Oct. 11th, 2011

joreth: (being wise)

I got into an argument recently (I know, shocking, right?) where I found myself sounding suspiciously like those wooagers I am usually arguing against. It has been plaguing me for some time, and I feel the need to delve into it more thoroughly.

The argument was over research vs. experience. On my website, I have a graphic based on the Triangle Theory of Love that I use to try and explain how I see my relationships. The theory goes that "love" can be broken down into 3 elements, which can combine to make 7 total classifications for different types of love. I'm told that this theory is largely discredited in psych circles, but I'm not told how or why. The problem is that this theory does, actually, describe how I experience my relationships fairly accurately. Most of the research and theories I have seen have a tendency to categorize things on a binary scale. This Triangle Theory was the first, and so far only, time I have seen someone try to explain the concept of love as a collection of multiple traits.

For example, some will try to say that love can be broken down into romantic love and familial love, and then they will try to define romantic and familial. Except that I have relationships that have elements of both, and are missing elements of each, and have other elements that aren't listed at all. But with this Triangle, it feels more representative of that nebulous sort of way that I experience my relationships. I can draw an X anywhere on the Triangle, closer to this point, further from that one, and that is a description of my love for a specific person at that moment in time. I can move that X around the Triangle over time as my love changes. And, since there are different kinds of love that are represented on that Triangle, I do not get the impression that one type of love is preferred over others - that I am justified in finding value in different kinds of love and not rejecting something as not being "real love" because it doesn't fit onto a binary scale.

When I put this Triangle on my website, I did so to give a graphic representation of a personal experience, but I also cited where it came from since I didn't make it up. I was not discussing research or the validity of the claims. I made only one statement on my website that referred to how other people experience love, and that was that I believe our society values the One True Love over other types of love. I have yet to see any credible research that refutes that claim.

So, the argument started because someone with letters after his name suggested that I remove the graphic from my website because the theory was "largely discredited". It was pointed out by someone else that I was trying to describe a personal experience, so therefore the graphic was accurate. The lettered person then proceeded to suggest that I needed lessons in how to tell the difference between good research and bad research, that he could instruct me, and that I was tarnishing all of the poly community by supporting this theory.

That did not go over well.

I defended my position that, as a description of my personal experience, that graphic was accurate and the research he linked to was actually not relevant at all (he linked to a study of monogamous people where love was defined as 2 different types, and the conclusion was that most people wanted that all-encompassing romantic love). I concluded my rant with "any research that claims that my experiences didn't happen can go fuck itself."

And that statement is what is bothering me.

I often find myself arguing with people about personal experience, and how our perception is flawed and can't be trusted to be accurate representations of the world. Specific arguments that come to mind are: the one where [livejournal.com profile] tacit and I tried to explain to a person who was convinced she could predict the future through her dreams that her personal experience doesn't make it true because she cannot account for things like confirmation bias and post hoc ergo prompter hoc and she has no grasp of statistics; or the arguments with people convinced they have some disease that was made up by hucksters trying to swindle them out of money but who believe him because "science" hasn't found an acceptable answer to their symptoms.

In both of these cases, the other side of the argument feels as though their personal experience is being dismissed. I believe that is due to communication errors. The rationalists and skeptics that I have ever heard talk about these sorts of things do not actually say that what these people feel isn't real. What they say is that the explanation they are giving for these experiences is false.

Let's take psychosomatic illnesses, for example. When you try to tell someone that what they have is psychosomatic, they will often respond with "don't try to tell me it's all in my head, I feel this pain!" I have no doubt that they do, and neither do the doctors who try to explain that they don't have whatever wacky, made-up illness they think they do. The experience is true, it's the explanation that isn't.

When a person dreams that her second cousin is going to get pregnant, and the next day the second cousin calls up to say that she's pregnant, I absolutely believe that the events transpired as described (well, OK, I don't "absolutely" believe it - I know enough about the fallibility of memory to know that it's not only possible, but probable, that things didn't happen exactly as reported, but I'm willing to accept the description of events at face value). I believe that she did, in fact, have that experience. It is the explanation of those events that I do not believe - that it was a supernatural, telepathic, future-telling event. In this particular case, when more details were dragged out, that second cousin actually had a very long history of promiscuity (and by promiscuity, I mean unsafe, unprotected sex with large numbers of people, often one-night stands or random hookups). This is what we call a high-probability hit. Based on the facts, it was actually fairly likely that this second cousin would get pregnant, and the dreamer happened to have been worrying about it a lot right up until the dream in question, including earlier that day.

So, I found myself sounding like these people that I usually argue against: the research itself must be faulty because my experiences don't match; how dare you tell me that what I experience isn't real; fuck the research, I know what I feel. And that rankles. A lot. I really don't think that I was able to explain what I meant because I used "fuck" too many times and got the thread shut down. I wasn't making any claims about what research is good or bad, I wasn't talking about trends or other people, and I wasn't giving any sort of explanation for my experiences. I was only describing what love feels like to me. I'm not even sure how something like a theory describing how people experience love can be "discredited" when there are people who say they do, in fact, experience love that way. Maybe you can't say it's how "most" people experience love, but I don't see how it can be claimed that a description of certain types of love is not true when there are people who do actually feel love according to that description.

So, my basic point in that argument, that I don't think I adequately conveyed, is that "research" has not yet been able to tell me that I experienced something, especially when I stand here and tell you that it is not how I experienced it. Research can offer explanations on the how and why I experienced something, but it can't tell me that I didn't experience it.

If I feel afraid, science can tell me that what is making me feel afraid is not real - it's a manifestation of my imagination or it's my inability to tell reality from fantasy, or that it's "all in my head", or even that it's an illusion created by skilled artists. Science may even be able to tell me the physical processes that create the fear, such as too much of this hormone or a missing fold in the brain, or a flaw in the human eye that falls for optical illusions. But what it can't tell me is that I am not feeling afraid. I may have no valid reason to feel afraid, i.e. what I'm afraid of may not exist in reality (like, say, evil dolls hiding under my bed that teleport in every night from another dimension), but it can't tell me that my fear is not real. That's what [livejournal.com profile] tacit and I mean when we say a feeling is real, but not valid - that the person is feeling something is real - they really are feeling it, but the reason for feeling that way may not exist in reality, making it not "valid". People get hung up on that word "valid" and think it means the same thing as "real", but it doesn't. Anyway, that's a tangent.

I think that's the difference between what I was saying and what the wooagers say. On my website, I am discussing a feeling - the feeling of love and what it's like to experience love from my perspective. I used a graphic that I found to illustrate what I'm feeling because it was the closest 2D representation of what I was trying to explain. "Research" or "science" cannot tell me that I don't feel what I feel. It can, however, explain where a feeling comes from.

The wooagers make a claim about a feeling they are having, and then extrapolate that feeling to justify the explanation. I feel hurt, therefore you hurt me. I had a dream, therefore psychic powers are real. I feel sick, therefore I have this disease. What I am saying is "I feel love". Period. No therefores, no justifications of external phenomena, just a description of what I feel. I don't know why I feel that way and I'm not making any claims to explain the why or the how. I'm also not claiming that anyone else feels any particular way. But I will defend that I feel that way, and that it is not the role or the ability of research and science to tell me that I do not feel what I feel or that I do feel what I don't feel.

Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works. It can explain the hows and the whys, even if we haven't figured out all the hows and whys yet. But people cannot use science or research to tell someone what they feel in contradiction to their subjective experience. We can only offer suggestions as to why they feel that way. I feel "love" as a feeling that is comprised of several different elements, and the varying balance of those elements is what defines the different types, or categories, of love that I feel. And any research that tries to tell me that I don't feel what I feel can go fuck itself.

joreth: (Purple Mobius)
This is a slight departure from my usual movie reviews, and I plan to do a few of them in the future. This is not about poly movies, but about poly analogues for monogamous people. It has always been my opinion that polyamory is really not any different than monogamy, only with more people.

And by that, I mean that there is a wide variation among relationships that fit under the heading "monogamy" and a wide variation among relationships that fit under the heading "polyamory", and the vast majority of questions about "how do you do this in poly?" are answered with "the same way you do it in monogamy," partly because of that variation, so there is no single answer, and partly because the questions are not usually poly-specific.

For instance, whenever someone asks me how to deal with schools handling the issue of multiple parents, I answer "the same way my monogamous, hetero sister deals with them as a single parent." I then go on to explain that, on her In Case Of Emergency sheet, and the list of adults that have permission to pick up her children, she has about 5 or 6 different names, many of which do not have her child's last name and/or are not blood-related to the children. She doesn't explain that Joreth is the auntie and Sally is the babysitter and Jason is the boyfriend even though he's not the father of one kid, but is the father of the other kid, or that Larry is the grandfather and John is the godfather and Crystal is the 2nd cousin and that Sarah is mommy's best friend from high school. She just put those names down on the lists. When asked for familial relation to the child, she just circles something like "family friend" or "uncle" or whatever.

My point is that "how do you deal with schools" is not a poly-specific problem and monogamous people have to deal with that same issue all the time, thanks to single parenthood and blended families. There isn't a single answer, and there isn't a different way that poly people do it from mono people, who find themselves in the same or similar situations.

Same thing goes for issues like "how do the children know who their parents are?" and "how do you keep track of everyone?" and "how do you schedule things?" The same way non-poly folk do. Being adopted, I didn't have any difficulty understanding who my "real" parents were. Kids of blended homes (meaning, divorced parents & step-parents) don't have any difficulty understanding who their "real" parents are. And so on.

Much about polyamory is not actually very unique to polyamory, and even those issues that are unique to polyamory have similar situations, if not exactly the same, in monogamous society. One of the things I like to do is try to find these poly analogues to use as bridge-building stories, in an attempt to help monogamous people better understand polyamory.

The first one I ever noticed was Sex And The City. I originally started watching the show because I have a tendency to feel alien among "normal" women. I don't understand those things that I'm told women are supposed to understand. Now, of course, I understand that there is no such thing as "normal women", just that there is a collection of criteria that various people are told is "normal" and everyone else is therefore abnormal when they don't have all the criteria, even if some of those criteria are contradictory or even mutually exclusive, all with complete disregard to the actual numbers of people who fit or don't fit any given set of criteria.

But, the point is that I never felt as though I really fit in or that I understood women very well because I didn't match what I was told I should match. So I watched the show to get an idea of what this hypothetical "normal woman" was thinking.

SATC is a show with 4 main characters that follows their romantic lives for about 6 years. Each of the women are archetypes, basically a model or an epitome of a personality type that has been repeatedly observed in US culture. By coincidence, the four women also happen to fall into the 4 main MBTI categories - NT, SP, NF, SJ - although they weren't deliberately written that way. That's what made it so popular, though. No matter what kind of person you are, almost everyone could see a little of themselves in at least one of the characters, which is why it was considered such a great examination of "the normal woman". Even men could see a little of themselves in one or more of the male side characters (and yes, the show was very gender binary - that's a complaint for another journal entry).

The show also had witty dialogue, even if you didn't like the topics. But one topic is what brings me here to this review. And that's the idea of multiple loves and intentional family.

This is a recurring theme throughout the entire 6-year lifespan. We do not see much of the girls' biological families, and what we do see is largely negative. The characters have, more or less, left their families and created their own intentional family of each other. They are there for each other in good times and bad, they support each other, they occasionally condemn each other, they squabble and hug, and they build lives around each other. It's true that all the women are heterosexual (except for one 3-episode story arc), so they are not romantically involved with each other (even for that story arc), and if there is any criticism of this as a poly analogue, that is it.

But anyone who has ever had one or more of *those* friends - y'know, the ones you think to call from the hospital before you call your boyfriend, the ones you go to confide in about your wife, the ones who were the first to stand up with you at your wedding and the ones who were first to get you drunk & let you cry after your divorce, the ones who have seen you without your makeup on and still love you, the ones who were there to bail you out of jail after that little misunderstanding and kept it from your spouse, the ones who were there long before you met the love of your life and, just like the love of your life, will be there until death do you part - if you've ever had *those* friends, then you understand just how unimportant sex is as a defining element in what makes a relationship *important* and *meaningful* in your life. Not that sex isn't important, but that there are so many other aspects to what makes a relationship meaningful, some of which matter much more.

When people ask me how I can love more than one person at a time, the answer is because we all love more than one person at a time. Our spouses are not the only people in our lives for whom we feel that deep commitment, that connection as if our very souls have found their mates, that trust that there are people we can count on for anything, that sense of elation at the idea of being with them or that sense of despair at the thought of losing them. The only difference between me and them is that I am physically attracted to more than one of the people for whom I feel that way, and occasionally I act on it.

Sex And The City highlights one of the many ways in which people form lasting emotional bonds with other people. Their friendship is closer than most of their romantic relationships, and has certainly outlasted all of their romantic relationships. They are closer to each other than they are to their biological families, and the men in their life are required to make room in their relationships for the other women.

When the women do find serious romantic partners, each of the men understand that he will have to "share" his partner with the other three women. Each of those men turn to the other three women for help when his partner is going through a particularly rough time and the man is not enough to help on his own. One asks the other three for communication help to patch up an argument with his girlfriend, another asks the other three to console his wife when she has a miscarriage - the men are not in an isolated, monogamous relationship, apart from any other relationships; they are in poly-ish relationships where they "share" their women with three other women, who have been there longer, know each other better, and can often provide a type of support that the men just can't. Any man who sticks around long enough has to accept it, and the good men embrace it.

Long before I ever heard of polyamory, I had friends like this. I had friends who were so close, we gave ourselves our own family name. I had friends who were so important, we made long-term, life-altering plans around each other, like where to go to college, where to live after college, and even sometimes who to date or marry. I had friendships that were so meaningful, that losing those friendships didn't feel any less devastating than losing a boyfriend. I cried for weeks after my best friend stopped talking to me. I felt like I lost a part of myself when we all went our separate ways.

I even felt as though I didn't have any real identity when some of those friendships ended, the same way I sometimes had to re-evaluate who I was and what I wanted out of life when I lost a serious boyfriend and all our future plans were scrapped. It didn't matter that we weren't having sex, those relationships were *important* in the same way my romantic relationships were important - simultaneously equally as important and too unique to be compared to each other.

Not all monogamous people have had these kinds of friendships, of course. One of the wonderful things about the human species is its diversity. But a very common trend, especially among women, is to develop close emotional bonds with other people, or to want to. And for many people, those close, emotional bonds are not restricted to a single bond with one person, ever, throughout the entire lifespan.

Each relationship, and each emotional bond, is different, unique, individual. Even if we had a best friend in high school, and then switched to another best friend in college, those friendships are as non-interchangeable as the romantic relationships are. And if people can just wrap their heads around the idea that sex is not the single defining element in complex emotional relationships, they can see the parallels between monogamous Sex And The City intentional families, and my poly family.

Casual Sex

Oct. 11th, 2011 07:25 pm
joreth: (sex)

Greta Christina wrote a post listing 5 reasons why she not only likes casual sex, but why her casual sex was a positive activity in her life. That has prompted me to write my own.

In her article, she points out that people keep getting baffled by the idea of women who have sex for its own sake. People insist on believing that women "have sex for love, commitment, poor self-control, to manipulate men, to please men, to make babies, to sooth their low self-esteem, and just about any reason at all other than their own pleasure. (While men, of course, are rutting horndogs who just want to stick it in the nearest wet hole available.)"

And, while those reasons certainly do exist for many women, that is not the only reason why women have sex, and, I would dare to say, not the primary reason why women collectively have sex. If anything, I believe those are more often justifications that women give for why they have sex, because they are not supposed to admit to liking it (although there are, of course, women, and men, who do not like sex).

As she says, "They're not asking, "Why do some women have casual sex?" They're asking, "Why on earth would some women have casual sex, when it's so clearly a bad idea that will do them and other women harm and is obviously not in their best interest?" And they're doing this despite research showing that casual sex isn't, in fact psychologically harmful for young adults. They're basing their questions on the common assumption that women's natural state is to keep their legs closed unless they've got their hands on marriage or commitment... and that women who don't are some sort of baffling phenomenon that needs to be explained."

So she thought she'd explain it. And I also thought I'd explain my own reasons in my own words. My own reasons are actually very similar to hers, so on the one hand I'm throwing my weight in to say "yep, other women have sex for pleasure too". But my reasons are not identical to hers, so on the other hand, I'm also saying "there are lots of reasons why women have sex, and procreation or to manipulate men are not always among them."

  1. Fun. This is Also Greta Christina's number one reason. I have sex because it's fun. I have casual sex because it's fun. It feels good to have someone that I find attractive touch and rub bits of me that respond positively to touching and rubbing and it feels good to elicit similar responses in someone else. I have body parts with nerve endings that seem to exist for no other function than to provide physically pleasing sensations and an innate drive to find at least one other person to stimulate those nerve endings. The whole idea of people being baffled by the reason for sex being "because it feels good" or "because it's fun" or "because I want to" is just nonsensical. I know that there are other reasons for having sex, and I'm even going to give my own other reasons. But to be confused by this reason just baffles me.

  2. Experimentation. This is also Greta Christina's number two reason, but it happens to be mine too. As she says, while having casual sex with a lot of different people, I was also having lots of different kinds of sex. I ballroom dance (I promise this is related), but I don't exactly have ballroom training. I have what's called "social dance" training. That's where they teach a bunch of non-dancers some traditional ballroom steps, but then they mix and match the dance partners so that you never get to learn any particular person's style so well that you actually skip learning how to dance and just learn that partner. The object of "social dance" is to be able to dance socially, not to win competitions or put on performances. It's not enough to know where to put your feet. You have to also know how to read the signals your partner is giving you. This is so that you can go to any dance event, like the company holiday party or your cousin's wedding, and be able to cut a rug no matter who you're dancing with.

    This is what casual sex did for me. I didn't just learn technique, and I didn't just learn a particular partner's preferences. I learned how to read my partners, how to experiment, how to try new things, and how to communicate about trying new things. I learned some things about sex that I would never had learned if I hadn't had some of the casual sex partners that I had, and consequently some of my current partners may never have discovered that thing they like that I introduced them to, that I learned from casual sex.

    And I didn't just learn things about other people. I also learned things about myself. I learned that some things about myself that I thought were weird were totally normal, and some things I thought were normal were actually pretty weird. That was a good thing, because it taught me how to better communicate to my partners those things that are particular to me that they might not have experienced before with their previous partners. I learned what works for me and what doesn't, and I learned that some things that I thought "worked" and "didn't work" for me were not universal truths, but things particular to that partner. That taught me to not give up and to try things a couple of times before deciding that it's not for me. And consequently, I learned about some really awesome things that weren't that great the first couple of times.

    Greta Christina makes a very good point when she brings up the fact that it was easier to explore and express her "freakier desires" with fuckbuddies than with romantic partners. When we are not emotionally attached to the outcome of the experience, or the longevity of the relationship, it can be a liberating feeling, which may contrarily allow us the freedom to express things that are harder to express with a trusted, emotionally-connected partner. It sounds counter-intuitive, I know. But if you really really really want your partner to stick around, you might be afraid of revealing something that could send him running for the hills. Whereas if you don't care too much if you freak this guy out, you might feel safer telling him your deep dark secret because it won't hurt as much if he leaves because of it. Ironically, the lack of or lesser amount of emotional intimacy can sometimes increase our feelings of emotional safety.

    And one of the things that casual sex taught me is that I do not like that counter-intuitive feeling of lower intimacy = greater safety. So I learned, from my casual sex partners, how to be more free, more expressive, and more exploratory with my romantic, long-term partners. In fact, I intentionally sought out a long-term romantic partner who would help me to break down this particular wall. Which, by the way, is something else that casual sex taught me - how to approach and go after relationships that I want and to feel comfortable in engaging in relationships that serve a particular function or purpose, providing that the other person is aware of and agrees to that function or purpose.

    I've learned A LOT about love and relationships from casual sex.

  3. Pleasure without unwanted commitment. Yep, again, this is also Greta Christina's third reason and mine too. But the reasons why we didn't want commitment and why we were single are different. Most of the time, being single wasn't exactly a "choice" for me. Most of the time, being single was because I couldn't find someone who was interested in me, or who was interested in me but wanted different things from a relationship than I wanted. I'm a very independent sort of person (no, it's true!) and a lot of young men and teens seem to be afraid of independence. I was engaged twice before I was old enough to legally drink, both at the urging of my male partners, not because I fell for any of that "a woman isn't worth anything without a husband" crap. My parents were adamant that I not get "tied down" until after I graduated college and started a career - a career that I was expected to maintain after marriage, and my catholic high school was all about female empowerment and female contributions to society that included, but was not limited to, producing the next generation. So both of my engagements were not because I was the one pushing for them.

    But I never really wanted to be "single" either. I just wanted to have relationships with people where I didn't get lost in the relationship. I wanted to still be me and I wanted him to still be him, but I didn't seem to be finding that. I kept finding people who wanted to be "us", as if we were a single entity. Y'know, two halves of a whole and all that. I've seen what happens to people when they lose themselves in a relationship and I think that's horrifying.

    On top of that, for a large portion of my dating life, I was in school or working a job with unusual demands, so I just didn't have the resources to be that responsible for another person's emotional fulfillment. I had papers to write and projects to finish, and later when I started working, I had to cancel appointments and dates because work called and I had to go. Romantic partners all seemed to want more of my time and attention than I had to give, and they were making their emotional satisfaction with the relationship dependent on how much time and attention I gave them. Casual partners did not do that. I even had some very intimate and emotionally close relationships with some of my fuckbuddies. But that lack of intention, that lack of pressure to serve someone else's needs that comes from a casual relationship allowed me to do those things that were important to me like school and work while still maintaining some kind of connection to another human being, as well as have fun sexy times that I am so biologically driven to desire.

    I'm finding, now that I'm older and polyamorous, that there is much less of that kind of intense, fearful stranglehold on me as a romantic partner. Maybe other people have different experiences. If I were to judge by Sex And The City, I might think that men have the exact opposite problem as they get older, with women becoming more intense, more fearful, and more strangleholdy, as they start to think that their options are dwindling and they're running out of time. But I don't think that's universal, and I think a lot of people, including women, are finding more of a comfortable interdependence with their partners as both they get older and as our society matures. So with the apparent abundance now of men who aren't trying to "lock this thing down" and who don't expect me to be responsible for their every happiness, I find I am much more likely, nay, actively interested, in developing closer emotional bonds with people as well as more intentional commitments. And, as a consequence, my plate is full and I just don't have the time for casual partners anymore because I have a job, I have hobbies, I have sex, and I have emotionally intimate relationships that are now all taking my limited time.

  4. Confidence. Greta Christina actually lists her #4 as "independence and confidence", but I was already independent. Casual sex didn't teach me that. If anything, casual sex taught me how to be interdependent instead of so independent. But it did give me confidence. Growing up, I was the geek that everyone picked on, except I wasn't accepted by the geeks either. I was too skinny, too introverted, too smart, and too socially awkward to be accepted by the cool kids, and yet I was terrified of being lumped in with the geeks so I didn't fit in with them because I didn't seem to be smart enough and I wasn't interested in comics or band or gaming or astronomy or any of the other geeky things that bound them together. From an early age, I was told I was ugly and weird and I'd never have a boyfriend.

    So when the first guy who expressed an interest in me came along, I was flattered and flabbergasted. And when he dumped me after making out with me but before his friends could find out that we were "dating", I was heartbroken. Eventually, though, I started to realize that people did like me. Some people thought I was attractive (which I still have trouble believing, to this day) and some people enjoyed being around me, and sometimes both of those types of people were found in the same individual. But the ability to turn someone's head and to make him feel good in bed, and his desire to make me feel good in bed made me feel strong, powerful, likable, and attractive.

    The problem with this explanation is that it sounds as though I am using sex for self-esteem. And maybe I did when I was a teenager. But the implications with labeling it "using sex for self-esteem" is that this is an inherently flawed and possibly dangerous method for bolstering self-esteem, that it won't work, that it's a desperate grab for something by desperate (read: pathetic) people who will never reach what they are grasping for.

    And that's not how it was for me at all. I learned confidence and self-love through casual sex in much the same way that I also learned confidence and self-love through public speech class and drama and, surprisingly enough, through the sci-fi community and conventions. For some reason, if a person wants to develop self-confidence, and they take a drama class, we don't think of them as being "desperate" or warn them that drama will only make them feel worse about themselves in the morning. Like Greta Christina, casual sex taught me the power of adventure. Through experimentation and exploration, I learned to be adventerous, both in bed and out of bed. And being adventerous is being self-confident. I am willing to take risks, to explore, to try new things, because my confidence has taught me that even bad experiences, as Greta and my old college film producer both say, can make for good stories. This extends to every area of my life. I got into rock climbing because of a casual sex affair, and now I walk an 18-inch steel girder 60 feet in the air because it's fun and it's thrilling and because I know I can. My self-confidence doesn't make me reckless. If anything, I have also learned what I can't do and what I shouldn't do. As Francis Bacon says,

    "Your true self can be known only by systematic experimentation, and controlled only by being known."

    Casual sex taught me that long before I ever heard the quote. Knowing what I can and can't do, and knowing that adventure and curiosity brings more experiences and more self-understanding, makes me self-confident.

  5. Polyamory. This is different from Greta's #5, but I think it's related. Casual sex led me to polyamory. I had all the same fucked up ideas about relationships that any other person can have, growing up in this society. I thought that, when I started to fall in love with someone new, it must mean that I was no longer "in love" with the person I was dating at the time. I thought that merely being attracted to someone new meant that there was something wrong with my relationships. I wanted sexual diversity and excitement, but thought I was wrong for wanting them. I wanted both lack of "commitment" and emotional intimacy, but believed I could only have one or the other.

    Every time I got fed up with the suffocating side-effects that comes from dating emotionally-insecure and immature monogamous people, I would swing to the far extreme and go for totally emotion-less casual sex partners - and as many as I could find. Eventually, I would get irritated at the lack of emotional intimacy and find a single person I could bond with to provide it. Which would then spark another round of getting-antsy, suffocating possession, too much expectation, etc., which would push me into more casual sex relationships.

    After a few rounds of that, I saw the pattern. Monogamy taught me what I didn't want out of a relationship - that suffocation, that sense of possession, that emotional insecurity in my partners, that desire to place all their expectations out of life on me, that loss of identity for the merging of two personalities. This doesn't mean that all monogamy is like that. It means that, through my monogamous experiences, this is what I learned that I don't want.

    But casual sex taught me what I do want - diversity and intimacy simultaneously, freedom and responsibility simulteanously, adventure and stability, and the encouragement for each individual to explore and grow and become more of themselves without the fear that doing so would harm the relationship. This is what I got out of my casual sex relationships, and it is what taught me that these sorts of seemingly opposing wants were possible. This is what my polyamory looks like. Even though I rarely have casual sex partners while I have "serious" relationship partners, those things that I wanted from my relationships, and got from my casual sex partners, is what led me to discover the word, the practice, and the community, of polyamory, which led me to my current polyamorous family, which is everything I ever wanted in relationships, even before I knew what I wanted.

I have nothing but positive feelings for my casual sex experiences - even those that didn't work out the way I wanted them to at the time. They were good for me in many ways and I benefited from them greatly. If given the opportunity, I would have casual sex experiences in the future too. The only reason I don't now is because I'm polysaturated - I don't have time, emotional energy, or sexual capacity for any romantic or sexual relationships other than the ones I currently have, an that includes even low-maintenance casual sex. As long as both people have similar goals and expectations for the relationship, I recommend casual sex as an enjoyable experience with the proper safety precautions.

Greta ends with "It gets better". Like her, not all of my individual casual sex experiences were good and not all were done for healthy reasons. But, also like her, not all of my relationships were good and not all were done for healthy reasons. But, again like her, I got better as I went along. I learned and I grew and I had fewer of those bad experiences and more of those positive experiences. Just like my serious romantic relationships. Each one was an improvement on the one before it, with only a sprinkling of setbacks here and there.

And my serious romantic relationships got better because of my casual sex experiences. My serious romantic relationships are better because of the confidence I gained and the insight about myself that I gained. They're better because I learned about interdependence and stopped holding on so tightly to strict independence. They're better because my sexuality is diverse and I'm more knowledgable about my body. They're better because I learned how to communicate and negotiate better. They're better because I learned to just enjoy sex and pleasure for their own sakes, and because I learned, through having casual sex and non-traditional relationships, that things don't have to be permanent to be valuable, which, in turn, has made me receptive, and therefore available to enjoy so many more types of relationships, and so many more types of experiences, than those only-til-death-do-we-part-has-meaning-and-value types.

Not everyone will have good casual sex experiences, and not everyone will be able to enjoy them. And that's fine. But casual sex is not inherently bad, and, in fact, has quite a few benefits going for it, for those open to exploring them. Casual sex benefited me and my current long-term, serious, committed relationships are better because of the casual sex experiences I've had.

Ethnicity

Oct. 11th, 2011 09:41 pm
joreth: (Default)

Ethnicity has come up quite a lot lately, which I think is a strange thing. Part of the reason I think it's odd is because no one can seem to agree on what "ethnicity" even is. Take my own, for instance. I'm half caucasian, which is, more or less, an issue of pigment, and half Mexican, which is an issue of governmental borders, neither of which has nearly the level of affect on who I am as a person as the geographic location in which I grew up. For some categories on the demographic forms, it's all about the pigment; for some, it's the borders on a map; for some, it's the physical geographic region; and for some it's the actual cultural influences regardless of where you were born or where your parents were born. Also, there is no consensus on how far back in our ancestry we are supposed to go to determine ethnicity. If my family came here on the Mayflower, when do I get to start calling myself American instead of English? If my several-times removed grandparents were born in Scotland, but only because the Romans invaded & impregnated the locals, are they Italian or Scottish?

I'm not really looking for answers to these questions because I think the question of ethnicity is pretty much a stupid, useless question. Only for certain medical issues does it even have any relevance, and the more we learn about genetics, the more we can pinpoint the specific genes that cover those medical issues, so we can stop calling it an ethnicity issue and start calling it a genetic issue.

In my opinion, the much more relevant question is what were the cultural influences on a person, rather than where were their 6-times grandparents born. It's more relevant, and it's also much more interesting.

I grew up in Northern California. NorCal has a fascinating history, filled with a spectacular clash of cultures. A lot of people hear "California" and think movie stars, Baywatch, Pretty Woman, Clueless, surfers, and hippies. And that's true, all those cultures are represented in California. But not only are they not the only cultural influences, they're not even the most well-represented. They show up in very specific areas, like Beverly Hills, San Diego, and Santa Cruz. But California is a very large state - one of the biggest in the US and bigger than many European countries.

In the Victorian age, California was flooded with immigrants from Asia, mostly China, which heavily influenced the entire flavor of the Victorian Era in America. Then, in the middle of the last century, roughly from the '40s through the '70s, we got another influx of Asian immigrants, this time mostly from Viet Nam and Korea (funny how war-ravaged countries tend to lose their citizens). So I grew up surrounded by a strong Oriental culture, from the accents to the decorations to the traditions to the modern cultural values of good education and over-achievement in school and sports.

But before all of that, before California was even a state, the coastline was explored and settled by Spanish missionaries. A tour of the coastline will show you some of the most beautiful examples of Spanish architecture from the 16- and 1700s. Then, throughout the centuries, fleeing from bloody dictators and revolutionaries, immigrants from Mexico and South America found their way up north to influence the local culture with a Latin flavor. In spite of the large Asian population, California is extremely, and I mean EXTREMELY, Catholic in culture (well, being settled by missionaries, what do you expect?). All of the good schools, both public and private, are named St. Something Or Other, and have old mission-style chapels and other trappings of Catholicism. If you can't say anything else nice about the Catholics (and I can't), you gotta admit they have some beautiful churches, and California is just littered with them - of all different styles.

Then, in the 1920s and '30s came the Dust Bowl. Migrant Farmers entered the state in droves, looking for work to suppor their families after their own farms dried up from the draught. They brought with them their Caucasian southern and midwestern influences, with their work ethic, pride in manual labor, adherence to tradition, and, of course, their accents. The blend of the different southern and midwestern accents all merging together in California evolved into what I used to call California Hick. It's a unique southern-style accent that I can't properly do anymore, but it is amusing to explain to people when they hear it slip out of me, that I CAME to Florida with that accent.

My accents are an audial representation of the history and culture that I grew up in. When I was a child, I had mostly a neutral accent. My dad was pure Norwegian (by way of his grandparents all being born in Norway), born in the midwest, so he had very little accent except for a few specific words like "warsh" instead of "wash". My mom is Mexican and grew up in Texas, so she has that curious Tex-Mex accent, which is mostly a version of Spanish with a little southern threw in. Sort of like "Hola, como esta ya'll?" But then she learned English in school at a young age, and in school they taught her "proper" English, so when she speaks Spanish, you can tell she's a native speaker, but when she speaks English, you can't hear any Spanish accent at all.

So, my parents had very little in the way of accents except for a couple of odd words now and then. But my city was still a farming town when I was a kid. So between the rednecks and my cousins who grew up in an even smaller town nearby, I developed a slight southern accent. My mom likes to tell the story of the time we went on a road trip, and dad had the CB radio in the car, and he was trying to get the truckers to tell us the time by using trucker slang, because he thought I would be amused at the whole thing (and, of course, I was). But truckers tend to not like it when city boys use their slang or their airwaves, so he wasn't getting any response. So I picked up the mic and said something like "can any ya'll big boys out there give me the time? C'mon back!" Apparently, the truckers found an 8-year-old charming and I got them to respond with the time.

But then I got to Jr. High, which was in the ghetto. I had the big, curly '80s hair, the giant hoop earrings, and the Chola accent (which is actually slightly but significantly different from the Cholo accent, although they are collectively the same culture). That was a lot of moving the head from side to side and clicking with your tongue, and mixing a Spanish accent with American slang and a few odd Mexican cuss words. Sort of like "[click] naww, puta, I ain't goin'! Whatcho think I am?" That's also an accent I can't do well anymore. I never liked that culture and I dropped it as soon as I no longer needed it to survive. The Cholo culture is gang culture. It's heavily misogynistic, violent, and religious. I think we can all figure out why I didn't like it.

But then I got to high school. I went to a private school in a VERY affluent neighborhood. That's where I picked up the Valley Girl accent. Even though my school was a full 8-hour drive north of The Valley, that accent, for some reason, became really popular among the affluent teens all over the state. Personally, I think of it more as the teenager accent, since it seems just perfect for the attitude that most teens seem to go through ... "Yes moTHER!" "whatever!" "OMG dad, you're such a FREAK!" "He TOTALLY, like, LIKES you!"

My high school, since it was a private school, had an orientation day, about a month maybe before school actually started, for the incoming freshmen to meet their teachers and learn the layout of the campus. My very first day, I was wandering around, and I passed by a classroom that had a couple of girls talking to each other. I heard "Ohmygod, I totally don't want to go here, cuz like my older sister, she, like, went here, and, like, all the teachers, they, like all know her, y'know?" So, as I grew into my teens and was constantly surrounded by "likes" and "totallys" and "ohmygods", that creeped into my accent on top of the "ya'lls" and missing "gs".

Also during high school, I joined the church choir. The church I joined was almost exclusively made up of Philipinos, many of them only newly-immigrated and the children my age were only some first-generation American-born. Philipino culture is quite a curious mix all on its own. It's sort of like a blending of Asian, Pacific Islander like Hawaii, and Catholic Spanish. Even their language has a mix of Latin-based Spanish words and Asian words. The other members of the choir were some of my closest friends for a couple of years, so the strange dichotomy of frantic, hectic movement & language, with a complete disregard of deadlines and time, also started to color my own way of doing things. Anyone who knows me in person knows I am physically incapable of arriving anywhere on time. I have to set my arrival time for anywhere between 15 and 45 minutes before my actual arrival time, just to be ON time. I know a lot of people joke about Poly Standard Time and Pagan Standard Time, and many other cultures that are laid-back about clocks and time, but where I grew up, it was Philipino Time. And I set my clock by it way back when and have yet to figure out how to re-set it.

In the middle of all that, I turned to Native American culture. Yes, I know that there isn't a single Native American culture, I mean the privileged white middle-class people who feel guilty about their privilege who turn to "indigenous peoples" believing they were all living in harmony with nature and each other all the time, and who infuse this idealized version of "Native American" into their environmentalist/hippie activism. This didn't have a particular accent to go with it, but it did influence my identity and my personality. I wore knee-high moccasins and made my own leather amulet (a bag worn around the neck with special items inside that had spiritual significance) and preached all the trendy environmentalist issues and fancied myself a storyteller of the old style, weaving tales of magic, mysticism, and morality through "traditional" fables and folklore.

Then, somewhere towards the end of my high school career, I got back in touch with the California Hick side. I worked on a horse ranch for a while, and I started listening to country music again (I gave that up in Jr. High, because cholas only listened to hip hop and dance pop, not country), and hung out with the blue-collar crowd, most of whom were not going to graduate high school, much to my mother's dismay. And the "ya'lls" came right on back and the gs went missing again.

Right after high school, and through college, I ended up working in customer service, sales, and I even did a stint as a tour guide for a historical landmark. All that public speaking wiped clean all the accents to the mostly-neutral accent that many of my friends are now familiar with. Then, switching majors to theatre, I spent a lot of time with theatre kids, who, for some reason, all really love British accents, so now I have a few random Brittish-slanted words, like "dunno" and "wot's that then?" mixed in among the "ya'lls".

Then, more recently, my exposure to Southern stagehands, who seem to be all redneck hicks and Puerto Ricans or Cubans, has brought back the Southern accent in full force, with a smattering of the old chola accent and Spanish words.  Anytime I've been at work for several days in a row will find me slipping back into those accents randomly even when not at work.  So my current accent is a mix of Southern, Spanish, British, and neutral Mid-Western/newscaster, with still a hint of Valley Girl.

So, for some reason, people, particularly the government, are all concerned with what country my ancestors happened to be born in. Those countries are Mexico, Scotland, England, Germany, and Sweden (I'm adopted, so I don't have the same ethnicity as the parents I mentioned earlier). But if you really want to know anything relevant about who I am as a person, the cultural influences who have made me who I am are Mexican-American, Vietnamese, Chinese, Philipino, Native American, Valley Girl, surfer, farmer, southern redneck, rancher, hippie-environmentalist, political activist, feminist - none of which are indicative of the cultures that spawned my great-grandparents, which is how far back you have to go to get my official "ethnic labels".

And now, I am learning Bollywood dancing, which is sure to influence me in the future. Westernized Hindi culture is another bizarre mix of traditional, patriarchal, stereotypical and the more modern egalitarian, strong female, democratic, capitalism cultures. Yet, although I have olive-toned skin and long dark hair, I have no Indian ethnicity in my heritage at all.

I'll say it again because it bears repeating - and the demographic takers ought to take note - where my several-times removed ancestors were born bears very little relevance on who I am as a person, either medically or personality-wise. Far more relevant is to ask what my cultural influences are, and those may have little-to-no relation to the geographic location in which I  or my parents were born. It's time to stop being concerned with categories of people that have no bearing on the important aspects of who they are and just start seeing us all as people. And even that, with the gradual blending of technology and medicine, will cease to be a relevant classification in time.



I thought about making this an audio post, so ya'll could hear the various accents, but I don't have a paid account & the work-arounds are all way more complicated than I wanted to go through.  I don't want to take up any of my own server space with an audio file (and ya'll wouldn't like the lag time it takes to play it anyway), and any other free hosting account I have is video, like YouTube - and I didn't feel like putting together a video for all this.  Maybe I will someday.  But if you ever want to hear me speak in one of these accents, you can either ask me, or get me to start talking *about* something related, and it'll just slip out accidentally.  That's always amusing for my friends.  Also, the pictures are all linked to larger images, if you're interested.

ROAD TRIP!

Oct. 11th, 2011 11:35 pm
joreth: (Super Tech)

One more and then I'm done posting for the night - promise!  And not just because tonight is technically going to end in half an hour.

I love road trips.  I love just taking off and driving.  I've done the plan-the-route-to-the-minute and the just-drive-and-see-what-happens and I love them both.  I haven't had a good road trip since I moved to Florida 11 years ago and I think it's way past time that I had one.

The problem is that I'm the only one I know with enough free time to do what I really want to do (not that I have the money for it - having free time sort of correlates with not having any money).  Now that I'm a Grown Up (TM), all my friends are also Grown Ups, which means they have jobs and families and obligations, and planning a long road trip like I want means they'd have to sacrifice something else - many of whom are not willing or able to do that.

So that means I will have to plan a road trip on my own.  I can do that, and I'll enjoy it, but it's not my preference.  I'd much rather share the trip with others.  But I just had another idea.  What if I plan my road trip and then invite people to fly out to various points along the way and share only a portion of the trip with me, and then fly home from another point a few days later?

The route I was thinking of is a giant, 5,000 mile half-circle around the US.  I've traveled across the country via two different southern routes, but I have seen almost nothing of the North US.  Ideally, I'd like to plan it for the summer of 2013, which should give me time to save up for it if I really do make the plans.  I'd like to drive north out of Florida, along the East Coast, hit Manhattan, visit [livejournal.com profile] datan0de's hometown in upper NY, go through Chicago, see the Badlands, maybe stop by Seattle (that one is debatable), visit [livejournal.com profile] tacit in Portland, spend some time at my parents' condo in Tahoe, visit [livejournal.com profile] corpsefairy & her crowd in Oakland, visit my hometown of San Jose, and then fly home.

Google Maps says the entire trip would take almost 4 days if I drove nonstop.  If I average it out to 8 hours of driving per day, it'll take 11 days.  Add one full day for each destination and it becomes 20 days.  So, leaving time for sight-seeing, I'm going to overestimate and say this will be a three-week trip, minimum, possibly even a month long.  Or, maybe I'll plan two road trips, and break off the entire West Coast leg into it's own trip at another time.

So I'm just throwing this out there for now, give people something to think about.  If you're one of my RL friends and think flying out to join me for a leg or two of this journey sounds like fun, start budgeting now.  If you happen to live in or near one of my destinations and want to meet me, keep this idea on the backburner and when/if I actually start planning for this, send me an invitation when I post about it.


Proposed Road Trip:

East/North Road Trip:

West Coast Road Trip:


Banners