The Masculinity Of Vulnerability

Speaking of masculinity, one of the things that really gets me going is someone who presents as very masculine in body shape, clothing, movement, etc. who is secure enough in himself to also allow himself to be vulnerable and express emotions other than anger.

I had a customer come to my framing counter one day. He was a soldier, and built like one. My absolute ideal body type that I like to drool over is the dancer or swimmer's body, which is triangular but long and narrow. He was more like a wrestler, with a massive upper body and blocky frame. Still attractive, though.

His grandfather was in a previous war, and he took the flag that was flown in his grandfather's plane with him when he deployed to Afghanistan and had it flown where he was stationed. Then, when he was sent home, he had it framed, along with some kind of certificate, some pins, some patches - it was kind of a complicated shadowbox frame.

Well, when he had it shipped back home, it got damaged. The glass was broken, the frame corners were pulling apart, the patches came off. So he wanted to see about getting it repaired or re-framed. When I told him what kind of pricing we were looking at to do something that complicated, his face fell. Custom framing is expensive anyway, but to do the kind of job he wanted, it's a pretty hefty price tag.

Suddenly, everything just came crashing down on him - the loss of his grandfather, the damage, the fact that he didn't have the money to replace the memorial he had built - and he started crying. I'm not very good with displays of emotion. I don't know how to react because I don't want to embarrass people. So I kind of stood there awkwardly and let him cry for a few moments. When it looked like he was trying to stop the tears and move on, I started speaking to him as if I hadn't noticed anything.

But he clearly wasn't done yet. That's when he said he couldn't afford what we had to offer and that's how I knew what he was going through - that overwhelmed feeling that just hit him as I described above. So I asked him if he wanted a moment, and then quickly tacked on "or a hug?", in a lighthearted sort of way to indicate that he could take my suggestion as a joke and brush it off if he wanted to.

But he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said "I would love a hug, thank you."

So we embraced. It was a very quick but strong hug, and he immediately backed up and was able to gather himself together. We went on with our discussion of frame options.

I came away from this encounter with the following thoughts:

• I am not good with the touchy feely stuff and I don't intuitively know what to do when people behave emotionally in front of me. But I've been observing people who seem to be good at this naturally, so I offered the hug because it seemed to me like the sort of thing that a touchy feely person would do. And it turned out to be the right thing to do, and I'm glad I did it. I feel proud of myself for thinking of it.
• Some of those touchy feely types forget about consent when faced with these kinds of situations, and they just immediately move in to hug people. Because I'm actively trying to work on being more emotive and more comfortable with other people's emotions, I have done this in the past too, but mostly with friends with whom I have already established a level of comfort with casual touching. But even those kinds of relationships still need to observe consent, so that's another layer I have to work on.
  
  And this time, I did.
  
  It occurred to me that I ought to hug him as someone who is better with dealing with other people's emotions would do. But since I did not know him, I refrained. But then I thought that I could still make the offer, even though he was a stranger. So I considered it, and I decided to do the "say it lightly and with a wry smile to indicate a joke that can be dismissed without being taken as a rejection" thing as the least creepy way to make the offer.
  
  I asked for his consent, and he clearly communicated his acceptance. It was all very simple and quick and direct, just as any issue of consent in a social setting ought to be. I'm pleased to have modeled a good example of asking for consent, even if nobody else witnessed it.
• I realized that I had found him mildly attractive when I first saw him, but as I was in my work environment, I don't tend to consider the people around me in a personal way because, well, there are lots of problems with doing that. But when he cried, I not only found him mildly attractive, I also found myself attracted TO him.
  
  Which was a wildly inappropriate time to be attracted to a stranger, btw. And since he is married and a customer, I did not change my behaviour in any way to indicate any kind of attraction. Just as I've posted several times about having unrequited crushes, I have learned how to just feel my feelings, enjoy feeling them, and then let them go.
  
  So, instead of turning this into a really weird and creepy scenario where this obviously distraught (married) man is seeking my professional services and I hit on him, I chose to acknowledge my feelings in the moment and then shelve them for later.
  
  Now being later, when I could get a little introspective and look at what I felt and why. And it turns out that a masculine man who is also able to feel his feelings and express them without shame, even in public, twiggs the "masculine" category in my head even harder, which then makes him attractive to me.
  
  Stoic men who don't emote or express emotions are considered "masculine", but not something I like. I've had enough experiences with men like this to know that they typically don't understand their own emotional landscape and therefore act on their emotions without really understanding what they're doing, and then retroactively justify their actions as "logical". This is extremely frustrating.
  
  Men who do express their emotions tend to be considered not masculine, but that's mainly because the media tends to portray men as expressing emotions in overly dramatic yet feminized ways. Think Nathan Lane as Albert in The Birdcage.
  
  
  
  Since I don't believe that emotions, or the expression thereof, are either masculine or feminine, I believe that there are ways to express them that do not conflict with even "traditionally" masculine presentations. As I keep saying about my own gender identity: it's not that the gender assigned to me is wrong, it's that the definition for my gender is wrong.
  
  Masculinity can be preserved even during the expression of emotion. Even during the expression of so-called "feminine" emotions, such as crying.
  
  What I witnessed that day tripped whatever categorizing algorithm I have in my head that labels things as "masculine". When he cried, my brain said "now he's even MORE masculine! We like masculine!!!!" and suddenly I found myself attracted to him.
  
  If I ever had an "ideal man" in my head, the fantasy man that I hold up as the Gold Standard is Johnny Castle from Dirty Dancing. He had that same mix of toughness and tenderness. He had the body type, the working class background, the roughness, the strength, and also the compassion, the caring, the willingness to be vulnerable, the desire to be loved, the nurturing protectiveness, and strength of character to be all of those things at once and in front of other people.
  
  
  
  I found this stranger's expression of deep feeling, and his willingness to be vulnerable and feel his feelings unashamedly and openly, and his acceptance of my offer of sympathy and condolence, to fall under the umbrella of the range of things labeled as "masculine".

I felt we had a deep, connective moment that was made all the more precious for its fleetingness. I will likely never see him again, and I could not help him with the problem he came to me for.

But I hope I provided a similar kind of connection for him that I felt from him - a brief point in time where two strangers could touch each other emotionally and feel that thing that we social animals seem to so desperately need - connection, bonding, to be seen and acknowledged, witnessed and accepted.

Wherever you are, I hope you find a solution for your grandfather's memorial frame, and even though I could not provide the solution you were looking for, I hope I was able to provide a moment of solace for you on your search.

Hidden Rules Of Economic Classes

As always, individual variations occur when talking about TRENDS.  This is a discussion of TRENDS, so of course individuals are going to have some variations.

I was raised middle class by people whose parents were poor but moved into middle class, so my parents fit very firmly in the middle class category here on all boxes.  My mother especially.  There's a particular sort of mindset in immigrant families who are trying to assimilate - they tend to aspire to middle class and they also tend to be the rule-keepers of the classes, whether they ever reach the class they're aspiring to or not.

So I see a lot of my upbringing in the middle class category and therefore a lot of my values come from that category as well.  But I also see that I have developed a handful of traits from the poverty category since becoming an adult and going into poverty myself.

It's ironic to me that I make more money per hour than my parents ever did, and I have to work fewer hours in a month to make the same salary that my parents (jointly) did, but because of the economy and everything (especially rent) costing a larger portion of income, I am poorer than my parents who had a mortgage on 2 homes, 3 cars, and 2 children.

I actually make very good money by 1980s and 1990s standards.  And I do have the luxury that I only have to work 5 days a month to pay the bare minimum of my bills.   But that's because I live at poverty standards, with cheap rent, cheap cars, and the lack of acquiring *things* (although, by "things", I mean valuable items - I have a LOT of "stuff", which are mostly my tools and hobby items, such as 3 whole boxes filled with fabric and 6 boxes filled with rhinestones, pipe cleaners, fake flowers, earring hooks, etc.)

If I could work the job that I have at a normal 40-hours a week, I would be quite squarely in the upper middle class.  But I don't get that many hours.  I might work 40 or 50 hours in a single week, but that will be the only week I work that month, and possibly the only week I work for the next two or three months.

In the '80s and '90s, even working only one week a month, I would have easily been able to afford the kind of life my parents provided for me - a large 4 bedroom home in the suburbs of the 3rd most expensive city in the world to live in, private school, music lessons, enough vehicles for the children to have their own when it came time to drive, having children at all, etc.

But today, my very good salary yet few hours gives me a literally mouse-infested, termite-ridden 2 bedroom apartment with no straight lines or right angles anywhere in it in a crime-filled neighborhood, an 18-year old car that I literally keep together with zip ties and tin foil, and the bulk of my "disposable" income is spent on immediate pleasures like nice restaurants and dance events and stylistic clothing because I know I will never have anything for the future, so might as well enjoy my money now.

Not that I never save for the future, of course.  But that's my middle class upbringing.  I saved enough to buy my RV in cash, for instance, and every car I've ever owned was paid for in cash.  And I'm putting money away for the Honeymoon / Moving Road Trip if Canada ever accepts our immigration application (and if not, I'm still going to take a road trip and I might just move out to Seattle whether I have a job out there or not because #GetMeOutOfHere).

But my parents would have forgone all personal pleasures to save for the future, as I frequently did as a teenager living in that middle class home.  Now, however, I impulse spend on immediate pleasures because that's what someone does who is suffering from depression that's caused by economic suffering and who genuinely does not believe one will ever have health insurance or a retirement fund and can't even imagine the circumstances in which either are possible.

I am able to save up large amounts of money, but then something serious happens like my engine throwing a rod and needing either a new car or a new engine, or my 2 root canals at once, or my cat becoming terminally ill.  So I don't have any *confidence* in savings.  I know that something big will happen to drain it all as soon as I build it up.  That's the poverty mindset talking.

So I save only for very specific goals, because I know it's futile to just "save", generically, to have some kind of "nest egg" to live on in the future.  Which means I have the impulse to dip into it every now and then for present-day spending, as in the poverty category.  Whereas for my parents, saving is, itself, its own goal.  My mom seeing her father lose all his money, she's also very aware that middle class is not secure.  But, even though they also save for specific goals, they mostly just save as a general rule. They *manage* their money, while I *use* my money.

So, in my own personal experience, this chart tracks true.   My parents are middle class and their values match every box in the category.  Many of my values are in the middle class category because that was my early exposure, but I have developed some poverty class values since becoming poor and living this way for nearly 20 years, and I can see when and where the changeover happened.

Unicorn Hunter Bait And Switch Power Counter-Move

I just heard this amazing power counter-move that I propose ought to become Standard Operating Procedure for polys:

1. You meet someone through some kind of online sphere, probably a dating service or social media of some kind.  It progresses to plans for a "date".
    
2. After the date has been made but before the date happens, they spring "btw, my pre-existing other partner is coming too" on you.   You did not know they had a pre-existing other partner and/or they only have the one pre-existing other partner and/or you have not established your own romantic / sexual interest in said other partner.
    
3. You immediately invite a minimum of 2 other people who are special or important to you - preferably romantic / sexual partners, but any 2+ people who are important will do.  Bonus points if at least one of them is cismale.

It doesn't matter if you are open to the possibility of being involved with two parts of a couple under the right circumstances.  If someone pulls the Unicorn Hunter Bait & Switch on you by making a date with you and giving you the impression that it's a date between the two of you, and then "invites" their existing partner along after the plan has been made, you should "invite" someone else along too.

But it ought to be at least 2 other people.  If it's just one other person, it could turn into a swingers Bait & Switch.  While most UHers are not comfortable with the thought of their unicorn having any other partners, wife-swapping is still a thing that people know about, and so may be familiar *enough* for a UHer doing this predatory maneuver to counter-move against your counter-move.

And if you invite only one other partner who is a woman or presents as a woman or is perceived as a woman, this could just amp up a predatory man in a UH couple to attempt a foursome fantasy of multiple "women" all doting on him and doing Hot Bi Babe stuff for his pleasure.

Having 2+ other partners along distributes the numbers unevenly in your favor, re-imbalancing the power distribution that they are counting on having with their 2-on-1.  This is very unsettling for people who are deliberately setting up situations to disempower their dates, as a Bait & Switch suggests they are attempting to do (even if subconsciously).

If they're not doing this to disempower anyone (again, whether they recognize they are doing it for this reason or not), then the thought of their date inviting their other partners when they invited their own other partner ought not to feel threatening or unbalanced to them.

I tend to invite people I'm interested in to public or social events first, especially if I will have a partner or two there.   This gets the whole "meeting the other partners" out of the way early and I basically throw them in the deep end by seeing how they respond right up front to me having to share my attention among several people at once.   Plus, how we behave in front of our friends is often different than how we behave on a first date with someone we're hoping to impress.  So if they invite their other partners to a party or club or whatever I invited them to, I would think that's great!

But then again, I wouldn't be doing a Bait & Switch.  I would say right there in the invitation "I'm going to a friend's party and several of my partners will be there.  You're welcome to meet me there, and also to bring guests!"   People who decline to meet me in public settings tend to get rejected pretty soon, so it's kind of a litmus test for me as to how poly they are.   But now I'm digressing.

Odds are, you will get a last minute cancellation from your "date".  In which case, you now have plans with 2 of your partners / friends / family! Go out and have a good time!

BONUS MOVE:

4. They reschedule supposedly just the two of you, but pull the Bait & Switch a second time, leading you to believe it's a 2-person date and only after the date has been arranged, they mention bringing their "other".
    
5. You invite your 2+ guests again but don't mention it to them this time, so that when the couple shows up (which they will this time because), they are not expecting 3+ people.

It is not necessary to lie about inviting your 2+ guests, just don't mention them when they pull the Bait & Switch on you.  I am not normally in favor of lies even of omission, but I do think, in this particular set of circumstances, it's not unreasonable to assume that they will assume that if they invite a partner, you will invite 2+ partners *because that is how it already happened*.

Now, if they have the gall to say "btw, my partner is coming along, but could you not invite your other partners this time? We want it to be just the 3 of us", well, I won't advocate deliberately lying about inviting them, that's your call to make.  I, personally, would probably just end the game right there by calling them on their hypocrisy and predatory behaviour before blocking them.  But it's an option one could take.

Resting Bitch Face And Intersectionality

While it's not usually a good idea to hijack a thread talking about oppression of one class for another, this one explicitly asked the question if another class experienced anything similar.  Since oppression is about one group of people benefiting off other classes, the tools of oppression are often similar from one class to another.  A lot of what is done to women to keep us "in our place" is also done to people of color to keep them in "their place".  And intersectionality is when several axis of oppression cross and the tools are used doubly or triply to keep people in "their place" because they belong to multiple classes that all get held down.

Don't tell people to smile (unless you're a photographer and it's your job to get happy pictures).  Nobody exists to look pleasantly at you.  Nobody needs to gain your approval for existing in public or in the space they occupy (unless it's legitimately your personal, private space).

Y'all think you can read emotions on people, but you can't.  There are some great studies out there that show we are absolutely terrible at reading other people's emotions.  Not smiling does not equal "angry" or "sad".  Not smiling is merely an absence of emoting happiness, it is not the *opposite* of happiness.  You need other cues for emoting non-happiness emotions.

But, as atheists have been trying to explain forever, the absence of a thing does not mean the presence of the opposite thing.
 
And even if it did, it's none of your fucking business anyway.

How Many Dance Steps Can You Do?

www.quora.com/What-dance-steps-can-you-name-off-the-top-of-your-head-How-many-of-them-can-you-actually-do/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What dance steps can you name off the top of your head? How many of them can you actually do?

A. This reminds me of that scene in My Cousin Vinny where Marisa Tomei is on the stand and the prosecuting attorney is challenging her to tell him the correct ignition timing for a particular car and she keeps saying that she can’t answer the question and the attorney reacts as though he caught her in a lie, that she doesn’t actually know enough about cars to be an expert witness. So the judge finally interrupts and says “WHY is it a trick question?” and she goes on to explain that the car he’s demanding to know about doesn’t exist so she can’t give the correct ignition timing for it.

What do you mean by “dance steps”? And in what style of dance? This question isn’t really asking for a thing that exists without some kind of clarification.

At last count, I could name 34 specific partner dance styles,

I have at least tried 23 partner dance styles and 3 choreographed dance styles, not counting line dances (I haven’t the foggiest how many of those I have tried) and I can do 15 of them with some proficiency. Each of those partner dances has a “basic” step, but each of those “basic” steps are totally different from each other. So, do I know 1 step or 23 steps if we’re just counting the basic step?

In all of the partner dances, they have so many steps that I don’t think all of them have been categorized. You may be able to find a list of specific patterns allowed in competition for each of those partner dances, maybe, but a lot of patterns are not allowed in competition, are “street” variations, or are made up on the spot by individual dancers. And most of those don’t have names to them. Or have different names from different people.

Now, even if we just take the 15 partner dances I can do with some proficiency, I couldn’t possibly be able to list off all the individual patterns I can do in each of those 15 styles. I have no idea how many patterns (or steps) I know. I’m a follow, which means that my dance partner comes up with the step that we’re about to do and non-verbally communicates to me what I’m supposed to do. So, basically, I know as many patterns in each partner dance style as all of my dance partners ever in my history of dancing and in my future know how to communicate to me how to do.

That’s a lot of steps.

Then we move to the 3 choreographed dance styles that I know - Bollywood, Jazz, and Tap. Each of those styles also has their own repertoire of steps, some of which are catalogued and some of which are made up on the spot or are regional variations.

Again, I couldn’t even begin to list how many of those steps I know. I have probably forgotten more steps than I could remember just sitting here thinking of them (and I probably never learned their names), but if someone does one of the steps and I try to copy it, I’ll probably remember it.

Next we get to the types of “steps” that get randomly thrown into social freestyle dancing where a dancer could dance the entire song just doing that one step (twist, mashed potato, the jerk, etc.) or they could be mixed and matched in a collaboration of freestyle dance moves at a nightclub or dance event. I currently specialize in 1950s-1960s dances and solo charleston, and I spent many years as a goth dancer in goth and industrial nightclubs. Once again, there are so many steps for each style of dance, many of which were never categorized officially or named and some of which are just made up on the spot, and most of which were borrowed from and built on other dance styles, that I couldn’t even start counting them all.

(Goth dance “steps” are particularly fun and are often given satirical names like “Kick The Smurf” and “Change The Lightbulb” and “Start The Lawnmower” and “Pick Up The Dollar Bill On The Ground” and “Pluck The Apple From The Tree And Admire It” and “Stuck In My Coffin”.)

And then there are the line dances! Most country and urban line dances have a tendency to reuse the same handful of steps just in different combinations - things like the grapevine, the jazz square, the charleston, stomps, kicks, heel-toes, ball changes, etc. Pretty much all of these steps exist in one or more of the other styles of dance, such as jazz, ballet, tap, and even some partner dances like cha cha, country two-step, and more. So there is probably a heavy overlap between what steps I know in line dancing and what steps I know in other dances.

But since there is no over-reaching Catalogue Of All Dance Steps somewhere, and many steps are made up on the spot, there’s no way for me to know all of the steps that I know. For a lot of steps, I don’t know that I know it until I do it, and then I can think “oh, right, this is THAT step!” Most of the steps or patterns that I have learned, I was not taught the name of that step, just how to do it.

So the closest I can come to answering this question is by saying that I know 24 partner dance *styles*, 15 of which I know with some degree of proficiency, 3 choreographed styles, 1 of which I know with some degree of proficiency, and so many line dances that I never even bothered to keep track.

If I had to guess, I probably know at least a dozen specific patterns or variations (dance “steps”) for each of the dances I know with some degree of proficiency and at least 3 patterns or “steps” for each of the dances I have at least tried. There is some overlap. Add that to the freestyle dance “steps” and the line dance steps, if I just estimate or round my numbers and say, maybe that I know about 10 specific steps for every style of dance I know (partner and choreographed) with about 1/3 overlap plus the freestyle solo dance steps, I would hazard a guess that I probably know more than 2 or 3 hundred individual patterns or “steps”.

Now, if I was a choreographer or a Gold level competition dancer, I would probably know an order of magnitude more.

Why Would You Sleep Apart From Your Significant Other?

www.quora.com/Would-you-have-a-separate-bedroom-from-your-significant-other-and-why/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Would you have a separate bedroom from your significant other and why?

A. I do not sleep well with others.

• I have back problems and I need to sleep in a semi-reclined position (that means partially sitting up).  It makes my pillow arrangements inconvenient for people who sleep more traditionally laying all the way flat.  So I can’t really cuddle or snuggle with someone while sleeping, and if we’re not going to be touching at least part of the time, what’s the point of sharing a bed?
  
  
   
• I am a ridiculously light sleeper.  I wake at *everything*. My sister used to sneak into my room at night to steal my clothing and my cassette tapes.  My parents refused to allow me to have a lock on my bedroom door because they felt it was too “secretive” and they wanted access to my room at all times (they did not listen to me when I offered for them to have a key and they did not see any violation of privacy here).
  
  So I became super sensitive to motion at night.   I could hear the air pressure change outside of my bedroom door when someone approached.   I woke every single night to my sister attempting to sneak in, once I developed this sensitivity. Every night *for years*.
  
  So sharing a room with another person who snores, tosses and turns, mumbles, moves, or gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom is incredibly disruptive to me.   No matter how many hours of sleep I get, when I share a room with other people, I sleep so poorly that I feel jet lagged all the next day.
   
• I have several sleep disorders - Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, Sleep Paralysis, and Night Terrors.   With the DSPS, my internal sleep clock is off by about 6 hours.   My body does not think it’s bedtime until around 4 in the morning and insists that it’s not time to wake until noon.  Sharing a sleeping space with people who are on a different sleep schedule is disruptive to both of us, as one of us is not yet tired and still active while the other is already asleep and then reversed in the morning.
  
  With the Sleep Paralysis and Night Terrors, these things are both triggered by regular disruption of the REM cycle, at least for me.  So, things like hitting the snooze button repeatedly for several hours (yes, I’ve done this) will trigger an episode, especially if I do this for several days in a row.  Also, people who are restless sleepers and move a lot will interrupt my REM cycle enough to trigger an episode.  So are snorers.
   
• I’m also probably a synesthete.  Synesthesia is a condition in which experiencing something with one sense is received as another sense.  So, like, some people taste color, or they actually visually see sounds.  My version is that certain sounds produce an actual physical sensation in my body that is not just the standard “air vibrations entering the ear canal” sorts of feelings, nor is it that internal thumping feeling everyone gets with really loud bass.  My favorite feeling is the sound of one particular type of singing voice that produces the sensation of what I refer to as “liquid cat fur” gently rubbing down the back of my throat.
  
  Snoring produces a painful, rage-inducing feeling in my head and chest.  I absolutely cannot sleep when there is any kind of snoring at all, even the occasional one-off snores that happens to almost everybody.  It will wake me instantly with pain and rage.  I’ve had to learn how to sleep with earbuds in playing music at full volume just to drown out the sound of snoring because sleeping through loud music and hard things in my ears was less painful than hearing that sound.
   
• On top of all of these health issues, I’m polyamorous and introverted.  The introversion means that I really need space that belongs just to me, where I can feel safe and go to recharge and where nobody else is allowed in without my express permission.  In most house layouts, there are very few options for giving people their own space, other than bedrooms.  And as I live below the poverty line, affording a home with a shared bedroom and all the normal rooms and also private space for everyone quickly starts to become very expensive.  It’s easiest to make the private space also be everyone’s bedroom.
  
  The polyamory means that I am likely to have multiple partners.  If I live with more than one partner, then all my health issues are compounded because there are more than 2 people all attempting to sleep in the same room.  Trust me, I’ve done this, and it did not end well for me.  I was in a group once with 6 people and they all insisted on sharing a bed together.  After the novelty wore off, it became a living hell for me with 3 different snore patterns, 2 “morning people” to my “night owl” pattern, no privacy for sex, and crawling in and out at the foot of the bed without disrupting anyone else to get to my space.  Even giving everyone our own bed-sheets did not solve the problem of different preferences in ambient sleeping temperature either.
  
  If any of my partners do not live with me, then when I want to have them spend the night, I either have to kick an existing partner out of his own bed (and then have sex in a bed that someone else sleeps in, which doesn’t bother everyone but does bother some), or we have to have a house big enough for a spare room that’s dedicated to guests and that goes empty the rest of the time.  I don’t usually have the money for houses big enough to have rooms that are only being used occasionally.
  
  If I live with one partner, and our house is big enough for a shared room and a guest room, we might as well just each have our own bedroom.  That way nobody gets kicked out of their “own” bed when a guest comes over.  Then there are no hurt feelings over used sheets, interruptions of routine, feeling “left out”, etc.

My personal preference is to live in my own, self-contained space like an apartment.  My ideal fantasy is to have that self-contained space be on shared property with other partners, such as an entire apartment building for everyone in the network where we all get our own self-contained space and also a “common area” where we can come together for large family meals, recreation, etc.

This way I get my own room, I get All The Closet Space for my costumes, I get a work space for my hobbies where my clutter and mess doesn’t impact anyone else, and a kitchen where *nobody touches my knives except me*, and yet I can walk barefoot down the hall, or in some state of undress, to the next door over to visit with a partner or metamour, and there is enough separation between us that sounds of sex or loud music or enthusiastic video game play are not intrusive to anyone.

This whole sharing a bedroom thing is a relatively recent trend in human history.  We have tried a whole slew of different sleeping arrangements, each with their pros and cons.  There is no reason to believe that the house layout of one master bedroom for a romantic couple and several smaller bedrooms for children with common rooms like a kitchen and living room, is the “proper” configuration.  That was a lie told to us by post WWII propaganda in the United States trying to force everyone into a nuclear family setting for a capitalistic, patriarchal society.

Family structures have varied all over the map throughout time and across cultures.  This one particular configuration should not be the “default” that everyone falls into automatically, and those who don’t are considered deviations.  If anything, this nuclear family model is the historical deviation, and it’s turning out to have less and less applicability as American and Western European cultures evolve into more ethical structures allowing more freedom for individual variation and preferences in people’s pursuit of happiness.

I think more heteromononormative relationships would benefit from separating sleeping quarters and developing personal spaces within shared homes the way some of us who do relationships differently have done with our own families.  This doesn’t mean that people can’t be *allowed* to share sleeping space when they want to.  Just that having their own space and learning to accept sleeping apart as a “normal” option for relationships (rather than a sign of a problem) helps in developing autonomy, individuality, and solves a lot of poor sleeping habits that we Westerners are kinda famous for.

Once we start sleeping better, the rest of our days tend to get more productive and we become generally happier, which will spill into the happiness and success of our romantic and familial relationships.  We currently spend a lot of money on various products designed to mitigate or compensate for the problems that come along with shared sleeping space.  Those are problems that could be solved entirely by simply not sleeping together (when our circumstances and finances allow for it).

Can Straight Women Be In A FMF Threesome?

www.quora.com/Straight-women-can-you-imagine-yourself-taking-part-in-an-FMF-threesome-Those-who-had-one-did-you-enjoy-it/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Straight women, can you imagine yourself taking part in an FMF threesome? Those who had one, did you enjoy it?

A. I have on many occasions.  I enjoyed pretty much all of them, although several of them caused me to regret doing them after the fact based on how the other people behaved afterwards.  Being in a threesome does not necessarily mean that you have to have direct sexual contact with both other people.  Sometimes it can mean “ganging up” on one of the other people, or “tag-teaming” them.  That’s how I have FMF threesomes while being straight.

Also, I’m not afraid of accidental contact with the other woman.  We might not be directly sexual with each other, but it helps if we don’t mind it when we just happen to touch each other simply due to proximity, and we can also enjoy non-sexual touching such as hand-holding, hugging, cuddling, etc.

But being straight and in group sex situations with people of the same gender is, for me, best when we look at it as being on the “same team”, where we are there to support each other and have fun together with someone we both happen to like.  It can be a lot of fun to scheme and plot with another woman about how to sexually tease, “torture”, and please someone we both love, or at least are both attracted to.  It can be a bonding experience if the threesome is with people with whom I have some kind of emotional connection in addition to the sexual attraction.

It can also be a minefield if one or both of the other people don’t have their own emotional ducks in a row, so to speak.  If they get into a threesome for the wrong reasons (the only good reason is “because I think it sounds fun and I like the other people involved”), if anyone harbors any resentment or negative feelings about it (other than regular anxiety that may come with a first-time sexual experience of any sort), or if anyone has such insecurities that they feel the need to script out the encounter or dictate what *other people* can and can’t do with their bodies or they try to avoid or suppress any emotions.

Some of the threesomes that I regretted were ones where at least one of the other people had some kind of insecurity that prompted them to either restrict me and the third person from engaging in particular activities, or to *require* us to engage in particular activities.  Other regrettable threesomes involved one or more people doing it to “please” someone else or because they were afraid they would lose a partner if they didn’t.

And yet other regrettable threesomes involved one or more people who felt that a threesome was necessary for group cohesion.  Meaning that the two of us women were both involved with the man but she and I were friends, and one or both of them felt that we had to have group sex in order to maintain the friendly bond between us, as if having private one-on-one sex would harm the group in some way.

These guidelines for what I have found makes for happy and successful threesomes and what tends to make for regrettable threesomes apply no matter what the genders of the 3 people are (I have had a lot of MFM threesomes too) and they also apply to group sex of people more than 3 (I have had quite a few foursomes and orgies as well).

Is Casual Sex Offensive?

www.quora.com/Would-you-be-offended-if-someone-wanted-to-have-sex-with-you-but-not-date-have-a-relationship-with-you/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Would you be offended if someone wanted to have sex with you but not date/have a relationship with you?

A.  Seeing as how I frequently proposition people for the same, I wouldn’t be offended at the *desire* at all.  I might be offended at the *way* it was asked or offered.  I find it completely inoffensive to acknowledge that two people may be incompatible for a romantic relationship and yet still have some sexual attraction to each other.  If that’s the spirit in which the proposition is made, I wouldn’t be offended at all.

But if he looked *down* on me, if he didn’t think I was *worthy* of a romantic relationship, if he felt ashamed of being connected to me, if he was concerned about what other people might think of our relationship, if he saw me as a challenge to be won, if he was interested in me merely as a living masturbatory aid and an interchangeable body and it wasn’t personal to me at all, if he was dismissive of me, if he felt entitled to sex with me, if he felt I owed him sex for any reason, if he felt he was doing me a favor by offering sex, if he did not respect my consent and continued to pursue me after a rejection … if he felt any number of things that wasn’t just a sincere and genuine attraction to me as a person in a sexual role - *that* would probably be offensive to me.

All kinds of relationships have value, including sex-only without emotional connection or intertwined commitments.  Not everyone needs to *like* every kind of relationship, but they all have value.

What If They Asked For An STD Test Before Sex?

www.quora.com/How-would-you-feel-if-the-girl-you-are-dating-is-asking-for-a-STD-free-medical-certificate-before-getting-intimate/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

The phrasing of these kinds of questions always sounds like a "gotcha" question, where people are actually quite offended at the thing they're asking about and they're looking for validation that they are right to be offended.  I hope I piss these people off with my answers.

Q. How would you feel if the girl you are dating is asking for a STD-free medical certificate before getting intimate?

A. Well, if she used the phrase “STD-free medical certificate”, I’d probably have a conversation with her about slut shaming and sexual stigmas.  1) They don’t issue “certificates”, they merely tell you if your tests are either “negative” or “non-reactive” (depending on the test) or not, and most of the time you can request a print-out of the test results; and 2) you are not “free” or “clean” or “clear” of STDs, you merely did not react positively to one particular type of test for however many STDs you got tested for.

(as an aside, telling your doctor you want to be tested for “everything” does not actually get you tested for “everything” - it may get you tested for everything *that this doctor feels is appropriate to test for*, which is not the same thing at all.  They almost always leave out HSV, for example.  So always specify which STDs you want to be tested for and which *tests* for each STD you want them to use, as many of the STDs have several different tests that all show slightly different things and have their own pros and cons).

That being said, however, should someone I was interested in ask to exchange test results before engaging in higher-risk activity, I’d say “well, of course, that’s my general policy as well.  I try to get tested once a year, depending on my finances and whether or not my relationship status or risk profile has changed in the last 12 months, and right before a new partner just so that I have the latest possible results to share.  These are the things I get tested for and these are the specific versions of the tests for these things that I use.  Should I engage in any higher-risk activities without exchanging test results first (which doesn’t happen often, but does occasionally depending on circumstances), then I will get tested again 3 months later.  What does your testing procedure look like?  And what is your gmail account where I can share a Google doc of my entire sexual history and scans of my latest tests?”

Has Your Attire Ever Offended Someone?

www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-offended-somebody-with-what-you-were-wearing-What-was-it-that-you-wore/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

I'm sure I've offended people on more than one occasion with what I was wearing, but this was the one that came to mind:

Q.   Have you ever offended somebody with only something you were wearing? What was it that did it?

A.  I have a shirt that has a quote by some atheist that says (and I’m paraphrasing) something like “I contend that we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you”.  I wore it one day while spending the weekend with a boyfriend (who is also an atheist).

His friend was having a party that he had planned to go, and I totally forgot about.  So when we went to the party, I didn’t even notice what I was wearing, which was the only shirt I had packed for that day.  Apparently, the host and his wife are Christians and the shirt offended the wife so much that she emailed the boyfriend after the party and told him that I wasn’t allowed back at her house because of the shirt.

Fortunately, that boyfriend responded by saying 1) if I wasn’t welcome, he didn’t feel welcome either since he shared my views, and 2) if she had no problem with her pagan friends wearing their non-christian religious symbols and openly talking about their non-Christian pagan beliefs, then she was a hypocrite to single out the atheist for expressing our lack of belief as well.

So I never went back to that house again, and the wife was so offended that the boyfriend was offended on my behalf at her offense at my shirt, that it was the final straw in a series of offenses that severed their friendship entirely.

Considering they also disapproved of our being poly (even though she was a webcam girl) and the husband had actually been grooming that boyfriend and their entire circle of friends since high school (he was more than 10 years older and had sought out high schoolers to start a weird “sovereign citizen movement” cult that they thought was pretend like the SCA but he was serious about), I’m totally not sorry about being the final trigger to end that friendship.

Why Do Married People Not Wear Wedding Rings?

www.quora.com/Why-has-it-become-common-for-married-people-not-to-wear-their-wedding-rings/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

There are an awful lot of assumptions buried in this question.

Q. Why has it become common for married people not to wear their wedding rings?

A. It was not common in the US for wedding rings to be worn by men until the 20th century, so it had kind of a similar effect as branding livestock - it said that the woman belonged to someone, but the man (because same-sex marriage did not exist at the time) had no such corresponding mark of connection or ownership.

So it was only “common” for some people to wear rings, and it was only common for other people to wear rings for a short span of time in our nation’s history.  Wedding rings being common is a relatively modern practice, however they continue to be common today.  While it may be more noticeable now that some people do not wear their rings, and there may indeed be an increase in that number from previous generations, it is still more common for married people to wear a wedding ring than not.

But reasons why someone would not wear a wedding ring can include:

1. Historically, the wedding ring was connected to the exchange of valuables at the moment of the wedding rather than a symbol of eternal love and devotion.   Wedding rings are an archaic tradition used to mark humans as being “taken” or “owned” by someone else through this exchange of wealth.  Some people choose not to be marked as such or to engage in archaic practices that are not relevant to their modern lives.
    
2. The modern version of wedding and engagement rings were a deliberate propaganda campaign by the jewelry industry to sell more products, said jewelry industry contributing to war and slavery in their goal to obtain more product to sell, and some people are conscientious objectors.
    
3. Jewelry is often inconvenient or even dangerous in certain lives.
    
4. Jewelry is a very personal expression of the self and a wedding ring may not match the aesthetic that a person is going for.
    
5. Some people just don’t like things on their hands.
    
6. Some religions discourage the display of wealth and jewelry.  Methodist teaching says that people should not be "adorned with gold, or pearls, or costly apparel" (John Wesley, “The General Rules of the Methodist Church”).  Mennonites do not wear jewelry, including wedding rings, as part of their practice of “plain dress”.  Certain branches of Quakers have a “testimony of simplicity” and therefore do not wear jewelry and keep to “plain dress”.

I don’t wear my wedding ring because jewelry is dangerous in my job (#3).  I work with heavy machinery and anything that can’t easily tear away, such as metal around fingers, necks, and through ears and noses, could get caught in something and rip said body parts off.  My cousin’s fiance lost his ring finger a week out from the wedding (no idea why he was wearing his ring early) and had to go through the ceremony with a bandage on his hand and she put the ring on his right hand instead of his left.  I play piano.  I’d prefer to keep all my fingers, thank you.

As such, I have not worn rings in many, many years, so when I do put on a ring for an aesthetic look for dressing up or for a costume, it feels uncomfortable and gets in my way, much like long fingernails feel on people who do not wear their nails long normally (#5).

I object to the diamond industry, which is wrapped up in the jewelry industry in general, so I do not participate in displays of wealth and jewelry with materials associated with the diamond slave trade, the various gold rushes, or with the De Beers corporation and their capitalistic campaign to artificially create a market for themselves through their manipulation of the market (#2) with deceptive advertising.  Diamonds and gold are symbolic of that campaign and the horrific atrocities committed to obtain precious stones and materials for jewelry for rich people.  This could technically leave other materials and stones available to me for use as wedding rings or other jewelry, but I have other reasons for eschewing them in general.

I do not like being treated like someone’s wife (#1).  I prefer to be treated like an individual human being.  I have noticed that the way that strangers treat me changes based what they think my jewelry says about me.  As a teenager and young woman, I used to wear a wedding ring deliberately to avoid getting hit on in public spaces.

As an older adult, even though I am still getting hit on, I find that not being hit on just because I have signaled that I belong to someone else is more offensive.  My “no” should be more impactful than “there is a man out there somewhere who owns me and would not approve of you making moves on his woman”, so I would rather reject advances on my own than let the implication of some other man’s disapproval do the rejecting for me.

Aside from advances, I am treated more respectfully and with more deference when people find out that I am married (or when they think I am, such as when I used to wear a ring and was not married).  Again, I would prefer to earn that respect just because I am a person and deserve respect, than because I have met the social obligation of tying my fate to someone else.

So a side effect of not wearing a ring due to danger, comfort, and personal aesthetic (the actual reasons why I do not wear a ring) is that I get to challenge people’s assumptions and demand respect based on who I am, not my connection to someone else.  Some days I don’t want to put forth the effort of dealing with that challenge, so I might wear the ring to avoid it.  But mostly I see this as an opportunity for change rather than a drawback.  I consider it a feature, not a bug.

You Cannot Consent If You Cannot Say No

I don't know why this is so difficult for some people to grasp. If you are unable to say "no", then your "yes" is meaningless.  If you *need* to stay with someone - you are financially tied to them and can't untie yourself, you are emotionally or physically threatened, the thought of not being with them is the worst thing you can possibly think of including being alone - then you can't really give consent to the relationship.

If you are free to leave a relationship, then choosing to stay is much more meaningful than being forced to stay by circumstances, emotional chains, or power.

So I'm going to say this slowly because it's apparently a VERY difficult concept:

This. does. not. mean. that. people. who. are. free. to. leave. a. relationship. and. choose. to. stay. do. not. commit. to. their. partners.

For some reason, some people hear "I am free to leave a relationship because there is no power forcing me to remain, yet I choose to stay because I am happy here and I love my partner", and translate it as "eh, I'm here because I have nothing better to do, but I don't have any commitments or expectations or intentions to stick around and if literally anything slightly more interesting comes along, I'm outta here."

It's like, in BDSM, some people engage in power exchanges.  No, let me talk about something that's actually one of my own kinks:  Bondage.  I like being restrained under certain circumstances. I am literally being held by force.  Except it's an illusion.  At any point, I can tell the person tying me up that I don't want to be tied up anymore, and my partners are trustworthy enough that they will instantly release me (if I couldn't release myself - one of my superpowers is that my hands are almost the same size as my wrists so I can slip out of most restraints if I really want to).

But I'm here for the experience of being restrained.  I'm in it until the end.  Unless something goes wrong, I'm committed to sharing this experience.  I prepared for it.  I recognize that this may trigger some difficult emotional processing (for either of us), that there may be injuries, that shit may hit the fan and I'm here for that too.

But if things get *too* bad, if they cross boundaries, if they go *wrong*, not just challenging or difficult, I can leave.

I make a lot of commitments to my partners.  I quite often stick around, often enough past the point where I should have left.   My partners aren't disposable.  They're not replaceable.  They're not interchangeable.  They're not *convenient*.  But I still have the ability to leave.  And yet, I have chosen not to in many cases.

This is a False Dichotomy and a Straw Man, perhaps even a Motte & Bailey switcheroo.  It's not *either* "you have the autonomy to leave a relationship" OR "you have commitments to your partners".  Those are are not opposing things on a single scale, they're two different axes in the giant complicated chart that makes up all of any given relationship.  I'd even argue that having the freedom to leave and choosing not to actually enables you to better live up to your commitments because you're not being forced against your will.

I am with my partners, committed to the various things that I commit to, such as operating in good faith, trusting that we are on the same team, supporting them, being there for them, sharing the joys and the trials of life together as *partners*, precisely because I don't *have* to be, BUT I CHOOSE TO BE.

My mom held a job for something like 15 years because she *had* to.  She lived up to her obligations - she performed her job to the best of her ability and she did the things she had promised to do when she got hired for the job.  But she was miserable.  She hated her job and hated her boss.  Her boss did not value her and often made her job needlessly more difficult.  They did not have a fax machine, for example, because he felt more traditional methods of communication were better.  She had to walk down the hall to another company's office to fax invoices and other correspondence that needed to be faxed.  She told me once how humiliated she felt at having to beg fax time from another company.  He would have still had her keeping the books in a literal ledger if he could have.

After several years of watching her misery, we (her family) finally convinced her to look for another job.  She resisted because she felt that she had to stay - she made a "commitment" to work for this employer, she needed to help provide for her family, etc.  The threat of poverty is a pretty strong motivator and forces many of us to do a lot of things we would rather not do, some of which actually compromise our values and our integrity and our sense of self.

So her best friend told her about a job opening at her own place of employment and we all pushed her into applying.  The job was a stretch for her - she had no computer skills thanks to her employer, and she had wicked low self-esteem thanks to her boss telling her that she wasn't worthy of anything more than being a "secretary".  But we encouraged and we supported and she told her boss she had a dentist appointment one day and went downtown to apply for the job.  She got called for an interview, and a follow up interview, and she eventually got hired.

At the first job she applied for after taking the leap to leave and find another job.

She was terrified and nearly turned down the offer.  She just did not feel that she could leave.  But she did.  She went to work for this other company, and learned a whole bunch of new skills and made a whole bunch of new friends, and 20 years later she finally retired from a job that she felt brought her happiness and growth but that she was ready to leave and join her husband in retirement.

Once she left the abusive job, and she learned some skills and gained some self-worth, she worked for 2 decades at a job that she felt she *could* leave if she needed to because she had already left one job and the world did not end for her.  In fact, it got better.  So she had the freedom to leave her new job, but she chose not to because it was a job that she felt happy and satisfied in.   She threw herself into that job, often working overtime and taking on duties that weren't hers just to help out and generally contributed to a successful company and productive work environment.

And after she retired, her company begged her to come back when the person who replaced her went on maternity leave because she was so valuable to the company.  So she did - on a part-time, temporary basis, but she still did.  And she will leave again when her contract is up.  She *committed* to this job - to doing her best, to working in the company's best interest, to providing a salary for her family, but this time without compromising her integrity.

This freedom to leave was part of a general attitude on behalf of both her and the company that allowed her to truly commit to the job, rather than being forced to do the job that she left as soon as she could.  My mother, for all our differences, is an amazing woman who imparted many of my values and ethics on how to relate to people.  She has had the opportunity to leave a variety of situations over the years, yet she chose to stay because *that's what commitment is*.

And now she sits, in the sunset of her life, deliriously in love with her husband, in complete adoration of her grandkids, with a long career and strong bonds with her coworkers behind her and two adult daughters who credit her with instilling the values we are most proud about ourselves.

Having freedom of autonomy does not mean having no commitments.  It's *how* we are able to truly commit to relationships.  Because we are not forced to remain in unhealthy, toxic relationships, our commitments actually mean something.  If someone were to slap me across the face because someone else held a gun to their head and made them, I wouldn't hold the person who slapped me accountable.  They had no choice.  That slap doesn't *mean* anything coming from them.

But if they slapped me because they *wanted* to, then it would fucking mean something and you'd be damn sure I'm going to hold them accountable for it.  That's a negative example of basically the same thing.   Actions taken when there is no choice but to take them render the decision to do them meaningless.  Actions taken when you have a choice imbue them with meaning.

My partners choosing to stay with me and honor their commitments to me gives those commitments *meaning*.  Choosing to stay when they actually do have a choice does not negate their ability to make commitments, it makes their choice to honor the commitments more meaningful.
 And the people who think that there is no power imbalance, and therefore no consent violation, when one's ability to leave is restricted frighten me.  These people also tend to view having free will and choosing to exercise it as being "broken".  That is a direct quote from a conversation I just read.

Considering that my abusive ex also feels this way, I shouldn't be at all surprised at how fucked up this is.  He literally thinks that it is a broken worldview to believe that having the freedom to leave a relationship and choosing not to leave makes for more ethical relationships.  And I'm dumbstruck as to how I could have possibly missed this attitude before we started dating and horrified that I was ever with him at all.

But what's more horrifying is how many people who I once considered friends or close relationships of some sort also hold this position.  There are an awful lot of reasonably intelligent, rational people out there who don't believe you should have any autonomy in your relationships, who don't see how coercive the lack of freedom in a relationship is, and who think this freedom / lack of freedom / consent / non-consent issue is an either/or with the ability to make commitments in interpersonal relationships.  That, somehow, making a commitment *means* that you no longer have the freedom to leave, and that *this is a good thing* because otherwise people would just up and leave whenever.

And they think that *I'm* the "broken" one.

Just like courage means being afraid and doing something anyway, commitment does not mean being unable to back out.  It means having the freedom to back out *and doing it anyway*.

I think I need to go to bed now, because I'm feeling a little nihilistic about the fate of our species after this.

Have You Ever Seen An Open Relationships Work?

www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-be-in-an-open-relationship/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Have you ever been in or seen an open relationship that worked?

A. These are always such weird questions.  Even though the divorce rate for monogamy is around 50% (for first marriages, it’s way higher for second and third marriages) and basically 100% for every relationship prior to the marriage, and even though abuse runs rampant in monogamous relationships, and we all know and have all been in relationships that ended and that the people came away with regretting ever getting into, nobody asks “have you ever been in or seen a closed or monogamous relationship that worked?”

And, as someone else already pointed out, you have to define what you mean by “worked”.  Some people think that the only marker for a “successful” relationship is if somebody dies.  Personally, I think that’s rather gruesome, but some people seem to think that one person outliving the other, no matter how happy or unhappy the people were before death claimed one of them, makes a relationship “successful”.

I’m of the camp that thinks any relationship that makes the participants feel content or satisfied with the relationship for the majority of the time together and/or accomplishes the goals they set out together, is a successful relationship, no matter how long it lasted.  As the saying goes - sometimes people come together for a reason or a season in addition to those that happen for a lifetime.

If I have a relationship with someone and we have certain goals or purposes for our relationship, and we accomplish them and then go our separate ways, happy with the outcome, that relationship would be successful to me.  If I have a relationship with someone that lasts only for a short time, and life then takes us in different directions, but we were happy and satisfied with our relationship while we were in it and content with the way that it ended even if we are also saddened by the separation, that would also count as a successful relationship to me.

By those measures, I’d say about half of my relationships since I started having polyamorous relationships have been successful, including the relationship I have with my spouse, who I’ve been with for over 14 years now (and in an openly poly relationship from the beginning).  One of my former romantic partners has transitioned to a platonic friend and business partner and we are writing a book together on how to break up ethically.  I’d say my relationship with him is one of my greater successes, as we’ve managed to find a way to make our relationship work for us through a bunch of different life stages and different needs from each other in ways that we are both happy with.

I’d say that’s also a pretty average track record for all of the poly relationships of all the people I’ve known in all my years as a community organizer in the poly community (which means I’ve known a TON of poly people).  Considering poly people have the potential to have more partners than monogamists do (unless someone is a *very* active serial monogamist) since we can overlap them, having a 50% or better success rate is pretty good.

However, since most monogamous people I know consider the mere act of ending a relationship to make it a failure, I’d say that, of all the monogamous people I’ve ever known (and since this is mostly still a monogamous society, I have also known a TON of mono people), the vast, vast, vast majority of monogamous relationships I’ve ever seen have not worked (using their own definition for “worked” or “worked out” or “successful”).  50% success vs. way more than 50% failure might imply that open relationships are probably more successful than monogamous ones.

The truth is, that all relationships work or don’t work because of the people in them, not because of the structure.  Some people are compatible together, many people aren’t, some people are compatible only in certain kinds of relationships (while many of those kinds of relationships are prohibited by the culture around them so they often don’t even get to try the one where they might actually “work” out), and some people are compatible together for a while and then less compatible as they grow and change over the course of their lives.

It’s never the structure of the relationship that makes it “work” or not “work”. It’s the people in the relationship.

Which Dances Are Ballroom Dances?

www.quora.com/How-can-you-describe-the-different-types-of-ballroom-dances/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q.  Which dances are considered "ballroom dancing"?

A.  That depends on who you ask.  You have to clarify if you mean dances that are accepted under the International Ballroom Dancing competition standards, or the American Smooth / Rhythm Dance competition standards, or the kinds of dances are taught in ballroom studios, or any social partner dancing?

Very generally speaking, “ballroom” refers to a collection of partner dances that include smooth style European dances, Latin dances, and rhythm dances, some of which can be danced socially, and some of which really are only danced in choreography because there are too many times when the contact necessary for communication of the next step does not exist (such as side-by-side moves, or moves at a distance).

In addition to this, there are often several distinct dance communities in any given region in the US.  The “ballroom” community might do all (or a large number of) the dances, but there is also a separate community for each of the swing dances (usually lindy hop, which sometimes includes balboa and blues, west coast swing, and shag as their own communities), a separate community for Argentine Tango, and a separate community for salsa (which sometimes includes bachata and occasionally kizomba), and the country western dances (which can include two-step and one-step, as well as country-swing, country cha cha, square dancing, and line dancing, although sometimes square dancing is its own community all by itself) - all of which might do a slightly different version of those dances from the same styles danced in the ballroom community.

I recently started keeping a running tally of all the partner dances that are currently danced somewhere in the US, and so far I’ve come up with 34 specific styles (if I lump the 3 main Shags under one heading), but this is a work in progress as I keep adding dances as I am made aware of them:

www.facebook.com/notes/joreth-innkeeper/all-the-partner-dances/1612515565470846/

For more info, you can read about different kinds of dances here:

Music & Videos - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal - https://sites.google.com/site/orlandoballroomdance/resources/music-videos

Ballroom dance - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballroom_dance

#ThingsIWantToToon: Your Drink Will Meet Its Doom On My Riser

First panel - Me, standing at my camera, hands on the camera arms, looking up at the viewfinder, me and the tripod on our respective risers.

Next panel - A person walks up and places a bottle of water on the edge of my riser without even looking at me, eyes on the stage in front of us.  I look down at them.

Next panel - I continue to stare at them aggressively.

Next panel - they notice me staring and look up at me with a confused look on their face.

Next panel - two-shot of me staring at them, them looking back at me, confused.

Next panel - close-up of my face, staring. I now have whiskers and little cat ears poking out of the top of my hoodie.

Next panel - over-the-shoulder angle of me from behind, still staring at them, still looking confused at me. I have a tail now.

Next several panels - all different angles of me staring at them, glaring at them, and gradually turning more and more into a cat.

Second-to-last panel - Me, as a giant black cat, standing on a camera riser, staring aggressively at the other person, as I slowly and deliberately move a paw towards their water bottle and knock it to the ground, holding their eye the whole time.

Final panel - they sheepishly figure out why I've been staring at them this whole time as they bend to pick up their trash, embarrassed, and put it in the waste bin.

#backstage #CameraOp #ThisIsMyWorkSpaceNotYourFuckingTrashCanOrCounterTop #EveryTouchOfTheRiserShakesTheCameraOnScreen #DoNotTouchTheFuckingRiser #AVlife

Dance Floor Etiquette

www.quora.com/What-are-some-unspoken-rules-of-the-dance-floor/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What are some unspoken rules of the dance floor?

A. There aren’t really any “unspoken” rules, there are etiquette guidelines that most people are willing to talk about if anyone brings it up, and some guidelines that are explicitly talked about in classes. Which are which, however, depends on where you are. Some instructors remember to talk about floor etiquette and some don’t.

Basic etiquette includes things like:

• paying attention to the amount of space you’re taking up and how your presence affects other people,


• yielding the floor to avoid collisions,


• inviting people to dance with you without pressuring them,


• accepting rejection gracefully,


• offering rejection gracefully,


• not hogging anyone’s attention by dancing several songs in a row with them and allowing them to dance with others or not dance if they choose not to,


• no food or drinks on the dance floor,


• not smoking near the floor (or indoors, depending on local laws),


• good hygiene,


• proper shoes and attire to protect the floor, yourself, and other dancers,


• matching dance style and skill to your partner, particularly the more advanced dancers simplifying down to match less advanced partners and paying attention to differences in body size and shape and ability,


• thanking your partner for the dance at the end of the song and the person who did the asking ought to escort the other back to where you found them, or if partner-changing is happening quickly, at least acknowledge the goodbye with a nod, handshake, hug, high five, etc.


• Follow the line-of-dance and/or spot dancing rules, especially when there are a mix of dance styles happening at the same time.

There may be others, but they all boil down to courtesy and accountability. Be courteous to those around you and be accountable for your actions.

If You Are Not A Morning Person You May Never Be

www.vox.com/2016/3/18/11255942/morning-people-evening-chronotypes-sleeping

I've been suffering from this since childhood.  I say "suffering", although it's not a hardship at all when I'm just allowed to follow my own clock - the suffering is because the rest of the society won't let me.  It typically starts up in the teen years, and most teens outgrow it as they age, but for some of us, it lasts pretty much for the rest of our lives.

I'm on the far end of the bell curve, with my internal clock being set to bedtime around 4 AM and waking around noon or 1 PM.

It has been an ongoing struggle just to get people to understand that it's not something I can fix or change, and I can only barely compensate for it and that comes with some extreme consequences.  No amount of "just get on a schedule" fixes this problem.  I've tried both therapies listed in this article, and like the subjects of the article, all it takes is one day off my therapy schedule and the whole thing resets.

So now I don't bother - I sleep and wake when I feel like it unless I have a gig the next day and then I just deal with the jet lag.  It's one of the reasons why I do the work that I do instead of a regular 40-hour a week job, but it also means that I will never make a lot of money because I can't keep it up every day, so I only take a couple of gigs a month and fill in with lower-paid side work that has later hours.

"It turns out our internal clocks are influenced by genes and are incredibly difficult to change.  If you're just not a morning person, it's likely you'll never be, at least until the effects of aging kick in.

And what's more, if we try to live out of sync with these clocks, our health likely suffers.  The mismatch between internal time and real-world time has been linked to heart disease, obesity, and depression.  This all amounts to a case — not an absolute case, but a compelling one nonetheless — that we should listen to our bodies and not the alarm clocks. "

Abusers Do This Thing, Except When They Do The Opposite

I just read a thing that said "abusers are good at making your anger seem worse than their abuse."  And I thought "yes! They do!"

But then I thought a little more about my last abusive ex.  See, he would do this thing, where he would try to control his partners' behaviour, and they would do a thing that resisted that control, and then he would get angry at their resistance and call it "abuse" and accuse them of hurting him, of not caring about how their actions affected him, of destroying the relationship, etc.

If anyone accused him of "overreacting" or of blowing things out of proportion or of doing anything at all that was "too much", he threw it right back at them that they weren't allowing him to have his feelings (because all feelings are "valid", yo).  He was VERY good at making it seem as though his victims were making his anger seem worse than the so-called "abuse" his victims were doing to him when they resisted his control of them.

I still remember the day one of them called me up in tears, hyperventilating, totally freaking out because she may or may not have broken some fucking rule they had, depending on how the rule was interpreted, and she was upset not because of what he might do in retaliation for breaking the rules, but because she thought she was a horrible, thoughtless person for 1) breaking the rule and 2) not knowing if the rule had been broken because she didn't get clarification on this point.

I made a blog post a while back where I used actual quotes from one of our email exchanges post-breakup where I told him that I did not want him to contact me again except to apologize for one very specific act he had done during the breakup, and he responded quite indignantly about how he didn't "consent" to me placing "limitations" on the conditions under which he was allowed to speak to me.

Dude, that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

 

So, I realized that it's not so much that abusers do particular things like making your anger seem worse than their abuse.  Because someone skilled in abusive tactics will make it seem like YOU are making THEIR anger seem worse than YOUR "abuse" of them, when in reality, their anger is part of the abuse.

And also, as I've learned, we all have abusive tactics that we have learned just through exposure to it throughout our lives, from our families and our culture.  So when we are mistreated, we ALL reach into our own bags of tricks, and some of the responses we pull out can be pretty shitty too.

So sometimes (in my experience, basically all the time), it can be really difficult to tell who is the abuser and who is the victim, even if you apply the axioms "follow the lines of power and see who has the locus of control" and "the one who is trying to run away is probably not the abuser".  In this same relationship example, we all thought that the victim was the abuser at first because she was the one doing what seemed like controlling things.  You see, he was also deeply fearful of losing the relationship.  Abusers are in real pain and feeling real fear.  What makes them abusers is how they deal with that pain and fear.

So, to prevent her from ever getting up the courage to leave him, he would play on her fear of losing the family group, which would fuck her shit up, thinking that she could lose everything at any given moment, and it would trigger her anxiety about being "left out".  To relieve her feelings of being left out, she would request that no sex happen among anyone unless the door was left open in an implicit invitation for her to join, even if she didn't want to join.

To me, that seemed incredibly controlling.  But he was desperately afraid of losing his relationship with her and he desperately needed to make this a whole group thing with no individuality or independent-ness, so he made it seem like he was "acquiescing" to her demand to control the sex he was allowed to have, even though "everyone subsumes their identity into the group relationship and we are all one Borg, resistance is futile" was exactly what he was going for.

I'll be honest - the reason why I had a hard time believing that she was being abused is because I had a history with her as a metamour through another partner, and she tried to control our relationship then too.  So it seemed totally in character to me that she was being controlling, even though it was contrary to every value she *spoke* for.

But her controlling behaviour was a *reaction* to HIS controlling behaviour, just as it was the last time (she had just gotten out of a relationship with an abusive metamour and used controlling tactics as a survival technique).  Most of us develop toxic coping mechanisms to prolonged exposure to abuse.  He provoked it by preying on her fear of being alone, left out, of losing the family group.  And then, when things escalated to a level where I could more clearly see who was pushing whom, he strung her along by making it seem as though she were the one dismissing his anger to make it seem worse than her "abuse" of him.

So, it's not that abusers do any particular thing or particular tactic.  It's that abusers flip the script.  They take whatever tools you give them, whatever scripts that society gives them, whatever is available, and they flip it to make it seem like their victim is the "bad guy".  Some abusers are sophisticated about it and it can be really hard to tell that this is what they're doing.  Others, like a particular villain in a TV show I'm watching right now, are really fucking obvious about it (#ProTip - if someone says "the whole world is against you / doesn't believe in you / is holding you back, and I'm the only one who accepts you / believes in you / trusts you / encourages you / is not holding you back", then they're being abusive, just FYI).

This is why I am not a fan of Non-Violent Communication.  It's a ridiculously easy tool to convert into an abusive weapon, and we ALL have abusive tendencies - yes, even you, dear reader, you are not above this shit - so I've never seen NVC used in a healthy way.

And I don't need anyone to tell me "but I use it all the time!" 1)  I'm sure there is someone out there somewhere for whom it has never been warped into a tool of abuse - statistics guarantees that this must be true somewhere - and the fact that someone like this exists is not the point; and 2) I just got done pointing out that we all have abusive tendencies, so in this rant, I am dubious of anyone's claim that they have never misused a communication tool because I believe we all have, either knowingly or unknowingly, simply because we are all fucked up and I'm not letting you off the hook for this.

I'm digressing.  The point is not NVC specifically.  The point is that abusers flip the script.  The point is for them to make you question your reality, to question "who is the bad guy here?" and to come up with the wrong answer.  And they will use whatever script they have access to in order to flip it.

So, an abuser may make your anger at them seem worse than their abuse of you.  But they may also make it seem as though YOU are making their anger at you seem worse than your resistance to their control of you.  Sometimes anger is the correct and necessary reaction.  When someone is trying to control you, your anger is appropriate.  Anger is my primary defense mechanism, so let me tell you how hard it is for me to admit this next part...  But sometimes anger is also a weapon, and you are totally correct to resist their anger at you, because their anger *is part of their abuse* and their efforts to make it seem like you're the one minimizing their anger *is part of the abuse*.

And I don't have an answer for you.  I don't have a checklist for you.  I don't have a listicle for how to make it easier to tell which is which.  We can follow the lines of power (if they control your income, if they are your superior or supervisor in business, if they own the place where you live, if they influence who your friends are, etc.) and we can try to tease out who is running away and who is doing the chasing.

But those have limitations.  Many abuse victims do not try to run away for a long time.  Many of them are only *capable* of being abused because they're desperate to hold onto this relationship so they submit to the abuse out of fear.  Or out of grooming - where they get the victim to submit to a small violation, and then the next larger violation is excused because it's so close to the first one the victim let through, and how can you let one go and not the other, you hypocrite?

And many people gain power over a romantic partner in ways that are invisible to outsiders.  How many of you ask your friends the details of their economic situation?  How many of you know who controls the income?  When romantic partners are business partners, can you really tell, from the outside, that a division of labor based on skills doesn't have an element of power built in, such as one person controlling the money?

 How many of you have witnessed those private conversations where one person steered another away from building intimate friendships with people the first person didn't approve of, and they did so subtly, without overt threats?

How many of you can *really* tell the difference, from the outside, between "that person makes me uncomfortable, so if you are friends with them, I will have to not be around them, but it's totally without expectation or obligation and your choice to be friends with them is OK with me" vs. "that person makes me uncomfortable, so if you are friends with them, I will have to not be around them, but it's totally without expectation or obligation and your choice to be friends with them is OK with me, except I know how desperate you are to please me so that even mentioning this will make you choose the option I prefer even though I have said it was OK to choose the other option because we both know it's not really OK to choose the other option"?

In fact, how many of you can really tell the difference between those two things even from the inside, when you're right in the middle of it?  From either side?  The human brain is not logical or rational, it is a justification engine.  We are very good at justifying all kinds of things to ourselves and others.

And abusers are particularly good at this.  Which means that, since our brains are optimized for it, we are all capable of abuse.  Abusers flip the script - whichever script we have, an abuser will turn it around to justify their control of their victim.  And even they might not realize that they're doing this, because of that justification engine thing.

But they will take whatever is handed to them and use it to control.  If that means they use your desire to seem "fair" and "impartial", if that means they use the "all feelings are valid" principle, if that means they ride the coattails of the #MeToo movement, if that means they flip the gender script, if that means they *use* the gender script, if that means they use social justice language like my ex, if that means they use their social capital, if that means they use your good faith - whatever it means for them, that's what they'll do to come out looking like the "good guy", or if they can manage it, like the "victim" themselves.

Abusers flip the script.  Even if they have to use "flipping the script" to flip the script, as long as it makes you question who is the abuser and who is the victim, they're doing it right.

Are Older Women Dominant Or Submissive?

www.quora.com/Are-older-women-dominant-or-submissive/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Are older women dominant or submissive?

A. Hmm, let me check the handbook…

According to the owner’s manual, the models of women tend to go by decades. So, women born between 1945 and 1954 have a dominant version of their OS (they were teenagers in the ’60s - you didn’t think the sexual revolution happened by accident did you?), and then 1955–1964 had the submissive OS installed (swingers in the ’70s = more docile females), then we went back to the dominant OS for those born 1965–1974 (think of the powerful Business Woman in the ‘80s), etc.

So whether or not “older” women are dominant or submissive depends on relative oldness to whom?

And then there are jailbreak hacks that those skilled enough with technology can install to switch the default operating system in a given woman to make her more or less dominant, depending on whatever default OS she came with. Because, unlike women who were all designed to be identical in their respective cohorts, men are actually individual, autonomous beings, and some of them had different preferences for their women, so they figured out how to hack the models they ended up with to get something a little more personalized to their tastes and preferences.

Oh, and then you also have to take into account the regional formatting! Different cultures tended to prefer one variation of the OS over others, so not everyone switched back and forth like the US did. China, for instance, seems to keep all their women models in the submissive OS all the time and they strictly regulate them to keep them from exerting any individuality whatsoever.

That’s why a lot of US men seem to prefer to obtain their women from Asia - they can be guaranteed to get the same model no matter what, unlike US versions which tend to have more variation in the features offered, thanks to unfettered competition that comes with capitalism.

So, make sure you check the born-on date and the region of the woman you are considering purchasing, to make sure she has the OS you really want. You wouldn’t want to accidentally end up with a model that has a dominant OS, for example, when you thought you were purchasing one with a submissive OS.

You also don’t want to mistakenly treat a woman like an individual human being, who has thoughts and preferences of her own and has a complex, nuanced, rich personality with a completely unique history.  Now THAT would be absurd!

---

[EDIT: In case this isn't clear, this entire post is sarcasm, intending to point out the fallaciousness of the generalization and the general tendency of too many people to not see women as individual human beings, but rather as one collective group for whom, if you can just find the right formula, you can "figure out", but without that magical Unified Theory Of Women, remain this mysterious species who do random and unpredictable things for unknowable reasons.

"Older women" are not all of anything, except "older" (although, older than *what* is unclear since the questioner did not specify).  Even trying to do a legitimate cohort study on "older" women, we couldn't make any generalizations because this doesn't specify or take into account ethnicity, country of origin, religious background, political affiliation, personality type, economic status, or even account for the generational differences of everyone who is "older" (for instance, Gen X and Boomers and the Silent Generation are all older than Millennials and each of those 3 cohorts have their own trends that make them different from each other, as I tried to point out in my sarcastic response).

And on top of all of this bad generalization of lumping all women into a single class, the criteria being studied is all lumped together into a false dichotomy as well, completely ignoring the complexity of BDSM trends and preferences in individuals.

So I am being sarcastic, women, even "older" women, are not either/or of anything, and trying to treat this question with any degree of seriousness like discussing studies of women and kink completely miss the point of the sarcasm, which is that the question is flawed from so many different angles that a real discussion on women and kink can't even begin to address the underlying premises and biases going on with the question.


"Can you answer the question?"
"No, it is a trick question."
"WHY is it a trick question?"
"Cause Chevy didn't make a 327 in '55. The 327 didn't come out til '62. And it wasn't offered in the Bellaire with the 4-barrel carburetor til '64. However, in 1964 the correct ignition timing would be 4 degrees before top dead center."]

What If You And Your Best Friend Like The Same Person?

www.quora.com/What-should-I-do-if-my-best-friend-and-I-like-the-same-guy/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What would you do when you and your best friend like the same person?

A. The same thing that I do when anyone and I like the same person - find out what the other person wants.  Their input is kinda important here, and really the deciding factor.  If the other person likes us both, then we both date him.  If he only likes one of us, then he dates one of us.  If he isn’t interested in either of us, then neither of us date him.

His consent makes any potential conflict pretty much irrelevant.  It doesn’t matter how much I like someone, they have to want to be with me in order for me to be with them.  If they don’t want to be with me, then no amount of my feelings for them will change that fact (short of overriding their agency).  His relationships with other people are not my business to control or dictate.  He can have relationships with whomever he wants and manage them however he wants.

If what he wants or how he does the things that he does conflicts with my value system, resulting in a loss of respect for him, then I can choose to remove myself from the situation.  If what he wants or how he does the things that he does infringes or imposes (negatively) in any way on the well-being of my body, mind, emotions, finances, or anything else that belongs to me, I can choose to remove myself from the situation.

But him just liking someone else?  Him dating someone else?  Him being romantic or sexual with someone else?  None of that has anything to do with me, so if I and my best friend happen to like the same guy, well, there’s nothing TO be done about that.  I do what I do with the people who consent to doing those things with me, my friends do what they do with the people who consent to doing those things with them.

It’s like asking me “what do you do when you and your friend both like the same restaurant?”  Uh, we both eat there whenever we feel like eating there (sometimes together, most of the time apart) as long as the restaurant is open and catering to our business.  Whether my friend likes that restaurant or not has nothing to do with what I do about liking the restaurant, except if my friend doesn’t like it, I probably won’t invite them to eat there with me.

I actually find that a lot of my friends’ exes or current partners make good dating partners for me too.  Not always, but often.  As I like to say, polyamorous people come with references!  If my friend likes someone, then at the very least, he’s probably a pretty decent human being, and then I get the bonus of having metamours that I already know I like and get along with.

Of course, we don’t always have the same taste in partners.  I’m straight, for instance, and most of my friends are bi or pan.  And just because someone is a decent human being, it doesn’t necessarily translate to romantic or sexual interest.  A lot of my friends’ other partners are great people to be around, but I’m not interested in dating them.  That’s OK too.

The point is, who my friends are interested in is irrelevant to how I handle being interested in someone myself.  The person I’m interested in has the deciding vote in what happens there - without his consent, it’s a non-starter.  With his consent, we can negotiate the kind of relationship we want to have with each other, and whether anyone else is interested in him has fuck-all to do with what he and I negotiate between ourselves.  That’s between them.

What Is The Benefit To Learning Dance?

www.quora.com/Why-should-you-learn-ballroom-dance-or-any-dance-and-is-there-any-benefit/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Why should you learn ballroom dance or any dance and is there any benefit?

A.

• Dance is a great form of exercise that includes both cardio and flexibility work.
   
• Dance is a great form of social activity to meet new people and build friendships and community.
   
• Social partner dancing has been shown to decrease or relieve the symptoms of some forms of dementia and to also reduce the onset of dementia (https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcseriesblog/2016/04/04/keep-dancing-turns-good-brain/).
   
• Partner dancing increases your awareness of the space you take up and your effect on those around you, so it can help build empathy skills.
   
• Partner dancing improves non-verbal communication skills, which help in other areas of life such as romantic relationships, work relationships, familial relationships, customer service, etc.  (I teach a workshop where I teach non-dancers certain dance exercises that will teach them non-verbal communication skills to improve relationship communication with no dancing even required!)
   
• Social dancing offers clear guidelines for social etiquette, that can help improve self-confidence or relieve social anxiety, and can offer a framework for social etiquette in other contexts.
   
• Social dancing builds self-esteem as skill improves and as the dancer practices the social etiquette of asking for dances and dealing with rejection.  It builds emotional resiliency.
   
• Dance brings awareness to the physical body, which can help with self-esteem, and with awareness of the body that can lead to better detection of problems and better self-care.
   
• Dancing can be a safe outlet for physically expressing and processing strong emotion.
   
• A regular dance regime or schedule can provide a sense of structure while combining physical activity and artistic or creative expression, all of which are extremely valuable tools for children and young adults for building and maintaining healthy self-esteem and productive patterns that can be applied in other areas of life, and for people in any life stage who may be experiencing emotional upheaval, loss, change, or feeling unsettled or adrift through changing life circumstances, or who just might need or want an anchor or a steady point in their life.
   
• Partner dance is also great for mitigating the effects of touch-starvation, which a lot of people, straight men in particular, are brought up with very few outlets for non-sexual touch once we reach adulthood. This is a wonderful way to get some of the physical touch that we seem to need as human beings.

I Challenge All The Men To Do This Core Strength Challenge

My challenge to all the men out there: Take this workout course:

Watch on YouTube

I am not affiliated with this course or this company in any way. But as a dancer, I can recognize the value of an exercise routine built around the core strengthening exercise that's being used as the base exercise in this course. Here's the thing - men in general don't do a lot of exercises unless they are motivated to build muscle; men in general do not dance; men in general do not know how to do isolation movements; men in general do not work on their flexibility; men in general do not know how to loosen their hip muscles and end up being very rigid, causing joint pain later in life.

The reason why men in general don't do these things is because they have become associated with women and femininity. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had where men think that they all walk differently than women because of biology. While it's true that there are some "average" differences between the genders such as pelvic size and placement, our walks are largely learned, not inherited.

Here's something that a lot of my partners have been shocked to learn when the subject came up - you know that walk, the one on the runways and the one that women just do that men supposedly find so sexy? That walk was learned. We *learned* how to do it. We practiced it. Which is why some of us women do that walk and others don't - they didn't practice it. That is not a "natural" walk. It's what we learned how to do because it was prioritized. When I was a child, I wanted to be a model, so I spent hours walking up and down the hall practicing this walk.  Men can do that walk too. But, like us, men have to *learn* how to do it.

A friend posted a male belly dancer video to my timeline - that's another thing that "men" seem to think that they just can't do, that it's inherently a female thing, that their bodies are just not meant to do that. And, like the walk, that's bullshit - people who practice it can do it and people who don't practice it can't. Your individual ability to do those movements is a combination of your *individual* biology (not your gender biology) and all the physical choices you have made over your entire life, conscious or otherwise, that led to today. If you did not spend your life practicing isolation movements, you will have difficulty moving like a belly dancer.

But it's never too late to start trying.

Watch on YouTube

Learning this particular motion, learning how to isolate your muscle groups, building core strength, improving your cardio, and improving rhythm are also all incredibly helpful techniques for improving your skill in sex.  Just FYI.  I don't care how good you think you are in bed, you can always get better.  And as a straight woman who has sex with men, let me tell you - your lack of ability to isolate your core muscle groups have been noticed and is holding you back.

So, I challenge every man on my friend's list to take this course.  Not for weight loss, although you will probably experience some of that.  But because you have all been told a pack of lies about who you are as people that has led to a physiology that is less flexible, less strong, with less mobility and poorer health FOR NO FUCKING GOOD REASON.

Dance, core strength, muscle isolation, flexibility, and a robust cardiovascular system are about as masculine as it gets.  They're about strength.  They're about confidence.  They're about control.  They're about power.  And they're attractive to a lot of straight women.  That's everything that you've been told that heteromasculinity is about, and yet y'all avoid doing the very things that would accomplish these goals.

I don't even care if you "don't like dancing" or "have two left feet".  You never have to get good at this, and you don't have to come to love it.  I challenge everyone to complete one month-long challenge using this core exercise as its base.  If you like it, great, stick with it and see what else they have to offer.  If you don't, find another exercise to challenge yourself with at the end of the month.