My younger son was just about that dickish. Tantrums, bullying, stubbornness beyond comprehension. After he got booted from his third preschool, we sought, and got, help from a behavioral therapist, who taught us some skills for dealing with a very strong-willed child (big hint: don't tell him what to do, tell him what results you want and let him decide how to get there from here) and helped us design and enforce a program of positive reinforcement (if he got through a whole week without screwing up, he got a home-baked dessert of his choice -- that was his idea of what he wanted for a reward, and, what the hell, I'm a pretty good baker).

It didn't turn him into a little ray of sunshine, but he was clearly less rageful and more able to cope with day-to-day frustrations. He never did become an *easy* kid, exactly, but he learned to cope better with us and we learned to cope better with him -- he's now 25, working as a computer programmer, and making better money than I did at twice his age. (No girlfriend yet, but geek culture is, well, different.)

Some kids just have a tougher time; it's like their personal roads were just built rocky. There's no shame in hollering for help if you need it.

At any given time, and for any given minority group, there's the respectful description and a couple of disrespectful ones, and, often, one or two that are truly nasty.

As time passes, though, the "respectful" word will begun being used in a mocking way and will thus become "disrespectful." A new euphemism will be coined to take its place.

"Retarded" used to be the polite way of referring to a person we'd now call "developmentally disabled"; it supplanted words like "idiot" and "moron" because people had started using those as insults. "Special" is following the same trajectory right now, and the only reason "developmentally disabled" hasn't is because it's such an impossible mouthful of syllables.

You can track the same movement over dozens of trails: colored --> Negro --> black --> African-American (or person of color); crippled --> disabled --> differently abled; invert --> homosexual --> gay --> LGBT, etc., etc. The strategy seems to keep on trying until we come up with a word or phrase that's so awkward to say that using it as an insult is simply too much work.

However, noo word is inherently insulting; what makes it insulting is the intent to insult. And as long as people feel the urge to insult each other, new words will devolve into insults.

The message here is simple: the binary model of gender doesn't work. The character traits and behaviors we call "masculine" and "feminine" don't always map onto the corresponding bodies.

Why must an effeminate boy be either "gay" or "transsexual" -- why can't he just be effeminate? He might grow up to be gay, bisexual, heterosexual, a woman, or asexual, and none of that is directly relevant to his fundamental effeminacy. (There are butch MTF transsexuals, you know, who want to present with the body of a woman but masculine dress and behavior.)

If there were any room at all for shades of gray in our definitions of gender, these poor fought-over kids would be allowed to wear skirts on days when they felt like wearing skirts and pants on days when they felt like wearing pants, to experiment with makeup (who *wouldn't* want to experiment with makeup if they were allowed to?), and to express affection to people they liked and were attracted to. They'd have role models -- not just celebs, but people around them, teachers and aunts and uncles and doctors -- who didn't fit comfortably into traditional categories of male and female. Gender would be a spectrum of possibilities, not a choice... and categories like "transsexual" and "gay" and "straight" would melt into meaninglessness.

To people outside the spanking and BDSM communities, this writer's desires might seem wildly unrealistic. However, within those communities, it's not at all unusual for people to engage in various kinds of power exchange without getting into genital sex.

You're right, though, Cary, that this young woman could very easily be taken advantage of -- either by someone who physically overpowers, or by someone who manipulates her strong erotic draw toward submission and spanking play. For that reason, it is particularly important that she approach this goal using the structure of her local BDSM or spanking group. There, she can find people who can refer her to safe spankers who will respect her boundaries. She can even choose to explore in the ultra-safe context of a play party, where dozens of people are on hand to listen for her "safe word" and to interfere if her partner goes beyond their pre-agreed-upon limits.

I have spanked or been spanked by literally hundreds of men and women in my two decades in the scene; of those, I have had genital sex with fewer than a dozen... and I think it safe to say that all of my partners have gone away happy. For a spankophile, a good spanking is such a transcendent experience that genital sex seems a bit anticlimactic.

Janet Hardy

aka "Lady Green"

author, _The Compleat Spanker_