My Therapist thinks I should be a Professional Dominatrix

I'm naked, cuffed, and bound to a stripper pole, cling wrap tightly restricting my movement. The searing pain in my nipples has begun to fade. "Give in." As I hear the command, my knees buckle. My body becomes limp. Now, only the layers of plastic encasing me keep me vertical as my mouth falls open, but all I can manage is a weak mewl. I can't see through the nylon covering my head, but I feel Mistrix Sunmi's strong arms embrace me. "When you come out of this, you will be stronger and more confident."

Smoke and Mirrors

Centuries ago, back in 2018, I was a special program teacher at an inner-city charter school in Washington, D.C. I worked with neurodivergent kids who had fallen below grade level in their reading competencies. Parents and ominous court mandates paid $1000s per session to my corporate bosses (of which I received $16 before tax) to administer a "groundbreaking research-backed methodology for educating the unruly or otherwise unreachable" from torn and faded 1950s workbooks.

It was the end of my arc as a real-life gritty reboot of Mr. Rogers in a ghetto hood. Each morning, I picked out a whimsical necktie from my collection, stroked my dignified bush of a beard, poured a cup of coffee, kissed my wife Jessica on the way out the door, hopped into my '06 Toyota Echo with chipping paint and duct-taped together driver-side rearview mirror, and strode confidently into my classroom carrying a purple briefcase filled with crumpled receipts, gum wrappers, and pages of write ups for straying from the program. I could almost have passed for a cis man were it not for the whispers and gossip that accompanied kids telling their parents about "Mr. Persephone."

I was at the peak of my detransition and I had already reached entirely new levels of dissociation. I stared out the window at the spot where the previous year a student's father was shot and killed. I'd just found out Jessica was in the hospital where she'd be staying until she could receive a double lung transplant. My supervisor sat with me at the kid-sized table in comically small chairs. "It isn't a write up, Mr. Persephone." She was telling me. "It's just some performance feedback to help you grow as a teacher."

"Did you know this company didn't hire me as a teacher?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"They asked if I had any teaching or theatrical experience, and I said yes. I was hired as an actor."

"So stick to the script."

But this wasn't a play. These were real, underprivileged, human children who were struggling to keep up with their classmates. Half of my coworkers were college kids just there for a check. I'd taken a whole $1.50/hr paycut from my steady gig as store supervisor and regional scapegoat for Starbucks because I naively believed it was possible to earn a living improving the world.

I didn't know I was autistic at the time, but I was instinctually familiar with the sort of psychological distress and long-term effects caused by the behavioral modification and other types of discipline I was expected to enforce on children ("applied behavior analysis teaching"). Teaching in that environment gave me CPTSD flashbacks. I had been one of those children once. Excited, genuinely curious about the world, carefree, and oblivious to all the suffering and violence around me. And then, somehow, I was all grown up, now faced with the impossible choice of inflicting that same pain and trauma onto the next generation or completely forgoing my ability to pay a quarter of my rent and bills.

I excused myself to the restroom and stared at the overweight man in the mirror. Was this really who I was supposed to be? This absolute husk of a once beautiful and unique person, now devoid of any sense of individuality or purpose. Not only utterly destroyed by a cruel world, but now a part of the very corrupt system that had done this to me in the first place. It had been about six years since I'd last taken my last estrogen pill and thrown away the bottle, somehow having convinced myself that maybe I just never gave "being a man" enough of a chance. After all, I did start taking hormones when I was eighteen.

I'd given up on being Persephone because I thought choosing to be trans would mean I'd have to die alone. After all, who would want me? I couldn't date straight womxn because I was far too feminine for them, and lesbians were out of the question because if I couldn't even accept myself as a real womxn, how could other gay womxn? I tried dating bisexuals for a minute, but they always seemed to want "one or the other" and somehow, no matter how much I tried to be either, I always landed on neither. Even the clinic that prescribed my hormones had me listed in the system as "male with gender identity disorder, not otherwise specified."

The Repressed Sexuality of Trans Femmes

In the early nineties, some whackjob in a hospital yanked a hunk of sticky flesh out of my mom's pussy, decided it was a "boy," plopped it into a physical restraint device (sometimes called a newborn immobilizer), and used sharp implements to surgically remove the prepuce from its genitals. Thus was my first experience on the receiving end of bondage. My kinky sex life had already begun before I'd even said my first safe words.

Of course, as I would later learn from my mentor, Mistress Damiana Chi, real BDSM play is always "safe, sane, consensual, and ethical." Even the edgiest members within the BDSM community emphasize consent when they engage in what they call "risk-aware consensual kink." And BDSM never involves actual children, least of all infants.

The technical term for what I experienced on my first birthday is "sexual assault." Which, ironically, is not only more socially acceptable in our culture than Informed Consent BDSM activities, but so many people around the world share the same fantasy that circumcising children somehow improves their long-term sexual health-- though they often violently disagree about which types of genitals should be cut.

Could the fact that I started out in this world with only half a penis have something to do with my lifelong obsession with becoming female? It was, after all, my earliest memory: an intense desire to be, and to be accepted as, a girl. At four years old, my already complicated relationship with gender had absolutely nothing to do with erotic expression, sexual pleasure, or fifty shades of grey's anatomy. I wanted to be a girl long before I wanted to kiss girls.

Yet, as I grew older, it became more and more difficult to reconcile my wanting to be female with wanting to be with females. Yes, I'd read all three pages on the internet about transsexuality, and I understood academically that gender identity (sense of self) and sexual orientation (who/what you're into) were only tangentially related. However despite the abstract theoretical concept of a transsexual lesbian opened up by the identity/orientation distinction, the most pervasive explanation I could find was Ray Blanchard's model of "autogynephilia."

Blanchard's ill-advised hetronormative rhetoric paved the way for the unending "trans bathroom debate" and the even more transphobic notion that "all trans womxn are rapists and pedophiles" which keeps getting us killed. When I finally got the gender marker on my driver's license changed from "M" to "F," it required a "court order for sex change" and proof of "sex reassignment surgery" (which I only managed to bypass with a cleverly worded physician's note stating I'd received "sufficient medical care to qualify as female").

I guarded that driver's license so carefully for years, and whenever people found out I "still had a penis" I'd be quick to let them know I just hadn't had my surgery yet. I was so terrified that if I ever admitted to deriving enjoyment from using my penis sexually, that all my documents would default back to "male" and I'd lose access to my hormones. I feigned attraction to men, because many practitioners still considered "homosexuality" (but in terms of being attracted to members of the gender that matches a person's assigned gender at birth) to be a prerequisite to medical transition.

I really did try saving up for that surgery, and if I'd had enough money, I absolutely would have gone through with it. That's how willing I was to prove my convictions that I was "an honest to goodness real-life properly dysphoric transsexual." How desperate I had become for the tiniest of affirmations that I shouted into the void my intention to cut my dick the rest of the way off. I even started dissociating while having sex. I became practiced in the "ladylike" art of completely suppressing everything about my sexuality.

Every unrealistic expectation society holds of womxn, it holds twice as much for trans womxn, where our every movement, word, and thought is scrutinized in depth by people desperate to prove we're not really womxn. Already confusing social interactions became worse: do I hold the door for the person walking up behind me, or do I just let it close? Do I wait for someone to hold a door for me? Am I still allowed to have opinions about things or is that too masculine? What if people find out I like playing video games? What does it say about me if I use the men's room? Does it say I respect "real womxn" or does it say I don't respect myself as a real womxn? Do I even still look enough like a man to use the men's room? Do I look enough like a womxn to use the womxn's room? Am I invading womxn's spaces? What is gender anyway? Aren't there more important things in the world? Would it really kill me to just be a man?

Gay with Extra Steps

Blanchard's transsexualism typology laid the groundwork for the common misconception that, as my dad so eloquently put it when I came out to him, "this trans stuff sounds like it's just being gay with extra steps." This is not only an ideology held by the general population but by many trans people themselves who (as I once did) wrestle with finding harmony between their identity and orientation.

In order to clearly label one's sexuality, a person must first fully accept their own gender as a fixed (or fluid) component in order to understand how it correlates to who they find attractive. For instance, in order to be a gay man, you would have to accept yourself as a man, and then acknowledge your attraction to other men. Because I neither saw myself as a man nor was I attracted to men, I felt so strongly that I couldn't possibly be gay that I spent years confidently telling my girlfriends that I was a "heterosexual male that identified as a womxn" instead of, you know, just using the actual term for a womxn that dates womxn: lesbian.

Turns out, in my case, I was gay with extra steps all along. Just the feminine kind of gay that has nothing to do with men.

Forcing Feminization

Despite "sex change" being seen by many as the ultimate taboo, "Forced Feminization" is such an incredibly common literary trope that it is a major plot device in such pop-culture hits as Jurassic Park, The Woman Who Wasn't, It's a Boy Girl Thing, Alien Desires, The Assignment, and even in a children's book by the totally cis guy that wrote "Holes" that probably caused a lot of closeted 90's trans girls (including myself) to mysteriously break their arms while trying to kiss their elbows.

By the time I was old enough to discover the wonderful world of online pornography in the fourth grade, I was already so enraptured by the "fantasy" of "becoming" female that I found a certain genre of BDSM scenes-- of beautiful womxn turning submissive men into womxn... very interesting. I was captivated by the aesthetic of these perfect Goddesses, but there was one major thing that ruined it for me. From the videos I watched, my impressionable young mind got the idea that the entire reason these men were being turned into womxn was to humiliate and degrade them because they somehow failed at being men. But what if they never really wanted to be men?

They just looked so hopeless. Lost. Surrendering what little autonomy they seemed to have in order to become caricatures of female stereotypes. Was this what I had to look forward to? Was I just going to have to accept that I would never become a real womxn? That the best I could ever hope for in this life would be playing dress up for some Mistress who constantly reminded me I "wasn't a really a girl"?

Perhaps it had to do with how closely this kind of "sissification" porn seemed to mirror the attitudes of the real world and my peers at school. I was regularly made the butt of jokes for a myriad of inadvertently feminine traits I apparently possessed. Bullies took every opportunity to call me a "girl" or "fag" or "sissy" and while the emasculation of it never bothered me, it did feel like a constant reminder that I would forever be seen as male (girls weren't made fun of for being feminine, after all). It wasn't just boys either; the girls made fun of me too, and that's where it really hurt me: that feeling of wanting so desperately to belong, to just be one of them, and that sinking feeling of knowing I never could be.

That was until I discovered Jennifer Finney-Boylan's memoir, She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, and learned that not only was there a word for what I was (transgender), but also that medicine existed that really could transform my body from "male" into "female." Jenny Boylan was my first trans femme role model. A college professor, a published author, a mother, and unquestionably a "real womxn." Jenny Boylan was not some sissy man in a dress, she was the real deal. And from reading her story, I knew it would be within my grasp one day too.

Scrambled Eggs: Sissies, CDs, TVs, TGs, and the Cis

2005 was a different time to come out as a trans teenager. Most people simply didn't know what it meant. At first, my parents shrugged it off as a phase. My mother was certain it was Jenny Boylan's book that convinced me I was trans. But steadily, they started to get more aggressive about enforcing masculinity on me. It took me a long time to build up the courage to ask my mom if she would help me get a dress for the 8th grade dance, but she called my father and had him take me shopping for a suit and tie. I felt so ashamed, sad, and embarrassed.

My mother had very strict rules for me growing up, these included no going outside, no visiting friends, and if I wanted to eat chicken, I had to consume the entire bone so that the animal didn't die in vain. She also did everything she could to limit my access to the internet, presumably to keep me away from more "dangerous" transsexual influences. But the internet was the only place where I could find community. I kept a dial-up chord hidden in my closet that I used to connect whenever my mother was out of the house.

It was rare that I would meet other trans people my age online, so I generally avoided disclosing how old I was or outright lying when I had to. It was through these rich text-based asynchronous forums that I found camaraderie. Cyberspace was crawling with freaks and weirdos like me, and those were some of the most meaningful social interactions had growing up. This was before the explosion of distinct subcultures we see today; the pre-pronoun days, before "non-binary" identities entered mainstream discourse.

In these forums, the trans community shared our experiences with hormones and surgeries, practiced our monologues, and got our stories straight in order to get diagnosed with "gender identity disorder" in the least number of visits to a therapist. It was surreal and counterintuitive, the conversations we had about proving to cis doctors that we really were mentally ill. We knew we were trans, but society still demanded the diagnosis.

Today, trans-owned and operated online clinics like Folx Health make hormones accessible and give us more control over managing our care with informed consent. But ten years ago, we practically had to threaten to kill ourselves if we didn't get hormones. While obviously not exactly the same thing as sissification BDSM play, transitioning in the vanilla world involved jumping through a lot of hoops, including the obnoxious requirement to "live within our desired gender roles for at least a year" (which any feminist would agree is regressive).

I grew up inspired by the strong female representation in Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, Dark Angel, and Star Trek (TOS through ENT). None of the womxn I admired (in fiction or real life) would have ever been willing to put themselves through the humiliation of playing that parody of a submissive suburban housewife I was expected to maintain just to access trans medicine. And yet, there I was contorting myself into a little-miss-airhead-valley-girl. Performing a mockery of womxnhood just to get some pencil-pushers to let me grow my own tits. I was being "sissified," in broad daylight, by cis people. The gatekeepers weren't there to protect us, they were there to gaslight and discourage us.

I sat in the offices of cisgender therapists who told me my shoes weren't feminine enough, who told me they just "didn't understand" why I could possibly want to transition. The worst one was the therapist that asked me to picture a cube in my mind and rotate it a certain number of times, as if that somehow quantified a person's internal gender.

I went to support groups where I met other trans womxn, and they gave me weird looks. Sometimes, they told me not to say certain things. They were proud to distinguish themselves from sissies and transvestites/crossdressers. In many ways, it felt like they were competing to be "more trans" than each other, and pretty much all of them were heterosexual (as in they were womxn attracted to men, Ray). I never quite felt like I fit in with them either.

Every day it felt like I had to choose between being who I wanted to be (a confident, strong, proud womxn starring in action movies) or the only thing it seemed like I could be (an ugly man in a dress). And it seemed like no matter how much I tried to explain the former, even the most understanding people just told me, "the world isn't ready for that."

That was before trans womxn started getting vilified in the mainstream media the way we are today. Before the daily debates about whether we belonged in sports, or the military, around kids or in public spaces at all. Before the time a cop dragged me out of a womxn's bathroom shouting at me that he didn't care what my ID said.

But a decade of housing, job, and medical discrimination later, there I was: a fully detransitioned, male-presenting, integrated part of the crush-children's-hopes-and-dreams system. The only thing left of the womxn I'd almost gotten to be was my name. Persephone Rose.

The Sounds of Science

I stood over my wife's hospital bed, watching her sleep. I was exhausted and barely able to keep my own eyes open. Jessica had gone into sepsis earlier and her care team had no idea if she was going to make it through the night. Every moment I'd spent with her flashed before my eyes as I collapsed into a chair by the window.

There was a part of me that was really angry. She was the main reason I detransitioned. The reason I'd thrown away the one thing I'd worked hardest for and wanted more than anything: a chance to just live my truth, to just fucking exist as a womxn. Everything down the drain, just to make her and her family more comfortable. And now, here she was, literally dying in front of me. I'd sacrificed the most sacred part of my soul for her, and soon I might not even have her.

I paced the room, my emotions switching back and forth between these feelings of anger and betrayal to absolute guilt for thinking about something as meaningless as my gender at a time like that. I resolved that when this was all over, whether Jessica lived or died, I was going to be Persephone again. I was going to take back my power, and if she couldn't accept that, she could leave.

I was depressed, lonely, and more stressed than I'd ever been in my life. I quit my teaching job in order to avoid more "feedback." I started driving for uber and watching my bills begin piling up. Jess would be in the hospital for several more months, as set after set of potential donor lungs were disqualified moments before surgery.

I started getting really into erotic audio hypnosis and guided meditation as an escape. Something about having a sensual soothing voice whispering and moaning for me in surround sound just did a better job of putting me to sleep than white noise, classical music, or my own dark, distorted thoughts ever could. Even when the files didn't do much for me sexually, they were usually still worth a chuckle at least. That was, until I came across a curious file called "Morph Girl" by Shibby.

I was instantly drawn into the world she built with just her voice and soundscape. The file begins as a guided visualization of walking through the ruins of an ancient civilization, guiding you gently into a trance, and then introducing you to an incredible shapeshifting creature that makes love to you. Save for the occasional misgendering that stung (the audio assumes the listener is male), Morph Girl was perfect. I woke up sweating, with a throbbing erection, and a puddle of my own sticky ejaculate sliding down my legs. It was my first "hands-free orgasm," a concept that, until that point, I'd been incredibly skeptical of.

The coolest part was, Shibby had apparently been doing this for years. There were tons and tons of recordings, and I found myself listening almost every night to incredible exotic adventures, sci-fi tales of alien abductions, and even orgasmic pavlovian conditioning. And every time I put those headphones on and pressed play, Shibby delivered.

So entranced was I by this experience that I started paying less and less attention to the file names and descriptions until oh holy shit things have suddenly gotten really intense and omg whaaaaat is going on???

Shibby had slowly and methodically brought my mind back into the dark, mysterious, and endless possibilities of the BDSM world. But she did it in such a unique, powerful, and safe way for anyone to explore. She even goes out of her way to specifically create soothing, healing, audio for trans womxn dealing with gender dysphoria, demonstrating a genuine level of trans competency that I'd never encountered before in adult content.

My Personal Healing Journey

While Jess was in the hospital, I spent a fourth of my waking time in her hospital room, a fourth answering difficult text messages and being micromanaged by her family, a fourth doing my best to take care of our son, and the rest of my time writing, directing, acting, and producing the first season of my surreal horror-dramedy about monsters running a pizza shop & dispensary, Emperor Pigs. The show was a really great outlet for me at the time. I got to work with edgy writers and talented actors from all over the globe, and we even developed a bit of a cult following!

It didn't make much money though, and even though I financially lost way more than I had put into it, I wouldn't change that experience for the world. Few people in my offline life really cared or had any interest in my show. In fact, they generally scoffed at it as if it were some weird waste of time, or at best they might have feigned interest. It was quite a disparity from the online world where I'd wander into a random discord server and suddenly get swarmed by people telling me how much they loved Emperor Pigs.

I started seeing Dr. Laura Billiet at Forward toward the end of 2019, and she has grown to become one of my all-time favorite humans. She accepted me as female, without hesitation, and never once made it weird. She was the first doctor that didn't look at me like I was some kind of lab experiment or insane person. She is honestly the only doctor I have ever completely trusted. She has worked closely with me on not only improving my physical health, but also learning to take my own mental health seriously. She is quite literally the reason I am still alive today. She believed in me at a time when I did not believe in myself, and she is an ongoing inspiration for me to try my best to pay that forward.

I found another hero in the form of an actually non-binary psychotherapist, Mix Thomas, who I have hopefully kept entertained with a front-row seat to whatever my life even is. The biggest lesson I've taken away from these therapy sessions is: I'm not crazy. In fact, I'm the literal stereotype of a lesbian trans womxn with a deeply repressed sexuality (which is really weird considering part of that stereotype is just feeling like you're the only person in the world who could possibly be like this). We are, put simply, a severely underrepresented, deeply traumatized, terrified portion of the population.

So what can I do about this? How can I, as an autistic lesbian trans actor, writer, and storyteller, help to make a difference for the invisible masses of closeted trans people, especially in these incredibly scary times?

The Evolutionary Dominatrix Academy

Shibby's audio files began opening my mind to the kind of unique healing and therapeutic benefits BDSM can offer. Done safely, sanely, consensually, and ethically, BDSM play allows us to openly explore and express those parts of our mind we might otherwise be too afraid to explore, whether that is gender identity, or sexual orientation, or just a wild fantasy. Yes, it is a fine line to walk between consensual physical/psychological pain and actual abuse, but that is kind of the point.

The truth is, no matter how we try to spin it, humans are sexual beings, and humans are violent beings. Whether we naturally evolved to be this way or it is the product of generations of domesticated breeding is entirely up for debate. We need to find healthy outlets for it (masturbation, pornography, erotica, action movies, video games, shooting ranges, archery ranges, fencing, sports, rock-paper-scissors, BDSM, etc.) or we risk finding non-healthy outlets (murder, war, rape, genocide, landlording, etc.).

I used to think of myself as a pacifist. I believed that suffering alone and silently was the highest form of dignity. The less people knew about my problems, the better a person I was. Turned out that was not the case, it was just a form of masochism. Eventually, we all snap, so why shouldn't we do it on our terms? Harness that energy and channel it for the greater good, to make art, movies, and magic? These are the thoughts that drove me back to school to learn how to become a Dominatrix.

When I applied to Mistress Damiana Chi's Evolutionary Dominatrix Academy, I had every expectation of getting rejected. I had no industry references, no history in the BDSM community, and frankly, no idea what I was doing. She asked for my social media feeds and I was pretty sure that mess would get me disqualified for sure. I wrote what was probably a babbling and incoherent paragraph about how I attracted a lot of hurting people that I believed I could help but I wasn't really sure how.

A few days later, I received a letter of acceptance. And that was the most gender-affirming thing I'd ever experienced in my life. It didn't matter anymore how the rest of the world saw me, or what they thought of me. I had just been accepted, with open arms, to an all-girls school for alpha females. No one questions a Dominatrix's gender, not even if she has a cock. Especially if she has a cock.

Somehow I had accomplished something that would have blown the mind of that terrified child who thought she'd never be a real girl. We did it, kiddo. I love you.

The Lightworkers Who Play in the Dark

I knew I was in the right place when I heard Mistress Damiana call us "lightworkers who play in the dark." One of the early homework assignments involved interviewing submissives and really digging in to understand their psychology. What I found was the most incredible menagerie of beautiful humans. Some were men with stressful day jobs who needed a place where they didn't have to be the one in charge to not be in charge, others were people questioning gender, feeling that they had no other safe place to explore. Others still just loved receiving pain, pretending to be animals, or just generally playing and having a good time doing virtually whatever they were into.

I started playing with a couple of my own pets; trying things out, experimenting with them. I could tell they wanted more. I realized this is where I'm needed, what all my experience in business management, leadership, teaching, acting, and writing was leading to. Whether or not they admit it, most of what the general public thinks they know about trans people is limited to what they've seen in porn and consumed in other adult content, most of which is written/directed by cisgender people who are just guessing.

Representation matters. I am proud to represent the trans community and leave my mark on history in this way. I want to help people reach their full potential, live without fear (except fun fear), and change the world while doing all kinds of freaky shit. And my therapist agrees this seems to be the right path for me.

There was just one thing left I needed to do to be sure.

Kitty's First Beating

"So there's a video on the internet of your butt getting whipped while you... meow like a cat?"

It's November 2021 now. My wife is fine, she had her transplant, she's back at work. Where our relationship is heading, I'm not sure. It's certainly evolving. We're learning a lot about each other these days. "That's right."

"I thought you were supposed to be a Domme." She takes a sip of her coffee, looking at a still of Mistrix Sunmi smiling next to my ass, paddle in hand. "Doesn't this send the wrong message?"

"Would you trust a baker that doesn't know what hot buns taste like?"

"I suppose not. I like her legs." She zooms in on Mistrix Sunmi's legs. One of the things we've learned about my wife is she's pretty gay but has been shy about it her whole life. It's probably why she wanted to marry a womxn that looked like a man.

I was introduced to Mistrix Sunmi by one of my Sister Dommes, Domina Ara Lee, from the Academy. Domina Ara had been touring the country and invited a group of D.C. area Dommes together for dinner. Mistrix Sunmi (She/They/Daddy) is non-binary, so I was naturally very eager to learn all about them and their experience working in the area as a ProDomme. I told them I was new to the scene, that I didn't really like the idea of doing things to people that I wouldn't have done to me, so I asked for the honor of having them Dominate me, and to have their way with me.

They took the time to really get to know me, and it showed in the session. It's been a few days now and I am still not quite sure I've processed everything that happened. Mistrix Sunmi is a masterful storyteller and had excellent pacing. I told them apart from scat and anything that might leave a permanent mark, I was completely willing to just surrender to the experience, for them to take me wherever they wanted to.

They never once humiliated me, or made me feel bad, or misgendered me. Mistrix Sunmi completely broke me down and gave me my first taste of subspace. I lost track of time, of identity, of everything. They whipped me, flogged me, paddled me, caned me, poured hot wax on me, scraped off the wax with a blade, cuffed me, nipple clamped me, and saran wrapped me. They ordered me to become a kitten, and I became a kitten. They ground their leg into my cunt-- and it had become a cunt because that's what they told me it was. And when my body had gone completely limp, they held me and said, "When you come out of this, you will be stronger and more confident."

I am stronger and more confident now. This is definitely something I can do.

"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from."

- Agent Smith, The Matrix, 1999

If we want world peace, we must first take control of our own suffering. Or at least stop giving that control to big corporations and corrupt governments and give it to me instead.