In fact, a genre scenario is exactly what the two women are enacting, a dominance-and-submission ritual that they regularly perform to very specific guidelines – literally a handwritten script that we see Cynthia mulling over between sessions.
A new civil war in Nam Viet provoked the Chinese, after long and agonized discussion, to prepare to intervene there again in 1540, but the offer of ritual submission by a usurper gave the Chinese an opportunity to avoid war, and they welcomed it.
It was around 11 30 a.m. on a Tuesday at the offices of The New Yorker, the appointed time at which, for the better part of 50 years, cartoonists have shown up for the ritual submission of their rough drawings to the magazine's cartoon editor -- these days, Robert Mankoff.
The ritual submission and exaltation is nearly pornographic.
All the chimpanzees in the group, males and females alike, performed rituals of submission — known as pant-grunts — to him, while he pant-grunted to no one.
Robert Hardman, writing in the Daily Mail, thought Corbyn "appeared to freeze rather than offer the ritual gesture of submission and salutation".
Corbyn was also criticised by the Daily Mail for appearing to "freeze, rather than offer the ritual gesture of submission and salutation", though the paper's Robert Hardman attributed this to nerves and acknowledged his "solemnity" on the day.
D/s (dominance and submission) is seen throughout some rituals in Christianity; Opus Dei, for what it's worth, has self-inflicted pain built in (but I am not suggesting that anyone join an extremist group), and Catholicism at its finest requires submission from everyone.
As for the offering of the skull to Rosamund, that may have been a ritual request of complete submission of the queen and her people to the Lombards, and thus a cause of shame or humiliation.
There is ritual to mark this time of my submission.
Instead, college and adulthood seems more like a fascistic world of submission and staying in line – or even like some post-apocalyptic society in which these freaky cult rituals have grown up as part of survival.
