joreth | Entries tagged with gender issues

I was given a compliment that was definitely intended as a compliment and that I'm taking as a compliment and that, even though it includes a comparison, was definitely not intended to insult the person it was comparing, but nevertheless the compliment shouldn't actually need to exist and I'm using as a metaphor for a larger conversation on gender.

I have decided that there is actually a partner dance that I don't like: country swing. There are no patterns for the feet, it's literally a dance all about how fast and how frequently the lead can spin his partner (because gender norms). Now, dance involves the body so a dance style that doesn't focus on memorized step patterns can still be a legitimate dance style. But this is a dance style that is all about sequences of tricks with no concern for steps or musicality and relies on the strength of the lead to make the follow go where she is supposed to go.

And don't get me wrong but the really good country swing dancers do use step patterns and have musicality and the follows do as much work as the leads. But that's not the social dance experience. Usually it's a dude spinning the fuck out of some thin, young woman with no regard to how well it matches the music that's playing or whether she even knows how to do what he's making her do. Brute force will spin her and stop her without dropping her whether she knows what to do or not.

So, there was a guy at the wedding I went to recently who claimed to be able to two-step and swing dance. My sister grabbed him for a two-step and he was all over the place with her - no control, no musicality, just "slow-slow-quick-quick-spin-slow-slow-quick-quick-spin-spin-another spin-slow-slow-quick-quick".

When they sat down, he said that he was really rusty with the two-step and that he was better with swing. I would rather have danced a two-step with him, but since he said he was better at swing, I asked him to swing dance with me. So we got up and did a country swing exactly as described above - spin, spin, spin, who the fuck cares about beats and music?

I was told later that the dance with my sister looked pretty out of control and my mom was worried that he was actually going to hurt my sister, but she was amazed at how well I kept up with him. And I kind of downplayed it because 1) my sister was never as into partner dancing as she was into line dancing; 2) she hasn't danced in a while and I try to keep up with my dancing; and 3) I know exactly what "country swing" is and I know how to handle guys who dance like that.

So I've been feeling a little pleased that I impressed people by dancing with someone who had very little control and making it look like we were less out-of-control than we really were, mainly because *I* kept control of *me*. And it's legitimately not an insult to my sister, because he was the lead, so all problems were his fault. She's not even a poorer dancer than I am, necessarily, he was just that bad of a lead. I am, after all, a better follow than a dancer.

Here's the metaphor part: Too many cishet dudes are allowed to move through life like these country boys move across the dance floor - full tilt, without regard for their surroundings, who is around them, how they impact others on the floor, how out of control they are, dominating their partner, and with no regard to the mood of the music. And I have spent a lifetime developing the coping skills for how to keep my own feet underneath me when one of these guys swoops by and spins me around. And that's a compliment because it is, indeed, a skill that I've worked hard at and I am a good dancer (and "dancer") because of it.

BUT I SHOULD NEVER HAVE NEEDED THAT SKILL IN THE FIRST PLACE.

I should not ever be complimented for how well I can compensate for men's failings and flailings. Because men should not be allowed to stomp all over the floor and through life the way they do. But so many of them do so, that we just gave it its own dance style name and genre and said "yep, that's legit, that's how you do that!"

And we have done the social equivalent of tolerating and accepting men who do that in life.

Country swing is actually a really fun style to both watch and dance, *when done well*. But what *I* (and competition judges) think counts as "done well" and what social dancers think counts as "done well" are two very different things. It is, and should be, a legitimate style. But the way it's executed on a social floor is just fucking dangerous. It may be athletic, but it's not artistic, and it's not considerate. It's performative without being connective.

So don't be one of these country swing dudes. Pay attention to how you move through life, how you impact those around you, the space you take up, whether your partner is (or is able to) contribute equally to your partnership or are you just flinging them around with you, and for fuck's sake at least try to learn something about musicality because musicality is just emotional connection manifest physically. With a little math.

I watch a lot of '70s and '80s sitcom re-runs with feminist characters. Most of the time, that's why I like them. But that was the era of 2nd Wave feminism, which is notoriously sex-negative. So I occasionally have imaginary conversations with these fictional characters defending sex-positivity. This bit popped into my head today after an episode including a porn actress:

We all agree that we should have the right to say "no" and have that respected. But what good is that "right" to say no if we're not allowed to say "yes"?

That "no" is just as restrictive as anything else the patriarchy imposes on us. That "no" doesn't give us any freedom at all. We are still being judged by patriarchal values of sexual objectification. Required to have sex, required to be chaste - it's two sides of the same coin.

I will say "no" when I mean "no" and "yes" when I want to say "yes". And if I want to say "yes" more often than someone else, or less often than someone else, as a warrior for the right of women to own their own bodies, the right to say "yes" should be just as important as the right to say "no".

To be judged as "lesser" than other women because one says "yes" is to buy right into those same patriarchal values that led us to fight for the right to say "no" in the first place. You are still judging me for my sexuality, you are still defining my own boundaries for my body for me, you are still taking away my freedom, my choices, my agency.

You don't have to say "yes" if you don't want to. But I shouldn't have to say "no" if I don't want to. Consent is meaningless if you can't say "no", but the right to withhold consent is meaningless if you can't say "yes".

"But self-respect, blah blah blah."

I respect myself by listening to what my body wants and honoring it, not by allowing men to place their own narrow filter over me, telling me when I am worthy of respect by them (and myself) and what makes me not worthy of respect.

I respect myself when I have sex because I want to, and I respect myself when I don't have sex when I don't want to. I even respect myself when I trade sex for money, at least as much as I respect myself when I trade literally any other labor or experience for money.

It's not the act of sex in exchange for money that makes it disrespectful, it's the commodifying of labor and service to trade for survival that's disrespectful.

I am worthy of respect from myself and others because I exist, and no other reason is necessary. My self-respect is not subject to the whims of other people's values. That wouldn't be SELF respect, then. Certainly, allowing other people to decide what to do with my body against my own desires and interests would not be respecting myself.

www.morethantwo.com/polyprisonersdilemma.html

I wrote a rant a while back about my observation of a gender-based set of tendencies in the poly community. This is basically what I was talking about - People socialized as men have a higher tendency to start out defensively while people socialized as women have a higher tendency to start out cooperatively. But I don't mean that in the emotional sense, because often there is no clear gender line between people who feel *emotionally* cooperative and people who feel *emotionally* defensive.

So, let me expand a bit on what I mean there.

"I tend to see a lot of people in poly relationships who are very uncomfortable with the idea of meeting a lover’s other lovers. This is one of the most common sources of angst I’ve noticed for people who are polyamorous, especially if they’re fairly new to polyamory.

Meeting a lover’s other lover presents a host of opportunity for cooperation or defection. You can reach out to the other person and try to make that person feel welcome; you can be closed up and defensive to that person; you can even be actively hostile to that person. And, of course, your lover’s lover has similar choices."

When it comes to people who think about the idea of metamours, and who feel uncomfortable with the idea of meeting the metamours, I, personally, have not noticed any gender differences. Newbies, generally speaking, feel all kinds of anxiety about meeting metamours - should they or shouldn't they? How should they meet? When? Under what circumstances? Etc.

But when it comes to *actually* meeting, I've observed that, in heteronormative relationships (regardless of the gender or orientation of the participants, these are relationships that fall into heteronormative traits, habits, patterns, can take advantage of hetero privileges, etc.), it usually falls to the women to making it happen. Women are the ones encouraging the men to meet each other, and women are the ones voluntarily reaching out to other women to meet (or ask in the forums how to go about doing so).

Not without trepidation, not without playing dominance games, not without anxiety. But actually *doing* the emotional labor in poly relationships, I see more women doing more of the work.

In my observations, men have a tendency to just wait around until their women partners instigate or organize some kind of event that will bring the men into proximity with each other. Where they might bother to chat, if they happen to be near enough to hear each other, but unless they find some kind of common interest that sparks curiosity and enthusiasm, men have a tendency to just leave it at that and not put forth much effort to go uphill trying to build connection that takes some effort and doesn't happen spontaneously and easily. And if the men are the pivot points, they just sit back and let the women meet or not meet.

But women as the pivots have a tendency, in my observation, to keep talking and prodding their men partners to meet. They're the ones who schedule the dinner date, or host a party, or set up Skype for the men to meet each other. And if the women are the metamours, they are less likely to wait for their pivot man to insist on meeting and they'll send an email to their women metamours, introducing themselves and arranging a coffee date, or whatever.

These observations are not related to how each person *feels* about meeting metamours and not related to the *strategies* each person employs in meeting the metamours. I've seen people of all genders play out dominance games or pull rank or be passive aggressive, and I've seen people of all genders have excellent communication skills and get along well with metamours.

It's the *labor* that's involved that I had noticed often falls along gender lines and that's what I was ranting about in that post. And it has been my observation and experience that, when the women do all this early emotional labor involved in reaching out and establishing contact, then shit gets done because the groundwork has been laid.

Sometimes the "shit" that's getting done is productive. The women build friendships and a level of trust that enables them to weather turbulence in relationships because they built a foundation to have faith that trouble will eventually be worked out. That foundation gives them a sense of resiliency that makes the metamour relationships more likely to be successful and closer-knit.

And sometimes the "shit" that's getting done is not productive, including hierarchical primaries laying foundations for rank-pulling and place-setting and generally undermining the relationship between their partner and metamour. This is when the traps for hierarchy are set for future snapping shut on the poor secondaries and when cuckoos get the eggs in place to push out of the nest.

My point was that "shit gets done" because they start the work early.

But when men, generally speaking, just kind of passively allow their women partners to take the lead, they end up not having these sorts of foundations with their metamours. And then if a conflict ends up happening (which it doesn't always, but if it does), then the men don't have that connection, that trust that they will find a solution together through collaboration. They see themselves as on an island with their woman partner, who sometimes sails over to another island and stuff just kinda happens over there, and then she comes back. They don't see themselves as really *part* of their metamours.

And when men passively allow their women partners to do all the emotional labor in facilitating their own metamour relationships, that adds to the anxiety and stress and *effort* of the women maintaining those metamour relationships. Regardless of whether they all start out cooperating or not, the women metamours in this scenario are doing it all on their own while the men pivots just sit back and let them hash things out. The women carry the burden of maintaining both their romantic relationships and the metamour networks.

I generally have good metamour relationships. Not without their bumps, but pretty healthy and collaborative. But I'm an introvert and managing a lot of emotional relationships is fucking *exhausting*. It would be nice to have a little help facilitating, especially in the beginning when I don't know my metamour very well and we haven't yet found our common paths.

Add to that, the effort I have to put in to maintain *other people's* metamour relationships, because without me poking and prodding, none of my men partners have ever reached out on their own to meet each other.

I take that back - Sterling often reached out without me prodding him. He would often ask me if it was OK to contact one of my other partners and he would reach out to them. But he's the most social extrovert I've ever dated and has none of the social anxiety or concern that people might find his reaching out to be intrusive.

I've dated other extroverts before (and, in fact, I prefer to date extroverts to compensate for my own introversion), but they were either too concerned with pushing themselves on people, they gave up after a lack of reciprocation, or they were simply too passive and content to spend their energy on their own friends and partners.

And I see this *all the time* in other people's relationships too. Once I started seeing the gender split, I couldn't unsee it and it makes me very frustrated at how poor men's communication and collaboration skills are, especially initiating.

But all of that is a side-step to the point of this link. This link is focusing more on the things that people actually *do* to or for their metamours, not the more abstract application of, basically, using the cooperation / defection as a filter through which I see emotional labor.

"In a very literal sense, you make the social environment you live in. People take their cues from you. Even in a world of people who adopt a hostile, defecting strategy, it is possible to do well. On your first move, cooperate. Open yourself. Invite this other person into your life. Only if it is not reciprocated—only then do you become defensive, and stay that way only for as long as the other person is defensive."

"It turns out that even in complex situations, the simplest strategies tend to work the best. In fact, consistently, the programs that were most successful were nice, meaning they never defected before the opponent; retaliating, meaning they would defect if the opponent did, but only to the extent that the opponent did; forgiving, meaning they cooperated and forgave if the opposing program stopped defecting; and non-envious, meaning they did not attempt to score greater gains than the other program."

The bottom line is to start out being nice to someone, start out hopeful and optimistic and see your metamour as an opportunity instead of a threat. If you do that, they are more likely to do it in return. Couples keep asking how to get their potential "thirds" and "secondaries" to "respect" the primary relationship? The only way to do that is to start out by respecting your secondary and their other relationships.

You *have* to give first. But unicorn hunters never want to hear that answer. They *think* that they *are* respecting their secondaries, but the very act of wondering how to *make* someone "respect" a preexisting relationship is an act of disrespecting the other person. You get respect for giving it.

And then, you have to let them fuck up at least once first. That's the Tit For Two Tats strategy that this link mentions at the end. Start out being nice. Then, when they fuck up, assume good intentions and continue being nice. Only after they show a pattern of operating in bad faith do you start reacting defensively, not before.

Intimate relationships are not a medieval war game. If you try to put up battlements first to "protect the primary relationship" from this interloper that you're hoping will "respect" you, you will lose.

War strategies are basically methods for how powerful people fight each other to stalemates - both sides shore up their own walls first and then warily eye each other over the spikes in the walls and promise to cooperate as little as they can possibly get away with before the opposing side decides to retaliate. It's a game of how much can you optimize your own wins before you lose them in a battle when your opponent gets pissed off at your optimization.

Intimate relationships are the opposite. It's a trust fall. You have to open yourself up to vulnerability and you have to be willing to be hurt for the potential greater payoff in the future. Because you WILL be hurt. Your partners and your metamours will fuck up and your tender side will be exposed. That's the nature of the relationship.

But the goal here isn't to optimize our own gains *in spite* of an opposing force. The goal here is to build a cooperative structure where sometimes one side loses a little but sometimes the other side looses a little too and it all balances out in the end where both sides come out further ahead together than they would have alone. This takes them out of opposing sides and puts everyone on the same side.

The goal is to get out of the Prisoner's Dilemma entirely and build up systems where cooperation is always in everyone's best interest, and voluntarily taking turns conceding is in everyone's best interest because it'll payoff in the next round, and everyone is on the same team.

www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/duck-sex-and-the-patriarchy

"Freedom of choice, in other words, matters to animals; even if they lack the capacity to conceptualize it, there is an evolutionary difference between having what they want and not having it. Unfortunately for female ducks, though, evolving complex vaginal structures doesn’t solve the scourge of sexual violence; it exacerbates it. Each advance results in males with longer, spikier penises, and the coevolutionary arms race continues."

"Contemporary anti-feminists often portray men as victims of the coercive social control of women, even as they actively organize to diminish women’s sexual autonomy by impeding their access to health care, contraception, and abortion. But this view is a grotesque distortion. Like convoluted duck vaginas, feminism is about autonomy, not power over men. Although one is genetic and the other is cultural, the asymmetry in ducks between the male push for power and the female push for choice is mirrored in the ideologies of patriarchy and feminism."

" By evolving to regard violent, antisocial maleness as unsexy, females may have instigated the evolution of many elements critical to our biology, including big brains, language, and even our capacity for self-awareness and reflection."

"When sexism becomes unacceptably antisocial and hopelessly unsexy, then patriarchy may finally give up its remaining weapons."

Every time some man asks why I'm wearing my iPod (or now my phone) on my arm, I cock my head to the side and say in a blatant "this should be obvious, why are you even asking?" tone:

"No pockets," or "pockets are too small."

It's my way of constantly reminding people of casual and everyday sexism.

Women never ask me why I'm wearing it on my arm. They sometimes ask me if it's a health monitor (as do some men), but they always say what a good idea it is if they bother to say anything at all (except my mother, who sometimes wishes I wouldn't wear it when I'm dressed up, which is exactly the time I need it most because - no pockets!)

To be fair, about half of the men also think it's a good idea, but every comment about my armband has to be prefaced with a question about why I'm wearing it in the first place. These men simply can't come up with the answer on their own. Women know why I wear it on my arm. That men don't is a symptom of how habitual it is for men to not consider what it's like to exist as someone other than them.

Who asks me about my armband is literally privilege in action. That's what privilege is like - small, everyday, relatively unimportant stuff that some people never have to think about and others of us have to spend time, energy, or money to compensate for. In order to ask about my armband, specifically why I'm wearing it, one has to be able to look at me, recognize my attire enough to identify the armband, and never have had the necessity to try and find a place to carry one's phone because a convenient phone-carrying place was built in to literally every possible outfit that one has ever purchased (which itself is often purchased without much thought other than price and approximate fit).

Imagine going through life never once needing to consider how you might need to carry the 3 most important things to carry around on a daily basis - keys, wallet, phone. And never realizing that only some people never have that consideration.

It should be obvious why I wear my device on my arm - because I fucking want to and it's more convenient or comfortable or useful than alternatives, otherwise I would wear it somewhere else. This shouldn't ever have to be asked.

"Geez, what's the big deal? So what if he wants to open your door or pay for dinner? It's such a minor thing to be making a fuss over, just let him do it!"

You're right, this one instance *is* a minor thing. So YOU shouldn't be making it into a big thing if she insists on not doing it. If it's just a "little thing", then don't get all pissy when she doesn't want you to do it for her. It's just a "minor" thing, right? So it shouldn't bother you at all if she doesn't want it.

Oh, right, because it's not a fucking "minor" thing, it's a big fucking deal to both of you. That's why there's an argument in the first place. It's a symptom of much, MUCH bigger things, only we're the only ones willing to admit that these things mean more than they seem on the surface.

You're in denial. If it's not a "big deal", then shut up and let her get her own damn door or pay for her own damn meal. It should be no skin off your nose to let her have her way if she cares more about this "minor thing" than you do. Or can't your fragile ego handle her "minor" difference of opinion?

"Ladies first!"

That's right, taking point is the most dangerous position that requires the keenest senses for detecting threats and protecting everyone behind them. I shall scan the room to determine it's safety and security so that you can feel safe before you enter an unknown area. Thank you for acknowledging that you need a woman to lead and protect you.

#OrMaybeItCanJustBeWhomeverIsMostConvenientToEnterFirstBasedOnDoorMechanics #LetsNotPretendThisIsReallyChivalryBecauseYouClearlyHaveNotThoughtThisOut #ThisIsPureBlindAdherenceToSocialProgrammingOnYourPart

Found a couple of new identity words that I like, but I don't think they feel right on me. (All words written in the feminized form because the post is referencing a feminist movement regarding the labels).

I posted back on Cinco de Mayo the differences between certain labels for people of Mexican descent, and how I preferred "chicana" over "Latina", as a reclaimed, formerly derogatory word that emphasizes the dual nature of being of mixed ethnicity and living in the US as well as the association with activism.

A few years ago I learned about "chingona" and "maldita". As far as I can tell, "chingona" derives from the verb "chingar", which is "to fuck" and is considered vulgar - a swear word. But more than just "a fucker", a "chingona" is colloquial for basically "a fucking badass" and is also a derogatory slur that some are attempting to reclaim, particularly the feminine version that I'm referencing in this post.

A "maldita" is a step beyond "fucking badass", somehow. The literal translation is "damned" or "cursed" or "accursed", but the colloquial use as an identity label is like a chingona on steroids? They are kinda like Spanish words for "thug", with similar classist and racist undertones and a similar embracing of the term by some.

These are words that I would have vehemently rejected when I was a teen, back when I also rejected "chicana" because of the class implications of "gangbanger", "thug", "good for nothing", "low class", etc. I wasn't one of *those* Mexican-Americans. I spoke proper English and I had a proper education and I lived in the suburbs and I eschewed gang violence and tattoos (and used words like "eschewed").

I live very far from the gang violence I grew up on the peripheries of back in the '80s today. Now I live in poverty, often in a house that would have fit right in with the ghettos I turned my nose up at. I still eschew gang violence and I still speak with a "blank" American accent (slipping into a Southern drawl every now and then).

But many people have been blurring the lines between "thug" and "activist", and many of them have been reclaiming words that are normally used to condemn and dismiss them. Like "chicana". I feel that my temporal distance from the California gangs of the '80s and my observations of how civil unrest is sometimes deliberately masked by oppressors to resemble general "thuggery" has given me a new perspective and newfound respect for the title "chicana".

With my memories of the gangs and my distance from my Spanish-speaking culture, I don't feel that I can claim "maldita" and "chingona" for myself, nor that I fully understand all the subtle cultural nuances of the terms. But I like that I learned about them and I like that they exist. I think they'll be rolling around in the back of my mind for a while.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170417034346/https://soyxingona.com/about-me/what-is-a-xingona// - "A Xingona is a woman who is on her game. Basically she has skills that no one else has strived for only by first hand experience. Xingonas aren’t brought down by bias, machismo, prides, and over-rated ego. She gets shit done because she can and she will."

https://alvaradofrazier.com/2012/07/14/frida-kahlo-chingona-artist - "The term 'Chingona' is a Spanglish term, slang, for a bad ass, wise woman, powerful, individualist, self-activated, a woman who lives a life for their own approval, self-empowered, a strong woman..."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-i-define-my-chingona-fire_b_5887de69e4b0a53ed60c6a35 - "Chingona: noun. 1. a Spanish slang term meaning 'bad ass woman'. Although the word 'chingona' is a Spanish term, it is not limited to Latinas. A chingona is any woman who chooses to live life on her own terms. PERIOD. She is the scholar AND the hoe. At the same damn time. OR she is neither. The point is: she gets to choose. And whatever choice she makes, is the right one."

Reminder: Friendship is not the consolation prize, nor is it the stepping stone - the landing pad where you wait in the queue for your turn at a romantic relationship.

Friendship is the goal.

If you approach your relationships from the perspective that you will enjoy it in whatever form it takes *including platonic friendship* and that is your end-goal, then maybe, sometimes, occasionally, it might turn into a romantic relationship as a *consequence* of being a decent fucking person that they enjoy being around.

However, if you approach your relationships authentically instead of as tools to get you the one kind of relationship you think you want, then it won't even matter if it doesn't turn into a romantic relationship because you will have achieved the "right" relationship anyway. So don't try to be friends with someone if you are interested in them romantically and think being friends is the way for them to learn enough about you that they'll eventually return your feelings. If you aren't interested in the friendship for the friendship's sake, just don't be friends.

Because, I'll tell you a little secret here, you aren't their friend if you do this. If they never develop romantic feelings for you in spite of all your effort being their "friend", they're not the one stringing you along. You're the one pulling the bait-and-switch by dangling a friendship in front of them under false pretenses.

If you're thinking "how can I get someone to like me / love me / have sex with me?" and you come up with any sort of answer that includes any variation of "be their friend", you're wrong. Being their "friend" is not how you "get" someone to like you. Being their friend is how you BE THEIR FRIEND. What you "get" out of it is the pleasure of BEING a decent person who someone wants to be friends with.

Don't be friends with someone unless you honestly want their friendship and are fine with that being it, because you're *not* friends with them otherwise anyway.

*sigh* Met a really cute NASA engineer who is also a very good swing dancer, and who has taken it upon himself to learn other styles of partner dance. I knew it would be too much to hope for that he was poly, but he *does* come from an area where another dancer recently came out as poly, so it might not have been *that* big of a fantasy.

Except he's ULTRA Christian.

Reason #46 why I hate living in Florida - unlike other similarly-sized metropolitan areas, the partner dance scene is conservative and religious so I can never hope to find potential dating partners who also know how to dance. At best, I might meet guys who are open to me teaching them some basic dance steps. Which is fine, I enjoy teaching and I enjoy sharing my passion.

But what it usually means in practice is that we end up breaking up before they ever get proficient at dancing and I don't have anyone to challenge *me* to get better; I never get to play the student so I never progress above my current level, which is advanced-beginner or maybe beginning-intermediate.

I have only ever dated one person who is as good (technically, he was better) of a dancer as I am, and we only danced maybe 3 times while dating.

Dancing is such a strong passion of mine that I feel a distinct black hole in my life that I don't have a romantic partner to share it with. I *did* have a couple of partners who were actively working on learning how to dance while we were dating, but for logistical reasons like distance, I never actually got to dance with them and, as I said, I don't have the opportunity to challenge myself.

Of all the things that white men could have decided wasn't "masculine" enough, they had to choose dancing. Y'know, that hobby that has strict gender roles where the man is in control and athletic and gets to hold women in his arms, and requires a good sense of rhythm and is guaranteed to attract the attention of just about every woman in the room? Yeah, that's not "masculine" enough for white dudes, so for generations, we dumped dancing as a culture until most white men are convinced that they can't dance and never developed an interest in it.

Yay fragile white masculinity.

However, in some religious circles, partner dancing is still encouraged. Mormons and that weird "progressive-conservative" southern Christian type still partner dance, so in this backwards superficially-progressive state if I want to dance, it's with people who have a strong religious faith. Which is fine for dancing, but pretty much rules them out as a potential dating pool.

"Orlando is really just a small southern town with delusions of grandeur." ~Joreth Innkeeper

I tell ya, I'm really irritated at men who think they don't act emotionally.

I recall once where I was complaining about someone who emailed me to say that they weren't going to buy anything from my t-shirt shop until I included this one gender combination on my shirts that I had left out when I had come up with like a dozen different combinations, and I said that I was going to refuse to add that combination just because he demanded it and if he wanted that combination he would have to request a custom shirt to purchase like anyone else who wanted something that wasn't already in my shop. My partner to whom I was whining pointed out that I was reacting emotionally, and I said "yup! I am feeling petty so I'm just not gonna" or something to that effect.

I had another relationship once where the entire fucking relationship could be summed up as "he doesn't believe that he reacts according to his emotions and thinks everything he does is perfectly logical and reasonable". OTG he was like the most irrational, illogical, emotion-based person I've ever known, he was just really good at *justification*.

Like the time that he got all freaked out when I started dating someone new. He refused to acknowledge it, but he had been hurt really badly in his first serious relationship (and now that I know more about culturally enforced, misogyny-based abuse, I can see now how he did it to himself, but that's another tale). So every relationship he had after that point was arranged to prevent him from feeling that hurt ever again.

So he refused to tell me that I couldn't date this other guy, which is a good thing. And he refused to *ask* me if I would not date this other guy, which is also a good thing. But he couldn't admit that he was *bothered* by me dating this other guy. Instead, one week, before I and the other guy even decided that we wanted to date, my then-partner counted hours.

So, here's the thing... there was a special, one-time showing of an indie film happening in the new guy's town, which was 2 hours away from me and my then-partner. He organized a group of mutual friends to go and invited me along. My then-boyfriend wanted to go too, which I thought was weird because he never expressed interest in that type of movie before or in that group of friends, but whatever, it was a group outing.

So we get to the movie and the new potential moves into the row of seats. My boyfriend cuts me off to get into the row before me and sits next to the potential, so that I couldn't sit next to him. So I stood there, looking at him oddly until he got up and let me sit between them.

After the movie, everybody hugs everyone goodbye as is common in that group of friends and my potential gives me a kiss on the cheek, which is new for us. The rest of the way home was stony silence until I pushed him into an argument. He got all pissed off at me for inviting him along on this "date", why didn't I just tell him to stay home so that he didn't have to watch his girlfriend making out with another dude?

Keep in mind that this guy was a poly *veteran* and I had 2 other boyfriends at the time, one of whom he has watched flog me and make out with me at parties before.

So no amount of explaining or clarifying that this wasn't a "date", that I didn't "invite" the boyfriend, he invited himself, that we didn't "make out", and that I had already told him that the new potential was a potential and we were dancing around the idea of dating. The argument ended, but never got resolved.

But I tell that story not because of the content of the event, but because the 4-hour round trip car trip that I took *with my then-boyfriend* and the 2 hours spent at the theater *in a group not talking to each other* was "counted" among the hours I had spent with the new potential. Which is bad enough on its own, but then he also *deducted* an entire 24-hour period that I had spent with him that week, which was not scheduled and which cut into my crafting time even though I had a con deadline coming up, but that I offered to spend with him anyway because I could tell he was feeling anxious and left out and I wanted to reassure him.

So, if you add up the 6 hours for the movie and take away the 24 hour spontaneous date, that makes 6 hours for new guy and 4 hours for existing guy, so clearly new guy wins and I'm obviously more interested in him than existing guy and planning to dump him soon. Those are numbers! They're objective fact! There are no emotions here! 6 is clearly bigger than 4! You can't argue against that!!! He's not being irrational or lashing out because of his emotions, he's just plainly stating facts. And facts are facts.

I mean, except for the part that his numbers were completely pulled out of his ass, the point is that he couldn't admit to reacting out of his emotions, which don't necessarily reflect reality. No, he had to retreat into "logic" and "reason", which were anything but logical or reasonable. But to him, he had to have an *argument*, a *case* to win. There was no sharing together, no collaboration, no acknowledgement whatsoever that feelings ARE FUCKING REAL THINGS and affect the way we perceive the world and the way in which we see ourselves.

His problems were way deeper than this example, btw, but I don't want to spend any more time on talking about him because it's not just him. One of the reasons why I always identified more as masculine is because I have such little patience in dealing with emotional conflict. Almost every relationship I've ever been in has ended in *his* tears because he has such overwhelming emotions that he doesn't know what to do with them. But, at the same time, these guys just. refuse. to admit. that they're feeling feelz. So I get stuck in HOURS-long debates, day after day, as they try to "reason" with me about whatever the fuck has them feeling insecure. So after a few years, I just threw my hands up and said "fuck, you guys are so fucking emotional!" and stuck with casual sex for a while because I was so damn tired of managing other people's emotions.

Then, I started getting into poly relationships with guys who supposedly are better at communication and not so attached to toxic masculine standards. Nope, same bullshit. Emotion fucking everywhere, but long "debates" to hide them behind. And Cthulu forbid you point out to them that they're having a fucking feeling! Well, anger is OK to feel, and frustration. But being afraid? Feeling not worthy? Feeling small? Feeling unloved? Shit, even the good emotions - happiness is OK (not to my fucked up ex above, though), but tenderness? Vulnerability? Even elation and non-sexual passion is touchy because if you feel *too much*, that's also not manly. Or something.

But feelings are what give us the motivation to act. They're how we prioritize what we want to act on and how we're going to act. We literally cannot make decisions without feelings. And when some guys get it in their heads to do something that ends up hurting someone else, they get really entrenched in the idea that they've logically, rationally, thought everything through and decided this was the best course of action, when in reality, they *felt* something and reacted and then post hoc logicked up their justifications, which they now are invested in maintaining because to do otherwise would reveal the illusion that they are reacting in emotion.

I'm even willing to concede some things if they say "I want it done this way because I'm feeling emotions" instead of trying to logic me into agreeing with them. I had a freakout with a partner a while back, and I asked him to do something for me that, honestly, is a little unreasonable. But I owned it. I knew when I asked him that it was unreasonable, and I admitted it and I admitted that I asked it of him because I was feeling.

So I also said that it was OK for him to say no, and I had to really mean that. Before even asking, I got comfortable with the possibility that he would say no, and I resigned myself to just dealing with the feelings. If this is how men approached it with me, I might be a little more willing to bend on some things. I might actually be willing to do the unreasonable thing, because this kind of self-awareness and ownership is a good sign that they really will work through the feelings and the unreasonable thing won't be a permanent setting or a pattern of the future.

But, in my experience, that's not what guys do. They have an emotion, they react, and they instantly come up with all kinds of "logical" reasons for taking action. We know that people do this all the time, about, like, everything. There are even studies for it. See? Logic & reason & science, so there! So when I get mad about it, we have to fucking *debate* every goddamn detail like it's a fucking courtroom case that can be won or get thrown out for a technicality, and all of it misses the main point - that he's feeling something.

There are 2 other examples here, both from one guy. In one, he refused to admit that he was afraid and that his fear was clouding his judgement. In the other, he owned up to the fear, but then made his partners responsible for it.

The first example: he was absolutely terrified of HSV. Y'know, the "std" that is the most common and least harmful of all of them? The one you can get from your fucking grandma? But not just from fucking your grandma, just to be clear. So, through a long chain of network metamours, he "discovered" (because he forgot that it was disclosed it to him when he became connected to the relevant part of the network) that some metametamour had HSV, but that all the people between him and that person consistently test non-reactive for it.

So he threw a fucking fit over it and the idea that one of his partners was fluid-bonded to someone who was connected to this other metametamour. He didn't want his partner and her other partner to be fluid-bonded because of his phobia, so he bombarded them with "studies" about how latex barriers reduce the risk of transmission. He retreated into "logic" and "studies" and "science" because he couldn't admit that he was terrified of something that actually posed no threat to him (and I mean that literally, he later tested reactive for HSV himself and had it the whole time, he just didn't know about it because he was asymptomatic). It would be like a big manly man admitting a phobia of mice or something. Instead, he had to scour the internet looking for studies on rabies in mice and people who got sick from exposure to housepets. There's even more outrageousness to the story, but this post is already long.

The other example, he was absolutely terrified of his partners having other partners. And by "terrified", I mean that he described his feelings in terms of someone going through a PTSD trigger episode and he used that to justify the use of PTSD therapy techniques to deal with it.

What I mean is that he admitted that he was having a totally irrational emotional meltdown at the very idea of his wife having a male partner. He owned up to that. But then he *used* that to justify controlling his wife's behaviour. He ranked various sex acts from kissing to PIV, even breaking down different *positions* for sex as their own separate item. Then his wife was not allowed to do each act until he went through a "desensitization" process that included first thinking about them doing the act, then talking about them doing the act, then them doing the act in front of him, and then finally doing the act without him present but her describing it afterwards. Each time resulted in shaking and a literal catatonic state, and only when he could do that stage without shaking and going catatonic could the wife and her boyfriend move to the next stage.

However, as the wife racked up individual sex acts that she was allowed to do with her boyfriend, this guy used that as "proof" that he was "getting over it". See? This is how PTSD is treated! There are papers on it! He's following an approved psychological method! It's science! How can it be wrong?

As I read through Why Does He Do That, on the section on how individual psychotherapy and marriage counseling actually enables abusers because it doesn't attack the root issue and instead solidifies the attention back on the abuser (which is what he wants), this is so clearly what's happening here. He's going through the motions of being a "sensitive" man, of acknowledging his "feelings", but then he pawns off the responsibility for dealing with those feelings onto his female partners and backs up his actions with "logic" and "science" and "reason". And he never reached a point at which he had to stop "desensitizing" himself to things, he just got "desensitized" to specific actions. He still "needed" this massively invasive controlling behaviour because he never stopped feeling his feelings. He just moved various activities in and out of the "trigger" category by making his partner responsible for "triggering" him.

He, like so many others, can't just say that he's having strong feelings and those feelings are making him act like an asshole because it's hard not to act like an asshole when you're feeling strong feels. Just, will guys just fucking start owning up to lashing out in feelings for a change? Maybe then we can start moving onto what to do about those feelings so that you don't act like an asshole in response to them, but right now I'd settle for guys who just own it first.

And you? You right there? The guy who is shaking his head in amazement at all the assholes I've known and feeling just a little bit smug that you don't do this (or you stopped doing this)? Yeah, you probably still do.

Watch on YouTube

Country music has a bad reputation for being pretty misogynistic. The current crop of pop country is especially bad about that, sparking an epidemic of songs about girls in tight shorts who do nothing but sit in the cabs of pickup trucks. But like most genres, country is actually pretty diverse and has a prestigious lineage of feminist music. I've been building a playlist of "feminist" country music and I'm up to more than 50 songs so far.

Unlike Hollywood, however, this list is nuanced and shaded. The movies would have us believe that there are only 2 kinds of feminist representations - the badass Strong Female Character who can kick ass (except when she needs to be rescued by the leading man, of course) and has no other personality, and the man-hating harpy.

But this playlist shows many sides to the "strong woman". It's not all about women beating up their abusive men in retribution, although those songs exist too. In many places, it intersects with classism (although, to be fair, it's still predominantly white, as is the larger country genre, but there is one song in there about interracial relationships at a time when they were still taboo), where sometimes some ideals have to be sacrificed for the more immediate need of survival. Sometimes it's not about triumphing at all, but about existing in a misogynistic society.

There are tales of revenge, of liberation, of parenthood, of singlehood, of being caged, of sexual freedom, of running out of choices, of standing up to authority, of making the system work in her favor, of rejecting her circumstances, of accepting her circumstances and making the best of them, of birth control and abortion and sex, of career options and motherhood choices, of sorrow and pride and love and heartache and loneliness and optimism.

They are all stories of being a woman. This is what feminism looks like.

Watch on YouTube

www.buzzfeed.com/andyneuenschwander/which-female-mythological-monster-are-you

Accurate

You got: Harionago

The Harionago from Japan often appears as a woman with long, beautiful, flowing hair...that has sharp barbs or talons at the ends. As the legend goes, the Harionago laughs at men who pass by on the street, and if the men laugh back, she stabs them with her hair. In short, the Harionago takes no bullshit, and neither do you.

www.racked.com/2017/1/18/14112366/dressing-like-an-adult-sophistication

This is interesting. I thought it was going to rely on slut-shaming in order to make its point, that dressing "sexy" was bad so, ladies, cover it up! But that's not the take that I got. I also thought it was going to blast millennials by comparing youth to age in this specific time. But it didn't do that either. If anything, it picked on Baby Boomers.

I'm letting my hair go grey on its own. When I visited my mother before the pandemic, I had more grey than she did because shes not ready to let the world see her age (although she finally leaned into grey hair with the social trend that came about during lockdowns of more "natural" hair styles). I have nothing against people who color their hair because they like the color. But I'm not going to color mine because I *fear* my color.

This article wasn't about shaming people for their arbitrary fashion choices of today. It wasn't yet another "kids today don't know what's good for them!" It was a more subtle look at the way our culture dismisses older women (with a nod to the effects older men get too) and an appreciative look at the experience and complexity that can come with age, as seen through fashion.

"Before, girls aspired to wear the sexy draped dresses only deemed appropriate for over-30 women who could handle the consequences of showing off their cleavage. Today, if you were to read some women’s magazines at face value, we’re left with nothing to look forward to past the minimum age of renting a car.

The culprit? The baby boomers and the 1960s Youthquake. "

"“By the age of thirty, most women were married, held jobs, or both,” writes Przybyszewski. “And they were presumed able to handle the eroticism embodied in the draped designs that made for the most sophisticated styles.” Draping gathers excess fabric into unique waves that draw attention to the wearer’s womanly curves and the tug of gravity. “It offers a more subtle eroticism than our usual bare fashion,” she writes. "

"The only acceptable way to present old age in public is to completely efface it. "

"But what if we accented our age on purpose to show off our hard-earned sagacity?"

"You could either get botox or celebrate the raw power of gathering decades of knowledge of yourself and the world. I say, let’s assemble a squad of matronly motherfuckers."

https://theestablishment.co/special-snowflake-my-ass-why-identity-labels-matter-3b976b1899a4/

I've been arguing against the "I don't need no stinking labels!" crowd since I first encountered them. Not "needing" a label is a form of privilege. That's wonderful that you, personally, can move through life without ever having your personhood challenged or needing to do work in order to find people who are similar to you or who accept you.

The rest of us use our biologically advanced tool of language to communicate abstract concepts with each other like who we are and how we work to be "seen" by others and to find each other because we're not as visible or as numerous as some people are and we live in worlds that are hostile to differences.

"Labels are crucial for anyone whose experience isn’t positioned as the default in our society."

"That’s what labels do — they empower marginalized people. Through our identities, we build communities, we learn about ourselves, we tell our own stories, we celebrate ourselves in a society that often tells us we shouldn’t, and we come together to stand up to oppressive systems.
Our identity labels hold power."

"Remember those Earth-like planets NASA recently discovered? Well, they’re currently in the process of naming them — because that’s what often happens when you discover something that you didn’t realize existed. Notice I said “you didn’t realize existed,” not “new.” Many of these identities aren’t new — it’s just that people are only now starting to learn about them and name them."

"On a daily basis, people are discriminated against for being something other than white, thin, neurotypical, cisgender, heteroromantic, heterosexual, and whatever else is perceived as “normal” in our society. If you fit into any of these categories, then you experience privilege. Some of your identities are more accepted, or at least more widely known. You don’t have to explain yourself everywhere you go. You don’t have to worry about facing discrimination throughout your day.

That’s privilege."

https://nypost.com/2017/03/20/why-your-schlubby-hubbys-aging-worse-than-you/

Here's a *classic* case of the sheer wrongness of "reverse sexism" in action.

Imagine that - you pressure women to obsess about their appearance for their whole lives, they end up spending 40 years researching and trying out all kinds of different things in an effort to slow the clock, but give guys a "free pass" in looks and 40 years later they have absolutely no skills in taking care of themselves.

Poor babies. All those decades of women "nagging" their husbands to eat better, to exercise, and to finally give up and attempt dieting and working out on their own since their husbands won't deign to participate in "women's stuff" somehow managed to make 2 entire generations of men "surprised" when their aging catches up with them and their wives are still working their asses off (literally in some cases) to maintain their youthful appearance so as to not lose their jobs or social capital.

When I was a kid, my mom was forever on a diet. She tried aerobics, she tried Weight Watchers, she tried just about everything. But not my dad. No, that's what "women" did. It wasn't any kind of overt, malicious sexism, just that dieting, exercising, and looking youthful was for women. Dad only put on sunscreen when mom nagged him to. Dad only ate healthy when mom cooked (they both worked full time so they shared in the cooking). And then, all that healthy cooking was negated by the GIANT bowl of ice cream every night. Dad did absolutely nothing physical other than simply moving his body to the places where the body needed to be.

Ignoring the extreme end, where men and women are both health and appearance conscious - the average, everyday sort of people still have a strong gender divide where women are expected to care about their appearance and men are not. It is considered "sexy" for a man to be "rugged" and to have a weather-worn appearance and way less of a big deal for men to have a pot belly and sagging jeans than women. But after a few decades, that rugged, weather-worn skin looks a lot different from skin that was taken care of for the same decades.

Women are expected to wake up an hour (or two or three!) earlier than men to "put on their face". Then they have to carve out time in the evening to take off that face and care for the skin underneath all that makeup. Throughout the day, they have to reapply their face, plan and create healthy meals, and exercise. Once or more a week they have to find time to do certain other rituals that might not need to happen daily, like facial scrubs, manicures, etc. From the article itself, "[she] gets massages twice a week, regularly practices yoga and undergoes microdermabrasion, vampire facials, injections, IPL therapy and other skin-care treatments".

In addition to the time investment, this all cost a shit-ton of money. I do none of these things because I just. can't. afford it. So it's really *expensive* to be a woman in this culture.

But this article is framed as though women are somehow *fortunate* to have been "taught" all this diet and exercise and skin-care shit. Like we didn't get brutally teased or bullied for not living up to the expectation, or we don't literally get less sleep to keep up appearances, or we don't spend a small fortune of our smaller paychecks to maintain an appearance that could seriously, legitimately, harm our ability to hold down a job if we didn't.

"Robert" actually thinks it's a "luxury" that women he knows don't work as much as men do and can take the time to workout every day! Yeah, because not having your own independent income is SUCH a luxury! Women who lack their own income stream are NEVER tied to their male partners' income in this way and often trapped in relationships or situations because they can't afford to leave! We're just so FORTUNATE to be dependent on people who think everything we do is silly and meaningless ... until they need that information for themselves.

Like the poor dermatology patients, nobody told them to wear sunscreen! Like, in the last 30 years when the sunscreen market exploded with a million different SPF levels and headline-making "news" reports about the damages of sun and skin cancer rates and probably his wife pestering him for a little while to wear sunscreen until he shut her down for "worrying too much" so she just gave up and only applied it to herself, nobody told them to wear sunscreen! Ever!

And not a one of them had parents who got shriveled and shrunken and leathery and who developed diabetes and arthritis and a slowing of the reflexes and mental acuity! Not one of them had a parent that they watched age to teach them that they probably should do some preemptive work on themselves!

This is not a "side benefit" to sexism - ladies, hate your culture making you feel like shit for how you look? Well, at least you will look better than your husbands when you're 60 and they're struggling to sift through all the diet pamphlets they're bringing home from the doctor! You've spent your entire LIFE reading book after website and trying fad after fad! Aren't you so lucky that you didn't have to wait until you were a senior citizen to start that?!

Guys, diet and exercise are not "women's things". They are important topics for your health. If you wait until you already look and feel like shit, it's too late and the best you can hope for is to slow your already rapid demise. But the fact that women are required by society to study and apply this shit from an early age is not an example of "women's privilege".

This is an example of the Patriarchy backfiring on itself. Women are oppressed by social beauty standards so they start much younger on learning about health and appearance. The fact that men don't figure out the importance of health and appearance until their bodies start falling apart is not a *privilege* of being a woman, it's an unintended consequence of a system that oppresses women via the appearance route while letting men off the hook for the same thing.

Stop pissing on women for the amount of time it takes them to get ready, for wearing makeup (or "too much" or the "wrong" style), for being concerned about things like sun damage, their weight, their appearance, their future. 1) Women need to not be pressured to be changing their appearance to suit someone else; 2) Men need to start caring about their own health, of which appearance is an indicator of some things.

Maybe if sunblock came in a steel container that you had to open by pounding a hole in the top with an awl and hammer, and was named something like MANLY GUN OIL BUT FOR YOUR FACE IN THE SUN, guys would wear it instead of waving it away when their wives offer it to them and then show up at the dermatologist's office 30 years later asking "why didn't anyone tell me I needed sunblock?!"

Sunblock - it's so manly and rugged, it can even withstand THE SUN!

Sunblock - it's like waxing your Camero or your Hummer with weather protectant, but instead of your MANLY CAR, it's your own skin!

Sunblock - It's fucking ARMOR, dude!

Exercise regularly and eat everything in moderation and a variety of things, mostly leafy greens. Stay out of the sun and wear sunblock when you can't. Moisturize. No wonder men have a lower lifespan than women - y'all don't take care of yourselves and then blame it on everyone else for not "telling" you about it until later, when women have been talking about health and appearance the whole time but you just didn't want to hear it because that's "women's stuff".

Boo fucking hoo.

www.quora.com/How-would-you-react-if-your-husband-requested-a-threesome-with-the-third-partner-being-a-male-for-cis-couples/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How would you react if your husband requested a threesome with the third partner being a male (for cis couples)?

A. Well, since he knows that’s one of my fetishes and we’ve had quite a few already, it would be more surprising if he *stopped* suggesting MFM threesomes. For us, it would be the same as any other sexual request or suggestion he would make. If it were a newer partner, though, I would be surprised and highly enthusiastic. It’s hard to find straight cismen who have gotten over their homophobia enough to have at least the same amount of willingness for an MFM threesome that they seem to expect women to have for FMF threesomes.

But I suspect from your question that you are implying a suggestion of bisexuality, assuming that the husband in question is requesting an MFM threesome so that *he* could have direct sexual contact with the other man.

Since I tend to date straight cismen (much to my own annoyance), I would be absolutely thrilled if any of my cismen partners were to start exploring bisexuality, especially if they were willing to include me in part of the process, since I have the same thing for hot gay man sex that many straight men have for hot lesbian sex.

Unfortunately for me and my fetishes, two people in a threesome or other group sex encounter do not need to have direct sexual contact during the encounter in order to have the encounter at all. Most of my threesomes tend to involve two people of the same gender teaming up to pleasure (or torture, depending on the kinks involved) the one person of another gender, since I’m straight and my partners tend to be straight.

So having my spouse suggest a threesome with another man, and assuming by the implication of the question that this would include some male bisexuality explorations, I would first ask him what he managed to do in order to unflip that switch in his head that makes him regrettably but undeniably straight, and then I’d start planning with him who and how and when and where.

www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-inappropriate-interaction-you-have-had-at-a-club/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is the most inappropriate interaction you have had at a club?

A. I've had 2 that I can come up with off the top of my head and they happened on the same night.

I was at a regular nightclub with some swing dancers, and towards the end of the night, everyone had left except for 2 guys I know. They were off dancing with some non-dancers they had met. I was approached by a guy who is not a dancer, but who was clearly drunk. He asked me to dance. He said that he saw me dancing earlier and knew that I was with a group of actual dancers, not your typical drunk club girl.

Now, partner dance etiquette is to accept dance requests, dance one song, thank your partner for the dance, and return to your place to dance with someone else. You can dance with them again later, but you don't dance multiple songs in a row because you don't want to monopolize anyone's time. I get that non-dancers are not aware of this, but I still do this even at nightclubs.

We danced one song and he was terrible. He was sloppy drunk and unable to tell that his clumsy manhandling of me was wrenching my shoulder. So I thanked him for the dance as soon as the song ended and I turned and went back to my spot. He followed me, demanding to know why I had left him on the dance floor. I told him about proper dance etiquette, and that he got his dance with me, now I was done. He backed me into a corner to prevent me from leaving and started arguing with me about dancing more with him.

Right about when I was getting ready to pull out my knife to get him to back off, one of my 2 dancer friends left saw what was happening and rushed over to grab my hand and pull me on the floor. The asshole shouted after me something about being a bitch for going to dance with someone else.

A couple of songs later, I got asked to dance by some other drunk guy. I accepted, and he attempted to hold me like he had seen the real dancers holding me, but as usual, he had no clue how to do it right. He held me way too close and his hands were way too low on my back. I started leaning away from him and he started holding me tighter. He tried to spin me in a clumsy spin, and when I came back from the spin, he grabbed me in a full-body embrace and kissed my neck.

I pushed him away and walked off the floor. He grabbed my arm to pull me back, but the other dance guy who was still there saw me and dove between us, putting me into a proper dance hold and whisked me away.

This second asshole tried to cut in, but my dance friend yelled back at him that I was "his" and he wasn't letting me go again. He quietly asked me how "friendly" he could be to make his point, and I gave him permission to be *very* friendly. So he put his hands on my butt and kissed me. Finally the asshole left.

I hate displays of possession, but the behaviour of these two jerks left us only 2 options - allow someone else to "claim" me so that they would respect my rejection, or escalate to violence. I chose the non-violent response first, and fortunately I did not have to fall back on the violent one.

This post was originally commentary I attached to a link to some other article that has since been removed and I don't remember enough of the article to search for an alternate copy of it or a wayback machine archive of it. But I've used this commentary in other discussions since, so I'm archiving it here. If I find a relevant article to attach to this commentary, I will amend this post. I think it might have been the story of the real-life "Lord of the Flies" where a group of boys was shipwrecked but they formed a cooperative culture until they were rescued? But I'm not sure.

I got into this argument with a former metamour once. Apparently she had read some well-written book about the Stanford experiment and waxed philosophical about the terrifying nature of people, and I criticized the experiment for its many flaws which means that we can't draw the conclusion that people are fundamentally evil and corruptible, but that *privileged white boys who want to impress their authority figure who removed their accountability in the first place* are the only ones we can draw that tentative conclusion about.

She also really did not like me saying that.

When people are raised at or near the top of the privilege ladder;

When they are given absolute authority with no accountability and no personal history of education or exposure to the responsibility of authority;

When their own authority figure involves himself personally in the experiment instead of recusing himself;

When *someone believes their victim is consenting* (because the victim is a volunteer who, presumably, can "opt out" at any time, and they don't understand what happens to a victim's ability to consent *even when they originally volunteered*);

When they believe the whole thing is play-acting and *are told to take on a particular role*;

When they come from a society that says one class of people is subhuman and then they are told to play a character in charge of said sub-human who is also supposed to be a "character";

When all these things happen, as they are far more likely to do when someone is raised white, male, and middle-class than in any other demographic, THEN you get this outcome.

When someone is raised with empathy as one of their highest values, and are taught throughout their life about the responsibility that comes along with authority, and that other people are real people too, and that consent can be revoked at any time but certain times are really difficult to retract consent from, and that rehabilitation is both more effective and more humane (and that it's admirable to be humane) than punitive justice systems - you don't get this outcome.

As we know, because we've seen how other cultures handle their justice system. And not everyone devolves like this.

There have been a lot of rumblings in my various communities about the lack of accessibility for basically everyone other than straight white educated cismen. One popular option that a lot of people are choosing to take these days (and I wholeheartedly support them) is to look at the speaker lineup, and if they are the only POC or woman or disabled person or whatever on the lineup, then to decline the invitation to speak.

Another option is to do the same thing as a guest. A third / fourth option is to do the same thing *as* straight, white, cismen and to do it publicly as a way to give up your seat for someone who is not (especially if your "seat" is on a panel or podium discussing accessibility issues).

As I said, I support this choice completely. However, the consequence of all POC and women and disabled people et. al. refusing to participate is that these events *remain* white, straight, male, and able-bodied.

So, if we are a member of an underrepresented demographic, and we get invited (or accepted) to speak at an event where the speaker lineup has less diversity than we'd like, and we have the spoons or the matches or the hit points for it, and our lecture topics work this way, I'd like to propose doing more of this in addition to our boycotts.

Give our lectures and workshops and panels in ways that absolutely do not benefit the people who are not us but that do benefit the people we are trying to make these events more accessible for.

This will not be applicable to everyone who speaks. It's most easily demonstrated with something like hearing loss because accommodating people with hearing difficulties tends to be *inconvenient* for people who can hear, whereas many other forms of accommodation benefit everyone or most people even those who do not *need* the accommodation.

One of the things that I do is, in my Simple Steps workshop, where we take dancing exercises and learn how to apply them as actual communication tools, we deliberately arrange this hands-on workshop so that men have to touch other men. Everyone other than straight cismen is socialized to allow some form of physical contact (often whether it's wanted or not), but straight cismen get to indulge in their homophobia because of the homophobic culture.

So we do not accommodate them. They are forced out of their comfort zone in our workshop.

Obviously, this has limitations. People who have mental health issues regarding physical contact will find our workshop difficult for them. We made a choice to focus on this one issue, and the nature of the workshop is to be hands-on and interactive. But the same goes for the ASL speaker in the original meme here - people who have eyesight problems would have had difficulty in his lecture too.

Another thing that I do is I make many of the events I host to be either child-friendly or low-cost / free (or both) because poverty is one of my pet SJ issues. I am not a fan of children. But I make as many of my events child-friendly because I know how expensive child-care is and how difficult it can be to participate in a community when everything costs money and time and there are children at home. Children running around an event is inconvenient to many adults. But without childcare options, poor people (and mostly women) are left out.

I will be considering some of my more popular lectures and workshops to see if I can adapt them to make them less convenient for various target audiences, to illustrate this point. If there is a way to make your lectures more accommodating to the people you are representing while simultaneously making it less accommodating to the non-representative audience, please consider this act of civil rebellion in lieu of just not participating at all.

If we want separate spaces, that's one thing, but if we're asking for more inclusivity, some of us have to be the ones to barge through the door. Otherwise, the room will remain monochrome because we've all decided that forcing the door open is too much effort.

No photo description available.

Event Organizer: We're sorry, there won't be interpreters at the event where you are presenting about Deaf things, sign language, and interpreting.

Me: No problem, I'll present in ASL without interpretation. Hearing people will have to get by.

EO: Ummm ...

I presented for 25 minutes, and opened with a couple of slides in written English that explained the situation. Told them to stay, so that they could "learn a lesson they didn't come here for." They all did.

People don't seem to understand that everyone has a right to life just not at the expense of someone else's right to choose to not support that life with their own body. We get it when it comes to organ donation, but for some reason not full-body donation.

www.quora.com/Would-you-opt-for-an-abortion-or-put-your-kid-up-for-adoption/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What are the reasons you would chose to abort a child rather than carry it to term and put it up for adoption?

A. I don’t want to be pregnant. As said elsewhere, there shouldn’t need to be any further explanation. I do not want to donate my body to the incubation of another.

Lots of people don’t want to be organ donors either, but nobody is lining up to take away their right to bodily autonomy and force them to donate organs without their consent, even though it would save someone’s life. Even though it would *kill someone* to refuse to donate. An actual human person with history and loved ones and memories and plans, unlike a fetus.

I do not want to be pregnant. My reasons for why I don’t want to be pregnant are not necessary for anyone else to know. I want to have the same rights to bodily autonomy that you have as a corpse, where even in death, nobody can make you use your body to give life to another if you don’t want to, regardless of your reasons why.

I don’t want to be pregnant and it’s my fucking body. That’s enough of a reason.

www.quora.com/Wives-would-you-be-upset-if-you-are-overseas-and-your-husband-hangs-out-with-a-gold-digging-female-friend/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Wives, would you be upset if you are overseas and your husband hangs out with a gold digging female friend?

A.

I am not overseas but I am literally about as far away from my spouse as I can possibly get without crossing an ocean or international borders. We live on opposite coasts and also on opposite north/south borders.

I do not police who my spouse hangs out with. He's a grownup, he can manage his own friendships. Nobody can do anything to him that he doesn't permit (short of actual robbery or violence). I have nothing to fear from any other person. Should my spouse do something with another person that makes me upset, that would be his fault, not hers, because he is responsible for his own actions.

I do not make assumptions about the motivations of other people. This question implies the assumption that said "female friend" is not just interested in securing economic stability, but that she is planning on doing so at the expense of my spouse. That's a whole lot of unspoken assumptions right there.

Should any woman attempt to manipulate my spouse into some kind of con for the purpose of getting his money, I probably wouldn't do anything about it but laugh at her. My spouse is broke. Of the two of us, I'm the one with the money, and even I live below the poverty line. Plus, we have a pre-nup and our finances are separate and we maintain separate households. He might get swindled, but my finances won't be touched. And then he might learn a lesson about being too trusting too soon.

I do not throw other women under the bus. Other women are not my enemy. The term "gold digger" was deliberately and consciously subverted by a wealthy patriarchal class who was offended at the idea of women achieving any socioeconomic power of their own: https://nationalpost.com/life/relationships/in-defence-of-the-gold-digger-and-the-fight-for-class-economic-and-gender-equality & http://skepchick.org/2013/10/in-defense-of-the-gold-digger/

tl;dr - No I would not be upset if my spouse was hanging around with anyone, let alone a woman who prioritizes her economic stability. Good partner selection solves an awful lot of problems before they ever come up, and treating people as individual agents rather than children, dependents, servants, or things solve most of the other problems.

www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a19598317/men-cant-get-a-date-because-of-feminism-metoo-movement/

"But if you are a man who can't get a date with someone who actually likes you, it's not because of feminism. It's because you are someone people do not want to date. Possibly because you spend a lot of time whining about how women having rights has made dating impossible for you."

"Basically, this means that men have to be someone who people want to date. They can not simply exist, as a man."

"This is one of the first eras where men have to bring something to the dating and flirting table beyond the very fact of their being a male who is willing to date a women. Which means that they have to actually respond to women's cues. They have to learn how to read women."

"Women have accepted, from birth, the notion that dating is about bringing qualities to the table. ...Maybe it's about time men started doing the same."

And no, men, "bringing home the bacon", "being a provider", and "doesn't beat her" are not sufficient qualities you can bring to the table. For some women they might be *necessary* qualities, but they're not sufficient.

Like being "nice", it's a *baseline*. It's the bare minimum required for us to not automatically disqualify you, but it's not enough to put you in the running. You still have to be an interesting person and you still have to pay attention to your partner.

www.quora.com/What-is-a-tactful-way-to-respond-to-my-step-mother-in-law-when-she-pesters-my-husband-and-I-about-having-kids-when-we-told-her-we-do-not-want-any-children/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is a tactful way to respond to my step mother-in-law when she pesters my husband and I about having kids when we told her we do not want any children?

A. The original question asked for "tactful" responses. Trust me, for me, this IS "tactful".

"I'm concerned about why you’re asking me this. Are you getting everything you need at home?"

"I actually like being happy."

"Sweetie, I couldn't keep my goldfish alive as a kid, what makes you think I should be in charge of a child?"

"I'd rather spend my money on beer" - you could go with a totally frivolous item meant to show you as totally unsuitable like "beer" or "drugs", or you could go for high-ticket items that show how expensive children are like "a new house" or "a dream vacation"

"The world is overpopulated already."

"I just found out I'm infertile, but thanks for bringing up such a painful and private subject."

"The cat would get jealous."

"I love my husband as a person, but frankly, I'm not passing on my genes unless they merge with Jason Momoa [insert celebrity hottie here]."

"I need to be the only one in the house who has temper tantrums and cries for no reason."

"After the last 'incident', the courts warned me to stay away from children if I value my freedom."

"I'm an atheist / feminist, I don't birth children, I eat them." (full disclosure - I’m both, this is a joke) (this also works for "pagan")

"I don't know why women need to have children to be seen as complete human beings." ~ Marissa Tomei

"Childhood was heartbreaking enough." ~ Chelsea Handler

"We thought we might try renting one first, to make sure we don't kill it before having our own."

When are you going to have children? -

"I'll let you know when I change my mind. In the meantime, I'm sure there are more important things in your own life that you could be thinking about."

"When you learn to mind your own business."

"Why? Are you finally sick of talking about yours?"

"What answer could I give you so that you'll stop asking?"

"I'm sorry, what did you say? Oh, I thought you said something else that's completely none of your business."

"Only God knows, and He hasn't told me yet."

"As soon as I figure out how. Got any suggestions?"

"I already have one - your step-son."

"Tomorrow."

"Can I get back to you? How soon do you need to know?"

"Did you know that 1 in 6 couples, who desperately want to have a child, struggle with infertility? I'm not going to tell you if I'm one of those people, but maybe you'll think about how hurtful your question might be to someone who is."

"You know, that's a really personal question you shouldn't ask everyone. Some people have a hard time getting pregnant, and questions like that could really make them feel bad about their situation."

"We're waiting to see how yours turn out before we decide."

"As soon as their value goes up to an acceptable level on the black market."

"Oh, soon I hope! I found this great recipe for roasted babies that I've been dying to try out!"

"I'm waiting to meet Mr. Right." (especially funny since you're talking to your husband's parents)

"When I can be sure of doing a better job of teaching manners than your parents."

Look, I get it ... the shoe industry and in particular *women's* shoe industry is bullshit. I could go on a rant for days about the history of shoes, of women's shoes, the patriarchy, and the predatory fashion industry. And, on top of that, both "comfortable" and "attractive" are subjective. No matter what any individual person says about any individual shoe, there will be someone who disagrees on either it's comfort or its style or both.

So I am going to share some shoes that *I* find both attractive and comfortable, and within what *I* consider a "reasonable" price range. Any, all, or none of this may apply to you, but if you're looking for feminine style shoes that are not painful to wear and won't break your bank, here is one place from where you can begin your own investigation. I've shared several of these options before, but I'm revisiting the topic.

I just finished documenting all of my shoes for my Wardrobe Database and I thought y'all could benefit from my having pictures to reference. Let's start with shoes as close to "typical feminine shoes" as possible - dance shoes.

Dance shoes are, for all intents and purposes, regular dressy shoes, but with 2 very important differences: construction and sole. Dance shoes are constructed slightly differently to accommodate the unique stresses that dancing puts on shoes. Usually this means "higher quality", but it definitely means "more durable" and sometimes "longer lasting", depending on how you wear them. I have a whole page about the quality and purpose of dance shoe construction located at https://sites.google.com/site/orlandoballroomdance/FAQ/danceshoes.

The other issue is the sole. With dance shoes, you have to pay attention to what the soles are made of. If they’re hard leather or vegan plastic/resin type stuff, you can wear them anywhere but if they have suede on the bottom, they can only be worn on hardwood floors. I try to buy my dance shoes with leather or vegan soles, and if necessary, I can take my shoes into any cobbler (shoe repair place) and ask to have leather put on. I just have to be clear and make sure they understand that I do not want suede (also called "chromed").

So, with that in mind, dance shoes tend to be way more comfortable than comparable dress shoes. I would put them in the "expensive" category, but people who typically buy designer shoes might classify them as "mid-range" at around $80-$200. All of mine have been in the $80-$120 range. But they last for years and I treat them like sporting equipment - if you want to play the sport, you need to invest in quality safety gear.

In addition to that, there are places where you can pick a base style, and then custom choose the strap style, fabric options, and heel height, and if you get the vegan soles you can wear them on any surface including outdoors. What makes this so important is that heel height and strap style. I grew up in the '80s, in the era of the slender, delicate, stiletto heel pump.

So I really like the look of the delicate pumps with skinny heels, but I really don't like wearing *tall* heels. Being able to specify a short (like, 1.5-inch) heel in a slender flare has been terrific for someone with my aesthetic taste but preference for flatter shoes. I used one of these vendors for my wedding shoes. I found a base model of shoe on the website that had the look I was going for and then I picked the heel height and style, all the fabrics and where to put them, and I also added an extra strap (the base model only comes with one, either an ankle strap or a criss-cross strap and I requested both).

I requested a fabric sample before ordering any shoes and I matched everything to my wedding dress. Despite being different fabrics (the dress is made of stretch performance fabric and these are all satins), these shoes are a nearly perfect match and I couldn't be happier with them.

The brand of shoe is Very Fine Dance Shoes, and you can get stock, other customer's custom designs, or design you own direct from www.veryfineshoes.com/customladiesdanceshoes or from one of several retailers that sell them.

They're as comfortable as any dance shoe, which means that they're still heels but they're made for hard wear with padding and properly constructed soles and shanks. They're not going to feel like sneakers because they're not sneakers, but if I'm going to wear dress shoes, those made for dancing are about as comfortable as they get, with one exception...

These are the most comfortable pair of dress shoes I own. They're Crocs and I have them in black and oat (kind of a light khaki / tan). Even when I have hard leather soles on my dance shoes that allow me to wear them off the floor, I still bring these shoes to change into afterwards. Because no matter how comfortable the dance shoes are, dancing for 4 hours in heels is still hard. When I put these on, I add another several hours worth of walking to my evening while still looking dressed up. Honestly, the only reason I don't wear only these for dressing up is because they're open-toe and I prefer the closed-toe look. That, and I rarely get dressed up if I'm not dancing.

It looks like Crocs has discontinued this model and changed to a criss-cross strap over the toes (which I love) and is about to discontinue that model too. They have other styles of shoes, but you might be able to get these from another retailer that still carries some old stock. The model I have is called the Leigh and the criss-cross version is the Leigh II.

I've probably had them for more than a decade now, and since I don't wear them very often because I don't dress up often, they still look brand new and I expect to continue wearing them for years more.

These are also Crocs, and also a model that has been discontinued. I know most people would never have thought to hear anyone say this, but keep an eye on Crocs for not-ugly comfortable shoes. They sell more than clogs. These are a simple red wedge with a black patent leather-like toe cap.

Like the Leigh Wedges, they are made from the same Crocs materials and have the same comfortable Crocs sole. They have other wedges available on their website, so keep checking back to see the new models, as they frequently rotate new designs in.

I would put Crocs in the mid-range price category, with shoes usually costing between $25 and $60, plus you can often find sales or clearance items. Once something gets discontinued, though, the third-party retails jack the price up because they become hard to find.

Another place to look for shoes that may be both stylish and comfortable is the recent trend of "foldable" ballet flats. I got these from Payless when they announced they were going out of business and put everything on clearance. I also bought the same pair in this really smart grey flannel-looking fabric with a black toe cap that goes amazingly with my grey suit pencil skirt.

Payless opened back up again as an online-only store, and I'm pretty sure these are available online. Because they're this "foldable" style, meaning that they are intended for you to fold them literally in half and stuff them in a purse, they're not constructed with the same high quality materials as traditional shoes. They might be using high quality materials, but they are of a different type.

They are soft and flexible all over, so there is virtually no arch support or padding. These feel, to me, almost like going barefoot, with no shock absorption whatsoever. This may or may not count as "comfortable" for you. I put foam insoles in mine.

Also, because they are made and stored "folded", you'll notice the shoes are curled up. I would not have thought that I would feel any curling once they were on my feet - that my feet were more solidly straight and would out-compete the tension in the shoes. But I do start to notice a slight pressure on my feet to turn up at the toes over time. Fortunately, they're also easily slipped on and off.

And finally, if someone is fortunate enough to wear an adult woman's size 6 or smaller (sometimes up to an 8), you can also get dressy children's shoes because they go up to a size 4, which is a 6 in Women's. Walmart carries kids shoes up to size 6, which is an 8 in women's.

I got these adorable little white pearl dress shoes at Payless that look every bit like adult heels except they have a child's low heel. As in - they're not *flats*, they're *heels*, just with a very low heel. I had to take a seam ripper to remove some goofy leather flower things on top, but given the price and the heel, it was worth it.

I don't have a picture of them yet, but you can see them in this video of me performing in them: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmgiGlDIuJw

Watch on YouTube

Kids shoes don't come with fancy arch supports and memory foam padding or whatever, so I still have to add insoles, but the low heel instantly makes them more comfortable than adult heels just for that alone. I wish they made kids shoes in all adult sizes. I mean, what adult wouldn't want low-heeled dress shoes or canvas sneakers with Thor on them or pastel pink & blue boots or something? Kids have some pretty awesome shoes and lots of us are just big kids.

So, there you have it - a few ideas on where to get comfortable (or less UNcomfortable) feminine dress shoes, that will not be applicable to everyone for either aesthetic preferences, finances, or size constraints.

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.

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."]

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:

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.
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.
Jewelry is often inconvenient or even dangerous in certain lives.
Jewelry is a very personal expression of the self and a wedding ring may not match the aesthetic that a person is going for.
Some people just don’t like things on their hands.
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.

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).

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.

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

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".
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.
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:

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".
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.

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.

I am in love with this corset vest meant for masculine fashion. I need to make one with feminine lines for me now.

Y'know, in my copious spare time.

The other corset vests seem to be more like standard corsets but with masculine lines. The one in the thumbnail looks more like it's double-layered with a corset underneath and a vest on top. That's the one I like and that's the one I'll be making, if I ever get around to it.

There was a great forum thread somewhere about how to make dresses for masculine fashion / male bodies. The discussion was about how the trick was to not just put men in dresses, but to tailor non-pants to male bodies using "masculine" lines.

Feminizing male bodies or mixing masculine & feminine fashion is a different thing. This was about taking "women's" clothing and turning it into something masculine people can wear and still be masculine. Women have tons of examples of taking "men's" fashion and turning it into "women's" fashion by re-tailoring it to fit curvy bodies or using more feminine lines and elements. Darting a button-up collared shirt, for example.

That's part of how we got away with expanding our available fashion choices into more masculine avenues, such as wearing pants - we feminized pants and now women in pants is just seen as "normal", whether they're feminized versions or not.

If men in our extremely patriarchal, fragile masculinity culture are ever going to move towards more freedom of fashion expression and break out of their much more narrow fashion boxes, one of the ways to do it is to masculinize traditionally feminine clothing, the way we feminized traditionally masculine clothing.

The examples in the thread (that I wish I could find now, so I could share it) gave some really great examples of do's and don't's for masculine skirt-wearing. One suggestion was to avoid emphasizing the waist, which is the opposite recommendation for feminine styles because emphasizing the waist in a feminine style is intended to highlight the curve of the hips, waist, and ribcage.

Instead, drop or raise the waist, or pair it with shirts, blouses, or jackets that go about butt-length, to make more of a rectangular or triangular shape rather than an hourglass figure. We see this in tuxes, where the waistline is hidden beneath a cummerbund or vest and the jacket extends to below the butt or even as low as the knees. This elongates the torso and creates rectangle or triangle shapes instead of curved hourglass shapes.

This corset vest manages to both shape the midsection and also follow the above guideline by not shaping it in the same way that feminine corsets do with hourglass silhouettes and extending to the upper hip, creating a long triangular shape by extending the shoulders with the curve in the seams, which is very masculine.

As a straight woman, I'm attracted to masculinity. I just am, I can't help it. I think if I saw a man wearing this in real life, I might just swoon.

Miranda Crim

tlSeFeebgdpgrachuiuoacanrsyh 18,od drn201e9cd

Well, while trying to prove a point to my kids, we’ve just surpassed the 48hr mark of the “who will pick up the random piece of trash that they KNOW isn’t supposed to be there” challenge... Between the kids AND the husband, and MULTIPLE trips in and out of the bathroom, this little piece of heaven may just be in it for the long haul!

#easymoney #justdotherightthing #decorativefeature #stopthemadness

I wonder if this might have changed the course of my triad relationship.

But, then again, someone would have had to actually pick something up in order to discover the money, which would lead to a change in behaviour "just in case" money was on the bottom of everything.  The main reason, I think, that women still do the majority of the domestic labor in relationships, or if not the labor, then the Household Management labor, is because we are conditioned to both believe that things will not get done unless we do it and then conditioned to be "bothered" by things before everyone else.

As long as we really are "bothered" by the mess sooner, then the people we live with never have to learn how to be "bothered" by it themselves. It will always get done. We have to really learn how to not do shit until either the consequences for not doing it get bad enough or the reward for doing it is high enough that people will learn how to be "bothered" themselves. That's how we were conditioned, after all.

In the last days before my triad imploded, the house was a fucking disaster. You see, we had an unequal distribution of income, so we redistributed the other parts of the household to compensate. The person who made the most money was responsible for the highest financial contribution and that was it. The sole household "job" she had was to write on the shopping list what she wanted from the store because I am not a mind reader.

(incidentally, she refused to put anything on the shopping list, because she didn't want to "bother" me by requesting things even though that was the point of the shopping list. So I outright refused to buy her groceries, even those few that I did happen to remember she wanted or liked. She ended up paying more than her share simply because she also had to buy her own food in the house.)

The person who made the least amount of money had no financial contribution other than donating his food stamps to the household groceries. Instead, he was responsible for all the household chores. Since his most recent job *was as a personal house cleaner*, this should not have been difficult for him.

My job was to make up the difference in the finances, to manage the finances, and eventually to manage our houseboy because he wasn't doing any chores at all by the end.

We were so poor, that one time I took a 6-week contract job that took me out of the house for a month and a half. The amount of money I made for that job should have paid for my share of the bills and given me a cushion for the next month. While I was gone, he was responsible for managing himself and she became responsible for managing the finances, including paying the bills on time and doing the shopping.

I came home to find the electricity and gas shut off, no food in the house, and an overflowing litter box. She had forgotten to pay for 2 months in a row and he didn't clean anything. So all my "cushion" went towards reconnect fees.

By the end, I had given up. I had previously put a trash can in literally every room of the house, so that nobody even had to get up to throw something away. And yet, trash would pile up on tables, furniture arms, any available surface, including the floor.

A few weeks before I moved out, I spotted some trash sitting on the floor next to the trash can in the living room. One of them had thrown it towards the trash can from the sofa and missed and then left it there. The bin happened to be in the path between the living room / kitchen and the hallway that led to their bedrooms and the only bathroom.

Which means that you literally had to step over that trash to get to anywhere in the house except *my room* which was an add-on on the other side of the house. Anyone using the bathroom had to step over it. Anyone going to his or her bedrooms had to step over it. Anyone coming from their bedrooms or the bathroom into the living room had to step over it. Anyone going into the kitchen had to step over it.

That bit of trash was still on the floor when I moved out about 5 months later. Since all the furniture was mine, I cleaned out the entire house in all the rooms except their own bedrooms (and I did go through their rooms too, looking for my things - he had a habit of leaving his dirty dishes piled up behind his computer desk and they were all my dishes).

But I left that fucking piece of trash right there on the floor of the empty house.

If I had had the money at the time, I wonder if this would have worked? I did use my father's tactic of taking anything they left in the common area that shouldn't be there and putting it out on the curb (Dad has OCD and would accidentally throw away my homework if I left it out on the table, just because "it shouldn't be here" got expressed in his brain as "I will throw it away then").

But all that did was teach them not to leave things they wanted to keep in the common rooms. It didn't stop them from from leaving *trash* around, and if I had picked up their trash for them, that would only have reinforced the problem.  I wonder if I could have retrained them with positive reinforcement instead, since they clearly weren't bothered *enough* by the mess to fix it themselves. But someone would have had to pick up that first piece to find the positive reinforcement in order for that to work.

So I applaud this person for attempting such a creative solution to this pervasive problem. My cynical brain, however, is not at all surprised that it doesn't seem to be working.

Men: PUT ON YOUR BIG BOY PANTS AND START MANAGING YOUR OWN FUCKING HOMES. Don't wait for the women in your life to tell you what needs to be done, just fucking do it. And start getting on your friends' backs about them doing it too.

https://theoutline.com/post/7083/the-magical-thinking-of-guys-who-love-logic

The magical thinking of guys who love logic

I have a couple of exes like this, and pretty much all of my online flame wars are with dudebros like this (with an exception being a small number of actually "emotional" people who are feeling feelz that are not necessarily connected to reality and expecting everyone around them to cater to those feelz).

And this is the reason why I consider myself a New Atheist but refuse to associate with the "movement" and I don't attend atheist events. I believe in anti-theism, which is what the New Atheists are more or less founded on, but their toxic pseudo-logic justifications for sexism and racism make the community a place that I just don't want to be around.

"Specifically, these guys — and they are usually guys — love using terms like “logic.” They will tell you, over and over, how they love to use logic, and how the people they follow online also use logic. They are also massive fans of declaring that they have “facts,” that their analysis is “unbiased,” that they only use “‘reason” and “logic” and not “emotions” to make decisions. ...

These words are usually used interchangeably and without regard to their proper usage, squished together in a vague Play-Doh ball of smug superiority, to be thrown wherever possible at their “emotional” and “irrational” enemies"

"Any dialogue attempted by these men was not made — at least as far as their partners could tell — with the goal of exchanging views and opening themselves to being challenged. Their goal was to assert their beliefs as fact; to teach their partner the truth,"

"But for the Logic Guys, the purpose of using these words — the sacred, magic words like “logic,” “objectivity,” “reason,” “rationality,” “fact” — is not to invoke the actual concepts themselves. It’s more a kind of incantation, whereby declaring your argument the single “logical” and “rational” one magically makes it so — and by extension, makes you both smart and correct, regardless of the actual rigor or sources of your beliefs."

www.quora.com/What-can-I-do-if-I-would-like-for-my-wife-to-have-an-orgasm-but-she-doesnt-care-if-she-does-or-not/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What can I do if I would like for my wife to have an orgasm but she doesn't care if she does or not?

A. Let it go. It’s her body, her orgasm, so her desire to have one or not is the only one that matters.

Stop making her orgasms about you and what you want. If she’s ever going to have one, it won’t be while feeling pressured to have one just to make you feel better about giving her one.

I’m going to say this again: stop making her orgasms about you and what you want.

It’s so frustrating being a straight woman when so many men want to make my pleasure all about them. Take some lessons from lesbian sex - it’s not all about the orgasm. If you make sex all about the orgasm, you’re missing out on about 99% of the fun of sex.

It’s not about you.
It’s not about the orgasm.
It’s not about the penetration.

Just let her enjoy sex the way she wants to enjoy it, if you care about her experience at all. She doesn’t need to experience sex in the same way that you do for it to be a pleasurable experience for her. And she definitely doesn’t need for her ability to orgasm or not to become some kind of statement about you.

3 Ways Men Wanting to 'Focus On Her Pleasure' During Sex Can Still Be Sexist - Everyday Feminism - https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/focusing-on-her-pleasure/

Guys, You Can Learn A Lot From Lesbian Sex - https://www.bolde.com/guys-you-can-learn-a-lot-lesbian-sex/

I am frequently appalled at why people marry. This is why I am basically opposed to legal marriage entirely, even now that I am legally married.

www.quora.com/He-and-I-have-been-together-for-2-yrs-I-want-to-get-married-I-want-to-have-his-name-and-the-respect-that-society-gives-to-the-wife-Instead-he-thinks-of-it-as-a-government-conspiracy-and-gives-me-the-divorce-rate/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. He and I have been together for 2 yrs. I want to get married. I want to have his name and the respect that society gives to the “wife”. Instead, he thinks of it as a government conspiracy and gives me the “divorce rate” argument. What can I do?

A. You two clearly have diametrically opposed worldviews. Even if you manage to convince him to marry you, your marriage is probably doomed. Mutually exclusive worldviews do not lend themselves well for long-term compatibility.

Incidentally, you do not have to legally marry and let the government into your bedroom in order to obtain many of the same things that marriage can afford. If the “respect” of a society that doesn’t think you are worth anything unless you are attached to a man is important to you, you can arrange your relationship to resemble a legal marriage without the legality (assuming your partner is willing to participate).

Nobody demands to see a marriage license when you introduce yourself as Mrs. No banks require a marriage license to purchase property together or open joint accounts together. If, at this point, you don’t know that babies can be born outside of wedlock, I don’t know what to tell you.

Personally, I don’t believe that anyone should get legally married unless their intention is to become legally entangled in exactly the ways in which a legal marriage entangles them. If you want something other than those legal benefits and responsibilities, there are other ways to get those things. You can even have the big party and white dress without the legal license, if you really want it.

Tying yourself to another person, ostensibly for life, just to get the “respect” of a bunch of strangers who wouldn’t know the difference if you weren’t legally tied anyway, is probably the worst reason to get married*, IMO. Followed by getting married to “lock them down” into a commitment. Marriages are easier to break than getting out of a shared mortgage these days.

If what you’re looking for is some societal respect, you’re probably going about it the wrong way. But that aside, your partner clearly does not share your views on how important that respect is or how to get it. All that convincing him to marry you will do is increase the odds of a divorce in your future.

At least if you stay unmarried, when you inevitably break up, you won’t be a divorcee, you’ll just have a paranoid ex-boyfriend in your past instead of an ex-husband.

*Excepting same-sex marriages … sort of. The reason why queer people fought so hard for the right to marry, as opposed to “different but equal” (which they weren’t) civil unions, was partly because of this exact “respect” argument.

As long as same-sex marriages were illegal, same sex partners could not pass themselves off as “married” and get the same respect, because the people who don’t respect them knew that their “marriage” could not be legal and therefore they did not consider their marriages valid. So they fought for the social recognition of their unions as part of a larger issue of validating and legitimizing their existence and their relationships, which, in turn, was part of a larger issue addressing the inequity and discrimination of an entire class of people based on who they love.

However, if it is generally known that two people are *able* to get married, then it is possible to just pass themselves off as married without the state-issued license and they will receive that societal “respect” because nobody actually checks for licenses when people say that they’re married, as long as they believe that those people have the ability to get married.

So, for an entire class of people to demand social “respect” through being allowed to access certain legal benefits that were previously only available to one class of people, that is a different situation than an individual person wishing to tie themselves to another individual person in order to get “respect” for the association. And that is what I meant by it being the worst reason to get married.

Fighting for class equality is not in the same camp as individuals using their romantic relationships to force those other individual people around them to “respect” them.

https://www.quora.com/My-wife-has-changed-since-marrying-me-She-isnt-as-laid-back-and-free-spirited-as-she-used-to-be-The-same-thing-happened-with-my-ex-wife-too-which-led-to-our-divorce-Why-do-they-get-bitter-after-marriage/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. My wife has changed since marrying her. she isn't as laid back and free spirited as she used to be. The same thing happened with my ex-wife too which lead to our divorce. Why do they get bitter after marriage?

A. As they say, “if all of your exes are crazy, the thing they have in common is you”. Lots of other commenters are pointing this out.

First, losing one’s free-spiritedness is not “bitter”. As someone else said, the opposite of laid back is not bitter. So one does not follow from the other. If they’re both “bitter”, then something serious is going on. But if they’re just not as fun as they used to be, then it’s probably your problem for expecting them to perform their personalities for your entertainment.

Either way, the problem points to something you’re doing that results in your partners ending up unhappy, which is point number two.

Third, women, in general, are still expected to be the Household Managers, even when their hetero relationships are more or less “equal” in other respects. When a man gets home from work, he might have to take out the trash or wash the dishes after dinner, but his job is essentially over when he clocks out. When women get home from work, they start their second job.

Even when *chores* are split evenly, women are still expected to be the manager. Men “help out around the house”. Men often say “if you want me to do something, just ask”. We shouldn’t have to ask. As an adult living in the house, you ought to know that the trash needs taking out and the dishes need washing and the kids need to be fed and the floor needs vacuuming and, and, and.

Project Management is a full time, highly paid job. But a lot of women are expected to do it for free, and without notice, when they get home while a lot of men are given all the credit for “helping out”. So a lot of women who, as single women with only themselves to care for, get married and have children and end up losing their “laid back” and “free-spirited” natures because shit has to get done and nobody else will do it unless they take the reins and make them do it. The household needs to be managed. It’s really difficult to be “laid back” and “free spirited” when there is shit that need to get done, especially when the people you’re responsible for overseeing don’t realize that you have a legitimate job as the overseer.

I’m a freelancer in an industry where crews are hired to perform job duties for a particular contract, and when the contract ends, we go on to find other contracts. Many of us who have been working in the industry for a while know each other and we often find ourselves on crews of the same people over and over again. Between regular contact and our industry’s traditions of networking for gigs, many of us are friends outside of work.

Because of this, we can often find ourselves working on a crew one day where our friend Joe was hired as the crew chief. And perhaps the next week, Emily got hired as the crew chief for this other gig and Joe has to work under Emily’s supervision when Emily was working for Joe just a week ago.

Some people who are new to the industry find it difficult sometimes to work for their friends. They go from being buddies who drink and smoke pot together, to now their buddy is “in charge” and making demands of them and they can’t respond to their buddy like he’s their buddy. Yesterday, he was their buddy. Tomorrow, he’ll be their buddy again. But today, he’s the boss.

When people get married, and someone ends up taking on the Project Manager role for the Household Manager, they are no longer that carefree, laid-back, free-spirit you went on dates with. Now they’re in a managerial role, and possibly a role they didn’t ask for and might not even want. And here you are wondering where your date buddy went, now that she’s been promoted to Project Manager and there is shit that needs to get done.

You will probably find that your wives are better able to act more laid-back and free-spirited if they had a little less management responsibilities on their plate. I know that I’m usually too tired for a spontaneous decision to get dressed up and go out dancing all night when I’ve put in 12 hours at work only to come home and find the house a mess and someone waiting for me to ask them to make dinner.

And I find that a lot of my last-minute “let’s just get in the car and drive and see where we end up and spend the weekend there!” plans to explore and adventure get scrapped when I have a grown-up job and a mortgage to pay and kids with homework that need to be done and dentist visits to schedule and swim meets to attend.

The ability to be “laid back” and “free-spirited” is directly negatively correlated with how many responsibilities need one’s attention and how many other people require attention to those responsibilities for their survival.

If you want your wife to feel more “laid back” and “free spirited”, then you could start by taking some of the responsibilities off her plate.

The Invisible Workload That Drags Women Down - “To truly be free, we need to free women’s minds. Of course, someone will always have to remember to buy toilet paper, but if that work were shared, women’s extra burdens would be lifted. Only then will women have as much lightness of mind as men.”

Women Aren't Nags—We're Just Fed Up - “that I was the manager of the household, and that being manager was a lot of thankless work. Delegating work to other people, i.e. telling him to do something he should instinctively know to do, is exhausting. … Even having a conversation about the imbalance of emotional labor becomes emotional labor.”

Why I Don't "Help" My Wife - “When you make a mess, you shouldn't expect your wife to clean it up. It's your job to clean up your own messes. You both live there, you're not “helping” her with anything because it's your home.”

www.quora.com/Can-you-choose-to-be-LGBT-Why/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper/comment/85632057

In a quora question about whether we could "choose" to be LGBTQ, I responded that I *wish* it was a choice because men basically suck and I'd love to not be attracted to them anymore, but I just am and I'm simply not attracted to not-men.

So some douchenozzle comes out and mansplains to me in a reply about me being fed up with the shit that men do.

Because of course he does. Because #LewisLaw

Apparently I just have to learn how to find people with common interests. Because that's NEVER FUCKING OCCURRED TO ME EVER IN MY LIFE (says the person who literally gives that answer to everyone asking how to find other polys) AND I'M NOT ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT A BIGGER ISSUE.

Ernie Dunbar: It's worth noting that everyone has this problem.

The problem is finding someone who's compatible with you. It's no wonder that everyone thinks there's only one person in the whole world that fits just right, because when dating, we never narrow it down beyond “singles” before starting the search.

Personally, I've found a great deal of success by hanging out with people who have common interests. So long as there's a sufficient number of people open to a relationship in that group, you'll find what you're looking for just by narrowing the field down a bit first.

Joreth Innkeeper: Are you serious? You think my big problem is that I can’t find anyone who shares my *hobbies*?! And that I’m *alone* because of it?

I’m married. I’m polyamorous. I’m a community organizer. My own relationship network is about 50 people. I already know how to make friends and “hang out with people who have common interests”.

I’m not talking about compatibility. I’m talking about gender issues, sexism, misogyny, and feminism. And mansplaining like this is part of why I’m fed up with men and wish I could just chuck the lot of you out the airlock.

Here’s a newsflash for you … men who share my interests CAN ALSO BE ASSHOLES. It’s fucking easy to find people with common interests. It’s not easy to find men who aren’t mansplaining, privilege-denying, entitled jerkoffs and I’m too fucking tired to keep doing the emotional labor, the Relationship Maintenance labor, the Household Management labor and All The Intersectional SJ Educational labor every time I meet a guy who happens to share my interests in movies and music.

www.quora.com/How-do-you-ask-a-guy-to-sleep-with-you/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How do you tell a guy you just want to hook up with him?

A. Here’s what I said to the last guy I hooked up with:

“Hey there, I know we’re not compatible for dating in a relationship, but would you be interested in a hookup?”

Here’s what I said to the guy I hooked up with before that:

“So, we’re both getting out of long-term relationships and not interested in getting back into another one right now. What do you think about hooking up then?”

Here’s how I hit on a celebrity that I met when I worked for him once and a friend of mine who knew him said he would probably be open to me propositioning him:

“I hope you don’t mind, but [mutual friend] said you would be open to hearing about a fantasy I had about you…”

He said “Oh, yeah, tell me all about it!”

[I told him all about it]

He said “wanna make that a reality the next time I come to town?”

I said “yes”.

Now I keep an eye out for whenever his show is going to be in town, and if he doesn’t message me first asking to hookup, I message him to see if he wants to see me while he’s in town. So I basically ask him for a hookup about once a year (or he asks me for one).

Here’s how I asked another guy for a hookup:

“I’m kinda crushing on you right now. Interested in a little fun tonight, no strings attached?”

Basically, I find it’s usually most successful to just come out and tell someone that I’m attracted to them and interested in casual sex. But the real key to this working for me is by not having any expectations of their reciprocation. This means that, when I tell someone I’m interested, I don’t have any agenda. I’m not trying to “talk them into it”, I’m just passing along information. They can do with that information what they will. If they’re also interested in me, great, we’ll hookup. If they’re not interested in me, great, now I know where we stand and I let it go and we can go on being friends or coworkers or whatever we were before I propositioned them.

Getting all weird about it, asking in soft language to protect myself just in case they say no, not handling rejection, making them responsible for my expectations, trying to talk them into it - all that kind of stuff is what makes things awkward and uncomfortable and all the things that people fear when they fear rejection.

So I just put my interest out there, and if they return the interest then it’s cool and if they don’t then it’s still cool and I move on.

I can’t reasonably expect to get what I want if I don’t ask for what I want. So I ask for what I want. Some of the time, I get what I want. A lot of the time I don’t, but that’s life and I move on.

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-feminist-women-are-gold-diggers/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Do you think feminist women are gold diggers?

A. Feminists are people who believe that everyone should have equal power and freedom and opportunity in a society where women currently are disempowered, and the goal is to empower them to full autonomy. Under a capitalist system, that means that women have their own economic security.

A “gold digger” is a patriarchal term where society sets up women to be economically disadvantaged, offers them only one way to improve or secure their economic status and that’s through romantic relationships, and then socially punishes women for pursuing the only avenue available to them for privilege, empowerment, security, or simply survival by calling them names for doing the one thing they are supposed to be doing.

So, by definition, feminists want to dismantle the entire system that puts women into the position of needing to pursue romantic partnerships with men for economic security.

Which would make them the opposite of “gold diggers”.

The way to remove the trend of women using their romantic relationships to improve or stabilize their economic status is to provide more opportunity for women to improve or stabilize their economic status in ways that do not involve romantic partnerships - i.e. equal pay, equal job opportunities, social services for drains on finances like childcare, healthcare, housing, food, etc. Separate the means of survival and economic status improvement from relationship status, and you remove the problem of women pursuing men for economic reasons.

Q. Is it necessary that the dance lift was performed by a male partner? My girlfriend offers me to dance too, but I never played sports, unlike her.

A. First of all, partner dancing has nothing to do with lifts. People go their entire lives as partner dancers without ever doing a single lift, especially if they are social dancers. If your girlfriend wants to dance with you, you don’t have to know lifts to do it.

In fact, you **won’t** learn lifts for a very long time, because they’re dangerous and require skill. Lifts are not for beginners. The first thing you’re going to learn is just where to put your feet on which beat and where to put your hands. And you’re going to do a LOT of that, for a very long time, even if you want to eventually learn lifts.

Partner dancing does have a history of very strict gender roles. But fortunately, we live in an era where we can challenge those roles, and the dance world has been challenging them for ages now.

Anyone can lift anyone in dancing, just like anyone can take either the lead or follow role. Do the roles that you want to do.

Although I will point out that having once played sports is not relevant to who does the lifts. Proper lifts are all about leverage, momentum, and balance, not necessarily brute strength and definitely not about the kinds of movements that other sports use. There are a few moves that require brute strength, but most lifts use leverage more than anything else.

Watch on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfUcmYcZ4pw

Watch on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOe9r2RlE4c

A lift is not about a strong person throwing a small person around. Both people are using core strength to do a lift. The lifted person is engaging all of their own strength and flexibility too.

Watch on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3AH7W1YFTY

Dance is a partnership between two equal and complimentary partners, even when staying within traditional gender roles. The follow still has to come to this partnership as an equal and perform their role. In lifts, that’s as much athleticism as the person being their base, sometimes more.
If you want to be the person being lifted because you think your girlfriend is more athletic than you, you’re in for a big surprise. As the person being lifted, you have to have musicality, timing, flexibility, and strength in the legs, arms, and core.

Being lifted isn’t just about being small, and it’s definitely not about being weak. Check out YouTube videos on core exercises for dance lifts - you’ll see nothing but workouts for 6-pack abs because being lifted requires an enormous amount of core strength. Honestly, the leads (or bases) have the easier part of the job in lifts.

So, by all means, go out there and learn lifts! Be the person who is lifted if you want! Just know that A) once you start taking lessons, you will not get to the lifts for a very long time and B) if you still choose to be the person being lifted, that will require a great deal of athleticism that C) has nothing at all to do with other sports so skills in other sports will not help you here.

Btw, just in case anyone else needs this info, I found a menstruating aid that can be worn during sex.

I decided to finally try out a diva cup type thing so I could go without underwear (which means no pads, and even though I can't wear tampons (TSS), I didn't want the string hanging down either). I assumed I would be limited to no PIV, just other activities with a cup in, and that was fine as long as I could show up in a short skirt and no underwear and not get blood everywhere.

But right next to the cups was this package of something called Softdisc (disposable discs) that said on the side it could be worn during sex. I know there are other products that can be worn during sex, but this was the only one on the shelves that said so on the package. Probably my very first time wearing an internal menstruation aid shouldn't have been a product I had never heard of before while doing something ... questionable with it on.

But I tried it on the night before to get the hang of it and to see if it would trigger my TSS or otherwise be uncomfortable, and told him that if he could feel it and it was bothersome, we could stop and do other things. He was all for trying it.

It's a large plastic ring with a soft, crinkly bag attached, like an internal condom, only the bag is much shallower. You squeeze the ring to make a long strip instead of a circle, and push it in and *down*, not up. Then, once it gets past the pubic bone, you push the ring up to form a seal around the cervical opening. It just kinda hangs out there, hovering above the vaginal canal.

I could feel the ring with my finger (which is good because how could you take it out if you can't find it again?) so I assumed the hard ring would either be uncomfortable for him or get slammed into my cervix. Neither happened. He said he could barely feel it and it wasn't uncomfortable, and I didn't notice it at all.

However, it did slip a little, so I spotted afterwards until I changed it out. And because it wasn't sucked up where it should have been, it slipped a lot during a bowel movement push. That's how you remove it, btw, you push to make the ring more accessible and then hook a finger under the ring and pull while still pushing your bowel muscles.

So I would recommend changing it after penetration, but it worked as advertised. And now I can have penetrative sex while on my period! (I don't like messy sex, so I refused to before)

https://poly.land/2017/06/22/crumple-zone-partners-bear-impact/

This feels like a very surface-level introduction to something that I've been complaining about for some time. I don't have time to go into it more right now, but I think this will become inspiration for a longer post.

"if a person within the web is particularly skilled at doing emotional labor? They’ll often end up as a lightning rod for it."

"Folks who are in emotional crumple zones are the ones others worry the least about upsetting or hurting. Not because they don’t have feelings. And not because they don’t get hurt easily.

Indeed, many folks in the crumple zone are actually quite sensitive — to their own emotions and to the ones of those around them. But the reality is that their own hurt feelings don’t cause inconvenience to others."

In my case, it plays out that I take responsibility for my own emotions and don't expect other people to "fix" me or do something about a problem that's internal to me.

The double edge to this sword is that I end up dating men who *like* the fact that I don't make them responsible for my own emotions. But how is that a bad thing? you might ask. Well, it becomes a bad thing because it attracts both emotionally mature people AND people who don't like to do any emotional labor in relationships and expect their partners to do it all for them.

So my partners get complacent that I'll do the work on myself and compensate for their lack of relationship management skill and they coast along in a relatively drama-free relationship. Until I have an actual problem that requires their participation. Suddenly it's all "drama" and "I can't handle this right now" and "I'm overwhelmed, I need to leave" and "you're too much work".

My last major breakup was with someone who ghosted me slowly. After not having seen him in literally months, I asked him to tell me what kind of time commitment he *could* agree to. He insisted that our previous agreement of spending a long weekend every other week at my house was doable.

After another couple of months of still not seeing him, I mentioned one date night per month, where we leave the house and do something that requires focused attention on each other. One date night per month. Another month or two passed by with not only not seeing each other, but he also just stopped responding to my text messages. I finally got to see him when he felt obligated to a favor he had agreed to a long time prior.

In that confrontation, his response was to accidentally admit that his video game time was taking precedence over my request for one date night per month of concentrated attention. You see, I was fine to spend time with, as long as he didn't have to feel any inconvenience from my feelings. As soon as I started expressing unhappiness at his lack of participation in our relationship, he got "overwhelmed".

When we saw each other regularly, he told me how soothing it was to be in my presence. But when he stopped seeing me regularly and I started expressing sadness and disappointment, he pulled back even more to avoid facing my inconvenient emotions.

My most recent "minor" breakup was with someone who I knew would feel challenged by polyamory. So I was as up front with him as possible, telling him that there would be challenges, but that I would work with him every step of the way. After all, he was the one who insisted that he try, and I quote, "all in with an emotional connection or nothing". I would have accepted a quick rebound fuck and moved on, but he insisted that it had to be a "real relationship" and I was dubious at his ability to handle that.

Just as I started to let my guard down and show him my vulnerabilities as part of this intimate relationship he insisted we have, he tells me that "a relationship shouldn't be this much work" (keep in mind we *hadn't yet actually started dating*, we just had 3 dates where we talked about what we were interested in) so he's getting back with his ex-gf because she already knows him and won't put any demands on him to grow or challenge his preconceptions of love. Of course she won't, that's why he dumped her in the first place - he was bored and envisioning a lifetime of beige. But now, faced with potential "challenges" and "growth", suddenly that life without challenge seemed safer. Yes, he actually said all that.

I am always the partner who has to deal with my emotions on my own. I'm the "poly veteran", so obvs I'm an expert and don't need help. As soon as I exhibit any difficulty or ask for someone else's help in managing the relationship, I become "inconvenient", "challenging", and "difficult".

I'm the one people date because it's so "easy" to be in a relationship with me ... until it's not, and then I'm the one that gets dumped because fuck forbid my partner have to take the reins for a while and give me a space to be the mess in the relationship.

Dudes - show even the barest minimal effort in who she is as a person. Trust me, it will totally make you stand out from the crowd.

Right now, I am open to both LTRs and casual relationships. I can totally have casual sex without an emotional connection to people. I am capable of having a purely physical chemistry with someone without it being related to how I feel about them as a person. And I'm non-monogamous. If I express interest in a guy, it's *almost* a sure thing under these conditions.

So I'm on Tinder, which is all about the quick, physical attraction version of matching. I see a guy that I find attractive. I'd consider hooking up with him. Only problem is that I don't want to get blindsided, yet again, by someone who expresses interest and then suddenly pulls back because of a problem with who I am as a person.

If we don't match, then we don't match, and that's fine. Just don't lead me on thinking that we do and I start to get attached and then pull the rug out from under me because of an integral part of who I am.

So, I "like" a bunch of profiles, and I make the first contact email, because I have no problem being a woman who does that. But I squeezed a whole bunch of controversial labels into my character-limited profile to get all that shit out up front. Then, I send everyone some version of the following message:

Me: Since we matched, you had to have found me interesting in some way. Did you read my bio? What parts interested you? Does any of it suggest we might not be compatible?

So far, without exception, everyone has responded to my message with a variation on this:

Him: think we would get along just fine, and it doesn’t hurt that you are crazy beautiful😉
Me: OK, but that didn't answer my questions

Dudes. My profile is one fucking paragraph long. All you'd have to say is "hey, you're an atheist? Me too!" or "actually, I don't know what solo poly means" or "honestly, I swiped because of your pictures, but now that I see your profile, I don't think I'd get along with a feminist, but thanks for messaging me!"

THIS IS NOT HARD. I'm totally setting you up for a win here, or at least an easy out. Put forth ANY effort. ANY. AT. ALL.

**Edit**

To be fair, I was finally able to drag out of about 2 or 3 people a response to my initial questions. So far about half of the people I had to say "but that didn't answer my questions" eventually answered them, sort of.

Most of them I ended up unmatching with because, as I said to one of them, it shouldn't be this much work to get a guy to pay attention to who I am when that guy *says* he's interested in me.

There are a couple-three guys who I didn't send that particular question to because they actually had info in their own profile that I was able to respond to. So I opened my conversation with something specific to their bio - "hey, it says you like dancing, what kind of dancing do you do?", "you're a camera operator? Me too!", "you just came back from Korea? What was that like?"

Again, Tinder bios are one paragraph long. It's really not that difficult to read and comment on something in the profile (assuming there is anything specific in the profile to comment on, besides "I like food, music, and hanging out"). The bio even pops up over the second picture when you're swiping through their pictures. Just pick one thing in the bio and comment on it.

And when I message you first and *ask you to pick one thing in my bio and comment on it*, then fucking do that.

https://www.quora.com/For-straight-women-would-you-rather-have-a-man-be-too-nice-or-too-agressive-when-approaching-you-for-a-date/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. For straight women, would you rather have a man be too nice or too agressive when approaching you for a date?

A. There is no such thing as “too nice”. There is genuinely, sincerely nice, there is not nice, and there is passive-aggressively not nice masquerading as “too nice”.

Someone who is genuinely, sincerely, kind and compassionate and caring is “nice”.
Someone who is a doormat is not nice, they lack boundaries.
Someone who relies on gender-based behaviour revolving around a misconception of “courtesy” from an era in which women were chattel but somehow using the same behaviour on women hundreds of years later isn’t demeaning or treating them as chattel, is not nice, it’s misogynistic virtue signaling.
Someone who is “too aggressive” is actually violating boundaries and consent, not just the opposite of “too nice”.

I want someone who treats me like a human fucking being. I want someone who recognizes my humanity, who respects my agency, and who gets to know me as a person first so that they can treat me the way I want to be treated, not according to some rule book that says “all women want / like / should be treated…”.

That’s not “too nice”, that’s the absolute bare minimum, the bottom line, the lowest bar for “decent human being”. You can’t go overboard on recognizing one’s humanity and respecting one’s agency and treating one as an individual. You can’t be “too” of that.

Being a doormat, being passive-aggressively meek in order to curry favor, and being “aggressive” and ignoring boundaries are all just different ways of not doing enough of all that.

I've been watching Cobra Kai. I hesitated to watch it because, even though I was a Karate Kid fan, I a) didn't want them to screw it up and b) had some complicated feelings about making the villains into the protagonists. As I keep saying in my Poly-ish Movie Reviews, I am character-driven. If I don't like the characters, I won't like the story no matter how well it's told, and if I do like the characters I will probably like the story no matter how terribly it's told.

Which makes unlikable protagonists very challenging for me. And Cobra Kai is about an unlikable protagonist.

One of Franklin's favorite books is about an unlikable protagonist. He holds it up as an example of how to write that kind of character well. I disagree. I hated that character from the beginning, I never felt sympathetic towards him, and I wasn't surprised at all at how bad he turned out to be (I may have not guessed the very specific details of the ending, but I wasn't surprised that he turned out as evil as he was).

Some unlikable characters are popular because we love to hate them. Bestor from Babylon 5 is one of these for me. He's written in a pretty nuanced, complex way, and yet I still hate him no matter how many little humanized tidbits the show throws at us to make him relatable. I think those humanized bits make him so deliciously evil that I really enjoy hating him. I want him to suffer and I enjoy every time he loses.

Then there is the "flip the script" or "mirror" method of telling a tale from the other perspective. Such as in Maleficent, where we are presented with an origin story or "reasons" why someone's actions may have been interpreted as evil depending on the perspective of the storyteller.

If you look at a war in progress, the "other side" is evil because they're the other side, but if you tell the story from that other side, then the first side is evil because THEY are the other side. Maleficent waging war on humans makes complete sense when those humans keep coming into fae lands to massacre all the fairies. But to the humans, she's an existential threat.

Johnny Lawrence is not Maleficent. There is even an episode where he tells someone else the story of Karate Kid but from his perspective, where Daniel LaRousso was the bully. And I can see how he reached that conclusion. But he's actually wrong. It's like how I can see how Republicans reach their conclusions, but they're factually wrong about them.

Johnny Lawrence is an asshole. He is the bad guy. No amount of "understanding his reasons" changes that. And yet, I care about what happens to him. A lot of the time I want him to suffer, but I want his suffering to teach him a lesson so that he'll stop being an asshole.

This isn't an origin story. But it kind of is. Now that Johnny is an adult, he is able to perpetuate the abuse that he suffered as a kid onto a whole new generation of kids. So we can see exactly how you can take someone who is kind and compassionate and considerate and slowly warp him into someone who is cruel. And how that can be done without even necessitating malicious intent.

Johnny Lawrence is, and always was, an asshole. But it's possible that he may have a redemption arc. What I'm liking about this show is that it's not a clear arc. It's also possible that he will never find redemption, depending on where they take his character. As long as his methods result in what he sees as success, he has no reason to see why he's a bad guy. Both possibilities is what makes this story interesting for me.

That's where the conflict really is - will Johnny redeem himself, or is this just a Walter White or Thanos situation? He succeeds and yet remains a bad guy with no redemptive arc? Some people will just straight up tell you in what way they are evil and completely believe they are in the right. Nazis, racists, misogynists, domestic abusers, etc. Johnny could be written by people like that, or by people who want to tell that kind of character's story. Or he could be written by people who want to believe that even those kinds of people can see the light. Which character is Johnny Lawrence? We'll find out.

I think the actor playing Johnny is pretty brave to bring back this character and tell his tale. At least, in the way that it's being told. If this had been basically like that one space movie where it's just a 2 hour ride justifying violence and violation because reasons, I wouldn't be saying this. I think this show (so far) stays on the right side of the line between *explaining* violence and *justifying* it.

After completing the first season, I don't like Johnny Lawrence. I'm not supposed to like him. And I dislike him enough that I'm not even rooting for him. He could change, and I would be glad to see that change, but I don't root for him to win the fights he gets into or hope that he comes out ahead in his interpersonal conflicts. I want him to get his ass kicked. I want the people in his life to leave him. I want him to fail. But if he somehow manages to learn from those failures and become a better person, I'd like to see that too. He is simultaneously an exercise in hope for growth and in schadenfreude. He's Schrodinger's anti-hero.

I don't like him and I'm not rooting for him. But I'm *invested* in seeing what happens to him.

And *that's* how you fucking write an unlikable character.

Everyone else is fairly boiler-plate, and yet also still well written and acted. Each of the characters has a predictable path or an archetypal role. But there are a *lot* of them. This isn't a black hat-white hat good vs. evil story where everyone is basically the same character (or no character) except for the one rogue they throw us as a bone.

There are several different archetypes in the show, each with their own arcs and developments, and each face enough nuanced conflicts that their arcs have several pivot points that could take them in one of several directions.

But this show is really about Johnny Lawrence, an unlikable character as the main character. This is more than just an anti-hero story. In all the anti-hero stories that are popular right now, they're anti-heroes but they're also somehow likable. They're bad guys but they're charming, or they're ethically grey but sympathetic, or something along those lines.

We've been "flipping the script" for a while now, telling anti-hero stories or telling a story from the villain's perspective. And in order to get the audience to be invested, ultimately we end up making those characters likable who just make poor decisions or who have something terrible happen to them. While terrible things did happen to Johnny that molded him into the person we see now and who makes poor decisions, he is ultimately someone who is not likable. He is toxic masculinity personified.

They had a difficult job here, because the '80s movie was pretty standard with writing the antagonist as a clear-cut villain. Johnny was a bully and there was no real reason for his bullying other than he was an asshole. Yes, his sensei made him an asshole, but he was definitely an asshole with no depth underneath.

Now we want to tell his story? Not how he became an asshole, but to tell the story OF an asshole? How do you give depth to a character originally written as shallow? He has to really be an asshole, even with that depth. There has to be a reason why he seemed to take pleasure in beating the shit out of Daniel and why he treated Ali the way he treated her.

He is very much like a lot of my backstage coworkers, who are assholes and, honestly, unlikable, but I can get along with them fine because they're real people and real people are messy, complicated creatures.

Johnny Lawrence is an asshole. I don't like him. I'm not supposed to like him. I'm probably supposed to root for him? But the writers and the actor keep him as an asshole so maybe I'm not supposed to root for him. Either way, I'm not rooting for him.

But I am invested in him and his outcome.

I think this show is exploring a lot of complex themes and emotions and ethical dilemmas. In some ways, it's still a little heavy-handed, like the original source was. But by telling the story from the antagonist's perspective while still maintaining those same morals and themes, it complicates the story and gives it a lot more character and a lot more grey areas.

And I really liked the pinnacle season conflict in which it didn't matter how that conflict was resolved, Johnny Lawrence could not win either way. So how do you root for him when both outcomes would suck for him? You choose which moral lesson you want him to learn from the two possible losing options?

In anti-hero stories, we root for the protagonist to succeed at, what is actually an "evil plot" - we want Danny Ocean to rob the casino. In Bandits, we want Joe & Terry to succeed at robbing banks and to "get the girl" Kate. We want Dexter to continue to kill people, or at least not get caught for it. We want the bad guys to get away with what they're doing because they're the protagonists and we get attached to them.

But I don't want Johnny Lawrence to succeed. I'm not rooting for him. I don't like him. And I'm not supposed to. At least, not yet. So they gave us a conflict in which he can't win, even if he succeeds. He is still unlikable. Anti-heroes are likable. Or, at least, sympathetic.

I do not like stories with unlikable characters at the helm. I like to dislike certain unlikable characters as foils or villains. And I really strongly dislike stories that romanticize or justify unlikable characters ("but he was abused!", "but she wanted it!", "but he started it!"). I'm also totally over "privileged white man has some kind of challenge that actually a lot of people have but his challenge turned him into the asshole he is today, so let's spend yet another show explaining his story" kind of tales.

But, at least through season 1, I think Cobra Kai does an excellent job of creating a realistic, nuanced unlikable protagonist that is keeping me engaged and invested in the outcome. And I have to say that I'm impressed. I heard good things about the show, but I was still expecting to not like it, or at least find it meh. Instead, I actually think it's really good. I'll get back to you after a few seasons before I go so far as to say it's brilliant. But it could be.

I'm listening to the song Hole In The Bucket. The way I've always heard the song performed, it seems to imply that the guy is basically lazy and expects his wife to troubleshoot everything for him.

It's like, guys who can't find their keys or socks or something, and take one glance around the room and then shout to their wife in the other room "where is it?" and the wife, who is up to her elbows in soap suds with screaming kids running around her ankles and food burning on the stove has to also mentally remember the details of every room in the house and all her husband's activities since he came home the night before to find whatever it is he lost because he can't be arsed to actually look for the thing.

The song is always sung with irritation at the guy who can't manage very simple domestic tasks and expects his wife to tell him each step along the way.

But today, I had a different perception.

If the genders were reversed, and I was playing "Henry", this song now sounds to me like being mansplained at.

Henry isn't doing a thing. Liza tells him to do a thing. Henry gives a reason for why he's not doing a thing, so Liza tells him to fix it. Every step Liza suggests, Henry asks Liza how he's supposed to accomplish that step, until we come right back to the beginning where he can't do the first step because of the original problem he mentioned at the beginning.

This reminds me of the argument I got into with my parents' friend about why I don't have health insurance. "Just save money!" How am I supposed to do that if my bills are higher than my income? "Get a better job!" How do I do that if the economy is in a recession and there aren't enough jobs? "Go to school for a better education!" How do I afford school if I don't have any money? "Save better!" With what income?

And 'round and 'round it goes.

It felt, to me, this time listening to this song, that Henry already knew there was a problem, but Liza thought she knew better, and Henry had to walk her through it, step by step, to reach the conclusion he had already reached. And, as a woman, I find this "well how would you suggest I solve this problem then?" questioning method to be very familiar, as a lot of men really don't like it when I simply make statements.

"OK, that sounds reasonable. Oh, wait a minute, but then how would I do this part if this thing is happening?" Constantly catering to the person offering "advice" and doing emotional labor to manage their own feelings so that they don't get "hurt" that their advice isn't warranted. Spending all this time walking them through the decision tree until they finally get to the conclusion I have already reached and doing so gently so they don't get their feelings hurt when I was the one who was dismissed, as though I couldn't have figured all this out on my own.

Up until the very last verse of the song, where we come to the first verse again, with the genders as-is, this song is still very much a "women are the Household Managers and have to do all the Domestic Labor even when the men 'help out'" situation.

But when we come full circle, then I suddenly switch to the other side and hear the lines as not Domestic Labor Management but as Unhelpful Fixer Offering Not Applicable Suggestions.

So that was an interesting perspective shift.

So, I was actually challenged by someone on my stance on abortion. They seemed to try and catch me in a "gotcha". My position is that I do not want to be pregnant, and as its my body, I am the only one who gets to have a say in whether or not I am pregnant. The opposing position was the usual tripe about how men "deserve" the right to be fathers and it's not fair that women can unilaterally decide on behalf of men that they will become fathers or not be allowed to be fathers, just because women are the ones who carry the fetuses.

The question was what I would do if I could transfer the pregnancy to the father, in some hypothetical magical medical machine that would transfer the fetus with absolutely no side effects or permanent changes or damage to my own body. The unstated implication in the question was that he expected me to still choose the abortion, for ... some reason.

Instead, I said "I don't fucking care how the fetus gets out of my body, as long as it gets out of my body without damaging it and I don't have any financial ties to it." If the fathers really want to take on sole responsibility the way women have been forced to forever, that's their choice, but I suspect very few will really understand what it is they're taking on as single, solely responsible parents.

He didn't actually know how to take that response. Apparently it didn't occur to him that anyone would actually accept that as a viable option. Except I'm not pro-abortion because I'm pro-killing-fetuses. I'm pro-abortion because I legitimately do not want to be pregnant nor can I afford to raise a child. Whatever method results in that solution, I'm willing to entertain.

As an adopted child, and as someone who was once so poor that I signed up to be an egg donor, I have absolutely no qualms about someone else raising "my" child. I believe children should be raised by parents who want them, and I don't want them.

But I'm quite sure most men don't really want them either. At least not the way they *think* they want them. And being forced to carry a fetus will reveal that. Could you imagine the outcry if this magical machine was available to anyone carrying a fetus and the default option was to implant it in the other genetic-contributing parent with OR WITHOUT their agreement?

Like, we as a society don't like abortion, so this magic machine is created as a solution to abortion, which means that if the pregnant person wants it out, the fetus has to go SOMEWHERE, and the other genetic donor was obligated to take over the responsibility in the way that the current fetus-carrier is currently obligated by increasingly aggressive lack of abortion options? Passing it onto someone who is not genetically related would require both a consent form and a medical exam to make sure they could biologically carry it to term (like current surrogates), but if one parent doesn't want the fetus, the other has to take it, since getting rid of it wouldn't be allowed.

I'm not actually proposing that we have a solution that merely passes on the violation of bodily autonomy. I'm just saying that if the gender that has never really known what it means to live a life under the threat of no autonomy was suddenly faced with it, the arguments would change right quick.

Q. Does your husband allow you to drive alone?

A. You … you’re kidding, right?

I’ve been driving longer than some of my partners have been alive. I’ve been driving since before I could actually see over the dashboard and needed a booster seat. I’ve been driving a manual transmission since I could physically move the gear shift.

I used to race cars. I learned how to drive on a 1979 4x4 Landcruiser in the Sierra mountains on one-lane tracks with a mountain on one side and a cliff on the other. I learned how to drive in the snow, on rocky beaches, and in swamps.

Hunting as a child with my father, he decided that, in case of an emergency while the two of us were out in the middle of nowhere, far away from civilization, if he was ever incapacitated, I would need to know how to wrestle him up into the truck and how to drive that truck to safety or help. So he taught me how to drive when I was so small, that I needed a stand to hold the barrel of the shotgun I used to kill animals because I simply didn’t have the arm length or body weight for leverage.

(yes, I know I’m not holding the gun properly here - see aforementioned necessary stand; since I didn’t have the stand set up, I didn’t have the leverage to hold it for the picture, so I merely posed for the camera because I wasn’t actually firing it at the time)

I also drive a forklift and a high reach / boomlift (with an OSHA certification to go with both). I can drive better than every partner I’ve ever had, with the possible exception of the guy who taught me how to ride a motorcycle. Hell, I’ve even taught *some of them* how to drive things.

When I was 23 years old, I bought a 40-foot school bus, drove it down the Pacific Coast from the Canadian border, converted it to a motorhome, and then drove it (with a vehicle towed behind it) across the Southern United States.

By myself.

(ok, with my cat)

In addition to that, I am a fully functioning, legally recognized, autonomous human being. I have not needed anyone to “allow” me to do anything in decades.

Muffin, if you think any partner is even capable of “allowing” me or not “allowing” me to do *anything*, let alone something I’m really fucking good at and probably better than they are, then perhaps someone else needs to be in charge of “allowing” you out in public without supervision.

#ThingsIWantToToon

Image: simple pen drawing of zombies crowding around a woman. Not gory or realistic, but whimsical like Calvin & Hobbs or Far Side - comic strip style, rather than graphic novel style.

Caption:

Him: "Men want casual sex and women want relationships, it's just one of the differences between men and women."

Me: "Yup, I can tell you've never dated a man before."

Sure, "all" men want casual sex ... until you're a *woman* who wants casual sex, and then suddenly All The Men come crawling out of the woodwork demanding to know why you're such a cold, heartless bitch who won't love them.

Speech Bubbles over the zombies heads:

"Marry me!"

"Long-term commitment!"

"Children!"

"Aren't I enough?!"

"WHY WON'T YOU LOVE MEEEEEEEEE?!?!"

#NotAllMen #ItIsAlmostLikeSocietyHasRemovedAnySocialAndEmotionalConnectionsFromMenSoTheyHaveToGetAllOfThemFromOneWomanAndSuddenlyMenGetOverwhelmingCravingsForTheOne

Profile

Joreth

The Inn Between

Page Summary

Country Swing Dancing And The Systemic Obliviousness Of Men - A Compliment Becomes A Metaphor
Imaginary Conversations With Fictional TV 2nd Wave Feminists
Polyamory & The Prisoner's Dilemma (And Some Gender Role Bullshit In Poly)
Duck Sex And The Patriarchy
Asking About My Armband Is A Privilege Display
Because You Fucking Know Opening Doors Is Not "No Big Deal"
¿Que Es Una Chingona? Some Discovered Identity Terms
Friendship Is Not The Consolation Prize Nor The Stepping Stone To A Relationship
Why White Men Decided Dancing Is Unmasculine I'll Never Know
But Men Are Not Emotional, They Are Logical!
Feminist Country Music
Which Female Mythological Monster Am I?
We've Forgotten How To Dress Like Adults
Why Identity Labels Matter
When The Patriarchy Backfires On Men: Beauty Standards Episode
But, Ladies, A Threesome With 2 Dudes?!
The Most Inappropriate Interaction I've Had At A Club
We Cannot Extrapolate From Young White Cismen What Everyone Else Would Do
Malicious Compliance & Public Speaking
Why Would You Choose Abortion Over Adoption?
Your Hubby Hangs Out With A Gold Digger?!
Men Think #MeToo Ruined the Art of Flirting
Stop Asking Me About Having Children
You Do Not Have To Sacrifice Style And Comfort In Shoes
I Challenge All The Men To Do This Core Strength Challenge
Are Older Women Dominant Or Submissive?
Why Do Married People Not Wear Wedding Rings?
Can Straight Women Be In A FMF Threesome?
Resting Bitch Face And Intersectionality
Unicorn Hunter Bait And Switch Power Counter-Move
The Masculinity Of Vulnerability
Masculinizing Feminine Fashion
It's Your Home Too. Pick Up Your Fucking Trash
The Magical Thinking Of Guys Who Love Logic
How Do I Make My Wife Care About Her Own Orgasm?
How Can I Make Him Marry Me For Social Respect?
Why Do Women Get Bitter After Marriage?
Mansplainers Mansplain Feminism & Dating Advice To Me
How Do You Tell A Guy You Just Want To Hook Up With Him?
Do You Think #Feminist Women Are Gold Diggers?
Can Guys Be Lifted In Dancing?
A Menstruation Aid That Can Be Worn During Penetrative Sex
The Crumple Zone: Partners Who Bear The Impact
Adventures In Online Dating - Mr. No Effort
Would You Rather Have A Man "Too Nice" Or "Too Aggressive"?
Review: Cobra Kai - Season 1 (no spoilers)
There's A Hole In The Communication Bucket
Gotcha Feminist Abortionists!
Does Your Husband Allow You To Drive Alone?
#ThingsIWantToToon: Male Commitment Zombies

August 2024

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Ranty Lessons by Joreth

Entries tagged with gender issues

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