An Unspoken Pleasurable Kernel to the Act of Contracting Itself

February 13, 2023 1:50 AM

Unenforceable sex contracts hearken back to a core of sensual and intellectual pleasure that might even power enforceable, non-meretricious contracts, like the standard form contract at AT&T or Verizon. Such a modern “form contract” eschews negotiation and “dickering” altogether, requiring total submission to predetermined terms: they certainly feel sadistic. from The Sadomasochistic Cenote and Its Legal Upwellings [language, theme may be NSFW]
posted by chavenet (5 comments total)

Somehow, this reminds me of "financial doms", which usually exists as a subdomain of femdom. For those of you who's TL;DR, it's distance dominance or remote dominance where the dom is spending the sub's money, or the sub's being "punished" by transferring money to the dom for alleged transgressions. It is completely sexless.
posted by kschang at 10:25 AM on February 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have been involved in commercial contract negotiation and there is definitely something libidinous in the way people contemplate exercising power through contract terms or yielding power in order to get what they want. Which might be part of the point of this essay? It was not as clear as it might have been.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:21 AM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I found the idea that lawyers and authors of fiction are, to paraphrase, engaged in a kind of tug of war for the control of written language itself fascinating and highly stimulating.

I read a lot of genre fiction, and law degrees are amazingly common among my favorite paranormal romance, urban fantasy, high fantasy, and detective novel authors, especially the women authors.

I remember a friend of mine whose father is a judge telling me that when the Webster's much ballyhooed 3rd came out, the ABA refused to endorse it because it left out so many of the words which were still in common use in contracts, judges opinions, and filings, and which had been in the 2nd.
posted by jamjam at 1:17 PM on February 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

I wish non-kinky people would refrain from theorizing about kink, particularly by referencing extreme, salacious examples from the press, but it’s hard to get annoyed in this case, because the author only dances around a thesis. I’m sorry, I mean they effectuate discursion via rhetorical prestidigitation.
posted by dephlogisticated at 7:17 PM on February 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Surely this whole article was written for the fun of creating sentences like:

Mistress Lauren wasn’t a wormhole, and she wasn’t the hole at the center of a donut either, but she was some kind of productive lacuna.

'Scuse me, I have to go be some kind of productive lacuna for a while.
posted by inexorably_forward at 9:51 PM on February 13, 2023 [3 favorites]