[Uh, yeah... okay, did you find, uh, should I start guessing?]

[There's more than one obvious possibility?  Go ahead and list them, then, I probably need to know anyways no matter how much I don't want to.]

[Well, it wasn't North Korea. Apartheid? One of the genocides? The CIA getting up to shenanigans? I should maybe thinking of - weirder stuff - children's rights? Do you folks have diplomatic relations with corvids who you have figured out how to talk to?]

[What rights... do children... not have?]

[I mean, their parents have custody of them, so they can't like... move out? Make some kinds of purchases? We do have child abuse laws, they can be removed from the home if their parents are caught beating them or starving them or anything.]

Better answer than feared.

[On your own view, who is it okay to beat or starve?]

[Uh, subs who are into that and... uh... ...people on hunger strikes? Respectively.]

[How does a sub justifiably end up 'into that', on your view?]

[I don't really understand the appeal myself, I'm not a sub. I'm leaning back in the direction of the 'saw porn and had a crisis' hypothesis though.]

Thellim manages to notice this time that the English word 'porn' is matching against her horrifying memory, though with some strange-feeling internal missed connections, and that 'porn' also refers to something artificial.  Hope flickers up in her.  [Wait.  Maybe I've just been really stupid.  If I see a video of somebody being hurt is that not real any more than somebody apparently dying in a TV show?]

[Depends on the porn. If it looked like somebody died, yeah that's fake. If somebody's just having an interesting time with a horsewhip that's probably real but if they're pretending they're not having any fun that is most likely fake.]

[I - I don't know how to say this and I've been messing up this whole conversation but please listen to me, I can see how the dominants might have been - having fun - the thing I don't know how to say - in my world - we would think the submissive was a person too and it would matter that they were not having fun.  Please hear me out.  Please.]

[...the submissives are in point of fact having fun. There are some who are not into being hurt and they find doms who aren't into hurting them.]

Thellim is confused and it's not nearly as much fun as when it was about bad economics.  Maybe the video she saw was fake and Isabella is talking about a different class of videos that are real.  [No, she wasn't having fun, so maybe it wasn't real, then, the submissive I saw was -]  Thellim describes it like she's trying to spit out the words as quickly as possible so the memory will stop burning her, which it does anyways.

[I don't watch porn myself so I'm not going to recognize the specific performers or anything but subs like things that do not seem like fun to people who are not subs, it's correlated with masochism and stuff. ...I imagine Jackson didn't tell you much about how we met?]

[Keep talking...?]

[Jackson and I went to the same school and originally became acquainted because he was sexually harassing me, among other doms. It put us in kind of an awkward situation, see, because telling him to go away would be giving him an order, wouldn't it. Some of the others got fed up enough to kick him pretty hard and he kept coming back. 'Cause, you know, he's into that. He cut it out when he wasn't single any more.]

[Can you explain things... to a much stupider and more ignorant person than you are currently explaining them to.  What's 'masochism'.  What's 'into that' in context.]

[- yeah, sure. Some people are wired such that they are - sexually entertained by - imagining, or actually experiencing, things like pain, humiliation, fear, restraint, and other stuff that isn't universally popular. This is admittedly peculiar prima facie, but - do people on dath ilan eat spicy food, or ride roller coasters, or like weighted blankets, or play games that involve revealing embarrassing secrets -]

[How do you get from WEIGHTED BLANKETS to THAT.]

[...and how much work by psions is involved?]

[...I'm sure some psion somewhere has at least considered working on a power to get people more masochistic to solve relationship compatibility issues but it's not the sort of thing you hear about happening all the time, plenty of people are subs and plenty of subs are masochists all on their own. To varying degrees; porn tends to disproportionately feature the varietal with more extreme tastes.]

[So according to you there is not a known process that designates people as subs, or any known process that turns them into masochists, it just happens.  Can psions not make people not be masochists?  Can most subs not afford that, even if they'd only have to pay for that work to be done once?]

[I don't expect there to be any psions working on reducing masochism because that doesn't... seem obviously desirable? Anyone who could afford that would also be able to afford mage healing insurance coverage to get patched up if their dom overshot. People designate themselves as subs or doms - or switches, or even nondynamics.]

[Is there by any chance an early guessing program where some prettier teenagers who'd be more valuable to dominants get told they're probably submissives and then exposed to particular forms of carefully crafted pornography.  Does anybody ever decide to stop being a submissive and what kind of explicit or implicit obstacles do they face in that.]