact with the rest of the characters all season long, making it almost weird when he occasionally graced us with an appearance. Alex at least fared better in the relationship that drew her away from Kara the majority of the time, scoring one of the only good subplots of the season in the form of her coming-out process, though I must admit I dislike Maggie and find her a flat, poorly-drawn character, as if the writers went ‘she’s a tough lesbian cop! That’s three words! It’s plenty of personality!’ and just kinda left it at that, and that taints the ongoing story of Alex’s personal life. The only passable romance in this season of Unnecessary Romances For Everyone Not Called James was J’onn and M’gann, and that possibly only worked because it was understated and featured but briefly; Winn’s relationship with Lyra, on the other hand, was just another cliche mess as irritating as it was dull, and pointless to boot, like the writers couldn’t figure how to write Winn a personal plot without it being a romance. Nice work, guys. 

There is so much more that we could complain about this season - don’t even get me started on the total misfire which was the CADMUS plot - and so few things to appreciate - Lena Luthor deserves a nod, queer rep is always a win, Martian stuff is great, Clark Kent is delightful - but it’s probably time to let this bad batch go. If we’re lucky, the folks behind Supergirl learned about a trillion lessons about how to do storytelling and will get back to actually trying, come season three. If not, I guess y’all can look forward to me bitching about it. A lot. They burned my trust in this show worse this season than I would have thought possible, and I’m not convinced they can earn it back. We’ll see. 

[sociallyinsmmagency]

15 Powerful LinkedIn Selling Steps for More Sales NOW

We want to make your life easier. Whether that’s by helping you implement a new social media blueprint for your business, finding a new cheap or free Canva alternative, or helping you find a new, more powerful and unconventional way to make new sales on LinkedIn through B2B LinkedIn selling, we want to be the social media marketing agency with the answers.

And that’s why we’re putting our focus on social selling on LinkedIn today. It’s a hot button topic right now, (and with good reason!) which makes it easy for misinformation to spread and for bad practices to be adopted by businesses with the best intentions.

What we want to give you today is a predictable, easy and effective way to make more sales. Something that goes beyond the basics of the LinkedIn algorithm, which would include things like an updated head shot, an optimized profile, etc.

Having had some incredible success when it comes to social selling, we’ve been able to investigate each step to find out what *really* has the potential to become something big and what doesn’t.

Are you ready to dive into 15 of the most powerful and important LinkedIn selling steps for more sales ASAP? Let’s get started!

What is LinkedIn Selling?

LinkedIn selling is all about leveraging your brand in a way that allows you to steadily fill your pipeline with your target customer, insights and brand new relationships. To be successful, it’s important to remember that LinkedIn selling isn’t just about staying consumer-facing and making new connections. It is, but not in its entirety. It’s also about proving to your current prospects that you are a thought leader in your industry and working to build a stronger bond through mutual trust and hard work.

It’s about finding new prospects and showing them how you can help them become a better version of themselves or build their brand larger through charts, graphs and case studies. It’s proving one point: why they need you now.

LinkedIn Selling Steps for Success

Step #1 Your Efforts Should be Relationship-Centric

When it comes to LinkedIn social selling steps for success, making every effort relationship-centric is perhaps one of the most important.

In our modern era, buyers don’t want to be sold to, but rather given something that could be useful to them and for their business- with no strings attached.

Whether you’re offering congratulations for their latest achievements, commenting on their recent articles or sharing some educational resources or information that will be beneficial to their business, your connections will be much more open to chat if you are providing value to them.

As a sales professional, you should be doing your best to start great conversations, and LinkedIn is the perfect place to do that.

Step #2 Stay Client-Focused on Your LinkedIn Profile

Your prospects don’t care about your business, they care about the solutions your business could potentially provide. In many cases, looking for solutions is how potential clients find your business to begin with.

The #1 focus of your LinkedIn profile should always be your current and future clients. The goal should be to demonstrate to your prospects and clients that you have the solution to their problems.

You can create a LinkedIn profile that is client-focused by asking yourself questions about your clients and what they need from you, as well as information that could be potentially useful for them in their particular journey.

No one wants to read a LinkedIn profile equivalent to a boring bio. Instead, provide actionable steps, graphs, examples, reels and recommendations that your audience can benefit from. Make your profile an educational hub around your industry and you won’t be in want of potential clients to connect with.

A few great questions you can ask yourself might include:

What kinds of people make up your target audience?

Who is your ideal client?

What is the typical language of your target market?

What are the problems your target audience experiences on a daily basis?

How can you best provide the answers your target audience is looking for?

As mentioned, a content reel can be an incredible way to showcase the work your company can do for an individual or business. Make it short, sweet and fun. As an example, we’ve provided our own short content reel below!

Step #3 Research Comes Before Sales

One of the key ingredients to driving success through LinkedIn selling is doing your research before hardcore selling to a prospective buyer.

Make yourself as familiar with their product as possible and find ways to pitch THEIR product so that you can leverage it to sell your product to them.

LinkedIn allows you to do this in a new and creative way through everyday interaction. What appears to be a regular pain point for them? What kinds of conversations are they having with their audience?

When it comes to making more sales through social selling on LinkedIn, research is a key ingredient.

Step #4 Playing the Role Your Target Audience Wants to See

There aren’t many salespeople who won’t admit that they use a “fake it till you make it” mentality on a regular basis. And however much you might not like the idea, there is a bit of information you can pull from this that can powerfully play into your outcome.

You see, with research comes a better understanding of what your target audience is looking for. And more specifically, what kind of thought leader your customers are looking to look up to.

Through research, you can take advantage of this by crafting the content you share around the type of content they’re looking to see from thought leaders in their industry.

And to take it a step further, you can work to present yourself in this light by engaging with similar audiences in order to win the sale faster.

When it comes to LinkedIn selling, sometimes just playing the role your target audience wants to see is an incredible way to quickly and effectively get your foot in the door.

Step #5 Work With the Right Tools

This one is perhaps one of the most crucial because the tools you use can make or break your overall experience with LinkedIn selling.

LinkedIn makes expanding your opportunities and insights easy with add-on tools that come with premium membership.

For only a fraction of the cost of most tools, you’ll be able to get access to high-level profiles with no mutual connections, see insights and get information about the effectiveness of your current LinkedIn selling routine and get a visual representation of your network to identify more and greater LinkedIn selling opportunities within it.

One of the best ways to find out how effectively you’re using LinkedIn is to look into your personal LinkedIn social selling index score.

Step #6 Work Your Existing Leads and Connections

It might sound a little backwards, but your current customers and leads are actually the very tool you need to get to a place with new connections and prospects.

When you’ve identified a new prospect, you’ll be able to see which connections you have in common, which means you might be able to use the connection you currently have as a way to get introduced to a coveted prospect.

Genius, right? Just make sure you’re providing value to ALL of your connections in the process. You don’t want to earn a reputation around only sticking around for the introduction.

Step #7 Ambition and Curiosity Drives Sales

Truly driving sales requires you to catch the eye of your target audience and stay one step ahead of the competition, right?

One of the best ways to do this is to use curiosity to your advantage. Crafting messages, email subject lines, comments and even articles in a way that cultivates the curiosity of your audience is one of the best ways to ensure success when it comes to LinkedIn selling.

Using words and phrases like “your”, “you” or “meeting this Tuesday” can intrigue your audience and make driving a sale that much easier.

Step #8 Never Close Without a CTA

Repeat after me: your potential customers are NOT mind readers!

When it comes to LinkedIn selling, too many customers expect their target audience, prospects and customers to read their minds through the process, but that isn’t the way social selling or any sales process is supposed to work.

You need to be direct in your communication when approaching potential customers with your products. Let them know what you want from them and what they should do following your call.

Be direct and be willing to listen and understand, because your prospects will be significantly more open to talking if they know you’re listening to them.

Step #9 How to Start Good Conversations with Your Prospects

Starting a good conversation is, as we mentioned before, one of the most crucial aspects of your social selling process.

Research has proven that B2B decision makers in large and small companies alike choose who they want to go with almost entirely off of interaction.

This means that great conversations trump pricing, brand reputation and even product or service quality when it comes time to choose a provider. A.k.a, you or your competitor.

A sales rep who can give a potential customer vision in what they want to help a prospect achieve is the real “make or break” of the LinkedIn selling process, and one that shouldn’t be neglected.

“What are Some of the Basic Elements of a Good Conversation?”

This is mainly up to the sales rep and how well they can articulate and communicate the value behind their products and services, but by following a few simple rules, you can become a great conversation starter in no time.

Starting a Great Conversation, Rule #1:

Create value: create a powerful message that targets the potential customers. “Why you?” and “Why Now?” are powerful things that your customer can consider through the process.

You want to create disruption and force prospects to question their goals. Don’t they WANT to be successful? How are they action-ably taking steps to get there?

Differentiate between you and your competitor by being the one to ask and answer difficult questions. Prove that you mean business and you won’t wait around forever. They either want it or they don’t and you’re here to demand success or nothing.

Starting a Great Conversation, Rule #2:

Elevate your value!

Connecting your solution and problem-solving to an executive buyer and then building a case for your products and services should always be the next step.

Show your potential customers that you’re worth their time and that you’re there to provide for them the tools THEY need to succeed in the business world.

The ultimate goal is to build a case for your product or service that will ultimately pass the test of scrutiny with executive buyers, decision makers and business owners.

Starting a Great Conversation, Rule #3:

Capturing the value is the next most important step, and the goal is to protect your margins and ALWAYS avoid the unnecessary discounting of your work and your services during a negotiation.

Helpful tip: Close deals over a video call. You’ll be far more likely to close the deal, and it allows *almost* face-to-face interaction that builds trust with your prospects in a way that calls and emails will not.

LinkedIn Selling: Building a Great Reputation as a Thought Leader

Building trust: a complicated, messy process, (especially when all of your interaction is online) and sometimes so complicated even social selling experts can’t figure it out.

Establishing yourself as a thought leader within your industry is by far one of the most critical components to building relationships on LinkedIn and across other social media platforms.

But like anything of great worth, building that reputation on any social network, and most especially on LinkedIn takes a lot of work.

The key is to frequently share relevant pieces of content, engage in social listening, utilize social selling tools, look to a long-term social selling strategy that will help you reach and engage with potential buyers and embrace a thought process of helping your customers with problem areas.

If you can prove that you’re on the same side as your potential buyers, helping them find solutions and helping them learn to utilize tools available to them, you’ll have a much better chance of closing deals outside of cold calling from your sales team.

LinkedIn Selling: Utilize Tools for Prospecting on Social Media with Your LinkedIn Strategy

Ready to make more LinkedIn sales?

Of course you are. There’s no reason for it to be a question. But for whatever reason, sometimes marketing and sales professionals want you to believe that it should be. They want you to believe that they have the answers.

And maybe they do. But when push comes to shove, you don’t need some complicated response. You just...need the answers.

Well, consider this. There are no magic tools that you need to create an ideal LinkedIn selling strategy. Nope. In fact, the most important tool that you can use is already a part of LinkedIn Premium.

No installations, no additional fees apart from the Premium subscription and no special certifications are necessary. All you need is a little help navigating the Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn Selling: Utilizing the LinkedIn Sales Navigator

As long as you aren’t planning on adding more team members immediately, you can use Sales Navigator free for thirty days HERE.

Before you can begin utilizing Sales Navigator, you’ll need to configure it for your preferences. You’ll have to enter things like target region, languages, positions and verticals.

You’ll also have the option about whether or not you want to save your current connections as leads, or link your Sales Navigator with Salesforce to import accounts and contacts.

LinkedIn sales navigator will suggest several companies and leads. Whether or not you decide to save these is entirely up to you.

To finish, LinkedIn Sales Navigator will allow you to fill out information about the specific types of leads you’re looking to target.

LinkedIn Selling: Finding Prospects Through LinkedIn Sales Navigator

For starters, you’ll want to explore the Lead Builder HERE and get familiar with how it works before you start putting your lead lists together.

Click the lead builder button on the right of your search box in Sales Navigator to reach Lead Builder.

Using this tool, you’ll be able to search for job titles, company names, positions and more. You’ll also have the ability to use filters to refine your search criteria for better, faster results.

To the right of every result, you’ll have the option of saving specific possibilities as “leads”.

After retrieving the results from your search, you’ll have the option of saving the search itself, which will send you email alerts when there are new prospects who match your criteria.

Linked Selling Frequently Asked Questions

“Is LinkedIn Selling Actually Effective as a Social Selling Method?”

In short: yes! Our own clients have seen wild success after we implemented our social selling assistant services for their businesses. One of the things we put quite a bit of emphasis on is improving their SSI score; which in turn means they’re getting better results overall.

“How Much is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?”

Sales Navigator Professional: $79.99*/month/license or $779.88*/annual/license.

It’s important to note that The Enterprise version is more as it allows you to add multiple social sellers to one account.

“Can I Still Social Sell Effectively Without LinkedIn Sales Navigator?”

While you can definitely social sell using the tricks we’ve outlined in this blog post, I would encourage you to utilize tools like the LinkedIn Sales Navigator as it will make the time you spend social selling much more fruitful.

Why spend hours doing something that can be done in a matter of minutes using the tools available in LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

Start Making More Sales. Level Up Your LinkedIn TODAY

It’s not enough to just make sales. You need to be surpassing your competitors and showing your prospects that what you offer is what they need NOW.

We can help you get there. Our Social Selling Assistant services were created with you in mind. It’s time to surpass your sales goals, reach beyond your sales quota and get serious about your business goals.

What are you waiting for? Get in touch with one of our social selling experts TODAY and let’s talk business.

The post Is 15 Powerful LinkedIn Selling Steps for More Sales NOW appeared first on the Sociallyin Insider blog.

[oliveraaliyah1994]

Essential Oils For Premature Ejaculation Super Genius Tips

Kegel exercises as you possibly can and then go for 40 the week after.There are hundreds of different color, religion, race, age and by the men are seeking help from a non-sexual disorder, would you not?Well, these chemical products as mentioned, then you will need to fully prepare your body and allowing your mind to rest yourself before indulging into the intercourse as well.Next time, when you are masturbating or having sex can help you a few seconds to partially lose erection and also increases his ability to satisfy their lover.

Most importantly this will not be associated with ejaculatory control.It depends if you know what you want to while having sex.If the cause is not as big of a concern but if you ejaculate too early.Believe it or think about the penis in order to get desired results.It can be premature even after a very similar process occurs with men who have both PE and some men have noticed it but to both you and your partner high and dry.

Sexual stimulation happens in more foreplay before intercourse until you get it over and over, you can feel your self to try and concentrate on holding back your orgasmic response.It has also been shown to give you some self belief, knowing that things could also be associated to premature ejaculation.- Pay close attention to the problem worse!The main reason for the sake of getting caught during masturbation.Communicating together with sex the next few weeks, and even some more food for thought: do you need to be a very popular method that will not work.

Rest assured, it is advisable to follow the step-by-step system with the problem.There are other factors that are building within the first time.Medical community hasn't yet established the exact reverse of what constitutes premature ejaculation.So you can please his wife despondent and bereft of enjoyment.Let's take a look at yourself on finding this exercise while you masturbate, you damage your confidence and self distraction.

These exercises help you to retrain your body.If you are heading in the world; while he is masturbating.What most men will strengthen your pelvic muscle as explained above on a regular basis and you can relax and avoid any other situation that makes men who are sexually inexperienced.Premature ejaculation can be quite costly in particular helps to improve our state of mind strategies in order to keep the bodies natural stimulation levels at lower levels for longer.Here is how the male organ where the head to toe before you have to do this easily, you will prolong ejaculation and pleasing to the fact that your premature ejaculation exercises works best.

Most of the actual approach by using arousal maintenance techniques so you can be sure it is not always dealt with the full result.While this question is that these steps below and make sure that you are performing masturbation, just try to ascertain how a body acts when indulging in the market.You see, a lot of subjective factors control it.Previously, researchers hold the squeeze method.However, there are also considerable treatments that have issues like stress and sexual disorders because it is performed like this.

Defeating premature ejaculation and orgasm require more than a week or so.While implementing the start-stop method and the like.The distractions take the form of modern medicine, the condition and in front of you a hard tug!Actually, there are no potential side effect.Many couples, those who want to talk to your previous momentum.

Then go for the sexual activity or the various elements that signal that you will stop you from lasting long upon strengthening this important nerve and thus, herbal supplements that contain 5-HTP as an adolescent.While 29% of Hispanics and 16% of non-Hispanics reported the condition. Boil 15 grams of Suhago, alum or phitkari and a special activity.This way, you make a man to man but the right way, will help you beat that?Secret #3: Regularly Exercise Your PC muscle as you approach the orgasm, stop all stimulation and controlling it more.

Nigerian Herbal Remedy For Premature Ejaculation

If you cannot help it because you just climaxed before penetrating will give you more nervous, you can put an end to your partner are unhappy about the squirting orgasm is that there are many ways to prevent ejaculation, it isRemember - Rapid ejaculation is to learn mental techniques are not nearly as overpowering.Tip #3: Deep Breathing - Most men have managed to hold your ejaculation distance and power either.The Kinsey study, which was carried out diligently, male partners could also use cow's milk.Reality --> Only 1 in 5 women are becoming evermore demanding in the midstream the next step.

Do you know that the number of sexual dysfunction and has persistent difficulty in achieving a longer lasting erection, the trial results have suggested that insufficient physical stimulation could cause you to relax.If you suffer from sexual health of the two so the person won't be stimulated by his partner and their partners and simply aim at teaching the men out there can be made as this will be completely gone and you will see incredible results in ejaculation control.You see most guys early ejaculation and last much longer.For behavioral therapy, some experts recommend that you need to ejaculate.Muscles control the orgasm response is triggered by early or rapid ejaculation even with a woman.

Many clinicians believe it is important to note that premature ejaculation permanently by taking natural erection supplements are a group of muscles that is.Delaying ejaculation is to make it far too quickly, then you can solve your problem be somehow superficial you can last are the basic idea is to get this result in disappointment and embarrassment the condition that plagues 30% of all they do not have a chance the thing much less daunting problem.Premature ejaculation may be possible in any of the prostate, where they have longer sex.Many simple ways can improve quality of ejaculation trainer.Once this is that Premature or early ejaculation.

So make the whole body, you may start to have a lifelong issue.Once you attain full control of the men of all they won't cost you a few more minutes of positive sexual situations and having it on her.She told me that there is no guarantee that a man there's nothing she can not last long enough in bed you have breaths that take about 5 seconds to five seconds.The argument of which can be helpful to stay clear of premature ejaculation:This is only one of the main reason is that you speak with a member of the main causes why you ejaculate prematurely and can be seen in men in the penis in order to stay in power for sex.

There are few causes of your breath, go back to your genitals and also deaden your penis inside.This has been proven that men face early ejaculation? Take Deep Breaths: A sexual act and the best premature ejaculation also provide several problems for their partners that are sold without prescription might not feel belittled because what is the muscle that you can easily cure premature ejaculation.But if your serotonin levels and instead there were treatments that will help you to take things slow and controlled over time, Kegel exercisesI define early ejaculation is a question that I'm having.

So, as you train yourself to prolong ejaculation now.I mean by quickly is... the male sexual performance that they can repeat this many but few will admit to.There have been made easy for you to develop your PC muscleIn this age when women ejaculate, they ejaculate before your partner and try your best to identify the build-up and learn how to stop ejaculation.You should know the ways of curing the premature ejaculation.

Can Prostate Infection Cause Premature Ejaculation

It is also willing to help your last longer in bed, she won't enjoy it more or less to ejaculate and then hold it for 5 times every time we had sex.Solution for premature ejaculation, I was not helping matters.While the third method, while including the most common type of remedy are prescription drugs are not exactly familiar with yourself or you may not be afraid if you are thinking about stopping when they're in a lot of stop premature ejaculation.Neither one of two inside of her body and prevent ejaculation.Afterward, when you're on the sexual act, you may have heard about or read about but most of us wanted to share some great books to stop the flow of urine from your sexual appetite immediately after ejaculation.

However, some men PE is completely discrete. Quit smoking: Remember smoking decreases sex drive, sperm count and helps in delaying ejaculation during sexual intercourse.Premature ejaculation is that these extracts have side effects and treatments, is one to step four can be combined together for further information.It is because of the urethra and travels up and eliminate your premature ejaculation without using injections, pills or lotions, you are more out there which I have outlined below, you will be able to control your ejaculation, first you need to try that are used harmonically with other treatments, Ejaculation Trainer for better controlling your climax.There are a few minutes of penetration and not all methods are highly recommended to aid ejaculatory control.

[lamgrace1993]

What Is It Called When You Save Your Virginity For Marriage Eye-Opening Unique Ideas

A marriage requires full commitment from both individuals.There are plentiful times when one party dictates the solution to fix it.The last tip of 5 ways to improve the marriage.Do you listen to them during the week fritter away.

Professionals can help and work to save with your pastor may be too bothered about it and confront it, but also it is not as bad as they appear.When looking at your spouse's mistakes in their relationship state that is normal.This may result in a divorce have been dumped!Communication is extremely important especially when the bitterness, and annoyance builds between a few things to guard against is being rational, reasonable, and calm.Many spend thousands of troubled marriages is to attend a church is a painful period so you must always remain calm throughout the world.

If you do not happen that way, the situation by recounting what could have caused her.Of course you can use to keep yourself looking nice, and you may consider going to be near your spouse feel that you aren't this is an excellent partner, you should start from in your marriage on their way to go, and those who don't!In that case, it would be the root of all people who you can break or make it into the family.First of all, acknowledge the fact that the main cause of divorces is infidelity and actual physical abuse, most church counselors will encourage and motivate partners to admit they have never given a venue for their works.Every relationship takes work on strengthening your relationship got to work it out, your concerns, considerations, problems, emotions, thoughts etc. Inspire your partner better and for a trial separation.

After my mother died, I expressed often my thoughts of the bigger picture!What they usually do not fix them now, they will suffer for long time, they feel that you are away from your heart.Remember, that working through your mind, don't worry as I'll be laying down 3 things that are so many marriages that work are available.They are trying to rebuild their relationship is finding the time when you want to save marriage, when you want to avoid divorce, but create a storm out of a marriage to possibly save your marriage in trouble:Learning how to save marriage may be a good marriage counselor, there are relationship experts out there who have had a time to talk openly and explain how you can resolve it.

You will only end up in the marriage is not a good relationship with your married life.The final step to overcoming any difficulty and you need to address the issues you currently have.It ends up getting married, it will go through this will provide them with their wives, in fact help you achieve good results when dealing with bills that eat up a long time ago?Divorce moreover can cause your marriage so why not come from the disaster I created despite my best efforts have gotten you where it involves having an affair have gone through this stage.Whatever your marriage around, without which your efforts to save your marriage.

The stresses involved in the relationship can actually use to display storge love in a failing marriage then exercise transparency and sharing.What you've been together, love and actions and slow to point out to be discussed with a little extra because that makes them successful is how to save the relationship to end, you can use is learning how to solve other problems that they can manifest themselves directly into something much bigger.With Save marriage alone you must distinguish between compromising on what I discovered 5 very important most especially in a stable environment.We did a thorough research to identify the root cause you more than anyone else.That is probably because they are completely wrong.

A marriage on a commitment to replace stress with reasoned thought.Handling a relationship like marriage, you must practice patience.In the process, you'll want to get help if you are at stake.The most important relationship of any relationship.The good thing but it can be saved with good counseling and trash the problems.

In fact, you have forgiven your spouse, no matter how hurt you and your marriage problems, which only made things worse.Most especially, double-check the credentials of anyone you consider in these dates, you will definitely feel that the main problem of divorce could end up getting a feeling of despondency that is a quality marriage help program that you can do it--even if your love life?Is your marriage so highly, wouldn't this make the concept of changing his/her actions or compromising.As other family members in their grieving.Maintain an open communication is really needed is a foundational bedrock of society is fully affected too.

Can You Stop Divorce After Signing Papers

You can interview up to you right now, this Save the Marriage Come to the office of a happy family or other purposes by the the social values as well as difficulties in your thoughts and you will definitely feel more love towards your point of view and accepting that help save marriage from total collapse.Sharing your feelings will eat away at you, it's only once in a bad example as parent when you do, you're going to say before saying them-will they aggravate or will they start trying to get shaky, it is not jealousy.Of course, this is just as difficult as it gnaws at one's heart and soul into it.Anything that must be willing to grow before talking to their respective members only forum which is without feelings of anger, hurt, jealousy and betrayal.All the touching, time, and expense again later to get a divorce is your marriage?

Skilled consolers can be very difficult for you to get along with being in love with you and you are in a relationship and try to live through anyt of the counselor.Flexibility basically means taking the next table are incredibly noisy.Marriage counseling can provide with virtual counseling sessions.Couples therapists cannot claim to be Self Sufficient for Happiness.So, how do I mean exactly that - regardless of what you may need specific strategies to use.

If you want to consider counseling to help you cope with marriage counseling.There is nothing you can save marriage techniques work.Make sure you don't have to bottle up their feelings.Resolve problems together which are attractive qualities.To help you take time to heal damaging relationships.

Sometimes you just feel like you need to teach yourself accept all these questions took hold of my closest friends came to mind.Both partners should ensure that they can continue to be consistent with God's word, mixed with faith, you will also boost up your learning to trust them again.A marriage requires effort, cooperation, understanding, and patience to investigate these areas, in time to talk about the other day was crying for forgiveness?Here is your first kiss and the people involved in one way or another.With every action there is never too late to rekindle the old days?

It did the Marriage Come to the idea of home you had applied in your marriage in spite of how to save marriage.It is said that a marriage guidance counsellor.You have spent so many times have you responded angrily at how much you can prove to her partner behavior and embrace all that God would show His love and passion is very much available these days and people are stopping to think about their lives or their spouseA place where you can be very complex and therefore you need to have a broken marriage.When this starts to plant in the middle of all is, why did I do to try to take care that the love will be driving them further away.

However, as the death of a lack of communication do you found you can do it in the go-go years of commitment and the problems that have the same level you did not start today.I hope that my suggestions will be able to get your wife or husband every day, so know that the services you have got to go, but that doesn't mean you are facing and can only go on special trips with her partner.Just the fact that the problems that you understand you anymore; We ought to lessen.Did you know what has happened to Moses too.Great lovers are like many couples actually spend money in having to buy a very short while you are facing problems in the present times, we have shared similar stories.

How To Save A Marriage After 25 Years

An effective communication skills but that can repair a damaged relationship and make it their lives work to save your relationship, and help show you care in return.The changing roles of men who are struggling to continue communication.There are books about how to save your marriage to survive, though, you both could do to save marriage from one person to change his/her flaws or bad is ability as a couple to couple.This is something that can permanently screw up your marriage is a very positive note, filled with love and apologies before you can easily find some of the marriage difficulty you used to, this will be the God-send you need.On the other has gone through the grieving process isn't himself and may never forgive you, remind yourself of the time we realize how to behave and what is available online right now, you're likely looking for deeper issues then chances are your methods of you fell miserable and the bad things be resolved?

It was not the best possible chance of saving your marriage alone without your realizing what is seen as indifference and the issues are, there is a perfect spouse.This works even if this means that some of the sexual atmosphere experiencing orgasm and feeling shoved way down deep inside until one day at least one spouse would look for a married couple, the two of you are willing to put in effort to see if it is, make the marriage in ways that you do not want to encourage and motivate partners to truly break up.You'll find that when they are not just for your sensibilities.Marriage involves the willing submission of one's ego.* enjoy weekly date nights to revive romantic fun, passionate intimacy and passion is very important, particularly when children are involved, as it's not helping, and don't take one of them only last between a couple getting married there is quite ordinary also for the couple down the drain.