Where's the Pants?

Fighting.

2011-03-26T23:07:00.008-05:00

I'm just going to come out and say it: part of being a man... is learning how to take a punch.

Not just learning to fight-- to throw a fist, to not tuck your thumb in like they do in movies-- it's learning how to be hurt... and still fight.

A friend of mine is taking a class about masculinity and found herself confused by MMA-- Mixed Martial Arts. Specifically, children taking the form as a sport.

I wrestled in highschool and let me tell you, I was terrible at it. It took me years, infact until the very first fight I had as an adult, before I realized why I was so terrible....

There just wasn't a lot of bite in that little dog. Also, I was wrestling outside of my weightclass and had shitty stamina but... I just didn't want it. I didn't want to hurt, I didn't want to pin, I didn't want to win. I just wanted to be in the sport my friends were in.

I needed to take a good punch.

I had fought before-- mostly, I'd been bullied. Punched in the chest, pushed, wrestled to the ground-- but it wasn't until I was 23 that I took a punch; a good, solid punch in the face.

I was riding my bike in a busy part of the city I lived in, in a place with many bars at the very douchiest time of the evening... bar time.

Three guys hassled me for my bike. Wanted to "borrow" it. And one decided to throw a punch. It struck my cheek, it gave me brief stars and it... didn't hurt too much at all.

The next day, I went to work with a swollen lip, a black eye and a smile. I didn't win that fight but damn... I fought three men, all taller than me, and in the end... they ran off. And I still had my bike. I got in my licks. And I still had my pride.

People had gathered to watch the fight. When I got up, I got nods and a few compliments. I lost that fight... but I didn't run. I wasn't afraid.

The moment you realize you can get punched in the face is the moment you stop fearing other people. It's the moment you realize that pain is temporary but shame is forever. It's the moment you realize... you don't have to hit the hardest, you just have to be willing to keep on swinging... even against three opponents.

I haven't been in a lot of fights. Once, I had a bad drunken bender where I felt the need to pick a fight with a much bigger opponent... he flattened my face into a parking lot, broke my tooth and left me a scar that has only just faded away, 5 years later.

But I got really good, solid hit on him-- a 6 foot and change, 200 something pound man-- and I took him off his feet and unsettled his jaw. And when I came home, it was to surprise my room mate, smiling blood and laughing at the while.

I just needed to know I could still take a punch.

I never like to fight people smaller than me. A friend once got sucker-punch outside of a bar and my friends went into action-- it was a mass brawl, them against us and the guy in question wasn't a close friend-- but that didn't matter. They touched one of ours and we, as men, are obliged to respond in kind.

I grab a hold of one kid near, a skinny one, slammed him to the ground, realized I could beat the shit out of him and said, fist raised, "stay the fuck down or I will put you down."

He stayed down.

We knew our place. He knew I could hurt him. I knew I could hurt him. And neither of us, in all the confusion, all the mess, had the will to bloody his nose. He was some skinny kid who didn't want to be fighting in the first place. And he was watching his friends get the shit beaten out of them.

I got drunk on one St Patrick's day, went out to a bar and decided it would be intelligent to grab a random girl's ass-- to harass her.

I had a girlfriend at the time, which made the move even stupider. After it was done and I realized how much I needed to grow up, I went to apologize to her-- and her boyfriend punched me in the face.

Stars... and I was on the ground, being wrestled. As they started pulling us apart and I finally got clear enough to get my own hit in, I... stopped.

I had touched this guy's girlfriends ass. Maybe I deserved to get punched in the face.

I didn't even take a shot. I laughed it off. I found my glasses, ducked the cops who were called in, and met my friends in the next bar....

I wasn't afraid to lose to this guy. I wasn't afraid to be beaten. It was a righteous pain I was feeling, with blood on my cheek. I deserved it. And besides... the pain never really is as bad as the fear of the pain.

It's fear that's the problem and it's the fear that is why taking a punch is part of being a man.

Men measure one another. When we walk streets, when we meet new people, some part of our primitive brains measure shoulders and height, watch for muscle and quickness... we all wonder, "if I needed to, could I kick this guy's ass?"

It created pecking orders, hierarchies. It is in every man that stands too close to another, it's in every loud voice that dominates a room-- it is dominance, one of the primary ways by which we judge ourselves and others in the social world.

All based on primal, animal fear. Fear of pain. Fear of danger.

And every punch you take is another reminder that pain... really isn't so bad, after all.

Sometimes, it feels good. Freeing. Righteous.

At some point in American history, we all became very, very afraid. We stopped letting our kids play tag. We stopped letting them skin their knees. We stopped wanting them to get hurt.

My friend wonders about MMA. She finds it brutal. I don't blame her, for one who isn't versed in it it does look brutal-- the special MMA gloves are smaller than boxing gloves, leading to less bruising and more blood. (That said, boxing gloves cause more overall damage, with less bruising and more internal damages, than bare-knuckle street fight). Brazilian Ju Jitsu, which is the basis of most MMA besides dirty boxing and kick boxing, is a subtle martial art which involves fighting for position and a lot of patience.

What everyone wants to see, is people getting punched and kicked. What people get, is... two men rolling around on the ground, doing things neither of us understand. A chess match, five moves in, where no one but the players and diehards know if someone actually moved their rook.

It's bloody and fisty and new and that scares people. But so is boxing. And wrestling? Did you know that people deliberately shove two fingers into the assholes of their opponents when no one is looking? It's not a nice sport, Olympics or no. Football? The NFL is only this year revising rules for kick-off returns--- because they're so generally dangerous. Paralyzingly dangerous.

Contact sports are not safe... and sometimes, unsafe might just be good.

Because if there were anything I could change about my childhood that I had any control of, it would be to get into more fights.

I wish that my 11 year old self would've been punched in the face more. And that he would've... kept on getting his licks.

Because while I accept, and sometimes even like, the man he grew up to be... I sometimes pine for the man he could have been.

The man who wasn't afraid.

Kanye, you Monster (or, does Mr West need psychotherapy?)

2010-12-30T12:23:00.008-06:00

Kanye certainly has a penchant for unfortunate imagery (what with his constant twitter barrages and endless self-publicity, I think I can safely say the world is on a first-name basis with Mr. West).

And I love him for it.

It takes a true Byronic Hero to name an album “My Beautiful Dark, Twisted Fantasy,” direct its first video, Run Away, singing “Let’s have a toast for the douche-bags! Let’s have a toast for the assholes!” and fill it to the brim with the kind of revealing, reflective and ridiculous imagery that plays Pavlov’s bell to thousands of drooling pop culture critics and arm-chair Freudians.

What’s that, Kanye? You want to fuck a bird? You’d like to keep a woman as a pet? You enjoy long walks in woods and learned helplessness? You ultimately acknowledge that your manic, self-centered, border-line-delusional behavior drives love away while simultaneously blaming your lover for not wanting to exist solely for singing out melodies of praise from your ego’s gilded bird cage?

Oh Kanye, you card. You are the height of too-muchery.

So imagine my delight and discomfort in learning that the best traditional rap track off of his new album had a brand new video. And imagine my wincing squeal win, having pressed play, the very first image I receive is women in high-heels hanging from the ceiling.

Merry Christmas, bored feminist bloggers, from Kanye West- sorry the gift came late.

Before we even begin this difficult discussion/dissection, I will allow that this video is the artistic vision of multiple sources. Moreover, I will admit that I am not of the school of thought that finds that every line, word, character and image speaks to a deeper truth about the artist his or herself. Myself a writer, I would hate to think that the behavior of my characters became a reflection of my inner demons and unspoken hatreds to critical readers.

That said, come on. Kanye BEGS for this kind of attention. A man with diamond studs surgically inserted into his teeth has a lot to say even when he’s saying nothing.

The key to watching a video like this is to watch it with the song off. Without the distraction of the lyrics or melody, you have the image in its purest form- and it’s a doosey.

The women we have here are highly sexualized. Ugly faces abound but, even when a woman in a wolf-monster or zombie, she’s still showing an awesome rack. Dead models lounge on couches, posed with the suggestion of necro-lesbianism (Rule 34); the aforementioned hanging women are all model-sized, leggy, high-heeled and in lingerie. This heady mix of violence and sex is juxtaposed with the glamour of the male rappers: Rick Ross, doning a Hefner robe and smoking a cigar; Jay Z in his trade-mark glasses, suited-up and swaggering; Kanye himself, open-shirted while the flesh-starved hands of (I presume) zombie fans claw his clothes off…. The men, the height of power. The women, more than submissive- corpses. Dolls to be played with, as Kanye shows in one scene.

An eagle-eyed observer would note that there are scenes with live women in this video. Saving Nicki Minaj’s self-flagellating sado-masochism (oh I went there), we begin with a pale male model-type bringing dragged, shirtless, across a floor- to be impaled by the living woman, with a heel.

The high-heel has a special place in the fetishistic circles. It is both an artifact of female sexuality and female submission. It is dominant while binding, something meant to pleasingly shape the female calve and add a few inches height even as it painfully cramps toes and alters one’s gait. In the modern world, only the corset can match it for schizoid sexuality.

So, on the one hand, there is a woman who is alive and killing, just as the men are presumed to be. The sexual power is in her hand (er, shoe). On the other hand, the murder is done with a phallic fetish object that seems to be aimed at the victim’s heart. Choose your own symbolic interpretation of that one, folks. And my (admittedly limited) experience with the sort of men who go to professional Dominatrix’s is that, even in submission they are a demanding lot. In the end, the woman is still very much an object.

Which brings us to my favorite verse, Nicki Minaj: the only female with a legitimately powerful (though, again, highly sexualized) role and who is she dominating? Another women. Not just another women, infact: she dominates herself.

Minaj is a bit of a mystery, in the hip hop world. A mix-tape diva, she was known for taking on multiple personalities on her verses and having a style that moved more towards diary than braggadocio. Many fans were disappointed by her debut album, Pink Friday, for being more mainstream than expected- the diary had given away to a younger, more energetic Lil Kim.

One could almost see this scene, made for a song that dropped before her album did, in those heady days when Minaj was the one to have guesting crazy verses on your rap albums, as an acknowledgement of her lessened personal presence in the making of Pink Friday. Here she beats the other side of her multiple personality, self-hurt in video-form, beating herself over selling out. This, on Monster, is the beast we expected and did not find much of on Pink Friday. Don’t worry, fans, she hates herself for it too.

Or I’m bullshitting. Either way, a woman on woman lap-dance is pretty hot. Perhaps Minaj could have been suited-up, ala Jay Z, interrogating a shirtless male model in a gimp mask? It’s another artistic choice but, ultimately, more teasing lesbianism- the most frequent and juvenile of male sexual fantasies- wins the day.

So, what are we left with? Women as objects, fetishized heart-breakers, wonderful background furniture or lesbian fantasy. Typical frightened teenage boy stuff.

Ouch.

It’s kind of hard to make a case for Yeezy on this one.
Erasing media portrayals of women and sexualized violence has long been the strongest column of the last feminist crusade. It’s hard to argue against domestic abuse, rising sexual assault rates and the blasé hilarity that is Snooki getting punched out in a bar.

When the criticism comes (and it will, oh lord it will), the question is how will Kanye respond? He can be wonderfully tongue-in-cheek (though one never really knows if it’s self-aware, self-delusion or self-loathing). A man who names his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy using cover-art of what looks like an African caricature drinking a beer while fucking a white harpy has to have a few aces up his sleeve. Perhaps this plays into his hand, as a pop culture creator and critic?
Perhaps the only woman who can truly understand Kanye West… is Lady GaGa (The Fame Monster and the Monster? Imagine the gossip columns!).

I’ll just wait for the fire-works here with my bag of pop-corn.

Here's the video:

Why Can't Men Play With Sex Dolls? (Or, Why isn't MY sex-toy empowering?)

2010-09-11T14:46:00.008-05:00

Have you ever read or heard an account of a man going to a porno shop to buy himself his very first Fleshlight (NSFW)? Was it a powerful experience that left him flush with confidence? Did he walk out of that porno shop with a brown paper bag and the swagger of independence?

Not much a realistic narrative is it? Okay, try this one on for size: a mouth-breather in a heavy overcoat slouches into Babylon to a chorus of fake moans echoing from the jerk-off booths where a mustached man idles against his spunk-mop. Pit-stained and nervous, the man enters the shop, buys his Fleshlight, averting his eyes from the bored punk chick who takes his money as if it expects to be sticky, and slinks out of the store and into the night to watch ANAL ANNIHILATION 3: The Quickening in his dingy studio apartment.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Contrast with this:

The staff members who work at the store left me pulsating with a sense of sexual liberation, feeling that there was no shame in any interest or fetish that I might have locked away. The saleswoman lead me around Babeland describing different products, asking me if I liked anal stimulation as casually as an employee at Banana Republic would ask if I want a rewards card. With each object she offered, she gave an informative explanation coupled with an open understanding of the good it can bring into people’s lives. Having a bizarre-looking stick described to me as if it were a family photograph or beloved tchotchke transformed the process into something much more normal and inviting.

“If you treat something as your ugly toy, then you will think it is ugly and never want to use it,” she explained and I realized how true that was. Before coming into the store, part of me looked at toys and fetishes in a negative light, but I was so wrong. What started off as a trip to buy a vibrator turned into a realization that everyone has a different way of pleasing themselves and that knowing what mine is will only make my life better.

If only my masturbatory habits were so life affirming!

A funny thing happens when you try and talk about sex toys and men. Masturbation is an assumed habits but if you use something like a plastic poon-tang, you are an aberration-- a real man goes out and gets laid; you want sex toy, buy a Mustang.

A dildo is a form of independence from male dependence; a fleshlight is a loser's security blanket. What's worse if it you add the notorious Real Doll to the equation:

Just ask Salon:

For a cool $5,000, scrubs of all shapes and sizes can obtain unlimited access to all three orifices on a bootilicious bombshell fashioned from high-grade silicone flesh.

Sure, your local porn palace offers any number of disembodied vaginas sculpted after those of adult film vixens, and the plastic blow-up doll has been around for decades. And Abyss Creations has a number of competitors: Triple-X-Sextoys, for instance, offers a silicone love doll modeled after pornstress Chasey Lain for $259.

But Realdoll is the Cadillac of the club. With five anatomically correct body types; nine head styles, including a Japanese cutie named Mai; and a wide choice of characteristics including eye and hair colors as well as breast size, the company has gone a long way toward fulfilling the promise of that prescient 1975 flick, "The Stepford Wives." You know, the one where a cabal of yupper-crust executives take over a Connecticut town and replace their wives with oversexed androids who dig housework.

Well damn.... buy a dildo and it's rainbows, lolly-pops and You-Go-Girls rolled up in plastic phallic form; buy a Real Doll, it's a patriarchal conspiracy.

Continued:

Crikey, what have we come to? After all, $5,000 can buy a lot of trips to the local brothel for sex with an actual woman, not a lifeless puppet. Apparently some guys would rather own a trailer than rent a penthouse.

Hear that, ladies? Why buy a ninety dollar vibrator when you can go out, get drunk and fuck a random dude in your local dive bar? Ahem. Excuse me: I mean, fellas, why buy a sex toy when you can fuck a hooker? Ladies? Carry on.

Well, screw the biased (and male) writer of this article-- Where's The Pants is about the feminist/masculine conversation; what does a feminist scholar have to say about this?

"Obviously, I don't think it'll make women obsolete," says M.C. Sungaila, an attorney and writer in Southern California specializing in feminist issues. "But reducing a woman to an inanimate object in order to relate to her in the most intimate way is kind of disturbing."

Sungaila grants that individuals have the right to pursue their own fantasy lives but objects to Realdolls' larger message.

"Knowing that it's out there and that somebody thought this was a good idea -- to make money off the complete objectification of women -- is discomforting to say the least," comments Sungaila.

You'd think Sungaila never Jilled-off with a Feeldoe (and I find myself wondering whether, if she did, was it to Martin Luther King speeches and Betty Friedan Audiobooks?).

I believe we've moved on from the antiqued image of the 70s, second-wave feminist and the "All Sex Is Rape" strawman, but there is a lingering cultural threat from male sexuality-- specifically, male masturbatory habits.

In the use of porn, we reduce women to objects- we dehumanize; in the use of sex dolls, we only seek to perfect the patriarchal project, with perfectly submissive, perfectly docile sex holes in vaguely feminine shapes.

We shoulder the guilt of the long-standing stereotype that man is a beast with a penis and woman is a complex work of art: remove the penis from a man, you have safe sexuality; remove the personality from a female, you get pale imitation.

I don't solely blame the old-thinking feminists for this perception: no, I blame the lingering sexist attitudes of men for most of the issue.

Women are the competition and the prize. A woman's value is in her vagina and a male's virility is in how much value he's accrued in the plunder of said vaginas. If a male uses bought and paid for, toy vaginas... well, the question becomes, is he a real man? It is aacceptable for a man to remove himself from the competition for sex?

Ask most men and the answer is no: refusing the compete is to admit failure. The very definition of "Loser."

I recognize that I come at this from a male perspective: if you ask a woman about her objection to the idea of realistic sex dolls (as I've gathered from the comments sections of these various articles), the question then becomes one of relationships.

Can a man who has invested his sexuality in a silicon girl with a fixed smile ever be emotionally rehabilitated? And if one has voluntary chosen to "love a synthetic human", are they mentally disturbed and in need of psychiatric help?

The (full) documentary, Guys And Dolls, delves into the lives of men who have used these toys to varying degrees and purposes: we have Davecat who considers himself on the forefront of a new kind of sexuality, "Organiks" loving "Synthetiks"; we have Everette, the photographer who has found his perfect subjects; Gordon, the liver-faced, angry misogynist loser we've come to expect. And then we have Michael, who uses his 6 Real Dolls the way a woman would use a variety of vibrators and sex-toys-- something to hold him over until he finds himself a real, flesh and blood woman.

Michael finds his woman, Jody, someone he openly talks about on camera as "the one." She knows he has a secret and it bothers her that he won't share. So he shows her his doll collection. On his birthday.

She leaves him a week later. So much for honesty....

Two of these men are simply lonely; one has a fetish; the last is someone you wouldn't want in the gene-pool anyway.

What's wrong with these men? They're human.

They have problems. They have idiosyncrasies. They don't fit in very well. Or they're just plain disgusting. And most well-adjusted women wouldn't give them the time of day.

To quote Everette, "There are worse things in life than living with dolls, really. Like living alone."

So why shouldn't disgusting people be happy too? Is it so wrong to be QuirkyAlone?

It all comes back to a piece of M.C. Sanguila's quote: "individuals have the right to pursue their own fantasy lives," full-stop.

Part of sexuality is objectification: it is breasts and abs and detachable penises.

Part of modernity is isolation: the disintegration of traditional communal ties, the re-ordering of society along more niche, individualist lines.

Industrial societies are becoming more physically alone, while increasing their interactions through objects. Flirting through texts, selecting dates from the content of their essays, falling in love through font.

That is modernity. Get used to it.

So if a girl can name her dildo Long John Silver and still find herself, if she so chooses, a mate-- why can't John screw his Real Doll until the right Jane comes along? Or not?

Why can't men play with dolls?

Week 4.

2010-09-11T14:42:00.002-05:00

I haven't been updating on the weekly schedule I expected to because a funny thing happened in week 2-- all the changes went away.

I no longer have strange, strong dreams.

I still am not easily aroused.

I am no more aggressive than I was a month ago.

While I severely desire to end this fast already, I'm determined to stick it out through the 20th-- at this point, it has become less an experiment than an exercise in will power.

What we may learn, here, is that while the body may hormonally jerk about from temporary conditions, it will find a way back to its balance.

Week one: complete.

2010-08-29T19:47:00.003-05:00

Perhaps it's that I've been biking nearly 20 miles most days of the week or the fact that I haven't orgasmed for the same amount of time, but I've been having the most vivid, memorable dreams: and not all of them are sexual.

Mind you, most ARE in some way involving the opposite sex or the female form, with only a few blatantly pornographic (indeed, one dream was neither-- I was a wolf, hunting someone-- yet I still woke up unusually aroused), but the only consistency is that they are there, every night and morning, at the very tip of my thoughts when I wake up and often lingering after.

Thus, my first week of the sex-fast has been one filled with fantasy.

The interesting thing about this little experiment is that while, yes, I get very stiffly aroused and, yes, I give second and third looks to every and any woman with a wisp of flesh showing (thank god for Lakeshore jogging paths), I also found that, after the first few days, I'm not easily aroused. The first day? Drop of a hat-- second, third, a stray thought could get me going.

But then around the fifth I found that I'm not as constantly hard as one would assume, considering a pop culture that SCREAMS that men are horny beasts-- especially without any manual relief.

The truth, it seems, lies in the middle-- I think I've moved a bit passed the physical and into the psychological. I'm not hard at the drop of a hat but my mind is still pretty preoccupied.

Are these clues to the supposed "sexual energy" some gurus of abstinence are so adamant about? I'm a believer in energy, in the non-spiritual sense: I believe we pass on subtle behavioral cues that influence group behaviors, whether you realize it or not. So, perhaps, there is a sexual energy but it is only the build-up of hormonal tensions then expressed in interpersonal interactions.

In the mean time, I find myself more focused on the physical, again: daily, I find myself distracted by the desire to do push-ups, pull ups or get a ride in.

Mind you, that may be tied to hormones crying out for relief: the "Look good, drop fat, get chicks" model.

Indeed, I've actually thought more about dating, more than I have in some months. I idly peruse OKCupid. I listlessly click pretty faces. I passively hunt, late into the night. Still, for now, it's only looking.

I'm curious to see if this is going to make me more aggressive in my interactions with women I don't know: aggression being something that only manifests itself in me when I've been drinking.

The only thing I'm sure about, in this little experiment, is that it is very, very hard to complete-- no pun intended.

This is going to be one long, hard month.

No pun intended.

The Sex Fast. Week 1

2010-08-20T19:40:00.005-05:00

It occurred to me the other day that I had stopped enjoying sex.

Not to say sex wasn't enjoyable-- it was, as far as it goes. What I noticed was that, enjoyable as it was, I was less and less there as it was happening.

There I'd be, in bed with some wonderful girl or another, and my mind would be elsewhere-- the passion, the fire, would be elsewhere. For a while, the only thing that really worked for booze: properly drunk, I would bowl a girl over like a far-sighted caveman, drooling and slobbering until I got my last "grunt."

Not my best performances, I'm sure.

Truth was, and is, I had been in a sexual funk-- no interest in hunting Big Game and, if a deer happen to stray into the line of my phallic metaphor, no real interest in pulling the trigger either.

Worse yet, I didn't even want it alone. Every orgasm was a limp cough, a fleeting spark without a fire. The worst time to be disappointed in yourself is when your masturbating.

So I got an idea. And by "got," I mean stole.

Some guy had posted in a forum about how he had gone without an orgasm for an entire month-- no sex (he was married, so it wasn't hard-- har har), no masturbation, no nothing.

Eureka.

Since yesterday, August 19th, I have gone without touching myself and will do so for 30 days.

And you, lucky readers, will be along for the ride.

Like smoking, I hear the first week is the hardest (har har): so, a week from now, I'll report again on how my thing fares.

As for right now, I don't feel any different. No blue balls, no leering at high schoolers, no morning wood. But, my friends, we shall see.

If I don't report back by the end of the 30 days, assume I've gone on a killing spree.

(by the way, how is this about masculinity or feminism? Seriously, a 30 day fast from sex? What better way to find out what a man truly is... when he's not trying to get laid.)

Rage.

2010-04-12T17:40:00.005-05:00

I was 15 years old and she was my first real girlfriend-- real in the sense that we spent a lot of time together, we cared for each other and, most importantly, we had sex (and the kinds and variety pretty much spoiled me for life).

She'd a rough time, as long as I'd known her. She'd been raped. Her father was long gone. Her past boyfriends tended to be gangbangers with uncomfortable nick-names (Face-high was the one I recall).

When we'd first met, she'd been called over my house by two friends who were tentatively planning to get her high and "run a train" on her. I had no plans on joining-- I was a virgin at the time and that wasn't how I saw myself stepping off the starting block. She came in, she smoked, she saw what was up and, instead, decided to take a nap in my room.

I came in, put a blanket over her and let her sleep. She wasn't sleeping, of course-- I found that out later. That was the moment, she later told me, that she fell for me. We became friends. We later became more.

She was a good girlfriend. She defended me like a Rottweiler. She wrote me poetry. We had some really great sex, for a 15 year old. All because... I was a nice guy and most people weren't.

It's important you understand that. Because later, when, in a moment of blind rage, I shoved her to the ground and some dark thing crouching in the back of my mind howled for her, when I looked into her eyes it was the nice guy she'd fallen for reflected back at me.

The argument was stupid and petty and involved my little sister: I didn't want her around, she did, and we argued, I suppose; she insisted, I suppose; and, I suppose, I got very, very upset. I barely remember the whys. Only the effect it had on me.

I never wanted a woman to look at me that way, ever again.

Perhaps, in her eyes, I saw my mother.

I have fragmented memories. None of the act, really-- just the fallout. When my mother "fell down the stairs" and had to have stitches in her face. I stayed with my grandmother, that time. The house with blue walls. Memories of screaming, through those walls. The constant, constant fear.

I remember going to school and there being a class on domestic violence and I went home and I told my stepfather to stop hitting my mother. I was in 3rd grade. Gawky. Small. Big headed. Standing up to a monster.

And it stopped, for a while, that's one thing I will never forget-- for a while, God help me, it actually worked.

Until it didn't.

I'm sure at the time I could never fathom why these horrible things had to happen. And then I got older. And I got into an argument. And the chittering, insectile thing perching at the base of my skull hatched from its egg.

I know what it's like to feel a bone deep, monstrous rage. I know it feeds on itself, builds itself, takes off like a run-away train. I know what it's like to want to beat someone you love. Not hit. Beat.

They say that the most common indicator for future violent behavior is a violent environment. I've spent my entire life very much aware that I am a statistic.

I have an affliction, is all. I do my best to keep it under control. Sometimes, it's hard.

I dated a woman who had just left a physically abusive marriage. One night, during an argument, she began pushing me-- she gripped an argument and chewed on it, pushed the topic, backed me into an emotional corner.... She goaded me, almost taunted, and I knew she did it on purpose because she'd done it before... in her marriage. The psychodrama was playing over for her and all I had to do was play my part.

It became physical. She started kicking at me, willing me to hit her. I didn't. I left.

No similar incidents happened. We broke up soon after. She'd later tell her friends I was emotionally abusive-- I suppose the physical was just too big a lie to pull off. See, she was very used to be a victim. Abuse was part of her identity, at that point.

I had a fight with a female friend, one of my best friends. I said some pretty terrible things and I said some pretty honest things but mostly I said things she didn't want to hear. We were shouted, she was emotional and it became physical.

She came at me, scratched me. Left marks. Pushed me further than I've ever been pushed until I grabbed her by the throat and held her against her car and I thought, then, that I would love to see her lip bleeding and tears in her eyes. And then I let her go. And I walked away.

I had a long distance girlfriend I hopped onto a bus to ride 5 hours to see, to repair a break in our relationship. It was a lovely romantic gesture, I thought. She didn't see it that way. We immediately got into an argument, at my hotel room; her pacing, me sitting very, very still.

We get closer and closer to resolution only to break into fighting again until she leaves, refusing to talk to me face to face-- only phone communication, she says, and I'd had enough, I'm frustrated, I'd gone so far and she could only insist on her position, she just wouldn't back down, that bitch, and there I was, outside, in downtown Minneapolis, screaming into a cell-phone, kicking newspaper holders and slobbering like a beast. I'm lucky I wasn't arrested.

I left a voicemail message that probably sealed the deal on our breakup. And made her friends think I was psychotic.

People think that men who commit domestic violence are all just rotten human beings but I know better. They're people like me.

There is a rage that boils up so strong it can take days to come down.

It comes from this little voice that whispers... disrespect. That whispers, she should know better. It's defensive, this voice. It's always their fault. It doesn't like being pushed, it doesn't like it when someone doesn't listen, it doesn't like when someone makes it feel small. It hates to be pushed. Just do what the fuck I say, it hisses. Submit.

It has it's own logic, this rage. And it is intoxicating. That is sad, sad truth.

Do you want to hear horrible thoughts? I once got into such a rage wanted my stepfather back to beat the living fuck out of my mother. I am not proud of that moment. But it was true.

It's made relationships hard. I avoid conflict. I avoid intimacy. I actually fear getting worked up with a loved one. I know what will happen, I know that rage is waiting with it's terrible logic ready to goad me.

It sometimes feels like the safest route is solitude.

All this and I've yet to lose control.

I know both men and women can be guilty of domestic violence but this is largely a male problem. There are ads out there, saying things like "Real Men Don't Hit Women." Real men.

I don't consider myself better than anyone else because I keep myself in check. I consider myself a sick person whose disease is in remission. An alcoholic who hasn't touch the bottle in 10 years.

The rage is there and it will always be there. Waiting.

And I'm a nice guy.

Why Men Cheat. No, for real. I have all the answers.

2010-04-01T13:17:00.005-05:00

I cheated.

Years ago, while in a loving and committed relationship, met another woman, we hit it off and in the electricity of the moment we were damn near fucking. Were it not for the intervention of a good friend, we would've had sex that night.

Didn't matter. Fuck the Clintonisms; it was still cheating.

Let me tell you, though, that I can say without any reservation that cheating was the best mistake of my life.

It seems the entire world is obsessed with cheating right now. The reasons are simple, of course. Jesse James, Tiger Woods, any given congressman, an episode of South Park and every cover of every women's magazine--- the entire world is obsessed because women are obsessed- and scared. If some other man cheated well, then, your man's gonna cheat.

So women want answers. As a cheater, I can very easily give those answers.

But first, a story.

The reasons behind my cheating may be rendered in complex terms: my ex and I were at a crossroads, an ebb in the flow of our relationship. She was suffering from a libido-killing depression, I was feeling tied down and unattended to and into this mix came my very own Manic Pixie Dream Girl... and movie magic happened. Or some approximation.

As far as I'm concerned, the why doesn't matter-- well, not until the end, that is....

It's what happened afterwards that's important.

I woke. I looked over, seeing the pantied and snoring form of my mistake. I went home. Not mine. Hers. I crept into my ex's apartment with her spare key and I wept. I cried as if some important person, my mother, my sister, my child, had died. I grieved.

I called my mother, weeping like a widow, bargaining with her and God to somehow make this not-alright thing, alright. And then, later, much later, I sat my girlfriend down and I told her.

And then... she told me. Yeah. She'd cheated too.

It was years ago, with someone who I used to joke about her cheating on me with.

She told me she was afraid. She told me she knew, the way I was, that I would leave her the minute she told me. Leave her and hate her for it. She was absolutely, 100% right. In hindsight, I approve her actions-- they showed she knew my character better than I did.

If I remember correctly, I laughed. And in those moments, I had an epiphany that has since changed my life: people cheat. You can't control them. You can't figure out reasons, you can't guilt or bribe them and you can't even love them into not-cheating. Some people cheat and some people don't and that's the universe, in a nut shell.

Let me tell you something I believe about human nature: we are all, each and every one of us, the protagonists of our very own living novels. Humanity, being what is it (a rational-seeming being in an largely chaotic, irrational set of circumstances), tries to make sense of the world through narrative. We tell ourselves stories, about the trees, about the rivers, about the Gods and about our own motives.

Ask yourself, after all, which comes first? The emotion or the action? The feeling or the processing of what that feeling is? Do you feel anger and then realize it is anger you felt? Do you feel love first, then call that feeling love?

We're all in a story, written by ourselves, starring ourselves and let me tell you, we are very, very unreliable narrators. Whatever our actions, most people, at core, believe they are good... or at keast just. Everyone believes there's a good reason for whatever it is their character is doing. Just ask a rapist-- that bitch always deserves it, doesn't she?

This may seem like a philosophical digression (and it is), but there's a point.

Would you like to know why men cheat? It's the same reason why women cheat.

Because it felt good at the time.

We'll call it sex addiction, we'll call it a moral lapse, we'll call it a drunken escapade; we'll blame our spouses for not loving us enough or loving us too much. We'll need space, we'll need attention, we'll need whatever but in the end those are just the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of an irrational chemical instance: we fuck because it feels good. We flirt because it feels good. We cheat... because it feels good.

Got your answer? Good. Now stop freaking the fuck out. You can't control other people any more than you can control the weather.

All you can do is all you can do and the rest? The rest is just someone else's story. Live on, writing your own.

Fatherhood.

2010-03-27T14:38:00.004-05:00

Some time ago, a friend of mine asked if I'd father her child.

She's in a relationship, right now, and nauseatingly satisfied with it; unfortunately, the male counterpart in said relationship is unable to perform the task of stuffing her cavity full of crawly, squirmy, active, sperms. So, they tapped me for the stringer.

This friend is my ex-girlfriend. I love her and, once, was in love with her. The decision was simple and no forethought, on my part, was necessary.

But afterthoughts....

I've always wanted to pro-create but never wanted to be a father. Some part of me has always been convinced I'd make a good daddy, if only because I've spent a lifetime avoiding the mistakes of my parents, but most of me has been horrified by the idea of being a father-- with all the attendant disciplines, scoldings and guidance.

How could I be a father, after all, when I've never really had one myself?

My father left my mother when I was too young to know whether to care. He was replaced by a string of idiots who only had single personalities traits: there was beats-mommy, the longest runner, there's frog-eyes the crackhead, possible-pedophile the mechanic, psychological-abusey, guy-who-can't-pronounce-my-mother's-namey....

None could take the place of an actual father. Whether they knew it or I did, there was always a separation: I was not of them and they had nothing to do with me. In the starkest terms, on the coldest nights, when I'd look up at the ceiling and my pre-teen mind verged towards nascent German philosophizing, they were just the guys currently fucking my mother.

My father was a ghost. He disappeared and started an entirely new family, complete with wife and kids and left me, instead, with a series of broken memories and a handful of aphorisms for modern living:

"Son, if you ever meet a girl who can pee standing up... Marry her."

I'm not making that up.

He also left me a shining example of what not to do: Don't have children in highschool, don't smoke crack, don't get cancer and if you do, try to fulfill your dreams before learning you're terminal, not after. Oh. And only pussies go Christian when they know they're going to die.

Sorry. Dark digression, there.

Back to the infinite potential laying between my legs.

After talking to the true parents, the one's who'd raise this child-in-negotiation, I realized I'd be just like my father after all: I'd inseminate a woman (the old fashioned way, if you're curious--- these are very modern people, I'm dealing with. Plus it's cheaper.) and just... walk away.

No responsibility. No attachment. No costs. And I fulfill my biological imperative.

I talked to a woman I know, a woman who had this same situation-- she was impregnated for a friendly couple (the old fashioned way, if you're curious-- I know a lot of very modern people) and carried the child to term, birthed the child and just... walked away.

She talked about how she couldn't be happier. That it was a gift for them and a relief for her-- this woman, single, 37, globe-trotting... and, by her own words and my own insights, thoroughly alone. She said to go for it. Just do it.

Yes. But what if I loved it?

I had an ex-girlfriend (a different one) who asked me, upon the birth of my only nephew, if I loved the boy-- and of course, I did and do.

She couldn't fathom this. How could I love a creature I'd never, up until then, met? Granted, I'm pretty sure this particular ex-girlfriend was a Aspie, but her point stands. How could I love something I'd never even seen?

Even now, when I think of this nephew, I think of him almost as if he were mine. Except that I live hundreds of miles away and have nothing to do with his rearing.

And so it is with inchoate offspring. I feel myself veering towards love for an idea... in which I will have no responsibility, no hand in raising.

I wonder if this is how people sponsoring egg-headed African kids feel, fingering their Polaroids and sending their just pennies a day.

When I last went to visit this friend, this future mother, I saw her with other people's children. I saw another couple, the biological mother and her boyfriend. I saw them discipline. I saw them scold. I saw them set boundaries and take away play-things. I saw them parent, each and every one of them.

I didn't think I could do what they did. And I realized, in these moments, that the truth was-- the very things that make one a parent are the very things that make one a "Man."

Setting boundaries. Discipline. Solidity.

This journal has been a personal exploration of masculinity in a largely feminist (even though it doesn't want to admit it) nation; a nation that sees women as, more or less, equals-- who can go to school, who can hold jobs, who can have careers outside of motherhood. Condoms and birth-control and a woman's choice and fuck-buddies and women's only gyms and OKCupid.

It's also, I realize, a search for what masculinity means-- intellectually.

And, at this moment, I realize that this journal is a document of a tragedy.

It is the search for the meaning of something that I could have been taught, if only I'd had a father.

This friend, this child, will not have this problem-- her or she will have enough parents, sisters, brothers, to be birthed and reared whole.

And I can have a part in that, simply by fulfilling my father's role-- to inseminate, and walk away.

But I can't help but question... whether I'd truly want to.

Perhaps, in walking away, I step further away from the growth towards my ideal... towards being a "capital M" man.

I talked to my mother about this idea, about helping this couple, in terms that made it clear this hadn't happened yet and she told me, if it did happen, she didn't want to know. If she couldn't see the child, hold the child, think of it as her grandchild, she didn't want to know about its existence.

Perhaps that would be the easiest way.

Maybe I'd feel differently if this were a sperm-bank and I'd never have to see these friends, and their offspring, again.

Or maybe I'd be like the African sponsor, loving something I'd never met. Maybe I'd wander through life searching every child's face for hints of my own.

Victims of Rape.

2009-09-28T14:10:00.004-05:00

I want to start out with a startling and no doubt brave confession: I have been date-raped. Twice.

Now, under the very modern definition of date-rape, this includes sex under circumstances where you are too intoxicated to give consent-- while the other partner is not.

Right about now, you're probably calling bullshit. If I were a woman, however....

The first time, years ago, I was invited over someone's house under the ruse of reading poetry. No, I didn't see through this pretty blatant get-you-back-to-my-place-and-fuck slight of hand; I really was naive enough to think it was just poetry.

Not long after I arrive, there's a glass in my hand-- if I recall correctly, 90% rum and 10% coke. And I wasn't much of a drinker, let me tell you. After that, I don't really recall anything-- I blacked out, though I have flashes of activity in my memory, it wasn't until the next morning, naked with the woman, did I know what happened. So I said "fuck it" and we had sex again. This incident never bothered me much, as, when I was able to consent, I did so.

Second time was an accident. I was in my cups, pretty deeply, and bumped into a lady friend-- a lady friend, who under other circumstances I would've loved to bed. Except, I had a girlfriend at the time. Well, this friend and I had some drinks, all goes black and I wake up alone, at home, assuming nothing happened. It was a few text messages before I found out something very much happened.

This girl knew I was prone to black outs. She knew I was sloppy drunk when I bumped into her. And she was sober enough to drive to my house and home before I woke up. I really wasn't in the shape to give consent.

Again, you're probably calling bullshit. I don't blame you: if I could remember the sex, I probably enjoyed the hell out of it. But if you go by strict definitions, well... there you have it.

Rape is a odd, odd thing. There was a time when it was simple: it was stranger rape, sex as control and violence. Then date rape, forced sex by friends and lovers. Now we have a world where two thoroughly intoxicated people have sex and one can be considered raped. Or a married couple can have sex and one member feel psychologically coerced, brow-beaten into sex and that, too, is rape.

Or, in the case of The Frisky blogger Anouk Collins, a miscommunicated rape-fantasy made real is, also, rape.

Allow me to condense Collins' story: During the course of her three month relationship with a man named "Jacob," Collins repeatedly told her boyfriend that she had rape fantasies she would one day like to be carried out. They used such talk as foreplay, sending texts about how he would hold her down and use her. On Jacob's birthday, they booked a hotel, sexed it up and partied there until, later, after a spat, they retired to bed. Jacob commenced to foreplay, Anouk told him she wasn't interested in sex. And so he commenced to raping her.

Or, as she puts it:

"...he got a menacing look on his face and ignored my protests. I knew after a few misguided attempts to block him from entering me that he thought what was happening was drastically different from what I knew to be taking place. To him, this was the fantasy I’d been talking about. To me, it was not.

What makes the story truly grotesque is that Anouk did not verbally protest or struggle, as she thought it would only encourage him, and, instead, laid there, motionless, until he was finished. Afterward, she informed young Jacob that he had actually, for-real raped her.

He was understandably upset and the relationship never recovered.

This story is interesting in and of itself but what's more fascinating is the response it's gotten: 115 comments, ranging from condemnation and criticism to declarations of Collins' bravery-- and idle speculation on whether she should have reported Jacob.

Let's take a scenario: A woman tells a man she wants a surprise party. Not on her birthday, though, because that's lame. Just a surprise party. And she tells him that for three months. One day, while the woman is particularly cranky and uninterested in partying, the man, being a man, throws her a surprise party. The party so upsets her she has a panic attack, which she later blames the man for.

Am I wrong to think that sounds like emotional manipulation? Guilt-tripping someone for doing exactly what they requested?

The reaction the post has gotten is typical of today's world: despite the fact that the miscommunication was by both parties, there are still people who lay more of the blame on the male for not reading his girlfriend's mind. They genuinely believe he is a rapist, just as Collins' labeled him (no doubt to his psychological detriment).

When you intimate that "no" doesn't always equal "no," how much can you complain when someone hears, "yes?" Especially in a fancy hotel, on their birthday.

On the very same site, there's also an article about a girl who falsely accused 5 boys of raping her. At the very end of the article, the blogger has sympathy for the girl, who apparently labeled these boys rapists in order to avoid being thought of as a "slut."

Sympathy for the person who was willing to have 5 boys socially tarred and feathered, labeled as sex offenders (having to register and alert neighbors); someone willing to potentially ruin their lives to avoid a social stigma. Essentially, sympathy for a social rapist.

Years of rightly protecting victims, who have been afraid to come forward because of the system or society or fear of persecution has given way to an automatic justification for women whenever the specter of "rape" appears-- real, imagined, strangely defined or outright false.

This is a dangerous trend that does more to damage real rape victims than to protect them. The concept itself is being watered down.

I knew a girl who told me, after a night of drinking, she'd woken up pantiless, blacked out, on a couch and alone. She didn't use the word "rape" but it was the word on my mind-- and, apparently, not on hers. She said it so matter of factly as to send chills up my spine.

Is it her blaming herself for the situation? Another hold-over from the overt chauvinism of yesteryear? Or is rape more real to some people than to others. Is rape a concept where a girl can asked to be held down and consider herself raped while another is violated while unconscious and considers herself... what, I truly do not know....

I'll end with another confession: I have raped a woman.

It was outside, by a lake in the city I live in; we were near a storage building, used for stowing away canoes when I pulled a knife on her and held its point to her throat. I hissed threats into her ear, dug the blade's point deep enough to pucker skin but not pierce it, told her to get on her knees and suck me off. Told her to pull down pants, panties and be fucked, right there, out in the dark of a park.

One white woman, one black man, one knife.

The truth is, I knew she had bad knees and couldn't suck me for long; knew the concrete beneath us wasn't comfortable (but then it's a rape, why should it be comfortable?) and we couldn't go for long. I didn't want to hurt her, after all.

She was my girlfriend at the time and she'd requested to be raped, at some point. A fantasy come true. The illusion of her control being taken away by a violent, forceful man.

The truth of the matter is, had she been like Anouk, she could very well have turned the tables with a single ear-piercing shriek-- a change of heart from her and her fantasy could have landed me in prison. She had all the power, the entire time.

After all, she was a little white woman and I'm a black man with a knife. Who would believe that she, quite literally, had "asked for it?"

Words are powerful. Definitions are powerful. And things like rape, or what it is to be raped, or false accusations of rape-- should not be treated lightly.

I don't pretend to have any answers. But I can't stop asking the questions.

The Problem With Marriage....

2009-07-31T14:00:00.005-05:00

is feminism. There. It's been said. And what a relief!

Wait, let me back-track a moment here: we, as a society, are all aware that marriage has been a crumbling institution for the past fifty or sixty years. We search for the clues as to why and how to fix the problem (or whether there's a problem at all) but all we see are the statistics: 50% divorce rates, fewer marriages and a lot more cohabitation. The statistics also show a likelihood that cohabiting couples are more likely to call it quits. This, normally, wouldn't be so big a deal-- if you didn't add children to the stew.

And the problem is pretty simple: feminism. Feminism destroyed marriage.

And that's a good thing.

If we go back to the very first concepts of marriage, before those heady days with the idea of "romantic love" was first conceived, marriage was little more than a living, breathing, eternally binding contract. You trade a daughter for a bunch of gold and a financial stake in an up and coming corporation-- In-Laws inc.

Later, you cemented alliances with feudal lords, passed a princess and a few peasants, be sure she gets knocked up and BOOM-- you needn't fight that messy war.

Times changed but it wasn't until postWW2 that the nature of marriage shifted-- until women went to work, marriage was a way to financially secure your daughters, hopefully to someone they could tolerate. It wasn't like women could own a property in all places, or were respected if they did. Thus, the safety of marital bless-- with it's attendant abuses and servitudes (of course, it wasn't all bad-- after all, marriage tends to take the fight out of a man).

Then a funny thing happened. Women started wanting, like, rights and stuff. And jobs. And equality.

And when they happened, they realized they didn't need to be married. So when they got married, while having jobs of their own, divorce wasn't as horrifying a thing.

Fast forward to today and you find women becoming increasingly successful-- and who needs a marriage when you've got a career?

We had a boom in divorce, followed by a bust in marriage-- fewer people doing so, but those who do understand the risk: a coin-flip on whether they'll last. Maybe they're a little more committed-- then again, maybe not--, maybe they're just a bit smarter, having watched a generation of parents divorced... they, like the survivors of some species-wiping cataclysm, have adapted their way into the next step of marriage evolution. And maybe that's a good thing.

You take the money out of marriage and all you're left with is love, hardship and commitment. Love, in the romantic sense, runs dry after a few years. Hardship is something modern Americans aren't used to dealing with (perhaps these new married couples have benefited from a decade of unwatchable romantic comedies). And commitment?

One of the few married couples I know have neatly side-stepped this problem in what I increasingly believe will be the next step in marital evolution: the open marriage.

They are a couple. They live with (and date) another couple. And date a few others, besides.

While I do not understand the mechanics of their particular little sex-nest, I've seen the overall concept executed a few times thusly: there's a primary partner, with a few other secondaries. There are "veto" rules, allowing some measure of control for the other partner (i.e., "no you're NOT sleeping with that particular crazy bitch-- go fuck that nice girl in the corner"). If one partner is feeling unappreciated, there must be some devotion to repairing the primary relationship. Communication is a must. And there has to be at least one MFF threesome.

I just threw that last one in cuz, you know, naturally, that would be my clause.... I just assume that's an unspoken given.

It seems to work out for them but more importantly, it may work out for those who aren't married. After all, some people don't want or need the pressures, stresses and time consumptions of a relationship-- why not, then, just attach yourself to a happily open marriage as a free-agent secondary and let the franchise players worry about the Big Questions.

Personally, I have a hard time with the idea of open marriage-- for myself.

That is probably because I have a hard time with the idea of marriage, period-- that is, once again, for myself.

But if and when I did, I would have all the knowledge that my marriage is fragile, fraught and likely to fail-- and still should be forever. Perhaps the rise in cohabitation shows that, in order to succeed, you should fail a few times-- and if and when you find the person to enter a binding contract with, you'll fight through the hardships, you'll let the love mature and you'll hold to whatever version of commitment you happened to hold with.

Either way, we can't go back to Donna Reed. And we shouldn't. This is a brave new world and we have brave new marriages to go with it.

And hey... let the gays marry, already. They couldn't do any worse at it than straight people, could they? Don't fight it: they're just another step in the evolution. Change is inevitable.

Weird Science.

2009-01-13T12:47:00.004-06:00

According to the New York Times, it won't be long before we see Love Potion Number 9

When a female prairie vole’s brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she’ll quickly become attached to the nearest male. A related hormone, vasopressin, creates urges for bonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles (or naturally activated by sex). After Dr. Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married. In his Nature essay, Dr. Young speculates that human love is set off by a “biochemical chain of events” that originally evolved in ancient brain circuits involving mother-child bonding, which is stimulated in mammals by the release of oxytocin during labor, delivery and nursing.

“Some of our sexuality has evolved to stimulate that same oxytocin system to create female-male bonds,” Dr. Young said, noting that sexual foreplay and intercourse stimulate the same parts of a woman’s body that are involved in giving birth and nursing.

Interesting but, in some ways, a bit of a finding in search of a hypothesis-- perhaps we stimulate the same parts of a woman's body that are involved in giving birth and nursing because they also have an unusually large number of nerve cells? And in the case of male fascination with breasts, that isn't even even cross-cultural. Black men prefer booty and a whole shit load of white guys seem to like women who kind of look like boys (I'm just sayin').

What is more interesting, though, is the idea of a love vaccine which, on its surface, seems to be a cure... for monogamy.

For years, the argument (probably made up and advocated by guys) went that men are the biological imperative to spread the seed as far and wide as possible-- and that women are more suited to monogamy, as they have the deal with the result for 9 months. Hence, why Alpha male's fuck more-- they have better genes and need to spread them-- and why nerds win last-- because, as the losers, they will then nest and provide secure monogamy for the woman. Until she's fertile again and the kid's older and those big men with their broad shoulders come swaggering by.

I know a few women in open relationships and I know at least one who initiated things herself-- so it's not to say that women are obviously wired one way or another.

But imagine a word where we did go ahead and take the "Love Vaccine"-- imagine the psychological and sexual equality resultant. Women who can go out and have fun (as safely as possible, of course-- no one wants the baby question) and never fear for kind of emotional fallout I get to overhear at the bar at work or on the weekends. No more self-doubt, no more longing for a past lover.

Just sex. Imagine: chemical polyamory.

Or imagine the idea that, one day, you can take this alpha guy, shoot him with the love juice and erase the entire idea of the 7 year itch (which, in this generation, seems to have fallen back to 3).

We know that infatuation phases of a relationship tends to go no more than 2 and half years, tops. Imagine if you could extend it as long as you like-- a physical, chemical and emotional love to last all time.

Isn't it kind of amazing we're even asking these questions?

When was it, exactly, that people stopped thinking they could love the way those who came before us did-- for 20 or 30 years at a time? Was it just the financial ties that kept these older couples glued? Was it fear of God-- fear of divorce?

Was it coming up in a media environment of unrealistic expectations- thanks to Romantic Comedies- and a-must-have-it-all-NOW mentality?

Questions for another day. But it's interesting to know that, one day, we won't be worrying about people slipping ladies the roofie-colada but slipping (and being slipped) love potions for sex, profit and quickie marriages. Men, then, will wish for the good old days of beer goggles....

What's a Feminist?

2009-01-13T11:57:00.004-06:00

I was out at a bar the other night, having a deep conversation with two ladies, one my own age and the other in her 40s (both of whom seemed to have wildly divergent ideas on what "feminism" means, but call that the generation gap), when we started talking about abuse and (in some disclosure) the experience I had in childhood, growing up in an abusive household.

I spoke of confusion and quite a bit of blame for my mother for putting up with it when the older woman said, "There's the problem. Why are you blaming her? Why are you asking why she put up with it when you should be asking why he did it?"

The question was very clear to me: The reason he did it is that he's an asshole.

To an 8 year old, a 12 year old or a 27 year old, that answer couldn't be clearer: my step-father was an asshole. To even try to understand him was to try and sympathize with him and, in the end, I made my peace by assigning him to that category of "Non-human force of nature with whom I rarely interact." At this point in my life, he's something like a familiar stranger, like someone I see at the bar some times and make a bit of small talk.

The mystery, to me, is in why anyone would ever continue in an environment of abuse.

But again and again, the woman would rebut me-- stop asking why about her and start questioning him. Why would he hit a woman?

This, to me, is an example of one of those confusions of priority and belief when dealing with an older feminist.

I could give dozens of reasons why I'd hit a woman (besides sex). Most of them revolve around power and control and respect-- about the same reasons parents hit their children (if they ever bothered to admit it). While I wouldn't do it, I'd still be able to come up with reasons.

Frankly, I know plenty of women who have come with reasons why they'd hit their man-- and do so.

But to be hit? To be the victim? Why on Earth would anyone put up with that, besides financial reasons (besides divorce, which was discussed a bit in the house-husband post)? It's irrational, therefore interesting.

But to her, questioning the victim is blaming the victim. Sure, I blamed the victim when I was a kid-- because I lived in the mess. Why wouldn't I? But years later, the mystery remains and the questions go unanswered.

The conversation meandered somewhat, veering into ideas about respect and male-female difference-- the younger woman felt she didn't want any help or retraction due to her gender, she felt she was not only just as good as a man but that there was barely a difference between the two. Meanwhile, the older woman spoke at length about the difference between male and female energies, about femininity and it finding a place at the table in the masculine world-- a difference so marked, I couldn't help but respond to it with my own point: they have an identity crisis but, at least, they have an active conversation about the identity in the first place.

Males, on the other hand... and that was where she cut me off. It was as if to say, even the subject, the very idea, of the oppressor trying to find his identity to cope with the cultural shift is too absurd to talk about (to be fair, this lady was good at cutting anyone off- and we were drinking).

There's a sharp line between these generations of feminist and it makes more clear to me the fiasco of the Clinton/Obama primaries and its identity warfare. Older feminists are still living the war, younger one's are coping with the reconstruction and furtherment of their goals--- where the bleeding edge, years ago, involved radical ideas and ideals to battle an overwhelming enemy, the enemy has changed shape and the war has gone subtle. Now the politics truly are personal-- how women carries themselves, self-respect, the question of sex, the question of objectification in the media (which is overwhelmingly used against women but, as with the growing trend of male body dysmorphia, has become a bit more equal opportunity exploitative).

In other words, to even ask the question, "what is male"? is a question for this generation. Just as our fathers before us never had to question it- hence why, in many ways, they are left behind-- neither have our mothers.

Girl Power (Where are the Female Super Heroes?)

2009-01-08T13:22:00.002-06:00

Jezebel outlines a little tet-a-tet between one movie site, claiming there needs to be more female super hero movies and another site, claiming we don't need them but I think that both sites are kind of missing the point.

The guy at cinemablend is an asshole. Women watch superhero movies and they read comic books. Period. So his sex in the city argument is pretty rank.

The lady at ropesofsilicon has a bit of a point, but is blaming the wrong things: female super hero movies are, in fact, being made and they suck. Sorry. (she also criticizes Mary Jane Watson from Spiderman for being de-sexed while ignoring the fact that the problem with most female heroes's is that they are frequently over-sexed and given less personality and background than written into Mary Jane).

The problem is not the quantity of female hero-- there isn't enough because there never have been many in the first place-- but the quality. And that, until recently, has been the problem with all super hero movies.

Perhaps we've already been spoiled by The Dark Knight and Iron Man, but did everyone somehow forget the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Puninsher 1, Superman Returns, Ghost Rider or X3?

There are only so many super hero movies, only so many super hero movies of quality and even fewer super heroines for whom there might be a quality film made.

Ladies, your hope, essentially, lies with Wonder Woman and She-Hulk (I especially like She-Hulk, as she's been recently re-conned into some kind of super Nympho lawyer). Sure, there's others out there but they are the equivalent to Aquaman. Unless the film itself takes liberties with the material, no audience is going to flock to see Zantana on the big screen. They might flock to see a Power Girl movie but, trust me, it'll be for all the wrong reasons....

In comic books, women are generally supporting characters or are on a team. When they aren't, we try to make them into movies (hello Electra and Catwoman) and those movies suck.

By why not embrace the options?

For one, why does the female hero have to be either a) super or b) the titular star? Y, the Last Man is a comic book going to be made into a movie about a world where men are killed off in a plague-- and the main character, Yorrick, is largely a hapless dolt surrounded by stronger and fiercer women who have to save his ass all the time. Do you need this film to be "about" women when it's filled out by nothing but strong female characters?

And why do people always focus on super heroes? What, is Strangers In Paradice no longer a comic book? Wasn't Persepolis a graphic novel? Or Ghost World? Women, as characters, are often better explored (and less exploited) in non-super hero comics, why not use that for inspiration?

Are women really so eager to indulge in power fantasies?

And anyway, with Battle Angel Akira on it's way to being adapted, it's pretty clear that if you want some "female heroes" you're best bet is manga, not American comics. Check out the Borders aisles and you'll probably start to notice the difference....

The First Date Debate (or, once again, in praise of the Slut).

2009-01-08T11:43:00.008-06:00

Over at The Frisky, there's a post extolling the virtues of not having sex on the first date-- a post inspired by a friend's husband, who said he'd never be with the friend is they'd slept together on the first date....

Edward, who has been happily married to my friend for over a year (after dating for four years before that), told me matter-of-factly, “If my wife and I had slept together on the first date, I can guarantee you we would have never been married.” This was almost insane to hear from him—they did not have a slow courtship at all. If I remember correctly, within three weeks they were saying I love you and within just a few months they were living together. Still, they waited at least a few dates before doing the nasty and Edward credits that for building up enough intrigue which eventually led to them falling in love and getting married. But sleep together right away and, “the mystery is gone before it can even be cultivated,” he said.

Edward, my friends, is an idiot.

I'd like to begin by saying that the essential problem with this romanticized view of sex, as if it were a gift to be unwrapped and if unwrapped too soon, the mystery will be lost, is threefold:

First, most of us have had sex before and it isn't terribly mysterious. It's just sex. It feels really good. And (here's the secret) it feels even better when you and your partner practice.

Secondly, there is the scarcity problem. At some point in a male's life, we may begin to understand the truth of the "Fish and the Sea" proverb: if a girl you are seeing will not have sex, there are always other girls who will. This is why girls who stop having sex in relationships shouldn't be terribly surprised that their man has cheated on them--- and especially so, with men in vice-versa situations (it's even easier for the woman, so you two had better be compatible). If you think keeping your "gift wrapped" through a few dates makes you "special" the person you're dating is likely dealing with a small pool of potential mates or is sexist, has gotten laid more than you or your friends have put together and believes you should be damn near a virgin. And he'll probably be jealous and possessive if he thinks you've screwed more than 2 guys (you dirty whore).

In my case, if you've made me wait, that sex better be phenomenal or the disappointment is going to make me break it off. Why waste valuable time for a lousy lay?

Lastly, this view of sex perpetuates a belief that is inherently negative towards women: that a woman's sole source of value is in their vagina. If you ask around, you'll find that some people believe there is some kind of inverse relationship between vaginal usage and the worth of the vagina's owner.

Or, roughly,

Kind of sick when you make it a graph, isn't it?

Edward's mystification of sex with his future wife is just a cover up for his basic belief that sex is the source of her value and that if she gave it too him too early, she is worthless.

And to him, personally, that may be true: but what does it say about you, that you'd sleep with a person who felt that way about you? Or what does it say about you, that you view yourself solely on the basis of your vagina?

Perhaps I'm the strange one, not to have such a view of sex. Maybe it's because the first girl I had sex with was a complete slut.

Now, when I say slut, I say, in this case, the conventional usage: she had a lot of sex, far too young to know what she was doing. She really did equate her vagina with her value and didn't value herself very much at all.

After all, when I first met her, my two best friends were trying to double-team her. I wasn't interested (I was 15 and had a handful of experiences with oral sex but had silly ideas about not having sex until ready).

Eventually, she pursued me (having refused my friends their good time), we began dating and I was taught a very valuable lesson: it's so much better to fuck someone who already knows how, than to start off clumsy. I had more, and odder, sex at 15 than most people I know had at 18 (with her, I began my great love of outdoor/exhibitionist sex).

Thus began my love of the slut. While I grew up and experienced personal growth, I found that my definitions of the word evolved from the common usage to something like a sainted position: the slut, as ultimate free spirit. The slut, as woman who isn't afraid to enjoy sex. With whomever they want. On their own terms.

I find them interesting, enticing: I love listening to women tell stories, I love sex and I love interesting things-- what's more interesting than listen to a woman tell stories about a lot of sex? And that's the great thing about the slut: she is so matter-of-fact, generally, that you may have these conversations. Detailed. Conversations.

She isn't uncomfortable with herself, with sex-- she likes to fuck and she'll fuck who she wants.

Tell me, who has more value? She who is in control of herself or she who fiercely protects her vaginal value from all comers, hoping to ensnare a man with her "mysteries?"

Mind you, it makes sense to protect yourself from those who would denigrate you: if a guy hates a slut, or would disrespect you, you probably shouldn't fuck him (unless you're into the slumming thing in which case more-- or less-- power to you).

Ladies, it isn't your vagina that will make a guy stop calling after the first date: it's you or it's him and there's nothing else to say about it. If it's you, you've had sex (or not), he didn't really feel a connection (with you and/or your vagina-- sorry, but sometimes it isn't you, personally, ladies) or if it's him, he wasn't looking for a commitment and it would have hurt all the more when he pursued you, finally had sex, and then stopped calling. Or maybe he's busy. Or maybe he's just a prick.

We're all adults, here. Have a conversation. Find out what the person wants. Find out what you want.

But in the end, keep in mind, always, that your value comes from who you are and that, at the very least, never fuck someone who has no respect for you-- even if it's after 14th date. It wouldn't turn out well, even if you got married later.

If They're So Fatale, Why Is No One Actually Hurt?

2008-12-17T14:42:00.007-06:00

Thanks to Daniella for giving me the heads up on l'Homme Fatale-- sadly, she might disagree on my reading of it....

A few years ago, Katherine, an actress in her mid-20s who lives in Park Slope, was cast in a play by a theater director several years her senior. He wasn’t particularly attractive. In fact, he was almost effeminate. But he was intelligent and not too forward, and he was always surrounded by beautiful women—which, Katherine admits, she found intriguing.

“He seemed like the antithesis of all the jocky guys I went to high school with,” she said. (The women in this story agreed to discuss their romantic pasts only if identified by their middle names.) “He was sensitive, funny, supersmart, not athletic at all and not physically imposing. But there was something that was so charismatic—a gentleness and gracefulness and a confidence.”

Katherine and the director began a weeks-long courtship. There were late-night rehearsals in a dark theater that turned into surprisingly intimate later-night conversations. But then summer came. They both left New York for a while. And every time Katherine tried to reach him, he never returned her phone calls and ultimately disappeared altogether.

“People told me he was trouble, but I really thought he was too evolved and sensitive to hurt me the way he did,” Katherine said.

Katherine’s director was an Homme Fatale—a genre of man that New York women have come to know well. Often the creative type, he projects a deceptive vulnerability, while maintaining an appealing confidence. He’s usually not the best-looking guy in the room, but he is the smartest; he turns these traits to his advantage, playing up the contrast with the typical hot guy or womanizer (physical inferiority, emotional evolvement). His courtship begins with a rushed sense of intimacy and, yet, a disarming lack of forward physical advances; a first date might involve a game of Scrabble or perhaps a cup of tea; his target usually leaves wondering if in fact it was a date at all. And yet the story always has the same ending—he grows distant, stops calling and eventually disappears with little explanation, if any.

There's so much here, I don't know where to begin-- but a good place is this idea of "deceptive vulnerability" and being "too evolved to hurt me."

You find yourself dating the sensitive "perfect man," the kind that romantic comedies assure us are hiding under every rock but, lo and behold, he does the unthinkable: he grows quiet. He grows distant. He leaves you.

And that leaving hurts.

Has this happened to you? Congatulations, you've just gone through a break-up. It happens. But why is this, a normal occurance, somehow sinister under the "Homme Fatale?" The author never says he did anything except for not call. Katherine's sense of betrayal comes from herself and the reason is simple: she expected, because this man was "sensitive" and "evolved," that he was just another nester stereotype. That all sensitive men are the boyfriend type-- this sensitivity of theirs assures her some measure of control and security.

Surprise! It doesn't. Katherine's betrayal came from buying into a stereotype and centering her expectations around it. It's painful, yes, but where exactly is the Fatale to these Hommes?

Dangerous femme fatale heroines, as portrayed by Rita Hayworth in Gilda or Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, are nearly extinct or have been reduced to tragic cougars while their male counterparts have only proliferated; now they can be found roaming the halls of magazines, publishing houses and the better English literature Ph.D. programs by day, and frequenting ironic dance parties in cramped Boerum Hill apartments by night. And unlike the typical womanizer, whose game is laughably easy to detect, the Homme Fatale’s modus operandi is more emotional and controlling than it is physical, leaving a wreckage that is, in the end, more disastrous.

(We pause here to note that the Homme Fatale, while related, is not the same as the oft-bemoaned indie rock or emo boy. While he may exhibit similarly sensitive qualities, an Homme’s emotional side is a learned part of his manipulation, not an authentic sentimentality.)

The Noir-era Femme Fatale character had particular traits, besides being beautiful and manipulative: they wanted something. They wanted a husband killed. They wanted some material object, some great and terrible favor. The love they elicited from men was of the obsessive kind, the kind that only a noir film could create: nihilistic, cynical, empty.

Often, those who wrapped themselves up with a Femme Fatale... actually died (if not that, went to jail or had some other terrible end).

The deadliness, in that era, was where their power came from: the allure was in the fact that these women were independent, blatantly sexual and always angling for themselves. That is what is fatal about the Femme Fatale.

And L'Homme Fatale, the so-called counterpart is... being sensitive as a trick? Well, what's this rotten bastard angling after, anyway? Sex?

The Homme Fatale has also slyly insinuated (as is to be expected) his way into popular culture. Take, for instance, the Aaron Rose character played by John Patrick Amedori on the teen drama Gossip Girl, the young downtown artist and RISD grad with the unfortunate goatee. In the six episodes in which his relationship with the glamorous, blond Upper East Sider Serena van der Woodsen has progressed in fits and starts, he has yet to actually have sex with her.

Okay... he's not trying to get laid? What makes him so terribly suspicious, then?

And for a somewhat nebbishy, shy person, he seems to have a suspicious number of beautiful female friends hanging around at all times. When Serena is justifiably confused by the other “muses” in his life, he simply says, “I could explain who Tamara is and why she was at my apartment last night, but the fact is, you feel something or you don’t. If you’re looking for an excuse to keep us apart, that’s fine.” It’s a classic Homme Fatale move: come on strong, then, when confronted with evidence that points to a lack of commitment or deception, turn it around so the woman feels like it’s her issue.

Again, we return to the problem of expectations. He's sensitive, he's shy but... he's surrounded by beautiful women? How dare he! That's Frat-boy behavior!

It's as if to say, if the guy doesn't walk like a Jock, quack like a Jock and fuck around like a Jock (and the funny part it, he doesn't seem to be fucking like a Jock at all), he's deeply betrayed someone by associating with a lot of women.

Let's just recap here a moment, shall we?

Femme Fatale:

:L'Homme Fatale.

The article later goes into a complete misreading of the Pick-up Artist stuff (I'll be writing about that at some point, I assure), making our "Homme Fatale" more sinister through association, despite the fact that the tactics of the two (PUA and HF) are clearly opposite. The manipulation meme is strong here-- how on earth could a man be sensitive and not be using that vulnerability as a way to emotionally manipulate women? Especially if-- gasp-- he leaves?

The article itself can't even answer that question as, in the end, it starts to contradict itself about how manipulative these Fatale Hommes are:

In my opinion, being an Homme Fatale is more of an affliction than a conscious course of action. I think you’re in love with the feeling as much as you are with each of those people. The Homme Fatale is not a slut, but the interest is both in the person, and even more so, in the feeling it gives you.”

Worse than a monster, then. A Romantic.

The Homme Fatale is neither a womanizer nor a sociopath—though these categories might overlap a bit.

“The Homme Fatale is a different, possibly more modern condition than a sociopath— he is not as aware of his actions. My understanding is that sociopaths are more clever and conniving. Maybe this is my personal bias, but I think the Homme Fatale is a slightly more sympathetic character,” said James. “The empathy is there, but people who do the most harm are people who don’t know what they want, and Hommes Fatales don’t know what they want.”

Gasp! Worse than a Romantic! He's the stereotype of a woman.

That's wrong of me, perhaps, but to this day I'll still hear that it's the right of every woman not to know what she wants.

So, too, is it the right of every man.

This article is emblematic of the Male Definition Problem: women have a expectations of behavior and feel betrayed when they are not met. And instead of blaming the female expectations, the males are blamed for exhibiting the exact same traits a female would bristle at being criticized over. All because no one knows what to expect of a "Man" anymore anyway-- emotion is encouraged yet, when displayed and someone is left hurt, it is then manipulative emotion, not true sensitivity. These expectations are tied into traditional gender roles: the more a male acts like a "female" (the article itself calls these hommes "almost effeminate"), the more he is expected to indulge in female-expectatant behaviors. And when he has "male-expectatant" behaviors, like emotional distance or haremizing? He's Evil and Wrong and Must Be Stopped.

No woman has the right to feel betrayed by a sensitive man who promises nothing, just as no man has the right to feel betrayed by a woman who doesn't give to him sexually. It's her right to choice to say no; it's his right to not know what he wants.

Public/Sex.

2008-12-17T13:57:00.002-06:00

I am in love with My Hot Mess (mostly safe for work, but don't scroll down past mid-point, one naughty picture), the blog that insists it's not a blog.

It's raw, honest, brutal-- its writer talks about ignoring douchebag's she'd never date (while happy to use them for cheap ice cream), about her interactions with celebrities and coworkers and, in it's most recent, about how she's used loved one's and grown as a human being.

Oh. And she fucks for the camera. She's porn star/director Penny Flame and she must be one of the most public personalities in all of creation.

Imagine: getting on camera to have sex, displaying the most societally-intimate acts (although in the gonzo style, which isn't terribly intimate), putting them on the screen then opening up the lap top to admit to coke habits and a fucked up break up.

I am fascinated by the phenomenon of the public personality- and most especially by the female public personality. In them, there is a measure of instant fame that comes from being on the power-end of a relationship with a lustful audience.

How else do you explain others, like Paris Hilton, like Kim Kardashian, or that Alysson chick Gawker is so obsessed with?

In a way, it's like the Dominatrix (fodder for another post, I assure you); her audience is already a sexual fandom, worshipful of her body-- but is that enough? Apparently not: now, they need her heart, her mind, her private self and her public pussy.

That's quite a bit of "self" to be selling.

Question is, which side of the Porn Star argument do you go by? The empowered woman, controlling and profiting from her own sexuality-- or the Sarah Silverman, a thousand penises can't fill the hole in your soul argument?

It's hard to say, vis a vis her porn, but I love, respect and wish more of her written work-- (I wasn't actually familiar with her porno work-- I'd stumbled onto her from the totally NSFW Fleshbot site (kind of a Jezebel for porn)-- as the level of honesty she displays, there, helps every jerk-off and chump save himself, from himself:

Its good to play dumb when you are breaking someone’s heart in front of their coworkers. Nothing worse than the shit talking that commences as soon as dream girl walks over your heart and out the door with a big ass extra special cheap acai bowl. So I play dumb and he accepts my ignorance and I walk out that door, bowl in hand. It was this final interaction that I make it clear we would not be going on a date. Fuck, I mean, and I hate to say it because it makes me sound like a shallow fucking bitch, but really?

I’m just not going to date the guy from Robek’s. And while his employment at said smoothie shop is a big factor in me not dating him, there are other reasons as well. Here are my reasons for not dating the guy at Robek’s.

1. He works at Robek’s. This should explain itself, from the apron and the visor to the minimum wage paycheck. I need a self made nucca, who is driven and going places.

2. He has roommates. He’s mentioned them, and I am not into that.

3. He is my height. Fucking shallow bitch.

4. I have a hard time respecting people that hook me up because I am a pretty bitch. If you know me, and we are friends, fine, but just random good looking strangers? Come on dude, paying $5.95 for a bowl instead of $6.95 is not a big deal, and it isn’t going to impress me.

5. He works at Robek’s.

She admits to being shallow about his job, shallow about his height and, most importantly, disrespectful of the fact that he's giving her a cheap hook up as a way to get into her pants.

Basically, she's telling men (her primary audience) the truth about women (or, at least, herself). And that, my friends, is very necessary.

I was at a bar the other day, sitting with a girl who was pining over a guy there-- a guy there with another woman, who wasn't even as attractive as she was, who still had no interest in her.

I tried to tell her the truth, the same truth that I'd tell any guy: he's not only not into you, you look like an idiot. But of course, she didn't listen-- why should she? I'm just a guy in a bar and her future husband is the only man for her, so what do I, some dude, know about male psychology that she doesn't?

She's probably going to very visibly take someone home one night, having been rejected (again) and hoping to make him jealous somehow (it won't). But who am I to tell her the truth?

Enter Penny Flame, sex object: In telling the hard truth to the public, in being honest about herself, she gives the lessons to an audience who might be more receptive, if only because it gives insight into how to get into her (fantasy) pants.

She's in a position, as pornographer, to affect her audience's cocks and their behaviors.

She's also in a position to just seem more human. Imagine that: jerk-off material, thought of as a living, breathing person.

She isn't just a pussy and a pair of tits. She works out at Bally, knows Murs, hangs in Vegas, used to have a coke habit, needs to knock off with the weed and sometimes directs videos of her and her costars sucking the very real cocks of pretend strangers. What's more, unlike the Lindsey Lohans of the world, her frailties aren't exposed by the media, but herself. She creates a product (and uses herself as such), then engages in a dialogue. And well written, at that.

I have to say, from the profession to personality, I have nothing but respect.

Bi Bi, Fear of Gays

2008-12-17T10:33:00.000-06:00

Had a little back and forth with a female friend last night on why, despite making out with, being sexually attracted to and pretty much having sex with women, she isn't Bisexual.

She isn't a "bi-when-drunk" type, kissing girls to titillate drunk guys in bars: she's genuinely attracted to some women and considers herself a "hedonist."

Why not bisexual, according to her? Simple. She doesn't want a relationship.

Ever seen a guy make out with another guy and say he isn't bisexual? Probably not. Now imagine if you met a man who sleeps with other men, but insists he isn't gay or bisexual-- because he's not there for a relationship. If he's black, they'd say he was on the "Down Low"-- that ambiguous, I'm-not-gay-but-I-fuck-men status minorities (Mexicans have a variant) cling to to maintain machismo.

General opinion on the guy would be pretty clear: Dude's a total closet case.

Maybe the categories themselves are at fault: by bisecting all sexuality, by making it black and white (you're with them, you're with us, or you're nothing), it takes away the kind of loose, pressureless spectrum my female friend seems to be looking for.

But that doesn't change the fact that a man in that position wouldn't get the kind of pleasant leeway she would.

Know what, though? We can't blame anyone but ourselves. The gay boogeyman has such a looming presence in the straight male psyche, it's hard for us not to force them into a safe little box. It's protective, to have them so clearly defined. Even for a guy like me, who is neither offended nor uncomfortable around gay men.

Er... that is, most gay men....

I am black. And I have to admit, nothing makes me more uncomfortable than being around a black, gay man. Somehow, within my mind, this is an aberration and is both more threatening and more confusing than any other racial category for gay men. It's almost as if I expect it from whites but the engrained cultural machismo, the majority homophobia that marks our subset of society, has a deep infection in me I can't shake.

Honestly, I don't want to have a problem with them. But they scare me.

They scare me the way an urban black male might scare a quiet, suburban white male.

They scare me... sexually.

At work some weeks ago, a black gay man comes walking by and our eyes met, briefly: I at once look away, distinctly uncomfortable. Moments later, a friend, who is also black, comes up, says he just had the guy stare him down and visibly shuddered. Our reaction is visceral disgust, even though we deal with gay men every day, as coworkers and, in my case, as friends.

Perhaps this is deeper than gay and straight, perhaps this is also racial and racist: somehow, in them being black, their homosexuality becomes shaded with prejudices of aggression. Perhaps, when a black gay man looks at us, we feel as some protected white female may feel when we look at them: as if, at any moment, a rape might occur.

It comes down to the "threat" of it all.

These day, bisexuality is becoming more acceptable on the male side, mostly in urban centers among the bohemian types. Women may indulge in seeing their male hipster friends putting tongue to tongue, the way most of the nation drunkenly suggests sorority girls do to one another (sometimes on camera). But this is, in no way, the norm.

And... I think I'd like to suggest that it be okay. Our reactionary fear to gays doesn't make us any straighter and it doesn't suite us for a world where we co-exist with homosexuality (and this is inevitable, this is human rights) or with the growing segment of women who wouldn't sleep with us if we didn't accept the gays. In the end, all it causes is anxiety-- can I admit I think Dave Navarro is hot, without all my friends thinking I've switched sides?-- and anger.

We don't need the fear. We have to find a way to get over it.

So maybe if a girl likes kissing girls, she isn't bi. And maybe if a boy likes kissing boys, he isn't a closet case.

But I insist that if you're screwing someone, relationship or not, you're a that-sexual (omnisexual?).

No one can say you aren't a zoophilic if you've only just fucked a pig once.

A Man's Making of Woman (or, What the HELL is wrong with Frank Miller?)

2008-12-17T00:07:00.003-06:00

Friends, let me introduce you to a pencil necked geek:

Meet Frank Miller. You may know him from such hits as 300, Sin City or, if you're a real nerd, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

I know him as the cranky prick who has been humping the dead corpse of the noir genre for so long, there's isn't an orifice he's left unraped, the director of what looks to be the shittiest movie of the year and, of course, the poster boy for the Manly Man complex.

Frank Miller is obviously a punk. Look at him, in that 1986 photo above-- that's the face of a man who hangs out at arcades, goes to Goth clubs, rages against the jocks who kicked his ass in high school and, most importantly, calls every woman to reject him a whoring bitch and every woman to tolerate him a bitchy whore.

Think I'm pulling it out of my ass? Art tells us a lot about the artist so what can the working life of comicdom's crankiest creator tell us about himself?

Well, let's look at the Spirit, his first full directorial effort:

What do these clips tell us (besides the fact that Eva Mendes isn't even bothering to phone it in-- seriously, you'd have to WORK to act so badly)?

Once again, as he did in Sin City and as he's doing in All-Star Batman, Frank is showing his scared little inner boy. Every woman he creates is a prostitute, a whore, a victim or a monster. All women are Femme Fatales in the Millerverse: and if they aren't, they'd better be Donna Reed.

Miller is afraid of women.

And in Miller, we find the kind of man every man is, at core, afraid of becoming: bitter, angry and ultimately weak. He's a Manly Man, the cartoon of a strutting mouse-- the kind of man you can see ducking a bar fight and beating his wife when he gets home. Someone who wants to be powerful, but isn't. Mostly, he's afraid.

All men want to be powerful, but few fetishize power like the Manly Man- and that fetishization often has to do with a kind of fascistic lust for violence and an absolute Us and Them mentality. It isn't so surprising to find that the Them (you know, besides the gays and minorities, which Miller perfected in 300's giant bald RuPaul)-- can be women too. And why not? What could be more threatening than that which we desire but has the ability to reject us?

And so Miller's creation of women. The prostitutes of Sin City are fiercely protective of one another but, in the end, reflexive of his inner belief that there's always a trade in male-female relations-- the villainesses of The Spirit, always self-interested or even the Woman In Trouble he employed in the Hard Goodbye ultimately had a quid pro quo in the very base of the "love" story. This is Neo-noir with a kind of paleoconservative twist.

Frank Miller remembers an age that never existed and it seems he's obsessed with it: back in the 20s and 30s, I suppose, back when men were men and women were women. He lived through the 70s and 80s, through Second Wave feminism and its backlash and, for that, I have to have some sympathy for him-- Second Wave feminism must have been a hard time for a pencil-neck with a yen for the pulps.

But whatever it is that he wants, that his fantasy mind keeps calling back for, it isn't worth it. It doesn't make a better man, to think of women as either the Enemy or the Mysterious Other. It doesn't come off as strength, the thing that Miller, I think, ultimately wants.

It's okay, Frank: whoever she was, let it go. You're a famous director now! All the chicks dig directors. Ask Woody Allen.

Desperate House Husbands.

2008-12-16T09:48:00.000-06:00

Perhaps the problem with the modern woman is that, like the modern man, she's not so sure she wants to be modern. And when she does, she may not want to be fair about it. Perhaps the problem with relationship is that modern equality is a thoroughly defensive.

Take Karen Karbo's article in the NYT's "Modern Love" feature: the entire feature is about how she found herself an "accidental breadwinner"-- and ended up resenting it and her S.O's (tongue-in-cheek, she says she couldn't imagine being her mother, dusting on Tuesdays, etc, then goes on to say she wanted her "househusband" to dust on Tuesdays, etc.. and give the kids more than cereal for breakfast).

It's all standard-issue role reversal: as the "wife" now, he must take on the traditional gender roles women have been trying to free themselves from for years, follow a work-like schedule of the routine tasks June Clever would have done. Not to say he shouldn't be playing video games, but there's a reason that Soap Operas existed: you can't be cleaning all the time. And if you were expected to, you wouldn't be a house-wife, you'd be a slave.

But Karbo doesn't get juicy until she talks about her leaving a relationship and the financial troubles it represents...

It’s not just a problem from my mother’s era. Several years ago, a friend of mine decided she’d had enough of her arts administrator job. With the support of her husband, who worked somewhat unhappily as a doctor, she quit with the idea of taking a year off to decide what she wanted to do. The year slid into two, then three. She walked her dogs, attended yoga classes. Then her life became a third-rate show on basic cable: she discovered her husband was having an affair with a nurse, and worse, when she confronted him, he said he wasn’t going to stop.

My friend was devastated. She knew she had to get out but couldn’t bring herself to file for divorce. I imagined that she was afraid to be alone, that she would miss her husband’s companionship. “There’s always Match.com,” I said, trying to console her.
She snorted. “It’s not that. I don’t have a job, and I don’t think I could get a job that would pay enough.”

Enough to live in the way she had become accustomed, she meant.

They are still married.

Poor thing. Cheated on by some rotten shlub, having laid around, done yoga and ate bon-bons all day. She couldn't leave the bastard, though-- she's too accustomed to that good living.

Of course, when the tables are turned, after her own house-husband played too much Halo....

When we divorced, he wanted alimony, child support and the house — the house that was purchased with my money, in my name. During one of our last conversations, I wept with incomprehension. He wanted my house? Whatever happened to the way people divorce in the movies, where the husband packs a bag and moves into a sad hotel, leaving his wife (whom he supported) in the house?

The Cuddle Bum said that if I insisted on leaving him, he had no choice but to play hardball. (In response, I stepped up my freelancing work and got a better lawyer, who spun things into my favor quite nicely. Don’t talk to me about hardball.)

So the heroine wins again-- she gets herself the freedom from a relationship, "wins" the divorce by keeping the house (again, Karbo is very knowingly tongue-in-cheek, here).

What's depressing is where Karbo ends up: in a thoroughly litigated relationship, with seperate budgets and an almost renterly attitude. Her current beau pays his share of the bills on the 15th, while Karbo pays for herself and her daughter.

Is this the direction of the modern relationship? separate beds, separate budgets, separate lives?

In moving towards a state of equality, it seems that relationships of equals mean equally on-guard. A shame, but it's meant to be.

I've waited a long time to even consider the possibility of marriage, for this very reason: while I have, in the past, thought a relationship might be "forever" I couldn't get over the fact that marriage is a litigative trap-- a legal concept, masquerading as a rite of love. My partner (read: girlfriend) at the time wanted marriage and specifically for the security it provided.

For her: security.

For me: utter dependence and debt.

Is the only way to have a long-lasting relationship the clearly delineated Karbo way?

The day Jim and I moved in together, I gave him a formal accounting of how much our monthly nut would be; he would pay for himself, and I would pay for my daughter and me. Since then, he has written me a check for his portion on the 15th of every month. Sometimes he buys the groceries, and sometimes I do. But he always pays for both of us when we go to the movies, and spends lavishly on buttered popcorn and Milk Duds. I am always touched by this.

I couldn't imagine "togetherness" more romantic.

But, I suppose, what other choice do we have? It's slavery, independence or nothing, it seems.

Makes me wonder how the communist's fucked.

2008-12-15T18:34:00.001-06:00

This is my blog.

There are many like it but this one is mine.

My blog is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

Without me, my blog is useless. Without my blog, I am useless.