15 Things - What's Yours? By Domina Jen.

Add your list below....15 things (or near enough to 15 ) about you most people don't know.

Below is Domina Jen's list and Mine. 

15 Things (Domina Jen) 
 So there’s this fad going around facebook right now, where you list a specific number of things that most people don’t know about you. So I figured, why the hell not do it here, too? I was given the number 15 on facebook, so I figure that’ll work.  

1. Shoving things into a boy’s ass is a requirement of any romantic relationship I will ever have.  

2. My favorite movies are Nightmare Before Christmas, The Princess Bride, the Neverending Story, Mirror Mask, and The Fountain. Pan’s Labyrinth and The Peaceful Warrior are also absolutely phenomenal. So is the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  

3. I was a wedding singer once upon a time, but that was short-lived. I’m an operatic soprano and dream about singing on the stage one day. I’d love to play Abigail in Aida (that role is one of the highest and most challenging ever written, and has actually damaged singers’ voices. I can sing it.) 

The Quiet Power of Service

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Why I am an optimist.....WRITTEN BY FRANKLIN

I found this article on the internet by chance, but having read his other work - loved it....

Why I am an optimist - By Franklin

Recently, while I was driving in my car, I had an epiphany.

You see, I've always joked about having a desire to crush the earth beneath my iron boot, but in the past twoscore years, I've made very little progress toward realizing that goal. And it occurred to me why that is. I'm actually very optimistic about the state of humanity, and unbridled optimism about the human condition doesn't lend itself to the kind of monomaniacial dedication required of a true James Bond-class villain.

There is a reason I am an optimist. That reason emerges directly from the fact that I do not believe in god.

This might seem, at first glance, to be something of a contradiction. Many people cling to a belief in some kind of divine, personally involved caretaker high up in the sky precisely because it's the only way they can find optimism and not despair. There's even a Web site set up by a Fundamentalist Christian organization that is organized around the idea "if you don't matter to God, you don't matter to anyone." The site is advertised by banner ads like this one, showing some gangster wannabe who, without God, presumably has no reason not to blow your punk ass away:

I find this attitude, that without god there is no morality and no meaning or purpose in life, very, very interesting...more for what it says about the people who subscribe to it than for anything else. The Web site that this banner advertises is strongly anti-evolution and pro-creation, and I think that's extremely telling.

There are, I think, two driving forces behind much of religious thought: fear and despair. The despair comes from the idea that human lives and human achievement are without meaning or purpose in a universe without god, a universe where we are the natural result of natural processes on an insignificant and not terribly remarkable part of an insignificant and not terribly remarkable galaxy lost in a universe that is quite literally inconceivably huge. When you look at an image taken from the Hubble Deep Field camera of a teeny, tiny patch of sky, and you see that everywhere in the universe, as far as you can look, you see not hundreds or even thousands but billions of galaxies, and every one of these galaxies is made up of billions of stars, and we occupy such a tiny sliver of this universe that our entire galaxy could vanish or be destroyed in some kind of cataclysm and the universe would scarcely even notice, some people get all freaked out.

But it's true.

Every object you see in this picture with the exception of the bright object in the lower left of center (which is a star in our own galaxy) is an entire galaxy. The scale of the universe beggars comprehension, and we feel insignificant.

So the creationists, who never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge, invent a new universe to satisfy their need to feel special. They imagine a tiny universe, a limited universe, a universe only a few thousand years old, a small place containing a world (which is seventy-five percent water) deliberately created just for man (who has no gills). They post videos on YouTube arguing that the hand of god is clearly visible in the banana, which with its convenient wrapper and hand-pleasing shape was deliberately designed by a benificient creator to fit easily in our hand and be eaten--though they ignore contradictory evidence, like, say, the coconut. Or, they argue, since the evolutionary idea on the origin of life claims life can begin when non-living matter is exposed to radiation, then how come life doesn't spontaneously begin from other non-living matter, like peanut butter?

It's easy to mock creationists; they're just so cute when they pretend to be scientists! But their folly isn't born of stupidity; it's a product of the very human need to feel special and significant. 

When you add the Void to the mix, the problem becomes even greater. Human beings have the cognitive tools to generalize from their experiences and make predictions about future events, and that gives us the capacity to realize that one day we are going to die. Facing the Void is, for many people, the very embodiment of stark raving terror. We are going to die. There will come a day when we will be gone, and there is nothing we can do about it.

So we as a species respond the only way we can: by denying it. We pull the shade down over the Void, and then decorate that shade with an entire bestiary of gods and demons and angels and supernatural forces of all descriptions imaginable who will protect us from the certainty of death. When you look at all the various gods and deities people have worshipped throughout history, all the supernatural beings we've ever believed in--the sun gods worshipped by almost all hunter-gatherer tribes; the god Tezcatlipoca of the Aztecs; the various gods of the Egyptian pantheon; the feuding, spiteful divine teenagers of the Greeks; the vengeful, erratic, emotionally volatile god of the ancient Israelites--one thing becomes very, very clear: these gods are all us. All these divinities are distorted, funhouse mirror caricatures of humanity. We pull the shade down over the Void, then project onto it ourselves. All our fears, desires, petty insecurities, all our need for conformity and control, all these things are reflected in the gods and demons and pixies and faeries we invent. All these dim, distorted projections, created to convince ourselves that the Void is not real.

And it works. The first time I was confronted by the Void, at about thirteen years old, the thought of going to heaven was the only comfort I could find. When I lost that, I lost my only defense against the Void, and that's not easy to do. These crazy funhouse projections serve a purpose.

But there is a price to pay for this comfort, one that I suspect many people aren't even consciously aware of.

Part of that price is truth. If one cares passionately about the truth, one can not help but notice that every time a religious entity has disagreed with empirical about science about some matter of empirical fact about the physical world, the religion has been wrong. Every single time, with not one single exception. The creationists seek meaning and purpose by believing themselves to be the favored of a supernatural entity that created the whole of the universe just for us, yet this belief requires them to imagine a universe much smaller and much younger than it actually is.Their need for meaning, their desperate desire to feel special, causes them to adopt the notion that the whole of creation is only six thousand years old (5,997 years, according to Orthodox Judiasm; Fundamentalist Christians put the figure at about ten years older), in spite of massive, overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

And this notion leads naturally to other notions as well, including the idea that humanity, the favored of the divine architect of the universe, can do no wrong. Environmental responsibility? Social responsibility? Outmoded beliefs of godless liberals; we were given divine sanction to do as we please, and that's exactly what we should do.

God made the universe for us. We are the most important things in all of creation. The world was put here specifically for the purpose of housing us. If we believe this, we will never die; God won't allow it.

If you don't matter to God, you don't matter to anyone.

When people let go of the idea of god, they're left with a sense of despair. If there is no god--if we are simply the result of natural, mindless forces operating in a universe that is incomprehensibly huge and incomprehensibly ancient, a place that is steered by no divine force and a place where an airless rock is just as good as a planet teeming with life, then what meaning can any of us have? What meaning can any of our struggles and triumphs have? What point is there?

And that attitude, tragically, misses the point entirely.

For you see, if we were made a brief time ago in God's image and put here for the sole and express purpose of worshipping and exalting God, then what we are now is what we will always be. There is an upward limit on the things we are capable of. We are born disgraced, pale shadows of the original models who fell from that grace, and our job is to struggle through this brief life of misery and tears hoping we somehow manage to do and say the right things so that god will rescue us. We have no purpose other than that which is given to us by god--and looking around, I gotta say it's not much of a purpose.

But if we are evolved monkeys...

Ah, now things are different. If we are evolved monkeys, if we are the result of natural processes that conspired across a vast sea of time to give rise to sapient, self-directing entities capable of understanding themselves and the physical world, then all bets are off. Now, there is no limit to what we can become. Now, anything within the physical laws of the universe is potentially within our grasp. Now, we have the power we once reserved to our gods; now, we can, through the application of our will, make of ourselves anything we choose to be.

And now we have meaning and purpose far beyond that of crawling around chanting to some insecure creator-god about how great and magnificent he is, and would he please please not strike us dead? Now, we are the part of the universe capable of understanding itself. We are of the universe; we are a part of it, not above it; but we are unique in all the universe we know in that we can understand it. We are aware. We are the universe's way of understanding itself.

And that is a far more magnificent purpose than telling a child-god over and over again that yes, he's great, really, he's great, he's good, he's wonderful, no really, he's great, and we love him, really we do.

There is a saying: "with God, all things are possible." The saying is false. With God, all things are possible save for rising above our station and becoming anything more than what we are right now.

Without god, however, all things not disallowed by the fundamental laws of physics really are possible. Without god, we make our own meaning and purpose; and that power lets us use the gifts granted to us to transform ourselves and the world around us in any way we want.

This power fills some people with fear. Without god, they say, how will we know what is moral? Without god, they say, what punishment can there be for people who do things that are wrong? To this I say: Your morals, given to you by your belief in god, allow for the most appalling atrocities, historically and today. Your morals teach that some human beings, simply as a result of the way they are born, are inherently unequal to others. The notion that there is one and only one right way to live is the cause of more human suffering, more grief, and more evil than any other single idea in all of human history. This is your morals? Your morals, like your gods, are a distorted mirror of your own prejudices and your own evil. You will not find heaven by backing away from hell; the fear of retribution is not the path to enlightenment.

We don't always make good choices, it's true. But we're still a young race. And I am very optimistic about what we can accomplish.

Will you be wearing pink on November 15th?

Taken from
 http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/11/11/lgbt-community-urged-to-mark-10-year-repeal-of-section-28-by-wearing-pink/

"To commemorate 10 years since the repeal of Section 28, campaigners are asking people all over the UK to wear pink “against prejudice” on Monday 18 November.

Schools OUT, an organisation that works towards equality for LGBT people in education, also wants as many teachers as possible to teach just one lesson from its National Curriculum-linked ‘The Classroom’ website on that day.

Schools OUT says it is a chance for teachers to “celebrate diversity” and for the UK to show solidarity with LGBT communities in countries such as Russia, where anti-LGBT laws prevent those at school from receiving basic, factual knowledge about LGBT people.

Birmingham is due to host the national LGBT History Month pre-launch event on 28 November, in which various workshops in both primary and secondary schools will engage young people in music, art, and history.

Section 28 was introduced under the Thatcher government as part of the Local Government Act in 1988.

It stated that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” and that schools “could not promote of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

 Section 28 was later repealed under Tony Blair’s Labour government in 2003 and the current Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, apologised for the policy in 2009.

Following the death of Lady Thatcher in April, Labour leader Ed Miliband said her support for Section 28 caused gay people to be “stigmatised”.

“Gay and lesbian people felt stigmatised by measures like Section 28, which today’s Conservative Party has rightly repudiated,” he said in a tribute to the former prime minister in the Commons."

Is it right for private schools to be exempt from certain discrimination provisions?

Here is an interesting article I found in the Guardian bringing focus on private schools being exempt from following  provisions which make it unlawful to discriminate due to gender or homosexuality.

Students expelled from schools for being gay? It's not OK

Private schools are exempt from provisions that make it unlawful to discriminate against a student on the basis of homosexuality or transgender grounds. MP Alex Greenwich is right to challenge it

Schools often aspire to be nurturing and supportive institutions. For gay and lesbian students, however, experience dictates that it can be a place of seclusion rather than support. In fact, in many private and faith-based schools, “coming out” is sufficient grounds for expulsion. Recently, Independent MP Alex Greenwich has moved legislation to help put an end to this in NSW. If passed, private educational authorities would no longer be able to discriminate against current or prospective students on the basis of homosexuality, transgender status, domestic status, age and disability.

It is tempting to romanticise how easy it is for young people to “come out” these days; politics and popular culture often combine to represent youth and social progressiveness as axiomatic Such cultural portrayals, however, blind us to troubling realities and homophobia remains a problem, especially amongst students. In 2010, Writing Themselves In 3 identified that over 60% of same-sex attracted and gender questioning young people have experienced some form of physical or verbal bullying. 80% of this abuse occurred in schools. Somewhat surprisingly, this represented an increase from previous years. Increased social visibility may have furthered recognition, but it has also led to heightened sexual/gender policing.

Homophobic or transphobic bullying is not just about physical violence. It manifests in far more insidious and ubiquitous ways. Boys are shamed for being effeminate or "camp". Girls are teased as “dykes” if they look too butch. Individuals who identify with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth are harassed for using the “wrong” toilets.

Sadly, students subjected to this abuse are construed as the problem. We still tend to assume everyone is a heterosexual and that they live according to a strict male/female binary. Is it any wonder then that individuals who challenge these expectations are accused of “flaunting” themselves or coerced into changing who they are? In a letter, former student Beci Jay recounts:

"I tried to convert myself to heterosexuality by going to church and praying about it. Of course, nothing happened. It's like holding your breath to change your eye colour. Even if you really want it to happen, it won't. I was gay."

Cases like Beci’s are not unique. Students are sometimes offered “conversion therapies” in order to “correct” their sexual orientation. Far from being reparative, as Beci’s story highlights, these programs have been shown to intensify the stress, anxiety, and depression faced by individuals navigating their sexual feelings and gender identifications.

What is even more concerning is that private and faith-based schools are licensed under many state and territory anti-discrimination laws to do this. In addition to hiring or firing staff on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, students can be summarily expelled for being homosexual or transgender. Or, as is more commonly the case, they are pressured into leaving.

Private schools aside, legislative exceptions remain a broader obstacle in the pursuit of social inclusion. Governments now increasingly outsource the provision of community services to private and faith-based organisations. Organisations receive public funds to provide vital services such as aged care, foster care, and education. They should not be lawfully entitled to discriminate. Further reform at both federal and state levels is needed to stop this happening.

Promising initiatives such as the Safe Schools Coalition in Victoria and Proud Schools in NSW exhibits that there is cross-partisan political support to prevent homophobic and transphobic bullying. Such programs emphasise the need for a holistic approach that combines education, dialogue and policy to support sexual and gender diversity in schools. However, there is little point in pursuing these conversations if laws make it clear that being same-sex attracted or gender questioning is an acceptable reason for expulsion. Schools cannot be supportive learning environments if young people have to hide who they are.

Anti-transgender bias with structural and individual racism

"The National Transgender Discrimination Survey [NTDS] measured transgender experiences of discrimination. The survey results showed that transgender people faced bias that affects all areas of life. However, one of the most important findings was that the combination of anti-transgender bias with structural and individual racism meant that transgender people of colour experience particularly devastating levels of discrimination. Among them, Black transgender people often reported the highest levels of discrimination."

Below is the link to the PDF report.

http://nbjc.org/sites/default/files/trans-adjustment-web.pdf

Also, you may wish to read: Murder statistics of transgender people

Humbled and Proud.

It is not often that I am moved, or even feel humble - It is not often that the work I do is appreciated. Nor it is often when a sub shows thanks or acknowledgment. Occasionally I will receive a gift - this is NOT as some subs think PAYMENT or as some may say "Mistresses are greedy, money grabbers - always wanting".  The purpose of giving gifts is to bring joy to both the giver and receiver.

A gift bestowed upon a Mistress is not a mere act of payment - When you are planning to give a gift to someone, you usually start thinking about it ahead of time. What would this person really want? Then, of course, you start searching for it and saving for it.

Bestowing a gift upon a Mistress is about a moment of pleasure, a slice of be happy, a piece of you are special. It is part of what it means to be human. In virtually every culture, gifts are a crucial part of the essential process of creating and maintaining relationships.

Occasionally I will receive a gift, and sometimes I will receive a gift worth more than its weight, cost the sender nothing but gained My respect and adoration. Gifts do not need to expensive, they need to be thought out and personal.  Below is the email I received from Slave Ash, which is a gift he has sent me...The biggest gift any one can receive - A simple THANK YOU.

Dear Mistress,

I hope you are keeping well.

 It has been a long time since I mailed you. In the past 5 months since I left UK, I there has not been a single day when I don't remember our sessions together. You, dear goddess, in the short time I interacted with you, opened my eyes to a whole new world. At times I felt like you had a direct connection to my mind and thoughts. something which I want to experience again.

 However, all good things have to come to an end. My parents have started to put pressure on me to "settle down". I don't think my family and parents will ever understand this craving I have to be subservient to a strong dominant. Some things even the people we are closest to will never understand. To hide this aspect of my life, I am ashamed to say, I had to get rid of every piece of female clothing and shoes before going home, lest they find it and my secret come out.  I beg your forgiveness for this. My parents happiness, was all I was hoping for. I hope the bag of clothes will help someone else in need, since I had kept it out for charity collection.

 I was hoping to be back in the UK by the year end. However, because of the proposed immigration fee and tighter laws, my company has stopped all transfers to UK  in the near future. I have been keeping track your blog posts. ( I hope you dont consider it to be stalking) I was saddened by some of the recent ones. In my humble opinion, anyone who disrespects you or your precious time should be kicked down the stairs of your dungeon. (I hope you dont consider me as one of those)

 I do hope we can still stay in touch, even though I know not when we shall be to meet.

 Yours Humbly

slaveash