(no subject)

[conuly]

The Lost Lingo of New York City’s Soda Jerks

How the webring became the grassroots tool of choice for sharing content online in the ’90s. The concept was social media before media was social.

Researchers Want To Show HIV-Positive Organ Donation Is Safe For HIV-Positive Recipients And Can Save Lives

Why aren't we paying more for public health?

DACA program tied to health of U.S.-citizen kids

It Costs $2.50 to Make Lipstick — Here’s Why You’re Charged So Much More

Nihil sub sōle novum, or, Kinkshaming Aristotle

The Only Emotions I Can Feel Are Anger And Fear

More Vets Who Are Coping With PTSD From Sexual Assaults Get Honorable Discharges

The women who fought against gender equality

Here’s Why British Firms Say Their Boards Lack Women. Prepare to Cringe.

The Religious Right’s #MeToo Reckoning Is Coming

The group least likely to think the U.S. has a responsibility to accept refugees? Evangelicals. (I guess they forgot about that pesky Sermon on the Mount.)

For Women of Color, the Child-Welfare System Functions Like the Criminal-Justice System

Miami’s Displaced Puerto Ricans Offer A Glimpse At America’s Looming Climate Crisis

Fears Trump's anti-choice picks could set back abortion fight for a generation

Incels aren’t really looking for sex. They’re looking for absolute male supremacy.

Trump’s trade policy is stuck in the ’80s — the 1680s

Biafra shutdown cripples Nigerian cities

Neighborhoods hit and supplies cut in Libya's Derna, U.N. says

Comments

[conuly]

How'd that work out for him? (Well, before the part where they got caught anyway, I mean.)

[siderea]

Well, apart from the catastrophic consequences for them both, really fabulously:

To avert suspicion I sometimes beat her, but these blows were prompted by love and tender feeling rather than anger and vexation, and were sweeter than any balm.

In short, our desires left no stage of lovemaking untried, and if love could devise something new, we welcomed it. We entered on each joy the more eagerly for our previous inexperience, and were the less easily sated.

And then, there's the evidence (if they're authentic, which seems the consensus) of their actual letters for the rest of their lives, in which she is hot for him like nobody's business. I don't know she ever writes about the physicalities of it from her perspective, but her wild enthusiasm for their super D/s-y dynamic–

I love you more than ever, and, to revenge myself of him [her uncle that castrated Abelard], I will still love you with all the tenderness of my soul till the last moment of my life. If formerly my affection for you was not so pure, if in those days the mind and the body shared in the pleasure of loving you, I often told you even then, that I was more pleased with possessing your heart, than with any other happiness, and the man was the thing I least valued in you.

– never abates.

So: not sane, not safe, but, yes, apparently consensual and with abundant affirmative assent.

I mean, I think he's a total narcissistic ass, and would have told her to DTMFA, but she dug him like whoa. shrug Non gustibus disputandem est.

ETA: though I should also say, it may have worked out better for Heloise than Abelard. One can get the impression from subsequent events – and the way he kept trying to put her off, and the way she kept begging for more of his attention – that he found himself with WAY more submissive than he was up to topping.