I’ll respond to this because my name is in it. And I can’t speak to anyone else’s experiences, so I’ll just speak to my own.
I never felt taken advantage of or used for street cred. 144 said many times that he liked to rely on people much smarter than himself to give better advice, which is why he reblogged so much from others. If I felt like he was “drafting” off me or otherwise using me, I wouldn’t have responded to so many of his asks. There were also many times when I or others told him he was wrong. And he admitted it. Tumblr is fundamentally a platform for reblogging. That’s why I like it. I reblog and comment on things that interest me or motivate me to share my perspective. I expect those things to be shared, and I have several followers who actively collect these kinds of things in their own D/s reference library. So, others can see it however they want. But I just see it as an exchange of ideas, which is the whole reason I’m here.
I’ve said before that I don’t really consider myself part of the tribe. The only theme day I didn’t filter out was the bad jokes day. Because I love bad jokes. That said, from seeing what others have posted, it seems that maybe I’ve missed some of the negative impact and cliquishness of the tribe precisely because I’ve been on the periphery. I don’t follow a lot of the people more central to it—not out of any inherent issue, but mostly because then my dash gets all clogged up with repetitive and (to me) less interesting posts. But anyway, I apologize if my actions have ever directly or indirectly made someone feel excluded from this community.
I was the one who suggested 144 add “taken” to his profile. He had a submissive at the time (whose name and blog name he shared with me…not public information, but not a secret) who felt uncomfortable with the amount of fawning attention he got. He asked me what I recommended, given that he didn’t want to be public with his relationship (which I don’t blame him for, given how that has exploded for so many other popular bloggers). I recommended that he just put “taken” in his blog header. And so he did. I am not in his inbox to know how he conducted himself privately before or after that. But I thought I would at least share how that part materialized.
While I can’t speak to the OP’s experience with 144 or his intent in those messages, I can share my own experience. I reached out to 144 something like 6 years ago, because I was seeing a dominant who minimized my feelings and told me I was a bad submissive for having emotional needs. He gave me a much-needed gut check. Then we struck up a friendship. There was about 2.5 seconds of flirting, and then he stopped himself and said NOPE. And we continued to talk at least a few times a week after that, for the next couple years. As long as I kept up communication, so did he. As a friendship tends to work. He looked out for me through the end of a few relationships, including one that threw me into a dark bout of depression. When I told him I very much wished I would stop waking up, he checked in more. It’s the closest he ever came to taking a dominant role with me (I’ve had submissive friends tell me they would have done the same in that situation). He told me to get the fuck up and go shower. He made not want to disappoint him. And that got me through the closest I ever came to suicide. I can’t speak to his behavior with other people or whether he had ulterior motives in his communications with them. But this was my experience.
I spoke with both pleasurewhore and submissive-seeking when they were still here, more about their own lives and relationships than about 144. But they were both good, smart people. Submissive-seeking called 144 her “brother from another mother.” She was a strong-willed, badass lady—and clearheaded enough even at the end to be medically cleared for physician-assisted suicide. So remember that if you’re insinuating that she was weak and vulnerable from her illness and allowed 144 to manipulate her. Also, she is 100% a real person. I have seen real things about her real identity out in the world. So, just laying that speculation to rest.
Listen, I get that this person I knew for six years may have had a completely different set of behaviors with others than he did with me. I have seen it enough to know that it happens. And if others felt used or hurt or made uncomfortable by him, then those experiences are just as valid as my own. But I would just caution people against too much historical revisionism. While it’s not bad in itself to reinterpret your life through the lens of what you know now, it can be tricky. This wouldn’t be the first time I saw someone reinterpret a caring act as a malicious one because they no longer had positive feelings toward the actor. No matter what you feel or believe about 144 now, the truth is that we all have some good and some bad in us, in varying quantities. I don’t think it’s necessary to reinterpret every positive interaction as having malicious intent, even if it comes out that the person has done bad things.
Anyway, I’m exhausted and heartbroken over this community and the friendships I’ve lost in the last few weeks. But I felt the need to inject a little nuance into this black-and-white, good-vs-evil, us-vs-them conversation. Because I am a person who lives in the grey. I take a methodical, deliberate approach to how I process the world, and there’s a hell of a lot of processing still going on right now. Happy to talk 1:1 with folks. But I wanted to represent my own experiences and perspective here.
kianamaiart
turnnoffyourmind
annaxmalina
titsay
