A Coke and some string cheese

[In reply to Mija's post at the Punishment Book, because my stats need a little love from time to time.]

I think it's generally a mistake to approach the concept of someone being disciplinarian for someone else assuming it's really complex or subtle, especially if it's men we're talking about here. Since when did thinking of men as complex beasts get anywhere? I think it's also a mistake to think of it as at all altruistic. I don't believe in altruism at the best of times (don't believe that it exists, that is; not don't believe in behaving altruistically), but especially not in a situation like this.

I'll speak only for myself, but I do think this mostly abstracts generally: people want to connect with other people. Specifically, they want to be wanted, and need to be needed (in the words of the late 20th century philosopher, Peter Gabriel). People express those needs in different ways, and need them to be fulfilled in different ways, but the basic needs are very similar. It's a very cold universe out there, and to be needed by someone whom nature has made attractive to us is about as powerful an emotion as we'll ever experience. When what they need from us is consistent with a kink that's also fundamental to who we are, the pieces just fit. We're not so far from cavemen that we - even the diffident and introverted of us - don't get pleasure from being the strong protector. Rather than considering that people of kink get close to each other so that they can express kink, it makes far more sense to consider that they express kink so that they can get close to each other. Kink isn't an end in itself. The warm body beside us is the end. The happy, contented, safe, warm body beside us carrying marks that we've put on its skin, is a kind of belonging, a kind of home.

Discipline is also of note in the kink because it typically implies not just a closeness, and a protectiveness, but also an exclusivity, a possession. It might be a transient exclusivity, but it's there for at least a moment. It says not just that we can meet a need in someone we care about, but that, at that moment, of all the people they might have chosen to meet that need, they chose us. It's a direct line drawn between two people, to the conscious (and often public) exclusion of others. It personalises the need; it makes the need about us, rather than just about itself. There is, of course, an echo of parenting in kink discipline, even if it's not part of the exterior trappings or the language used, and I think it's a mistake not to use parenting as a useful analogue - whilst recognising its limitations. It clearly matters to a discipline relationship in the kink that it have the basic one-to-one topography of a parent-child dynamic, even if the balance of power isn't - for obvious and very good reasons - so clear cut.

The problem of punishment and how a disciplinarian can get anything out of it is a big red herring, I think, mostly because they don't have to get anything out of it for the wider relationship to be working just fine, thanks very much. We accept all sorts of situations as packages in life, knowing that they're indivisible, and that the gnarly bits are worth it. However, there are all sorts of ways in which a disciplinarian can find punishment fulfilling, with it still genuinely serving as punishment, the most obvious being a careful unleashing of sadism, the enjoyment of causing pain being orthogonal to its purpose and effectiveness in changing behaviour or expiating guilt. Even without such layering, fulfillment in administering punishment isn't a huge conundrum; it's a restatement of the need and the want and the exclusivity which make the relationship matter. The process of creating vulnerability and then being protective of that vulnerability is a very practical way of showing that the vulnerability is ring-fenced to keep it safe. It's also, of course, a way of obtaining reassurance that one is trusted, and wanted, and needed.

But punishment is hardly the only way of feeling needed. I came back from Shadow Lane in Las Vegas over the weekend, having scarcely played, feeling that the most significant moment for me was not playing with a particular someone, at a time when what she really wanted was a Coke and some string cheese. Going out to buy them and bringing them back to the hotel room for her might well have been the toppiest thing I did all weekend. Explaining that might take a little longer.

Recursion

The first law of programming is that it always takes longer than you think it's going to, even after taking into account the first law of programming.

More or less

To Costco last weekend, where I was a taken a bit aback by this message prominently displayed on the side of a large case of Coke:

36-pack
50% more than
24-pack

It has the parsimony and the profundity of haiku: its simplicity, one imagines, can't be anything other than the skin atop a porridge of cosmic import. On the surface it speaks to a consumerism oblivious of anything other than size. It's quite possibly 50% more likely to give you a hernia while lifting it into your car, too, but that's hardly the point.

But here's the thing: isn't it, well, a bit obvious that 36 is 50% more than 24? Much as I love Costco (and if there's anything which captures the American dream better than scoffing an endlessly-refilling soda and a Hebrew National hot dog for a dollar-fifty while your station-wagon-sized trolley waits patiently beside you with your hundred-weight of beef jerky, your vat of mayonnaise, and your gross of toilet paper, I'd like it taken outside and shot), and I do love it, it's not a place for taking chances with promotion. Costco's marketing of ibuprofen has a straight-ahead genius to it: it comes in a blue Advil-alike bottle, for people who might normally buy Advil; and it also comes in an orange Motrin IB-alike bottle, for people who might normally buy Motrin IB - this one called, without the tiniest whiff of shame, Ibuprofen IB. This is marketing in a world where email-phishing works, where looking like means being like, and attentions must be captured in the first glance. That the active ingredient is the same in all four is scarcely relevant.

It's something like conventional wisdom that percentages are tricky for the marginally numerate, since they're basically fractions, which are as a class tricky. But it seems pretty uncontroversial to say that the '50% more than' comparator is intended to clarify the relationship between the size of the 36-pack and the size of the 24-pack. We're entirely used to seeing percentages used to clarify relationships where they'd otherwise be obscure: comparing between different units, say, or between irregularly-sized packs of stuff. The baffling corollary of which is that, at some point in the process of designing the packaging for the Coke, it was considered, at least implicitly, that some people would find it easier to understand what '50% more than' means, than to compute the relationship between 36 and 24. I would like to know who these people are, because I think they'd be good candidates for some particularly invasive medical experiments. This isn't an elitist sneer at the innumerate. I just think the Coca-Cola Company has some weird people in mind if they believe '50% more than' would be useful to someone for whom the second and third entries in the 12-times-table mean nothing.

There's another interpretation, though, which I think might have some mileage. It's that '36-pack' and '24-pack' (and such) have become patterns of language with no structure and semantics. Rather, they're just tokens, with no meaning other than to label. A 24-pack is a '24-pack' in the same way that an Ikea bookshelf is a 'Billy' bookshelf. It tells us nothing about the bookshelf except that that's its name, and, if we've seen one before, this one is the same as that one. ('Hurtigrute. 50% more than Smorgasbord.') Or perhaps the ontology does carry some minimal meaning, in the same sense of 'small', 'medium' and 'large'. We understand the size ordering, but we certainly don't have enough information to compute the relative sizes. Maybe this drift from semantics to mere labelling is a trend. My local supermarket prominently advertises that 'At Von's, a dozen roses is 14 stems'. Well, okay, but maybe it's worth considering that at some point it's unnecessarily complicated to label roses with the price per dozen, and then have to clarify that 'a dozen' is actually fourteen. (Myself, I blame those bloody bakers for starting this off.) At some point, 'dozen' ceases to have any reliable meaning, and we end up going from supermarket to supermarket comparing the nomenclature the way we'd compare local blackjack rules at Vegas casinos, searching out the rare 'dozen' that's actually 16, or the '36-pack' that's actually 60% more than the '24-pack'.

'I want a clean cup,' interrupted the Hatter: 'let's all move one place on.'