Thoughts – Page 13 – Femdom Resource

Emergency procedures (cont)

This is a continuation of my previous post. If you haven’t read that then I’d suggest doing so if the rest of this is to make any sense at all.

Before I go on, I should make it clear that none of this post should be taken to suggest any blame or fault is directed towards the submissive in the original scene. I can well imagine I’d have done the same things in her situation. The fault lies with the dominant. The priority should be for the community to blacklist him and warn others about his behavior. However, I’m an engineer, and when fallible humans are concerned my instinct is to look for processes that can help. I’m not part of ‘the scene’ and I’m not experienced when it comes to play parties, but I thought I’d throw a few ideas out. Perhaps people with more relevant knowledge can critique them and improve them.

In the last post I drew an analogy between a scene and a computer system. Both can go badly wrong, and when that happens the badness is compounded by the unusual nature of the situation. Continuing that analogy, one approach frequently used to mitigate emergencies is to make the emergency process part of the normal process. For example, you don’t want to have a primary system and a backup system that’s used only when the first fails. The middle of an emergency isn’t the time to try and fire up a rarely used backup system. A better approach is to designate both systems as primary, and flip between them on a regular basis. That makes the standard process the same as the emergency process, which means when your data center catches fire you’re not exploring an entirely new situation.

Applying this approach to a BDSM scene would mean that safewords wouldn’t be the exception, they’d be the rule. I’m not sure how often safewords are used in play parties, but I’m guessing it’s rare. That potentially sets up a situation where using one feels unusual or even ‘wrong’. It makes the critical case the exception case. If instead every single scene had to end with a magic word, said loudly by either the dominant or the submissive, then perhaps that barrier would be significantly lowered. If you’ve heard ‘Red’ shouted a dozen times already in an evening, maybe it feels easier to say when it’s really necessary, even when dealing with a submissive headspace and a fucked up scene.

Another computing idea that seems applicable here is the idea of the heartbeat. This is one of the ways you make an unreliable system reliable. Components send out a regular heartbeat signal to let everyone know they’re OK. If the monitoring systems don’t detect a heartbeat signal they notify someone about the problem and kick off repair procedures. Applying this to a BDSM scene would mean that an external observer would have to get a periodic ‘Green’ from a submissive or the scene would be stopped. That’s obviously not a system to use in every situation, but perhaps could be a default for scenes where the players are unfamiliar with each other. It would be helpful if a submissive suffers a panic attack or is in such a bad place that they’re not able to safeword.

The final computing analogy I want to use is the idea of watchdogs. These are systems that are specifically designed to watch other systems. They’re constantly checking that the right processing is happening and are primed to shutdown anything that appears to be misbehaving. In the BDSM space the equivalent of watchdogs would be dungeon monitors. They key question is what they actually monitor for. Simply looking out for safewords being ignored or legal violations leaves a lot of scope for abuse. Perhaps the default should be that any kind of ‘no’ or negative response from a submissive stops the scene. If you want to do an explicit safeword based scene then that needs to be agreed and confirmed beforehand. Otherwise the assumption should be that anything other than a visibly willing and keen submissive is cause for stepping in and at least temporarily halting things.

It’s kind of depressing that these kind of protocols would be necessary. Abusive assholes will never go away, but you’d hope a community that talks about consent so much would do a better job of identifying them and isolating them. Clearly that’s not currently the case.

I wasn’t sure what image would be suitable for this post. I didn’t want to trivialize the issue by featuring something pseudo-non-consensual. So instead I’ll go in the opposite direction, and feature something cute and life affirming.

I found this on the Fucking Cuddle tumblr.

Emergency procedures

I just had a really wonderful scene with Lydia. Many needles and much moaning on my part was involved. However, I don’t want to talk about that tonight. Instead I want to talk about a bad scene. A scene with an abusive asshole of a dominant. Specifically, this scene described by Little Dorky Cyclops. I’m not going to try and summarize it, so feel free to go read it if you want the rest of this post to make sense.

I have to admit that a few years ago, when I was not particularly young and still stupid, I would have been sympathetic but bemused by that scene description. I would have been the idiot saying “Why not just safeword? That’s what it’s for.” Now that I’m definitely older and possibly wiser, I get it. I don’t play in public and I’ve been lucky enough to encounter very few bad dominants. I’ve only really had one session go seriously sour on me (described here and here), but I still completely understand LDC’s reaction in the scene. It’s tough to switch gears and take control back from a dominant. You’re fighting the natural dynamic of the scene and a desire to do your bit to make it work. It’s always tempting to think it’ll get better, that that you just need to hang on till the endorphins kick in. It’s easy to safeword on cramping or going numb, but this scene was a far more complex dynamic, with social pressure added into the mix as well.

Obviously the dominant here – Jefferson is his fetlife handle (aged 50, in NYC) – behaved abusively and there are serious questions the people who attended the event should be asking themselves. Hopefully making this public reduces his chances of going to other events and repeating the process, although given he’s done it before I’m not optimistic. From a submissive (and possibly selfish) perspective it makes me wonder what I can do to avoid getting caught in a similar situation. Even assuming the BDSM community can do a better job of policing itself (big assumption), bad dominants will continue to be a fact of life. So what are good self-defense techniques for a submissive to practice?

In a weird way this problem puts me in mind of a common problem in computer systems, namely handling backup and recovery when disaster strikes. I know that sounds like a bizarre connection, but stick with me on this. The problem computer users often have isn’t defining the recovery process or setting up the emergency systems, it’s making sure they work when needed. They’re hard to test properly and are rarely used. Unfortunately when you need them, you need them to work flawlessly, the first time of asking and in the most difficult circumstances. That’s a really bad combination. Typically people find out their recovery system isn’t working the first time they try and use it.

I wonder if submissives face a similar problem? They have a theoretical mechanism for safety, but the only time they use it is when they’re already in a bad situation. That’s exactly when you want to fall back to a frequently used and easily deployed mechanism, not step further into the unknown.

I’ll continue this post tomorrow with a few more thoughts. Feel free to leave comments until then. I’ll finish with what seems like an appropriate image. Thanks to Little Dorky Cyclops we’ve found out about some of that lurking evil in one particular man.

This image is by the artist Ybar. I found it on the Velvet Underground tumblr.

The serious end of the flogger

Mentioning Dan Savage in yesterday’s post prompted me to go and catch up with the latest entries in his advice column – ‘Savage Love’. It’s an entertaining column and his answers are frequently funny and insightful. Even the comments, normally garbage on any popular mainstream public forum, can be thoughtful.

For kink lovers his column from a couple of weeks back, entitled Working the Kinks Out, was particular relevant. Of the three kinky folk featured, the letter that caught me eye was the third one on the page, sent by a woman married to a submissive man. She didn’t fancy ‘squeezing into an uncomfortable corset and using a flogger on him’ so allowed him to see a pro-domme. Now she’s upset that he’s going too often and spending too much money. Dan’s answer is a fair one, but I think it’s impossible to judge the situation without a hell of a lot more context than the letter gives. What really piqued my interest was the comments that followed the column.

As you’d expect the comments covered a lot of viewpoints, but a common one was that she should stop complaining and start hitting him. The reasons given ranged from being GGG, being financially smart, learning to like it, not being selfish and it’s easy once you try it. I’m all for more women topping and playing the dominant role, but I can’t help feeling that these comments overlook the complexity of D/s play. I wonder if they’d say the same kind of thing if the husband were dominant and wanted to tie her up and beat her? Would they suggest a non-submissive should just suck it up, stop being selfish and take the punishment? I doubt it.

Submission is often treated as something fixed, an in-built need that must be satisfied. Conversely dominance is treated as an act or activity, an option that can be turned on or off. I understand that coming from a vanilla perspective (nobody wants pain, but anyone can choose to inflict it), but it doesn’t make sense from a kinky background. Dominating someone is a very complex dynamic, and scenes can create a lot of powerful emotions. Nobody should feel they have to tap into that kind of energy if they don’t want to. I don’t know where the wife in question chose to draw the kinky line in the sand, but I do think she can’t choose to be dominant anymore than he can choose to not be submissive.

Given the letter writer seemed unhappy about using a flogger, this seemed a particularly apt picture to use. This lady certainly doesn’t seem unhappy about her flogging options. This is from a 2012 Divine Bitches shoot with Phoenix Marie and Parker London.

Worthless worms revisited

My post ‘Worthless worms : Hot or not?‘ attracted a lot of thoughtful commentary. It’s clearly a topic that provokes strong opinions from both sides of D/s slash. This post is intended to address a few follow-up points that struck me after writing it and reading the responses.

In the original post I used degradation, humiliation and objectification interchangeably. That was careless as they’re related but different concepts. If I had a virtual whiteboard I’d be standing at it now drawing partially overlapping circles. The worthless worm trope is primarily about the sense of self and personal identity. It’s very directed degradation (you pathetic sniveling coward, you’re not fit to lick my boots, etc.). Humiliation is more situational. Anyone can be humiliated in the right circumstances, no matter how self-assured and confident they might generally be. Objectification is about removing humanity and personality. It’s not about being worthless, but identifying worth through function and utility. A lot of people get off on a mixture of these kinks, but when writing about a possible F/m mismatch, I was primarily thinking of the first. I rarely observe female dominants write or blog about degradation, but objectification and, to a lesser extent, humiliation, does crop up in positive contexts.

Ferns astutely observed that this is a style of play that often conflates the person with the kink. Presenting themselves primarily through their fetish is a common problem for guys who’ve spent too long surfing femdom porn. I think it’s particularly likely to happen with this kink, because it’s primarily about the perception of the person and their value. i.e. Exactly the things that are emphasized, normally in a positive fashion, when building a new relationship. I guess the (badly broken) thought process is ‘Why bother to put myself forward as a valuable person to know, when I ultimately want to be treated as if I’m not?’

It’s also true that cliches of commercial femdom don’t help anyone into this style of play. For men it gets them lumped into the same bucket as the jerk offs writing emails about how they’re not fit to lick the dirt from the boots of any female dominant blogger they encounter. For many dominant women it’s a stereotype they’re trying to push against, and writing about it is only likely to lead to more emails from the aforementioned jerks offs.

All that said, I do standby my entirely anecdotal observation that there’s a mismatch here in F/m that doesn’t exist in M/f. As someone who doesn’t have this kink, I’m selfishly kind of glad about that. Many of the F/m tumblrs that focus on degradation and humiliation tend to veer all to easily into misogyny. I’m happy that it’s incredibly rare to encounter misandry in femdom blogs or forums. If you are a submissive guy who occasionally enjoys a bit of pathetic sniveling, then the best advice would be to make sure you compartmentalize it and treat it strictly as a kink like any other. While there might be male dominants who’ll respond to a new submissive describing themselves as a worthless slut in need of training, your odds of success with that opening line and a female dominant will be very close to zero.

Trampling beneath a dominant woman’s feet often seems to be a theme of the ‘worthless submissive’ style of play. This is from the appropriately named Woman Worship site. I particularly liked her choice of reading matter.

Worthless Worms : Hot or not?

The material I post here is almost all femdom. I’d hate to make my blog’s URL, title and tagline out to be liars. Yet my browsing habits cast a wider net. Kinky writing is often translatable to a variety of D/s and gender combination and my libido is an omnivorous consumer of kinky imagery. I might not want to tie women up, but a hot female bondage shot can still press my buttons.

One of the things I find fascinating when looking at a variety of blogs and tumblrs is how gender and D/s dynamics interact. I’ve written in the past about the type of imagery the different F/f/M/m groups post. Today I thought I’d braindump on the hairy topic of the worthless/worthy submissive. If we split the world into those who get off on a negative view of submission and those who don’t, what do we see? Or more accurately, what anecdotal observations am I about to pull out my ass?

From a submissive perspective it’s clear that there are both male and female submissives who get off on being insulted and abused. Words like worthless, pathetic, useless, dumb and weak often appear. They enjoy being told that they’re of little value. There’s not perfect symmetry here. Female submissives of this type tend to skew towards sexual objectification (bimbo, toy, ornament) where males skew towards sexual failure (cuckold, premature, small). I also suspect, based on nothing more than a hunch, that there are proportionally more submissive men than women of this type. But regardless of the ratios, it’s easy to find examples of both genders that kink on being demeaned.

When it comes to the dominants the story changes. It’s easy to find example of male dominants who get off on the idea of a worthless woman. Depressingly easy in fact. While some can appear to distinguish between consensual kinky play with a partner and the other 3 billion women in the world, you sadly don’t have to browse to far to run into some highly unpleasant misogynistic attitudes. I can only hope most of the bloggers are pimply teenagers in their parents basements who wouldn’t know what to do with a submissive woman if they found one tied to their computer.

In contrast most dominant women appear to strongly dislike this kind of submission. If you keep up with my blogroll, and writers like Ferns, D, Stabbity, Vista and Miss Pearl, you’ll see a consistent preference to strong, confident and self-assured male submission. Self-loathing, as stabbity recently asserted, is not an attractive trait. Even Fm couples who play with humiliation and objectification (Scott and Em perhaps or maybe Suzanne and tammy) tend to have a far more complex and nuanced approach that the stereotypical ‘worthless worm’ attitude. In fact the only dominant women I’ve seen clearly cater to this style of submission are pro-dommes. They’ll happily tell a guy he’s a pathetic sniveling failure – just as long as he can pay. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I suspect that the payment might be a significant factor there.

Personally I don’t get off on degradation, so all this is just observation and idle speculation. Anyone likening me to an invertebrate is likely to get a ‘Fuck you!’ followed swiftly by a ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ But I do think the potential for mismatch in F/m desires compared to M/f is interesting. I’m also intrigued by the correlation with conventional cultural stereotypes for the genders. Apparently weakness can be an attractive attribute in Mf, but not typically in Fm.

After all this talk of degradation and humiliation I thought I should finish with something cute and happy. I found this on the Domination on My terms tumblr.

Pigeonholing (sadly not a kinky technique)

I want to follow up yesterday’s post with a further point about variety in the sexual realm. Although it’s more of an observation on the perception of kink than a specific point.

In non-sexual situations everyone implicitly understands that what you enjoy is situational and variable. Sometimes I want a sandwich, other times I want a fancy meal with matching wines. Tonight I’m watching a moody existential French thriller, tomorrow I’ll catch up on my political comedy via some Colbert Report episodes. Nobody assumes that liking one thing precludes liking other things.

Yet in the sexual realm that assumption crops up all the time. If you like men you can’t like women. If you’re kinky you can’t enjoy conventional foreplay and sex. If you’re dominant you can’t enjoy giving oral sex. If you enjoy pain you can’t enjoy cuddling. Stating a sexual preference often seems to pigeonhole people in a way that other preferences don’t. I’ve been shocked by how many people assume that because I’m a male submissive that I always need a leather clad whip wielding dominatrix to get off.

Admittedly there are people out there who only respond to their very specific fetish. If the only way you can orgasm is by dressing as a penguin and having a large blonde lady in a viking outfit throws herring at your head, well you have my sympathies. But I suspect you’re in a minority, and not just because of that particular fetish. I think for most kinky people, their kinks expand their interests and options, not confine them. And that’s probably a fact we should talk more about. Doing so might encourage people to explore their sexual interests and not fear that they’re heading down a path of depravity that’ll ruin their lives and existing relationships.

I thought this image of some simple kissing and biting made a nice contrast to yesterday’s complex scene. I found this on the Fucking Cuddle tumblr.

Bloggy thoughts

I found writing yesterday’s post updating the blog page a touch depressing. Not because of the blogs that I listed, but because of the small number I had.

Whenever I find a potential blog to add (via comments, emails, blogrolls, etc) I bookmark it and keep an eye on it. My criteria for inclusion is pretty simple. It has to be something I want to read. It has to make an effort to spell and punctuate correctly. It has to be updated occasionally. Nothing more than that. Yet so many fail, and almost always on the third criteria. I had around a dozen or so blogs to look at, and when I came to update my page most had either been deleted or become dormant. It’s the same story when I look at people’s blogrolls. Most blogrolls are full of blogs that have ceased to be, are bereft of life and rest in peace. Clearly even the blogroll owners aren’t even looking at them.

There are plenty of articles giving advice on how to write a successful blog, and I’m not going to repeat them here. However, I will make two points that seem particularly relevant to kink blogs, as there’s a couple of pitfalls I regularly see kinky bloggers stumble into.

Firstly, if you want a long lived blog, don’t begin by writing enormously long posts. Every blogging guide suggests posting frequently, and long posts are anathema to that. I think most kinky people get so few chances to express themselves openly that starting a blog triggers a rush of writing. They’re very excited to be sharing a secret part of themselves and want to get all these important hidden thoughts out to the world. Unfortunately a huge wall of text is not great for attracting readers. More importantly, it associates a high cost to writing posts. Once that initial thrill has faded, the thought of continuing to update at that same level of posting is very off-putting. Rather than switch to a more manageable post style, a lot of bloggers simply give up.

Secondly, come up with a variety of post styles that you can switch between. Writing very personal posts about your experiences and relationships is great. And if your life is a continuous whirl of crazy people doing extreme things in unusual places then that’s probably all you need. But for most of us, even those with kinky personal lives, it’s tough to continuously sustain a personal storyline that’s blog-worthy. Great writers can make any situation interesting, the rest of us need a little help from the subject matter. Personally I have a grab bag of post styles I pick from, which I mentally categorize as: Pretty picture, mainstream idiocy, interesting article, my kinky play, BDSM politics, thought for the day, etc. Having those existing mental templates for posts makes regular blogging much easier. There’s no reason anyone should follow my mix of post topics, but blogs that stick purely to ‘my kinky play’ as their subject matter do seem to have the shortest lives.

I’ll finish with a picture of a typical femdom blogger in action. I’m sure all the best posts are written this way. Don’t burst my bubble and tell me otherwise.

I found this image on the Her Butler tumblr. I think it’s a particularly apt one to use, as I’m pretty certain the blogger in question is Ms Marie. For a time she wrote a really excellent femdom blog which featured a lot of shots from her personal life. Sadly, as is often the way of blogs, one day it just vanished with no explanation. The images of her and her husband still pop up on tumblrs from time to time, and they always make me smile. Whatever she’s doing now, I hope all is going well for her.

Random datapoints

The relative proportions of dominants to submissives, and the splits along the gender lines, are a well debated topic. Not only are the ratios for active kinksters up for question, but there’s also the issue of how many potential kinky people there are, or even what the percentages would look like if society was less screwed up. It’s a topic I’ve commented on in the past.

It’s also a topic that’s horribly lacking in hard data, and I’m afraid I’m not about to fix that problem. However, I did do a small experiment recently that’s related and I thought kind of interesting. The methodology was pretty simple. I went to the CollarMe site, randomly looked at profiles (with the widest possible selection criteria), and counted the proportions I saw. It actually started as some random browing over a coffee, but after a few minutes I got curious about what I was seeing, and started a tally chart. To keep it simple I just counted straight singles who didn’t switch.

The end results, before I got bored counting, were: Male Dominants = 40. Female Submissives = 22. Male Submissives = 23. Female Dominants = 7. Of those 7 female dominants, the number who were pro-dommes = 6. Leaving me with a grand total of 1 non-professional female dominant.

Now that doesn’t tell us anything about the ratios in the real world. It’s just a small sample of the people who choose to advertise on a particular site. But I was interested in how accurately it matched my intuition of what the numbers would be. I expected male dominants to be the largest group, submissives to be fairly evenly split along gender lines, and female dominants to be rare. I just wasn’t expecting them to be that rare. The contrast of 40:1 across the gender divide is striking.

I have to admit it wasn’t always easy to differentiate the professionals from the lifestyle ads. A couple of what I classified as professional ads didn’t mention payment. However, when I see numerous well lit/composed photographs of an attractive lady modelling several different exciting leather outfits, the cynic in me tends to assume she’s a pro. The non-professional dominants are normally dealing with enough dick pic shots as it is, they don’t need to encourage the hairy knuckle brigade.

While I’m on the subject of exciting leather outfits modeled by professionals – and as an aside let’s just admit I’m a genius at subtle segues to my post images – here’s Dominatrix Ella Kros in a rather striking black ensemble.

If you’re in either Tel-Aviv or London and would like to session with Ella Kros then her contact page is here.

The common man’s guide to bad books

The growing mainstream visibility of BDSM has led to a burst of kinky novels, guides and memoirs. A particularly active niche within this growing category has been the pro-domme autobiography and how-to guide. In theory this should have led to a lot of exciting reading. Anyone who has chatted to an experienced pro-domme will know they have many great stories to go along with their technical skills and insight into the complexities of human sexuality. In reality the results have been pretty mixed, with most books being, shall we say, less-than-great.

The latest contender is The Posh Girls Guide to Play by Alexis Lass aka Domme Dietrich, as featured in this NY Post article and this MF thread. It’s a kind of guide and memoir combo deal. The good news is that it’s not in that less-than-great category. The bad news is that it’s much worse than that. Admittedly I haven’t read the whole thing, but the look inside feature on the Amazon site told me all I needed to know.

I could probably deal with the juvenile writing style that reads like a cross between a teenager’s diary and a Cosmo article. The frequent mentions of her posh upbringing is weird, but I don’t think that would ruin it for me. I could even cope with her crass attempts to tie the whole things into the awful 50 shades trilogy. But some other things are just too annoying to ignore.

You might think that a book by a pro-domme would feature some positive thoughts on female domination. Even if the book covered a variety of gender and D/s combinations, surely the F/m one should be there somewhere, right? Yet no. As far as I can tell (both from the book and her interviews) it automatically defaults to the conventional submissive female role. The only submissive males are laughable clients in the commercial dungeon. Write about female submission by all means, but don’t act like it’s the goddam natural order of the world.

Next on the list of the “You’ve got to be kidding me…” was this gem.

S&M is archaic and rusty term that does not represent all or most popular dominant and submissive roleplay …. [We’ll have] nothing plucked from the psycho torture toy chest. This guide is intended for adventurous, whole and healthy women…

Well fuck you very much lady. A lot of us like a little S and a touch of M. And we don’t appreciate the implication that we’re not whole or healthy because of it. You’re drawing a bunch of arbitrary lines between what’s kinky and cool and what’s weird and deviant. I think I must have missed your nomination as ultimate ruler of acceptable kink. Is it to late for me to vote?

The final gem that almost made me laugh out loud was the guide to who the book is for. Apparently if you answer yes to just one of these questions, then BDSM is for you…

6. My lover and I are fighting too much, and it’s taxing our relationship.
7. I would love to tone down the stress in my life.
8. I am a dominant female and I’m wondering how it would feel to be relieved of control and play a submissive role in a ‘tryout’ play experience.

Yes, that’s right – if your relationship isn’t working out, and you’re fighting a lot, then clearly the best thing to do is to get ropes, gags and whips involved. That applies even if neither of you have any interest in BDSM. Just go ahead and get your kinky freak on. There’s absolutely nothing that could possibly go wrong in that situation. As for (8), I refer you to my earlier comments. Obviously if you’re a dominant female who brought a book by an ex pro-domme expecting some suggestions on female dominance, well more fool you. You probably deserve a good spanking.

The image is the author in question – Domme Dietrich. I might not appreciate her writing, but I have to admit she does look fabulous in a black corset.

Kerfuffle in the blogs

One of the things I enjoy about blogs is watching opinions and discussions ripple out across them. As a medium they exist somewhere between a newsletter, a diary and a conversation. The dynamics are complex and I’m often surprised by what posts will sink without a trace and what will trigger a storm of discussion and controversy.

One recent example of this was a post by that well known troublemaker Ferns on the subject submission, consent and the D/s dynamic. That was followed by this post by kinkinexile taking issue with the definition of dominance used. That provoked maymay into a series of posts written with his usual tact and subtlety on the theme that ‘Dominants are Rapists’. You can read them in chronological order as post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5, post 6, post 7 and post 8. That’s a lot of posts, so if you’re short of time then 1 and 6 are probably the key ones to read. Spinning off from all that was this post by Tomio Black and this by gingernic, plus no doubt others I failed to spot.

I was planning to stick my nose into the debate, but for the moment I’ll play the role of the lazy college lecturer and simply throw it out there for discussion. I am, after all, a resource site. Possibly I’ll come back to it in a future post. It should also go without saying that a link here does not imply endorsement of any particular viewpoint. The set of things I find interesting includes many which annoy or infuriate me.

As a meta-comment on the debate itself, I will say that maymay’s case is not enhanced by his tendency to classify the emotional and angry responses generated as proof that he’s getting close to the truth. I could post that all submissives are sad losers who don’t deserve a real relationship and generate a lot of strong responses. That wouldn’t constitute proof that I’d hit a nerve and was onto something. It reminds me of the old joke – ‘Yes, it’s true they laughed at the Wright brothers, but it’s also true that they laughed at Bozo the clown’.

I wasn’t really sure what image to go with here, but seeing as Ferns mentioned chores, I’ll run with that particular theme.