Thursday, January 31, 2013
Street Urchin
And thus, my transformatiion into a Victorian Street Urchin is complete. Damn, damn cold in here this morning.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Monday, January 28, 2013
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Saturday, January 26, 2013
GodDAMNIT people!
What did Criswell say? Weren't you listening? "We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives."
Criswell KNEW we'd all be living in a Prince song one day, and not a very good one either.
What else did he say? "And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future." THIS TIME LISTEN!
Criswell KNEW we'd all be living in a Prince song one day, and not a very good one either.
What else did he say? "And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future." THIS TIME LISTEN!
We may need to change the name...
So just lately, I've been seeing some interesting statements on Twitter. Seems some young feminists are worrying that men aren't on board with feminism as a whole. There have been quite a few conversations about how isolating the conversation can be. It seems that some of them have a solution, but it will require some work. The problem, as they see it can be boiled down to a single sentence.
"We need to make it clear to men that the goal behind feminism is for their benefit as well."
This is a good idea, but it needs help for implementation. First off, there needs to be obvious and not so obvious signs that it is, in fact, for the benefit of everyone. This is hard when people will continue to be people. It can be very frustrating to hear how women shouldn't be judged on the basis of physical appearances and then be told that any guy she dates has to be at least an inch taller than her. Or that while it's important to fight stereotypical gender roles, it's the man's job to propose. Those are minor issues though, vague complaints that are easily answered. They are important points to raise, but they're also You Statements and as such as less useful in a discussion like this than some I Statements might be.
So what are some things that might bring more men on board? I have some ideas.
#1. Change Feminism to a Gender Neutral Term.
In many ways, Feminism is as out dated a terms as Women's Lib. The problem with the term is that men will always know that they are not the focus of the discussion, so long as it's geared towards one gender. As a term, from the starting point, Feminism becomes a series of You Statements for men. We often feel like we're being cast as the bad guy, even when current theory is painting us as just another victim of a greater problem with society. Being cast as a victim is a problem for most men as well, for a whole raft of reasons. So much of the movement has become about gender identity lately. The other half has become trying to examine how to deal with male backlash, so maybe something that doesn't divide from the word go would be helpful.
We need a new, more inclusive name. I would like to suggest something along the lines of Gender Neutrality. This would free the whole movement from of some of its initial divisiveness. It's not about subjugating men, or raising women at the expense of men, it's about raising everyone so that we can all be who we're supposed to be. Yes, this is purely a cosmetic change, but you need to get people in on the ground floor and quite frankly just saying Feminism stops some people from even walking through the door. Too many men look at the term and decide that it has nothing to do with them, despite the fact that it would really help them personally if they joined in the discussion.
#2. Everyone Needs to Stop Talking About The Patriarchy
The Patriarchy is just saying The Man with more syllables. It continues the idea that men are The Problem, and as long as things are cast in those terms, many men will not join the discussion. Besides, The Patriarchy is ill defined and sounds like a Batman TV show villain, played by Peter Lorre. Just call it Society's Problem, we can all own it equally. It belongs to all of us anyway.
Along with that, phrases like "You need to own your privilege" do nothing to help the conversation. If anything, they derail any conversation you might have been trying to have. The whole idea of talking about privilege is to show off that the privilege enjoyed by some is not universal and in fact is really enjoyed only by a genetically lucky few. It needs to go from "You've got that privilege" to "That's not universal, that's a privilege that other people lack." which is a subtle variation, but no one feels like tuning into a conversation where they're exclusively cast as the Bad Guy. Particularly when they themselves didn't do anything, and extremely when they've got the privilege of not tuning in.
This is part of a larger problem of You Statements that need to be turned into I Statements or really, We Statements. I would rather see We Statements on that, quite frankly. One of the big issues here is that any man who doesn't feel like playing along can point out how many women do all these things that "Men need to stop doing" and gives them an out if they don't want to own any of this. We need to work towards making rape jokes inappropriate. We need put a stop to slut shaming. We need to stop expecting men to be sole or at least chief breadwinners. We need to stop acting like a wife is her husband's property. We need to stop forcing gender stereotypes on children. We all of us need to stop using gay as an insult. We need to stop acting like there is a black and a white to human sexuality. We need to stop equating softness as weakness. And of course, we need to stop wearing Crocs... cause SRSLY!
And my final suggestion for today...
#3. Men Need to Step Up to the Plate, Like Now.
It's time gentlemen. Allow us to admit, there are some things that only guys can talk about when it comes to talking to other guys. There are situations where only a guy can tell another guy "That's not cool" or, conversely "Ain't no problem with that." Things that have nothing to do with gender relations, beyond the thin veneer of social expectations. There are time when only a guy can say to another guy "Because because I like to feel the wind on my balls, that's why I'm wearing this skirt!" We, as guys, need to allow ourselves to drop some of this He-Man Woman Hater's Club bullshit and admit that we like watching The Expendables AND My Little Pony, and making delicately frosted cupcakes with pictures of Rainbow Dash... holding Barney's Knife. Someone make that fan art a reality. GO! GO! GO!
We need to step up and start talking seriously about gender issues, and the problems and difficulties behind them. Granted, some have started, the ball is rolling but the rest of us need to join in. We need to really get on board and have a long talk about this shit, probably over some Jameson's 18. We need to take away some stigmas that have been building up, we need to express some emotions that aren't anger and we need to be okay with those expressions. We need to make it okay to talk about male depression, fear, desire, and do so without shaming the person admitting these things. There is still a great deal of comedy geared towards men putting on high heels, and that's got to stop. Some guys wanna wear high heels and stockings because it makes them feel something they can't feel any other way. I get my kicks in a different manner, but I can see where the attraction lies.
Even if we find it weird, we have to stop leaping towards questioning someone's sexual identity for having a brief fling outside of gender norms. We need to break down the idea of gender norms, but I think that's a subject for another time. Right now, we need to not leap to homophobia, because that helps exactly no one. Softness isn't weak, weakness isn't gay, gay isn't bad, and it's okay to be a Brony. Once we, as guys, can start to accept that even our own sexual identity need not be black or white, once we stop being distracted by all these gender expectations, we can start to relax and get to working on important things like building that robot gladiator we've been talking about.
Yeah, almost everything I've mentioned has been done or is being done to some degree, but we maybe need to step it up a tad. I'm kind of tired of still talking about Equal Pay for Equal Work in 2013. That shit should have been over a long time ago and we should just pay everyone the same. I'm tired of still having to tell people that joking about putting roofies in some one's drink isn't goddamn funny. I don't want to have to still be mired in an argument about rape culture, I want someone to help me build Spinestro, The Mechanical Blade so I can go back in time and get on Battle Bots.
On the subject of Polyamory and Fear
I'm not sure I've ever actually seen anyone talk about this in these terms, so I'm going to go ahead and say it. 97% or all people who are poly are completely bullshit scared at one point or another. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the 97% is pants shittingly scared 82.7% of the time. Mind you, 93% of most normal people are paralyzing terrified 84.6% of the time as far as I can tell. Fear is just a big part of life.
We're not talking about so-called normal people though, we're talking Poly People. They enter the world of poly with hope, yes hope, but also with a whole lot of trepidation. Oh so much trepidation. I'll be flat out honest, it's a weird world filled with strange characters and bullshit terms that even people who live in the world don't understand. It can look scary, and it often is.
There are only two kinds of people who enter the poly world without trepidation, people who were always basically poly and didn't have a word for it, and people who have something deeply wrong with them. I have something deeply wrong with me. I leapt in fearlessly, with both eyes open, having viewed the terrain and calculating things in my head as I go. This has meant a lot of compensation, being cute, and fixing things later when mistakes are made. It also means listening to Prince. I'm not sure why that's important, but it seem crucial to me.
The way everyone else does it, if they're smart, is slowly and carefully looking at the area, being completely dogshit terrified. The fear is reasonable, it's understandable, in some places it's necessary. While people trying to pretend to be fearless say otherwise, those who actually live without the notion of fear realize that fear can keep you alive. Fear can keep you safe. Fear can keep you in out of the rain and maintain your position in society. This is where a manic pixie dream girl shows up and tells you that the only way to REALLY live is to abandon that fear, crank up some Prince and dance in the rain. Again, those notions are put together by someone who has the luxury of fear, pretending to understand the mind of someone who doesn't have that luxury.
Lack of fear seems freeing, but Prince has released a lot of shitty albums as well as some of the best music ever recorded. There are reasons for fear, and quite often what looks like fear is actually good judgment.
Let us point out that Poly is nowhere near an acceptable norm. Yes, there are people working towards it, but it'll be decades before the general public understands. Some of the people in the community aren't helping either. Hell, I still have to deal with people saying, in their out loud voice no less, "Me, my primary, secondary and metamours practice ethical pansexual polyfidelity in order to form more serious relationships built on trust, complicated rules and Franklin day planners which is why ours is a much more realer relationship than say your mono-cis-hetro-normative lifestyle." And that your honor is when the Red Mist descended and to be perfectly honest, I have no idea what actually happened after that. When I came to, I was covered in blood, leaning on a cliff at the top of the Rock of Gibraltar, explaining the cultural significance of the Batman TV show to one of the monkeys. I didn't even know they had monkeys in Gibraltar, but there they were.
Yeah, that paragraph when in a weird direction really fast didn't it? Strangely it turned into my testimony from that one time, when that one thing happened. You remember that one time? Yeah. Let's move on. The point is, those Othering Terms exist to form a wall of protection. Sometimes, the only way to stop someone else from pigeon holing you, is to do it yourself before they get a chance. That too is the result of fear.
Fear can be a powerful motivator, or a powerful deterrent. Fear will keep you from moving to another location, but it will also keep you moving towards that location once you do start moving. That's where the whole poly thing can come to a head. When fear and passion collide, you leap forward. Often you find yourself following a complete lunatic who knows no fear, but all the lyrics to Soul Sanctuary, and once you find a safe spot you stop again until the lunatic tears off again. The whole time, you are completely pants-shittingly terrified until you find a safe place. Every time there is movement, there is terror.
There are things to be afraid of, things can and do go wrong. Nervousness is just a sign of good, honest, horse sense. Of course, for those who decide to take the journey, there can be great rewards. And often the risk is far less of a risk than you think. Once you have distance between you and what you thought was danger, you find the tiger was just a kitten casting a big shadow. Granted, sometimes the danger is real and you should cower from it, but that's true if you go for a normal, heterosexual, monogamous lifestyle as well. There is always danger on every journey, but with the right companions it can be greatly lessened. One way is to find someone who already knows the way through the dark part of the forest and has head butted a grue or two. Another way is to trust in each other, and face the terrors head on with pluck and courage.
Either way, I wish you luck. In my view, the dark isn't really as dark as you think it is, and the bad will far outweigh the good. Educate yourself, learn all you can, be as honest as you can, and carry a lantern. It gets dark out there, and you're likely to be eaten by a grue.
We're not talking about so-called normal people though, we're talking Poly People. They enter the world of poly with hope, yes hope, but also with a whole lot of trepidation. Oh so much trepidation. I'll be flat out honest, it's a weird world filled with strange characters and bullshit terms that even people who live in the world don't understand. It can look scary, and it often is.
There are only two kinds of people who enter the poly world without trepidation, people who were always basically poly and didn't have a word for it, and people who have something deeply wrong with them. I have something deeply wrong with me. I leapt in fearlessly, with both eyes open, having viewed the terrain and calculating things in my head as I go. This has meant a lot of compensation, being cute, and fixing things later when mistakes are made. It also means listening to Prince. I'm not sure why that's important, but it seem crucial to me.
The way everyone else does it, if they're smart, is slowly and carefully looking at the area, being completely dogshit terrified. The fear is reasonable, it's understandable, in some places it's necessary. While people trying to pretend to be fearless say otherwise, those who actually live without the notion of fear realize that fear can keep you alive. Fear can keep you safe. Fear can keep you in out of the rain and maintain your position in society. This is where a manic pixie dream girl shows up and tells you that the only way to REALLY live is to abandon that fear, crank up some Prince and dance in the rain. Again, those notions are put together by someone who has the luxury of fear, pretending to understand the mind of someone who doesn't have that luxury.
Lack of fear seems freeing, but Prince has released a lot of shitty albums as well as some of the best music ever recorded. There are reasons for fear, and quite often what looks like fear is actually good judgment.
Let us point out that Poly is nowhere near an acceptable norm. Yes, there are people working towards it, but it'll be decades before the general public understands. Some of the people in the community aren't helping either. Hell, I still have to deal with people saying, in their out loud voice no less, "Me, my primary, secondary and metamours practice ethical pansexual polyfidelity in order to form more serious relationships built on trust, complicated rules and Franklin day planners which is why ours is a much more realer relationship than say your mono-cis-hetro-normative lifestyle." And that your honor is when the Red Mist descended and to be perfectly honest, I have no idea what actually happened after that. When I came to, I was covered in blood, leaning on a cliff at the top of the Rock of Gibraltar, explaining the cultural significance of the Batman TV show to one of the monkeys. I didn't even know they had monkeys in Gibraltar, but there they were.
Yeah, that paragraph when in a weird direction really fast didn't it? Strangely it turned into my testimony from that one time, when that one thing happened. You remember that one time? Yeah. Let's move on. The point is, those Othering Terms exist to form a wall of protection. Sometimes, the only way to stop someone else from pigeon holing you, is to do it yourself before they get a chance. That too is the result of fear.
Fear can be a powerful motivator, or a powerful deterrent. Fear will keep you from moving to another location, but it will also keep you moving towards that location once you do start moving. That's where the whole poly thing can come to a head. When fear and passion collide, you leap forward. Often you find yourself following a complete lunatic who knows no fear, but all the lyrics to Soul Sanctuary, and once you find a safe spot you stop again until the lunatic tears off again. The whole time, you are completely pants-shittingly terrified until you find a safe place. Every time there is movement, there is terror.
There are things to be afraid of, things can and do go wrong. Nervousness is just a sign of good, honest, horse sense. Of course, for those who decide to take the journey, there can be great rewards. And often the risk is far less of a risk than you think. Once you have distance between you and what you thought was danger, you find the tiger was just a kitten casting a big shadow. Granted, sometimes the danger is real and you should cower from it, but that's true if you go for a normal, heterosexual, monogamous lifestyle as well. There is always danger on every journey, but with the right companions it can be greatly lessened. One way is to find someone who already knows the way through the dark part of the forest and has head butted a grue or two. Another way is to trust in each other, and face the terrors head on with pluck and courage.
Either way, I wish you luck. In my view, the dark isn't really as dark as you think it is, and the bad will far outweigh the good. Educate yourself, learn all you can, be as honest as you can, and carry a lantern. It gets dark out there, and you're likely to be eaten by a grue.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Thursday, January 24, 2013
"So what's wrong with being a Nice Guy?" You mean besides everything?
So we need to discuss this... I guess.
The other day I posted this link on another social media that sounds like a horror movie* if you say it right. The person I snagged the link from had kind of a discussion on their board because someone wanted to know what was so bad about being nice. He hadn't quite twigged to the idea of what Nice Guy actually means to the internet, and was soon set straight. Now, since most the Nice Guys I've met don't have the self awareness of a Rotary Club Sign, it might be time that we lay this mutha out for everyone.
*Seriously The Book of Faces! Also, Twitter is a romantic comedy, Tumblr is an action movie and My Space is a wacky Sci-fi comedy probably starring The Weasel himself, Pauly Shore. Yeah, I have a mentally undemanding job and a lot of time without interaction.
So the basic facts first, I think... and there is no nice way to say what I'm going to say here.
If you describe yourself as a Nice Guy, you might want to stop doing that. See, everyone outside of Nice Guys (note the capital lettering) thinks anyone who self-identifies as one is an asshole. Seriously, it's like a code that Nice Guys don't actually know and it's frankly kind of sad. Is that fair? Sorry, what the blazing blue fuck does fair have to do with this? Fair is for sports, and this ain't no sport. There ain't no points and you only loose by failing to play the game. Go read over that link I provided, that will give you a great deal of the problem. The sort of guys who call themselves Nice Guys are so often not, and in fact are just assholes in disguise that most everyone else sees the word Asshole when they read the words Nice Guy. So yeah, stop calling yourself that.
I'm not going to go into the whole Nice Guy thing, except to say that you need to either understand some women aren't as attracted to you as you are to them and be a man about it instead of a bitter little baby. Here's the thing, they might want you later if you keep being a good friend. I don't say that it WILL happen, but it COULD happen. However, if you take the rebuffed advances with the attitude of "All bitches are bitches and they don't know a good thing when it's in front of them." then it WON'T happen. Not only won't it happen with her, but if she networks right, it won't happen with any woman inside the tri-state area. They don't always share talk about the good ones, but they will always warn someone off a bad one. You should be nice, but be nice for its own merit and as its own reward. It's not a game, you don't build up points, the friendzone is not a penalty box.
In fact, let us talk about The Friendzone for a moment. I have only once or twice heard the term used by women. It's almost totally used in the context of "That bitch put me in the freindzone and *blah blah misogynistic whining and entitlement issues* what a bitch!" For starters, call her a bitch again, women love to be insulted by guys. If you can't spot the sarcasm in that last sentence, please break off a chair leg and beat yourself in the face until you see spots, I honestly can't be bothered to come over and do it for you. Most the people who use the phrase use it as a complaint, and I can't understand why. I am firmly in the Friendzone of a woman I know. She's married, and monogamous, and possibly not into me despite my long flowing hair and dark as midnight eyes. Thing is, I love her deeply and dearly. We've never been to bed together, we've never even kissed. I've kissed her on the cheek a couple of times, that's the closest we ever got to that and as far as I know it's the closest we will ever get. And I'm okay with that because I love her and to an extent I love her husband and I care deeply about them both. I can't imagine that being a bad thing. She didn't penalize me, she didn't even consciously "Put" me there, that's just where I ended up.
I did however once have a woman explain that she had to "Friendzone" a guy. This surprised me, as she and I always refer to each other as friends. Now... spoiler alert, she had slept with me before and did so again soon after this conversation and the whole time referred to me as Her Friend. so I was surprised to hear that "Friend Zone" didn't come with a side of sex for the poor bastard. She explained that she had sort of intended to sleep with him, but he went on this hateful rant about what a bitch his ex was and it totally turned her off him forever and ever. And that's the other part of that, I am friends with a great many women, and I've had sex with more than a few of them. Unless there was an ongoing, committed relationship, all those women called me their friend. So yeah, even in the friendzone, there is sex.
The problem is, if you approach with desperation, with bitterness, with the attitude on your face... they'll know and they won't want to be with you. Maybe they don't want to be with you anyway, but you don't want to poison the well as it were. Okay, this one woman doesn't want to date you. Maybe that's because she's with someone right now, maybe it's because she doesn't have those feelings for you, maybe it's just not the right time. If you react badly, if you throw a tantrum, they'll talk to other people about it. Even if you throw a tantrum outside that one woman's sight, other women will see it. The network is strong. The network includes all types and genders. There is no escape from The Network. Fear the network. The only thing worse that labeling yourself a Nice Guy is for The Network to label you.
AND THEN THERE'S THIS!
Even if "Nice Guy" wasn't being used by everyone but Nice Guys to mean "dickhead", is that all you have going for you? That you're nice? Really? Because where I come from, that's like saying "I have a pulse and metabolize sugars in my liver" or "I am a person" No matter what, you've got to have more game than that you are "nice" by whatever we mean by that. Nice is a baseline, nice is expected, nice don't even get you through the door. You need some skills. Probably more than video games, although maybe not. If you can avoid calling a girl a Fake Geek because she's better than you at Medal of Duty: Call of Honor, you might be in with a chance. Look at me. Yes, I'm pretty, but there is so much more. I write bad novels, I take amazing photographs, I sing, I dance, I know more about the history of film making than is good for me, and I write truly atrocious poetry. Result? I still strike out seven times out of ten. Some people just ain't into me, but I have a fairly decent reputation and I know how to self-congratulate in a way that is sort of endearing and appropriately lamp shaded.
Point is, grow the fuck up, be an actual man, and quit pretending that Nice ever was enough for anybody.
Thank you and goodnight.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Monday, January 21, 2013
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Friday, January 18, 2013
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Monday, January 14, 2013
Sunday, January 13, 2013
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