"i hate winters in naples" gonchfield, 1973

Ice Pick Joe || 26 || Butch Uranian || Mandalorian || Original posts are tagged with #ipj speaks || Mutuals DM for my dicsord

[molemorgue]

stupid wuppyog

[molemorgue]

seems like we all fuck with stupid wuppyog

[kayla-denker]

Hey, you, cis girl that's very (correctly) vocal about women being allowed to talk about their periods, do you include trans women in that?

I ask because every single time I've tried to talk about it to anyone that isn't a trans woman they get fucking angry. Which has caused me to have to just suffer in silence every single month. So I really relate to cis women when they talk about literally the exact same thing; being shamed by everyone around them their whole lives for talking about their periods, so they just suffer in silence every month as it negatively impacts their work and social lives. But I don't even feel like I can voice that I am literally dealing with the same exact thing because most of y'all react like you want to throw me in front of a bus for saying it, even those of you who act like your such big great transfem allies.

[kayla-denker]

I guess I'll take this opportunity to talk about trans women periods. The first thing any tme person thinks when they hear this is always "how can trans women have periods? They don't have uteruses!"

The answer is: the uterus isn't what causes your period, it is effected by your period. What causes your period and what causes trans women's periods is the same thing: the endocrine system.

HRT changes the sex of your endocrine system. Feminizing HRT makes it a female endocrine system, giving us a 28-day hormone cycle just like cis women. At the end of that cycle, the hypothalamus floods the body with prostaglandins. Those are what cause all but one of the period symptoms, because they make muscles inflame and contract. They are what make the uterus shed its lining, they are what cause intestinal cramps, they are what cause body aches, they are what cause headaches and migraines. The only period symptom not causes by the release of prostaglandins throughout the body is depression, and that is caused by your endocrine system simply not processing as much estrogen and from simply feeling like shit.

So, the only symptoms trans women don't get every 28 days is menstrual cramps, because yes we do not menstruate since we don't have uteruses. But migraines, depression, body aches, intestinal cramps, and the infamous "period shits" don't exactly add up to us having any better of a time. Except we have to pretend that we're fine and nothing is different because no one believes that we get periods, not even cis women.

"But you can't call it a period then because that refers to MENSTRUATION!" is another one I hear all the time. This is incorrect. You use the word "period" instead of just "menstruation" because it doesn't just refer to menstruation. It refers to a period at the end of the hormone cycle where we experience a host of symptoms. And not all cis women experience all of the symptoms that encompass the period. Not all cis women get migraines, or body aches, or have severe depression. If a cis woman gets a hysterectomy she doesn't menstruate either! In that instance she experiences an identical period to what trans women experience. Yet, I doubt you'd insist that cis women who've had hysterectomies don't have periods.

[kayla-denker]

Oh, another thing that I personally discovered after bottom surgery: vaginal odor changes for trans women during our periods too. I was not expecting that because I always thought it was just from menstruation. But nope, the ph levels of a trans woman's vagina are the same of as a cis woman's vagina, and it changes during our periods just the same.

[bruzum]

[lastvalyrian]

This is literally what people are talking about when they say AI will be used to mainstream widely held bigotry. LLMs are trained on frequency and probability -> straight relationships are more well represented in the dataset -> straight pronouns and terms become the "correct" normal.

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).

Combine this with the mass of people inclined to believe (and being encouraged to believe) that if AI says and does something it must be correct

[mousegirlheart]

THE CHRONIC FATIGUE IS MINE AND IT WILL OBEY ME

[mousegirlheart]

[headspace-hotel]

I was trying to understand the Nazis' idea of "Degenerate art," so I have been reading through Max Nordau's book "Degeneration" which is freely available on Project Gutenberg. It was published in 1892. Nordau himself was Jewish but also racist, in conformity with what passed for "science" in those days.

It is a really interesting insight into how fascism and eugenics developed, and how entwined both of those things are with the history of psychiatry.

Nordau believes in a Lamarckian idea of evolution where if an organism's body is damaged or altered by the environment, those acquired traits can be passed onto offspring. This is very important for understanding the arguments of the book.

Nordau thinks that modernity is damaging the bodies and minds of humans, making them perpetually exhausted and weak, which makes them susceptible to "degeneracy," the decline of health, morality, and reason through regression to an animal-like state. His explanations for how this works, which I assume from his citations are basically what experts thought at the time, are fascinating to read. He gives theories for how the brain and the senses work that are a little bit right but dreadfully limited and mostly wrong.

Many of Nordau's main points, though, are basically identical to today's arguments about art, morality, sexuality, and censorship.

Furthermore, the social and human phenomena he describes, including psychiatric phenomena, are much more familiar and easily mapped onto modern concepts than I thought.

I wish I could find it again, but there was a book from...1904? maybe 1914?...describing the treatment of mentally disabled kids in an asylum, that I found online.

It was STRIKING to me how the descriptions of the kids matched perfectly to modern descriptions of ADHD and autism. This book also contained numerous descriptions that seemed unmistakably, obviously like ADHD or autism.

But the labels they used were: "mental defectives," "imbeciles," "idiots," and other things even more offensive.

What is so interesting is that Nordau describes, and singles out, what are popularly considered harmlessly quirky or even positive traits of neurodivergence, and identifies them as part of "degeneracy," categorized along with more noticeable or stigmatized forms of mental disability. He especially emphasizes sensory hyper- and hypo-reactivity as a trait of "degeneracy" in many places.

Here's an example of his descriptions:

“Imbeciles (weak minds) present, in graduated intensity, the phenomenon of fugitive thought (Gedankenflucht), i.e., the incapacity to retain, or to unite in a concept or judgment, the representations automatically and reciprocally called into consciousness in conformity with the laws of association, and also that of reverie, which is another form of fugitive thought, but which differs from it in that the particular representations of which it is composed are feebly elaborated, and are therefore shadowy and undefined, sometimes so much so that an imbecile, who in the midst of his reveries is asked of what he is thinking, is not able to state exactly what happens to be present in his consciousness. All observers maintain that the ‘higher degenerate’ is frequently ‘original, brilliant, witty,’ and that whereas he is incapable of activity which demands attention and self-control, he has strong artistic inclinations. All these peculiarities are to be explained by the uncontrolled working of association.”

This book made me consider the possibility that what we now call ADHD was actually significantly more disabling and stigmatized in the early 20th century, because criminality and mental illness are so closely linked in here, and it is highly visible how traits like impulsivity and emotional dysregulation were extremely costly to have.

At one point he gives a really detailed description of synesthesia, including grapheme-color synesthesia:

Sounds are said to awaken sensations of colour in many persons. According to some, this was a gift of specially finely organized nervous natures; according to others, it was due to an accidental abnormal connection between the optic and acoustic brain-centres by means of nerve filaments[...]That it is a question of purely individual associations brought about by the accident of associated ideas, and not of organic co-ordinations depending upon definite abnormal nervous connections, is made very probable by the fact that every colour-hearer ascribes a different colour to the same vowel or instrument. We have seen that to Ghil the flute is yellow, to L. Hoffmann (whom Goethe cites in his Farbenlehre) this instrument is scarlet. Rimbaud calls the letter ‘a’ black. Persons whom Suarez mentions heard this vowel as blue, and so on.

And he is REALLY pissed off about it.

In any case, it is an evidence of diseased and debilitated brain-activity, if consciousness relinquishes the advantages of the differentiated perceptions of phenomena, and carelessly confounds the reports conveyed by the particular senses. It is a retrogression to the very beginning of organic development. It is a descent from the height of human perfection to the low level of the mollusc. To raise the combination, transposition and confusion of the perceptions of sound and sight to the rank of a principle of art, to see futurity in this principle, is to designate as progress the return from the consciousness of man to that of the oyster.

Like, he is absolutely seething.

[headspace-hotel]

I don't know how to feel about this book. It's disgusting, but also FASCINATING. Like, okay, here's another excerpt

The effect of war on the nerves of the participants has never been systematically investigated; and yet how highly important and necessary a work this would be! Science knows what disorders are produced in man by a single strong moral shock, e.g., a sudden mortal danger; it has recorded hundreds and thousands of cases in which persons saved from drowning, or present at a fire on shipboard, or in a railway accident, or who have been threatened with assassination, etc., have either lost their reason, or been attacked by grave and protracted, often incurable, nervous illnesses.

Everything, EVERYTHING I have ever read about the history of our understanding of PTSD and trauma, says or implies that post-traumatic symptoms were first recognized in soldiers, and later were realized to manifest in other people who experienced trauma.

But THIS is saying "You know how people can develop long term mental illness from a traumatic event? Shouldn't we look into whether that happens to soldiers who have experienced war?" And then he goes on to theorize about how a nation having recently experienced a war could affect everyone because of the "moral shock" the soldiers bring home with them.

Something in the history of psychiatry isn't adding up here.

Here's one of the paragraphs addressing sensory differences.

Maudsley describes some cases of degeneration among children whose skin was insensible, and remarks: ‘They cannot feel impressions as they naturally should feel them, nor adjust themselves to their surroundings, with which they are in discord; and the motor outcomes of the perverted affections of self are accordingly of a meaningless and destructive character

This sounds an awful lot like autism

Here's what he says about psychiatric diagnoses like phobias

the principal phenomenon which lies at the base of all the ‘phobias" and ‘manias,’ namely, the great emotionalism of the degenerate. If to emotionalism, or an excessive excitability, he had added the cerebral debility, which implies feebleness of perception, will, memory, judgment, as well as inattention and instability, he would have exhaustively characterized the nature of degeneration, and perhaps prevented psychiatry from being stuffed with a crowd of useless and disturbing designations.

Okay, so this is closely related to the synesthesia thing. Nordau focuses heavily on "abnormal" sensory perceptions because he thinks that the brain's inability to properly process sensory stimuli is the cause of a lot of mental disability or "degeneration."

And, bizarrely, he actually got pretty close to being sort of right. Studies (like within the last 5 years) that ask questions of autistic adults commonly indicate that sensory differences are one of the most if not THE most disabling aspect of autism, and I (autistic) suspect that a lot of traits of autism are just downstream effects of the sensory differences.

The other thing Nordau focuses heavily upon is the ability to regulate one's own attention and action, and other traits that would be considered to fall under "executive function."

Again, bizarrely close to being correct about something that hardly anybody would be correct about for the next century. He's just being super hateful and stigmatizing about it.

[headspace-hotel]

I was not able to follow along with this guy's criticisms of art in a casual skim-read, because a large proportion of the examples of poetry and writing are in untranslated French.

What I was able to gather, is that he is extremely panicked and upset about all kinds of art that don't fit an EXTREMELY narrow aesthetic and moral standard. He is upset by Impressionistic paintings, because they don't represent reality "realistically," and it sounds like he might actually think that exposing people to Impressionistic paintings might cause them to lose their ability to accurately perceive visual stimuli?

So it all builds up to this central thesis, which is that "degenerate art" is a vector that spreads degeneracy.

Since he thinks "degeneracy" arises from incorrect perception or processing of sensory stimuli, it makes sense that he would identify art that doesn't literally visually represent things as "degenerate."

But the idea of "degeneracy" also extends into morality, and therefore into depictions of human behavior in art: "degenerates" can be disgusted by good things and feel positively towards evil things, which is once again, something physiological that's wrong within the brain.

So he argues, in the late chapters of the book, that artists who create art showing immoral, disgusting things are no different than people who actually do immoral, disgusting things, and that such art should not get made:

It is easily conceivable that the emotion expressed by the artist in his work may proceed from a morbid aberration, may be directed, in an unnatural, sensual, cruel manner, to what is ugly or loathsome. Ought we not in this case to condemn the work and, if possible, to suppress it? How can its right to exist be justified?... The artist who complacently represents what is reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of it, perhaps glorifies it, differs not in kind, but only in degree, from the criminal who actually commits it. It is a question of the intensity of the impulsion and the resisting power of the judgment, perhaps also of courage and cowardice; nothing else.

Furthermore, people who read or enjoy these works are themselves disgusting and immoral, and usually criminals:

Who would experience feelings of pleasure from the perusal of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Andrea de Nercia or Liseux? Only one species of human beings—that of the degenerate with perverted instincts. Portrayals of crime and vice in art and literature have their public; that we well know. It is the public of the gaols. Besides dismally sentimental books, criminals read nothing so willingly as stories of lust and violence.

He proposes that there should be some sort of council to determine whether art is moral or not, and if the council says

of a man, ‘He is a criminal!’ and of a work, ‘It is a disgrace to our nation!’ work and man would be annihilated. No respectable bookseller would keep the condemned book; no respectable paper would mention it, or give the author access to its columns; no respectable family would permit the branded work to be in their house

"Annihilated" can only mean one thing, right? D:

One of the things that was extremely interesting about this book was reading about the contents of the supposed evil, bad, immoral books, and how upset Nordau gets about them.

For instance:

His figures of women and their destinies are the poetical expression of that sexual perversion of degenerates called by Krafft-Ebing ‘masochism.’ Masochism is a sub-species of ‘contrary sexual sensation.’ The man affected by this perversion feels himself, as regards woman, to be the weaker party; as the one standing in need of protection; as the slave who rolls on the ground, compelled to obey the behests of his mistress, and finding his happiness in obedience. It is the inversion of the healthy and natural relation between the sexes.

This is continuing the trend of surprisingly accurate descriptions of things, utterly ruined by the author being a hateful little asshole about them.

Another example I thought was funny:

Let us remember Count Muffat in Zola’s Nana (p. 491): ‘At other times he was a dog. She threw her scented handkerchief to the end of the room for him, and he had to run on all fours to pick it up with his teeth. “Fetch it, Cæsar!... Look out; I’ll give it to you if you’re lazy!... Very good, Cæsar! mind! nicely!... Sit up!” And as for him, he loved his abasement, revelled in the joy of being a brute. He wanted to sink still lower; he cried: “Hit harder.... Bow wow! I am mad; hit me then!”’ That is the liberty of one who is ‘emancipated’ in the sense of the degenerates! He may be a dog, if his crazed instinct commands him to be a dog!

I was very surprised to learn just how little kinks have changed in the past 130ish years.

The author goes on a bracingly vitriolic anti-pornography rant:

And still more determined must the resistance be to the filth-loving herd of swine, the professional pornographists.[...]The systematic incitation to lasciviousness causes the gravest injury to the bodily and mental health of individuals, and a society composed of individuals sexually over-stimulated, knowing no longer any self-control, any discipline, any shame, marches to its certain ruin, because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks. The pornographist poisons the springs whence flows the life of future generations.

I wonder what precisely he means by pornography. This was written in 1892, so he could be referring to photographs, but every time he gives specific examples of immoral art in this section, they are written works, so it seems more likely that he's referring to books.

These are the exact qualities that conservatives and quite a few "left-leaning" folks attribute to internet pornography, often with the assumption that this degenerating influence upon human sexuality is new.

But apparently, for people of similar political ideology back in 1892, the "pornography" they had seemed equally likely to destroy healthy human sexuality.

Smut has clearly been an ongoing moral panic for quite a while.

[headspace-hotel]

This book is not well written or well organized. I'm going through it again and trying to look deeper into what Nordau actually thinks about art.

The ebook is displaying page numbers today. It wasn't doing that yesterday. Therefore I can give page numbers. On Page 80 Nordau says this about paintings:

the pleasurable feelings which are produced by the contemplation of a picture are not aroused by its intellectual import, but by it as a sensuous phenomenon.

I don't think that is true, Max.

The art of painting awakens through its media of colour and drawing (i.e., the exact grasp and reproduction of differences in the intensity of light), firstly, a purely sensuously agreeable impression of beautiful single colours and happily combined harmonies of colour; secondly, it produces an illusion of reality and, together with this, the higher, more intellectual pleasures arising from a recognition of the phenomena depicted, and from a comprehension of the artist’s intention; thirdly, it shows these phenomena as seen with the eye of the artist, and brings out details or collective traits, which until then the inartistic beholder had not been by himself able to perceive.

What is he arguing against here? These things: the idea that visual art can contain symbolism, tell a story, or evoke emotion through anything other than the viewer's pre-existing feelings toward a subject and how well the painter captured the subject.

Page 83:

Now, the subject-matter of painting is the visible, not the conjectural; the real, not the possible or probable; the concrete, not the abstract.

I keep doubting myself on whether I understand what Nordau is saying, because he contradicts himself a lot. He condemns the "degenerates" for being too emotional about art, but then says the purpose of art is to evoke emotion, not intellectual thought.

But then he gives the example of this painting, Holman Hunt's The Shadow of Death:

and gives this HILARIOUS rant about how stupid it is (Page 85-86)

Holman Hunt imagines Christ in prayer. Through the association of ideas there awakes in him simultaneously the mental image of Christ’s subsequent death on the cross. He wants, by the instrumentality of painting, to make the association of these ideas visible. And hence he lets the living Christ throw a shadow which assumes the form of a cross, thus foretelling the fate of the Saviour, as if some mysterious, incomprehensible power had so posed his body with respect to the rays of the sun that a wondrous annunciation of his destiny must needs write itself on the floor. The invention is completely absurd. It would have been childish trifling if Christ had drawn his sublime death of sacrifice, whether in jest or in vanity, in anticipation, by his shadow on the ground. Neither would the shadow-picture have had any object, for no contemporary of Christ’s would have understood the significance of the shadowed cross before he had suffered death by crucifixion. In Holman Hunt’s consciousness, however, emotion simultaneously awakened the form of the praying Christ and of the cross, and he unites both presentations anyhow, without regard to their reasonable connection. If an Old Master had had to paint the same idea, namely, the praying Christ filled with the presentiment of his impending death, he would have shown us in the picture a realistic Christ in prayer, and in a corner an equally realistic crucifixion; but he would never have sought to blend both these different scenes into a single one by a shadowy connection. This is the difference between the religious painting of the strong healthy believer and of the emotional degenerate mind.

Our buddy Max is furious over how unrealistic it is that Jesus's shadow would evoke the shape of a cross. First of all, it's not like the sun would magically position itself to make sure Jesus's shadow looked like a cross, and if it did, nobody would notice that in REAL LIFE, because Jesus hadn't died yet! That's why this painting is STUPID!!!11!!!!!

...

Nordau goes on to discuss the parallel phenomenon in poetry.

All poetry no doubt has this peculiarity, that it makes use of words intended not only to arouse the definite ideas which they connote, but also to awaken emotions that shall vibrate in consciousness. But the procedure of a healthy-minded poet is altogether different from that of a weak-minded mystic. The suggestive word employed by the former has in itself an intelligible meaning, but besides this it is adapted to excite emotions in every healthy-minded man; and finally the emotions excited have all of them reference to the subject of the poem.

He gives an example of this. It's presented in German, and I ran it through Google Translate, so it's not a very good representation of what the poem is supposed to be.

'Green shoots, violet scent, Lark's trill, blackbird's song, Sunlit rain, gentle breeze: When I sing such words, Do I still need grander things To praise you, spring day?'

This is the first specific example I've been able to find of a piece of art that Max thinks is good. Here's what he says about it:

Each word of the first three lines contains a positive idea. Each of them awakens glad feelings in a man of natural sentiment. These feelings, taken together, produce the mood with which the awakening of spring fills the soul, to induce which was precisely the intention of the poet.

He contrasts it with a line from one of the poems he hates, Dante Gabriel Rosetti's The Blessed Damozel. The poem discusses a girl who has died and gone to Heaven, and from her perspective, only a day has passed, but for her lover left on Earth, it feels like "ten years of years."

To the maiden in bliss it appears that she has been a singer in God’s choir for only one day; to him who is left behind this one day has been actually a matter of ten years. ‘To one it is ten years of years.’ This computation is thoroughly mystical. It means, that is, absolutely nothing. Perhaps Rossetti imagined that there may exist a higher unity to which the single year may stand as one day does to a year; that therefore 365 years would constitute a sort of higher order of year. The words ‘year of years’ therefore signified 365 years. But as Rossetti portrays this thought vaguely and imperfectly, he is far from expressing it as intelligibly as this.

Oh my god, Max. Max. Max. It's figurative language, Max. It's not supposed to literally represent the amount of time, Max. How can you be writing about poetry when you think that all figurative language is bad.

This is a much weirder viewpoint than I thought. Max thinks that human brains are not supposed to engage in abstract thought.

[savouryduck]

funny, because when I see someone who struggles with abstract thought and is frequently confused by symbolism, metaphor, and nonliteral art...my first though is to wonder if they may be on the autism spectrum

[segamascott]

i've been a bad bad mutual

[captain-price-returns]

A real page on the White House website

[amaliazeichnerin]

Is Africa leading the solarpunk future?

Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa are building solutions that richer nations could learn from

Interesting blog post.

[reasonsforhope]

I've been saying this for like 3 years now!! Always excited to see more coverage of it!!

If you're interested in the future of solarpunk, ecopunk, and a sustainable, livable future, African, South Asian, Latin American, and Indigenous climate movements are absolutely some of the biggest places you should look.

[a-kind-of-merry-war]

Happy Pride Month to family disappointments, dagger enthusiasts, women's wrongs, people who want to run away into the woods, queers who like beers, lesbians with swords, short kings, girlfriends who look like boyfriends, demi queens, and Ash.

[a-kind-of-merry-war]

Happy Pride Month to family disappointments, dagger enthusiasts, women's wrongs, people who want to run away into the woods, queers who like beers, lesbians with swords, short kings, girlfriends who look like boyfriends, long-lost lovers, troth-plight knights, genderqueer archers, trans people who named themselves after food, The Strap, and Ash.

[goldcrescent]

I also think that the strength gap is at least partially manufactured women would in fact be stronger overall if little girls were encouraged to do physically taxing games and activities and eat their fill while they’re growing vs having to constantly diet and be sedentary indoors (or god forbid do intense cardio while under-eating). The amount of adult women honestly afraid to lift weights bc they think they’ll get bulky as though bulking isn’t a full time job that athletes have to spend all their time on and anyone on earth gets shredded from just using their adult muscles for their intended purpose, girl your bone density 🥀

[goldcrescent]

if you say women are intentionally nerfed from birth in 2026 people look at you like you’re insane and start condescendingly telling you about how women are just better at different things (but not during their periods haha) but this was a completely basic feminist talking point I grew up with like “girls can do it too! [shot of little girls climbing and running with boys]” nickelodeon commercial tier base level I hate it how is everyone suddenly dumber than the average 7 year old

[cloudabserk]

WARNING do NOT start reading books and comics or watching movies or looking at art!!! you will start wanting to create art yourself. or god forbid. writing.

[cambriancrew]

[laterkiss]

i have [gestures vaguely] my tendencies

[radio-jupotter]

we are kind of in "fetish world where everyone does my fetish" but the fetish is heteromonogamy

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[halosnothere]

well that can't be good

[girl-mazios]

I bet having a blade bounce harmlessly off your armor feels good as fuuuccck

[thefairyringsystem]

Slightly misusing "thou" and "thee" to sound vaguely old-timey is both completely harmless and irrationally maddening to me, especially in kink spaces where language that reinforces closeness or dominance has so much potential.

Firstly, "thou" is a subject, "thee" is an object and "thy" is possessive. These get mixed up pretty often. I don't consciously diagram the grammar of every sentence, but if you read or hear enough early modern English it can eventually feel natural.

"Thou" is an "informal you," a second person pronoun that implies familiarity. It either communicates a degree of closeness or reinforces your status above someone in a hierarchy. "Thou" is for close friends, lovers, children, commoners and servants.

My main gripe with "ye olde timey" styling is just that knightposting using an "informal you" to sound vaguely historical is completely missing out on the opportunity to use "thee" and "thou" to imply an inappropriately close relationship, or a flipped power dynamic.

A few other things I think we're under utilizing in royalty kink:

I have never seen the word "sirrah" in a kink setting, but it could translate beautifully into D/s dynamics. "Sirrah" is the opposite of "sir," a title reserved for someone who is below you. It's a fantastic word for when you want to put someone in their place, and sound a bit grandiose and archaic in the process. It's also very fun to say.

"Thy Grace" or "Thy Highness" would be grammatically incorrect and paradoxical, making them the perfect stylings for a submissive royal.

For a non-binary knight or other nobility, in place of "sir" or "lady," might I suggest "noble" and "gentle" as possible gender-neutral titles?

In a similar vein, I have heard so many people struggling to find a gender neutral way to say "ladies and gentlemen" or "lords and ladies," and I would suggest "nobles," "gentles," "gentlefolk," and "gentle people" as alternatives.