My BDSM group has a fair amount of e-mailing and other regular monthly communications, like a newsletter. Because I am INSANE, I offered to proofread/edit these monthly communications. It’s what I do for a living, you know? It’s second nature to me, and I figured it would be easy-peasy. I had NO idea what I was getting in to.

I have an inveterate loathing for the upper-case/lower-case alphabet soup that way too many kinky people use in their writing (i.e., “i am looking for my Master’s bullwhip that He lost last weekend. If A/anyone finds it, Y/you can reach my Master on His cell phone. Or, i will be home all day if Y/you would prefer to call me. Thank Y/you all — the whip is O/our favorite, so W/we really hope S/someone finds it.”).

Sweet fancy Moses, every time I read an e-mail like that, I want to jab my eyes out with a spork so that I never have to see such execrable treatment of pronouns ever again.

I hope it goes without saying that I do NOT follow this convention. Setting aside for a minute the fact that I’m a switch (what do I do — capitalize *every other* pronoun?), I just cannot do it. It makes my teeth itch. Ack.

So, in editing the group’s monthly newsletter, etc., I’ve tried to change things to be properly capitalized (or lower-cased). This started a fight that approached the intensity generally only seen during “mayo or Miracle Whip?” debates. I did not win this fight. I had one victory, actually, and it was the most important one to me, but I also failed to change the status quo on the rest.

Basically, I convinced the P/people W/who use the slashes in T/their writing to pick a case (ideally, the grammatically proper one, given whatever context it’s in) and stick with it. They can capitalize all the pronouns They wish when They are referring to Dominants, and submissives can even lower-case “i” (although I twitch every time I see it).

Unfortunately, for me to NOT use this convention (or, as an editor, not *allow* people to use it in their writing) is seen as disrespectful by some. I don’t agree with that — my intent is NOT to be disrespectful, just to be grammatically correct. But it still pisses off the P/people W/who demand respect through capital letters. So far, the only solution that *I* can think of is to beat them with a copy of Strunk & White. Which, I suppose, wouldn’t be taken very well.

But oh, dear god, how I want to.

(And, relatedly — though this is a spoken communication issue, versus written — “domme” IS PRONOUNCED “DOM”!!!! Not “dommay”!!! Jesus, is it THAT hard? If you want to be sure that someone understands that you mean a dominant who is a woman and not a man, then say “femdom,” if you must. But “dommay” is simply. fucking. incorrect. So just stop it.)