Okay, real answer time.

But we gotta ask more: okay for who?

A dental dam provides (or can provide) protection to both parties.

Since going ass to mouth is inherently high risk, the person performing analingus is going to benefit more from it in that regard.

So, anyone objecting to you using one while eating their ass should be told to eat your ass as you walk out the door.

That being said, dental damns do change the sensation of oral endeavors for the recipient. Same as condoms or gloves, the texture just isn’t the same. Unlike those, using a dental dam takes a bit of skill to make work. So you know, “okay” is likely to be as good as it gets without practice. Goes for eating pussy too.

Me? It’s like being in the mafia; one slip of the tongue, and you’re in deep shit.

Also like the mafia, I ain’t joining in without multiple kinds of protection.

Butt, if you put the time into using them with a partner that’s open to a mutual learning curve, the end result can be very pleasurable, even orgasmic.

The key is to remember that the dam is not great if it’s used the way it is in the mouth in dentistry. It can’t be a static barrier and actually feel good. So you need a decent sized sheet that allows you to move it with your mouth and tongue (again, this applies to both analingus and cunnilingus) without also exposing your mouth to the anus and its immediate surroundings. It also doesn’t do any good if the damn is slipping around so much that it gets twisted, resulting in both sides having contact with the recipient.

So while you’re trying to move the dam to cause stimulation, you also have to keep it fairly limited in how far and how it moves. It’s a learning curve

Also, an instructional video: https://youtu.be/3l2oi-X8P38

Races are mostly arbitrary groupings, based on skin color more than anything else.

Ethnicity, however, is less arbitrary, but still contains some arbitrary factors. It’s usually going to be based in culture or national origin, depending on who’s using the term.

So, Swedes do have their own ethnicity, though you’d find arguments exactly what ethnicity they’d fall into, but it would likely be different than Brits.

Ojibwa people are very different culturally from, say, Cherokee people. There’s even a good degree of common features that vary. But some people will still try to lump them together as “native American”, even though that term is almost as useless as “white” or “black”.

Truth is, we’re all mixed to some degree. Except maybe the sentinel island peoples, or other isolated groups. Even then, it isn’t like they didn’t get to wherever they are without traveling, so they mixed with something along the way, even if you have to go as far back as when Neanderthals and what gets called modern humans were still fucking.

That’s part of what makes ethnic groupings partially arbitrary. It’s unusual for no movement between groups to occur, even across pretty damn brutal landscape barriers. Big rivers, mountains, they aren’t totally impassable. Even deserts can’t keep humans from fucking each other in small numbers as they travel.

However, you can usually go with nationality and ethnicity being linked, though there’s so many exceptions that it’s absurd to do so. Just look at Nigeria and try to sort out the various groupings there and not notice there’s barely an overall national connection between them. And that not everyone in those groupings are even all in Nigeria to begin with.

You know, I don’t think there is such, at least not in the way I think you mean.

And it is a community that could use a lemmy representation. It would likely need to be on one of the blahaj instances just because having admins that are overtly queer focused will help keep things from being bombarded.

Yup, communities.

Shorthand is often just c/

My default was always active listening. It took me a while to develop real skill at it, then longer for it to no longer be something I had to turn on.

There’s exceptions of course, but most people that are expressing emotion publicly do just want a chance to vent and be heard, no matter what that emotion is. Anger, grief, confusion, fear, whatever it is, just having someone gently say “hey, I can see you’re having a rough patch, can I help?” Is all it takes usually.

Sometimes, you might have to go further, draw out the personbehind the emotion. Sometimes, they don’t want to be bothered at all, and just couldn’t find somewhere private before they broke. In that case, you’d be surprised how often they still pull themselves together for someone offering real support, and you can then guide them somewhere they can break down alone, if that’s what they really want.

But mostly, just being present, really listening and giving just enough feedback that they know you’re paying attention instead of just being a fencepost, it helps.

But tears? That’s easy. If they’re giving you those tears, you accept them as the gift they are. Especially if someone breaks through the usual barriers with strangers and reaches for physical comfort, you just give them that shoulder and make soft noises while supporting them. If they aren’t in contact, extend a hand, just a hand, to where they can reach it if they want to, but not so far it becomes insistent. Then you just listen and let their tears wash away enough of the raw emotion until they can talk.

At some point, most people wind down a little and start apologizing. When you give them a genuine smile and say something akin to “hey, it’s okay, we all have to look out for each other”, or “it’s okay, we’re in hospital, it’s gotta come out sometime; I’m just glad I was here to listen”. If that’s a genuine thing, if you mean a sentiment like that, it’s like aloe on a sunburn. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it takes the edge off long enough to regather and cope just a little while longer.

I’ve been on both sides of it. Hell, three different sides: patient, family member, and caregiver. There’s no single,perfect path through it, but someone even trying to help and fucking up is still a great balm

Look, let’s just take it there, one more time

Sounds like you need some vitamin D in your mouth

I am both frightened and aroused

You’ve apparently never slipped on a banana peel

Which slid you off the side of a hill

Where you rolled onto a trampoline

Then bounced off, losing all your clothes

Onto a pogo stick

Which then bounced through an oil refinery

Where you slammed into a group of workers

Who were in the middle of a shower

Then landed square on a cock that went balls deep

And then got thrown off a half second before you came

Only to go sliding down the hallway, missing the orgy

To faceplant into the lap of a crack whore

That had just finished the last of her last rock

And was in the middle of explosive diarrhea

After having eaten a can of surstromming

Then spinning around until you’re cock first in her syphilitic twat

Only to realize it’s OPs mom

We got to pick, though most people stuck with the closest version to their real name. I did.

But we could pick any name, if qe wanted, which was pretty cool

There’s only twelve lemmy users anyway.

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

There was a dude on reddit that bigot watch kept nailing because of that.

Dude used the same patterns and words, thinking that switching user names would matter.

But, what if I use my real name and just lie all the time?

You can’t help others if you don’t take care of yourself.

So, you can’t take care of others’ shit if you don’t take care of your own shit first.

Which is a valuable lesson I learned while wiping asses for a living while having IBS. It just happens to apply here as well

Familiar

So, mint with cinnamon

I dunno if crazy is the right word, but you do run into people no longer giving a fuck the older they get. However, you also get them settling down and chilling out more as well.

The key to the kind of thing you used as an example is that if you can retire with a decent nest egg, you now have both time and funding to fuck around and find out in ways you can’t before that era of life. Mind you, you also have to get there in good enough shape to fuck around at all, but that’s tangential to this matter.

In my years doing end of life care, my patients were obviously past they point of getting up to serious shenanigans, but they would sometimes have family that were quite fond of finding fuckery to get up to.

One thing I noticed about old dudes was a proclivity to cars that were well beyond the horsepower needed for daily tasks. Anything from standard sports cars to serious machinery like one guy that had a pro street 55 bel air. Which, since I got to drive the thing, was bitchin!

Now that I’m in my fifties, I get it even more than I did back then. Life is fucking short. None of us get out alive, so there’s a tipping point where one’s give-a-shitter takes a flying leap. Since life is also often brutal, it makes sense that once you’ve done the expected bullshit, spending what time is left rotting in a chair by a window ain’t exactly enticing.

Only thing keeping my crippled ass from souping up my little 4 banger and seeing how tight I can get it to corner at speed is budget. I’m in that window where my reflexes are still solid, and my experience is deep, so taking opportunities to push the envelope like that makes sense.

I reckon that once I get even older, I’ll have less to lose as well, so I might end up doing something batshit like strapping rockets to a car just for the lolz. I’ve seen the destruction curve of the human body as it ages, so I’m not exactly enamored of longevity what with the shitty quality of life that’s nigh inevitable.

But for real, the majority of old folks are just tired and want a fucking nap.

OP’s mom

Psychic

I think you’ll find that the gripe is more about it being implemented badly, and in a way that’s harmful on multiple levels rather than the technology itself.