Love in Dark Settings

A due warning to all you folks who find discussions of real-life leather to be squicky: You'll want to skip this entry.

( Leather Seminar #1: Basics of Resistance Management )

"For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, the deeds of men run shallow and wander and are wasted."

--Ursula K. Le Guin: The Farthest Shore.

Topics in this post: family responsibilities, serving as a role model (or not), my leather fiction.

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"Working as a servant was as much a rite of passage for young people in the late Middle Ages and early modern era as going off to college is today. In contrast with other societies around the world, where servants were usually a class of people doomed to servitude for their entire lives, in northwestern Europe large numbers of young people passed through a phase of service before forming their own households and working their own lands or trades. In northern Europe, anywhere between one-third and one-half of all young people put in time as servants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the early 1700s, according to one study, 60 percent of all English youths aged fifteen to twenty-four worked as servants at some point in their lives."

--Stephanie Coontz: Marriage, a History.

Topics in this post: military history, orders, leather history, service, protocol, schedules, family hierarchy, religious hierarchy, business hierarchy, support networks for hierarchy.

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"No meritorious act of a subordinate should escape [an officer's] attention, even if the reward be only one word of approval. Conversely, he should not be blind to a single fault in any subordinate."

--John Paul Jones.

Topics in this post: Regency etiquette, long-distance relationships, protocol, leather history, schedule, training, military discipline, leather clubs, spirituality, versatility, feudalism, medieval hierarchy, my writings, memories.

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( A brief guide )