joreth | Entries tagged with rants

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.

Something I want to be careful of is the vilification of gaslighting. And by that, I mean that I want to draw a line between "this behaviour has harmful effects and we need to stop doing it" and "the people who gaslight are evil manipulators deliberately trying to drive you insane".

The reason why I want to draw that line is because characterizing it as the latter makes it too easy for people to distance *ourselves* from acknowledging when we do it. "I am not an evil manipulator, so I can't be gaslighting anyone." Even "evil" abusers see themselves as the victim in their stories.

The reason they abuse is because they have a *belief* that the actions they take are genuinely right, good, acceptable, appropriate, or warranted. Many of them feel that they are a good influence on others or that they are trying to better their victims or doing what they do for their own good. They can't change until they recognize that they are doing something wrong.

See The Villains As Ourselves

So when we use the latter definition, we give them justification room in their minds to excuse their actions. But if we use the former, then we ALL have to take a look at our own behaviour and keep working on bettering ourselves, and we can do that without the cognitive dissonance fighting us and telling us that we are a "good person" so this can't apply to ourselves. This makes it harder for outright abusers to excuse their own actions if the culture around them encourages this kind of reflection and correction of everyone.

Gaslighting is such a normal part of our society that we're mostly all raised with it all around us. That makes it difficult to identify when we do it ourselves.

One of the classic examples I use to illustrate non "abusive", well-intentioned gaslighting is a mother trying to get her child to eat her vegetables, the child says she doesn't like them, and the mother says in exasperation, "yes you do, now just eat them."

We likely have gaslighted people in these kinds of minor situations many times over our lives and never realized it, so never recorded it in our memories. Why should one of these totally normal conversations stick out in our minds, especially years later? It's *the way things are* in so many circumstances.

I can't remember anything specific but I'm sure I've said to people at various times "oh, yes you do!" when they said they didn't like something or didn't want something, and I'm sure I had good intentions when I did it. I'm not "evil", I'm a meat body driven by a belief engine and a product of my environment, which means I'm flawed.

The best I can do now is to be mindful of my language and try not to contradict people when they tell me their inner landscape. If I have reason to doubt them, such as suspecting *them* of trying to manipulate me, maybe I can ask for confirmation or I can point to conflicting *behaviour*, but I will try not to outright tell other people what they are feeling.

In this post, I want to be clear that I'm doing something that I often rant against doing - stretching the definition of a very importantly narrow term. Gaslighting is not simply remembering things differently, or even *just* telling someone with confidence that their memory of a thing is wrong, even if the "thing" in question is part of the other person's inner landscape. The original term "gaslighting" is, in fact, the second definition I used in my opening paragraph.

In the movie Gaslight, which is where the term comes from, a husband is *deliberately* changing the level of the lighting in the house (created by gas lights, not electric lights), and when the wife comments on the change in light, he *deliberately* says there is no change, so that the wife comes to doubt her own senses over time. The husband does all this *deliberately* so that he can have his wife committed to an asylum so he can access her money. This is a 1940s villain caricature, an evil mustachio'd villain who knows he is doing evil and doing it maliciously and selfishly.

The problem is that this is not how real life "villains" operate. And that's the point that I'm making here. It's important to keep a narrow definition of terms like "gaslight" and "abuse" and not round up just anything uncomfortable to these terms. But we have to *also* make sure that we don't keep the definitions so narrow that it only applies to people in black hats cackling in their lairs and stroking their white cats while they plot world domination.

Because that leads to everyday, ordinary people doing horrible things and justifying themselves because they are not evil villains. We have everyday, low-key examples of people trying to convince other people that they are not experiencing the things that they are experiencing. This is not the same thing as correcting people's flawed memories or understanding of factual claims, although that can also be weaponized. I'm talking about "yes, you do like broccoli!" when you do not, in fact, like broccoli.

These small little disregards of our inner landscape *lead* to large disregards of other people's inner landscapes, because it's the same thing but a manner of scope. The mother *believes* that it's in her child's best interest to eat veggies. And she's right, it is in her child's best interest, and the mother is, in fact, in a position of authority and power over the child to do "what's best" for the child. This is the nature of that relationship.

So it's a very small step to go from a parent / child power dynamic who uses an agency-dismissing tool to manipulate and control one's behaviour, to a romantic partnership dynamic who uses an agency-dismissing tool to manipulate and control one's behaviour *for one's own good*. This is a tool we have been given by our society, so it's a tool we may not even notice that we are pulling out and using because our brains are little more than belief justification engines.

And if our society has also encouraged us to see villains as black hatted evil caricatures of people, then our giant justification engines are going to work overtime to make sure that we are not Bad People(TM). And since we are not Bad People(TM), we therefore cannot be doing the things that Bad People(TM) do.

And THAT is the point of this piece. Gaslighting, the action, needs to be understood as a Very Bad Thing, but it needs to be separated from our personal identities as a thing that only Very Bad People do. The action is a tool that we have all been taught how to use. It's normal and reasonable for people immersed in a culture that uses this tool to reach for the tool themselves. It is an *inappropriate* tool, but the people who use it are regular, everyday people who have understandable reasons for reaching for it.

And now that you know it is a common, ubiquitous even, tool in all of our toolboxes, we ought to be on the lookout for when *we* reach for this totally normal, common but unhealthy tool. Gaslighting is not a tool reserved only for the most evil of all evil people. It's a tool that everyone has been exposed to, and taught how to use. All you have to do now is teach yourself how to put that tool down and reach for another one.

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.

Here's something else I'd like to see everyone stop doing - if someone is mean to you on the internet, stop calling that "abuse".

Yes, there are ways to be abusive on the internet. And yes, there are people who do that. But most of the time, it's not *abuse*, which is about *power*. It's someone being a jerk.

I'm a jerk. I'm mean to people. But don't confuse me losing my temper at something really fucking irritating that you did with "abuse".

When we start "rounding up" behaviours as "abuse", we dilute the whole conversation around abuse, particularly domestic abuse, parental abuse, and intimate partner violence, and also bullying. These are very real, very serious issues that we need to keep talking about and keep talking about. Someone yelling at you on the internet? Not abuse. Even if it hurts.

Did they dox you? Did they reveal personal information? Did they violate your consent? Did they use their position of power and authority to silence you? To turn people or entire communities against you? Did they withhold a valuable resource from you?

These are things that can be discussed in a conversation about abuse.

Did they yell at you? Tell you that you were hurting them? Accuse you of hurting others? Tell you to leave them alone? Call you petty names (but not names with the weight of systemic oppression behind them)? Block you from their personal profile? Use swear words where you could read them? Disagree passionately with you?

These things are not abuse. Depending on the context, they could be someone being a jerk (or they could be a legitimately valid reaction to you being a jerk). But these things do not constitute abuse.

Stop throwing that word around like it's going out of style. You are devaluing a very, very important word.

OTG don't start a relationship with someone who is in the process of leaving an abusive partner! And for fuck's sake, don't get upset when they act inconsistent or seem to reconcile or "go back" to said abusive partner.  Abuse does all kinds of fucked up shit to a person's head and they really need to find their own identity before beginning a new relationship.

Escaping one abusive partner into the arms of another creates a coercive dynamic because of the fucked up shit going on inside the victim's head, *even if you try very hard not to be coercive*.  The key part here is the loss of identity. Abuse wipes out victims' identities, and without a clear sense of who they are as an individual person, they are unable to create healthy boundaries for themselves in other relationships *which makes those other relationships coercive by nature*.

You cannot force someone out of an abusive relationship before they're ready, and you SHOULD not encourage them to leap straight from the abusive relationship to a new relationship, poly or otherwise.

Be "on call" for them to go pick them or their stuff up at a moment's notice, field or facilitate the finding of a new place to live so that their abuser doesn't find out about it, believe them and give them space, and most importantly, don't take it as a personal rejection or blame them when they inevitably backslide in some way including going back to their abuser.

Abuse does all kinds of fucked up shit to a person's head. If you can't be a proper support system for a victim, which includes not pushing them into leaving before they're ready and not complaining about how hurt you feel or that they "used" you or "played you" or "ditched" you when they end up not leaving or they gradually stop talking to you or they go back to their abuser, then back the fuck out of their lives. Otherwise, you risk making things worse for them.

For a better idea on how to be a "proper support system" for a victim, check out the resources in the back of Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft which includes books on how to be the loved one of an abuse victim.

This was in response to a "couple" who wanted advice on how to start a relationship with "a third" who was trying to escape an abusive partner. Other people's responses were ... abhorrent. Some of them argued for this couple to "just go get her out of there" and a few suggested that it's not the best idea but you can be careful or otherwise not treat this like an actual life or death situation that it could become.

To that, I must give a reminder: escaping from an abuser is the most dangerous time for a victim. This is the time abusers are most likely to escalate the violence to murder.

This is not only dangerous for her, it's dangerous for everyone around her. She doesn't need to escape into your home, she needs to escape to a place that knows how to keep her safe from an escalating, now pissed off abuser and that fully understands the situation she is in.  Every time you hear about some woman and her kids or her parents or her new boyfriend being murdered by an ex, it's almost always during the time she is trying to escape the ex. Everyone around the victim becomes a target for an enraged abuser.

What do you think an abusive ex, hell bent on power and control and now extra pissed off that his little punching bag is leaving, is going to think of the new boyfriend *and girlfriend* who "stole her away"?  He's going to *blame* the couple and polyamory as being a bad influence on his girlfriend and believe that he needs to teach everyone a lesson and reassert his authority. This is the time when previously emotional-only abusers escalate to physical violence too.

I can't stress enough what a dangerous time this is for her and why the concern needs to be what's in her best interest, not what's in your pants. That's also why you can't force her to leave if she's not ready. Only she understands the extent of the danger she is in, and if her mind has to rationalize why she stays in order to keep herself safe, then that's what she needs to do.

Please, everyone, read Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft. This is so much more serious than most people who haven't been there really understand.

"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

https://pudding.cool/2017/05/song-repetition/index.html

Basically, music has always had a mix of repetitive and non-repetitive music, and the most popular music *of any era* tends towards the more-repetitive end of the spectrum. Which I find annoying, but I do like a *little* repetition in my music because totally free-flowing, non-rhyming music doesn't work for me either.

Basically, people in general like "catchy" music, and that involves some amount of repetition. That's just how it goes.

This debate has always reminded me of the Dragonharpers of Pern book where a girl born to a fishing village has a unique skill for, what comes down to, "pop music". Her fishing family dismisses and actively discourages her talent for music in a classic blue-collar, working class anti-elitism way that many working class people feel about artists in general.

When she finally gets to their version of Juliard (where music and education are one and the same thing and a very elite profession), her catchy little ditties are dismissed as "twaddles", kind of like the vicious rivalry between opera and musical theater or opera and rock music. There is only One True Way to play music!!!

But much to the dismay of both her high-brow professors and her working class family, the bulk of the population loves her music because it's catchy and fun and easy to remember. Since music is used to teach in this society, "easy to remember" is a very important element. It brings their most cherished lessons out of the tightly grasped fists of only the elitist of the elite singers / academics and into the open arms of the general public.

If Mozart were also a history lesson, we would have even more trouble remembering history than we do today with our focus on dates. But if Britney Spears could also sing an accurate song about history and *that* was taught in classes instead, we'd have a lot more well-educated people in our population these days.

Anyway, point is that the reason why music is so "repetitive" has nothing to do with "kids today" and everything to do with how our brains work as humans. In spite of the hipsters out there who adamantly deny that they like repetition or that music keeps getting "watered down", human brains in general like repetition *to some degree*, and always have.

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.

I get really frustrated when I start a conversation with someone and we are mostly in agreement from the outset, but somehow I end up arguing by defending a more polarizing position mainly because the other person either didn't see or refused to acknowledge that we were mostly in agreement from the beginning.

Like, when I started out a book review with "polyamory isn't ALL about sex, but we are talking about sexual-romantic relationships so let's talk about the parts that *are* about sex" and the first two comments were from one person pissed off that I would dare suggest that sex has anything at all to do with poly relationships and another who is pissed off at the suggestion that romantic relationships have nothing to do with sex.

So I ended up simultaneously having to defend the idea that of course sex is an important part to most people's experience of romantic relationships AND of course sex isn't the single defining element that makes romantic relationships different from other kinds of relationships. I didn't necessarily disagree with either point, but instead of talking about nuance, we got bogged down here.

Or the time I said that I was unequivocally opposed to the for-profit prison system, but that I thought prisoners *should* be given *some kind of* pathway for learning trades that they could use to become contributing members of society when their time is served or for earning income to pay for the debts that their crimes have created.

Somehow I ended up arguing with someone about the *current* prison system when I was never in favor of it to begin with, but because work opportunities for prisoners and the current legalized slavery are conflated, my opponent got bogged down in minutia instead of the actual issues when he completely overlooked my caveat that *it should be done ethically and with an eye towards reform, responsibility, and reparations* instead of punitively or for the personal gain of corporate owners.

Or the time I ended up arguing in circles with a friend of my mother's about why I don't have any medical insurance when I agreed that all the reasons *for* medical insurance were a good idea and all the suggestions for earning or saving money were a good idea *if one had access to them*, all because she ignored the part where I started my half of the conversation by saying that I was working for a union who was putting money away for me in some kind of emergency fund (which, btw, I can't access now that I'm not working for them anymore even though I put in that money from my own labor, but that's another rant and a point I didn't know at the time).

Look, I already agree with you, how the fuck did we end up yelling at each other on opposite sides of the debate?

#RhetoricalQuestion #RulesLawyersDoThisOften #SoDoPeopleWhoPedanticallyMissThePoint

I wish I had a magical power where I could mediate a dispute between two sides and every time someone opened their mouth to distract, obfuscate, argue, or otherwise not say something helpful, I could raise my finger in the "shush" position AND THEY WOULD. I would calmly tell them to try again, and they could start again, but if they just found another way to do the same thing, I could shush them again. And they would all be forced to sit there until they learned how to properly discuss contentious topics.

It would help if *I* had that skill myself, so that I knew what "properly discuss" techniques were, but since this is a magical power, then I would magically know.

I had a partner once who I was attempting to teach about feelings, their importance, and how to identify and use them. I remember one particular argument we had where I was trying to just get him to state his feelings. That's it.

He said "I think they're wrong." I said "that's not a feeling that you are having." He said "well I FEEL that they're wrong." I just could not get him to understand that the correct answer is "I feel frustrated and hurt and defensive." He was just dead set on deflecting the conversation onto what OTHER PEOPLE were doing, not on what he was feeling. In our entire relationship, I never got him to understand this.

I've seen other people who go into discussions where one person is trying to understand but the other person just keeps taking every attempt to understand as an attack and reacts defensively. I want to make them put down their defensive positions and just talk. Stop *arguing*, and start *revealing*.

Whenever I see an image of Impeachface McTinyhands, I have this same frustration. Every time he opens his mouth, I want to bang a gavel at him to interrupt him until he learns how to fucking answer the goddamn question. Spiceyspice too.

My head is filled with banging judges' gavels and Dr. Evil doing "shhh!" and Ruby Rod with his "zzzzzzZZZZzz!"

No. Just stop it right there.

Try again. Nope, that's still not it.

Nuh! Try again.

Uh uh. No.

Nope. Stop. ...

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.

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I am not a fan of Dan Savage. He occasionally says something not terrible, but so do a lot of other people who don't fill the rest of their time with toxic nonsense. Just because a stopped clock is right twice a day, it doesn't mean that you should rely on that clock as your timepiece. A working clock is also right those same 2 times a day, but it's right all the rest of the time too.

This rant is brought to you by Savage's Campsite Rule. This rule states that you should leave your partners "better" than you found them, including no stds, no unwanted pregnancies, and no emotional or sexual baggage because of their experience with you. Aside from that being literally impossible to guarantee, the problem I have with the campsite rule is that it relies on the very person most at risk of being the problem to self-evaluate.

I've been involved in identifying abusive dynamics in my communities in the last several years, and what we've all learned the hard way is that abusers see themselves as victims even while they're actively abusing someone. Asking one of them to take on the responsibility of not leaving their partner worse than they found them is like asking unicorn hunters to take on the responsibility of not harming their unicorns, or the police department to evaluate and take on the responsibility of correcting its own level of racism and corruption. We need objective and independent evaluations, not our subjective opinions of ourselves which are inherently biased to think of ourselves as "Good People".

Abusers blame their victims for their situation. The abuser always come away from abusive relationships thinking that *the abuser* was the "good one" and that the victim is worse off without the abuser in the picture. I'm sure we've all heard "what does she see in that loser? She could have a Nice Guy like me! Women just want guys who are assholes! They don't even have enough sense to notice a good catch like me when I'm right in front of them!"

Abusers think that their victims are not capable of making good choices for themselves and they require corrective action from the abuser. The abuser is the one who knows how the victim should live / date / dress / eat / work / be! The victim is lost without the abuser to tell them the proper way to cook eggs and raise children and dress for work and clean the house and think about themselves! So the abusers say.

So I'm not a fan of telling people to leave their partners "better off" than they found them because abusers - the people most in dire need of these sorts of restrictions - honestly think they *are* doing that. They think that their victims *came* to them with baggage and that the abuser is the only one who can "straighten them out".

In the book Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft, we hear stories from the sessions with abusive men. Without exception, they believe that their partners are the fucked up ones, that their partners need their corrective hand to survive, that their partners will ruin their own lives without their personal guidance, and that they are absolutely justified in whatever tactics they employ to "guide" their victims.

We all like to think of ourselves as the heroes of our own story. In my observation, it's the victims who are most likely to think that they are too "broken" to be a good partner for someone and everyone else doesn't really believe at the beginning of a relationship that they will one day become a bad influence on their partners. Even without being an abuser, most of us genuinely do not believe that we will one day break up and our partners will be a bigger mess because of their experience with us.

I know that I've had partners, in my early poly days, who were absolutely not ready to deal with ethical non-monogamy. And to this day, I still do not believe that I treated them unethically. But their pre-existing issues did not mix well with my more advanced relationship skills or my own flaws and some of them probably have some baggage after dating me. I am not a beginner relationship. If you throw someone into a situation that is too advanced or too complicated for them to handle at that stage, they're likely to come away from that experience with a few issues.

*We* are generally not the right people to evaluate ahead of time what will or will not be "good" for someone after it's over. We're not even very good at evaluating what will be good for ourselves, let alone other people.

So I think that is a terrible metric to use in evaluating ethics in relationships. We have more concrete, objective metrics involving power dynamics and domestic violence red flags. We should not be relying on our own subjective opinion of ourselves when it is ourselves that need evaluation for potential harm. We are too biased for that evaluation.

Me: I'm trying to place an order and the website says "your order cannot be placed at this time. Please call customer service."

Tech Support: That's strange. Do you know why?

Me: No, that's all it says.

TS: Huh. Well, I see no reason why you can't place the order.

Me: ....

TS: [keyboard clicking for several minutes]

TS: Did you try refreshing the page?

Me: I've been trying to place this order for 2 days. Yes, I've refreshed it several times.

TS: Are you having a problem with your method of payment?

Me: I don't know, all it says is that it can't be placed at this time and to call you. So I'm calling, like it says to.

TS: Well, you should be able to place the order.

Me: ...

Me: So.... how do I make this order go through then?

TS: Uh, can I place you on hold?

Me: Yeah, whatever.

TS: [several minutes later] I can't see any reason why this isn't working for you.

Me: So, how can I place this order then?

TS: I don't know. I can't take the order for you.

Me: Well, who can take my order for me then?

TS: No one here.

Me: [hangs up]

#NotHelpfulAtAll #CustomerNONservice

Your sporadic reminder that there is no scale of theist --> agnostic --> atheist. Agnosticism is not in between "there is a god" and "there is no god".

Atheism is not a positive assertion that there is no god. It is absent a positive *belief* that there *is* a god.

Atheism is about lacking belief. Agnosticism is about lacking *knowledge*.

Instead of that line, you have a 2x2 box with theism / atheism on one axis and gnosticism / agnosticism on the other. You have 4 categories: gnostic theists, agnostic theists, gnostic atheists, and agnostic atheists.

It's *gnostic atheists* that claim to know that there is no god.

And to muddle things even further, you can have atheists who are gnostic about some deities and agnostic about other deities.

This is a tired, old argument that has been refuted ages ago and it's very irksome to keep having the same arguments repeatedly over many years just because *this guy* hasn't yet had it *with me*. I have no patience on the 100th time and I don't particularly care if it's your first. Like every other ridiculous debate that's been settled but keeps popping up, go look up where it's been debated before instead of reinventing the wheel yet again.

And for the record, I'm a gnostic atheist about most deities. We have tools to provide knowledge about the possible or probable existence of deities provided one first defines the deity in question. And yet I'm still irritated that we have to keep reminding people that atheism is an absence of belief, not a positive assertion of non-existence. That's my gnosticism talking, not my atheism.

In addition to that, the vast majority of even gnostic atheists don't claim 100% certainty. If we're using science, logic, and empiricism to arrive at our claims then we know better to claim 100% certainty. We just also recognise that one only needs be certain *enough* to operate as if it's true.

For 100% certainty, you have to look to the gnostic theists.

"That costs how much?! Please! I can make it myself for cheaper than that!"

Me: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

If, by some miracle, you actually can obtain all the materials for cheaper than the finished product (which, in my experience, only happens when I already have shit lying around the house from previous crafts or when I know someone in a particular industry who has shit lying around from their businesses), this doesn't take into account your time.

As a freelancer, I've had to learn how to view my time as valuable. I charge X amount per hour for certain labor. My time is worth at least that much. So, how many hours am I going to put into this craft? Multiply that times my going rate for work, and that's how much money the craft is "costing" me by not earning that money for that time.

It's easy to rationalize that I wouldn't be working anyway, so I'm just filling my spare time with activities that include crafting. But that's how we end up with the stereotype of the "starving artist" - by not valuing our time commercially, we don't charge enough and/or don't get paid enough for what we do that other people want to have but don't or won't or can't do themselves.

This is how we ended up with "interns" who are legal adults but who can't pay any bills because they got talked into working "for the exposure / experience". This is how we ended up with an entire generation of people not earning enough to feed themselves and another generation thinking that they're so "entitled" and willing to pay them wages that can't they can't feed themselves on.

Also, raw materials are fucking expensive when you have to buy retail or in small quantities for one-off products. Ignoring the more abstract issue of time, materials cost more than you'd think (if you don't already work intimately with those products).

That prom dress costs $200?! Ridiculous! Except that the same material bought at a retail fabric shop for 1 dress costs $300 plus your labor.

I have no problem with anyone wanting to make anything. As a crafter, obviously I make stuff. And, as I mentioned above, because I craft all the time, I probably already have stuff lying around that can be used in my crafts. Kinda like cooking - the first time I had to buy a $15 jar of some spice was a major investment, but if I only use a fraction of a teaspoon per recipe, then the *next time* I make it, it'll be way cheaper. What spice is it? Saffron? that's more expensive per oz. than gold?

But as a *producer* of goods and services, it really rankles me when my work and the work of artists is dismissed on the, usually mistaken, notion that it's "cheaper" to do it oneself. Or on the dismissal of homemade products by people trying to save money as somehow being "less" than store-bought manufactured goods because they don't count the labor involved as part of the financial investment.

There's that one comic out there somewhere that has a guy behind a desk complaining to a graphic artist that he just paid some "outrageous" amount for something that took the artist (or coder, I can't remember) 20 minutes to make. So the artist reminds the boss that he didn't just pay for 20 minutes of work, he also paid for the years of schooling and training that it took to be *able* to do the thing in only 20 minutes. If the boss had invested the tens of thousands of dollars into a similar education, then sure, he could have done the same thing in the same amount of time.

As a poor person, I definitely know how much "cheaper" things can be when comparing up-front costs. I get into that argument all the time from the other side. But then you can't count your *labor* as a dollar value. If you did that, it likely wouldn't be cheaper. And for someone on an income as low or lower than mine, that actual dollar value vs. potential dollar value is significant. I can actually afford some things I do myself because the bank won't come to collect on the 6 hours it took me to do the thing.

But as a content provider trying to make a living off that labor, because the bank won't come to collect on my *hours*, that means that I also don't have any *cash* to give them instead when people snort at how much I charge to perform labor.

Not saying that prices aren't ridiculous sometimes. Capitalism is a fucked up system from top to bottom. Just saying that it's very rarely ever "cheaper to do it myself" when you really add up all the associated costs.

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#CraftersKnowItIsNotAboutSavingMoney #AlmostAlwaysCheaperToMassProduceOrAtLeastBuyRawMaterialsInBulkToHandProduceLargeQuantities #BecauseIAmACrafterIKnowBetterEvenThoughIStillSayThisMyselfSometimes #HolyFuckAmISpendingALotOnMaterial! #CouponClippingAndItIsStillExpensive

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/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.

www.quora.com/Does-the-common-complaint-that-modern-music-is-getting-worse-have-any-merit/answer/Alex-Johnston-39

Every single generation has its batch of contrarians who think that music is somehow going "downhill" and is not as good as their own era or some previous era.

And it's utter fucking bullshit every single fucking time.

The response in the link above doesn't even get into a comparison of some of the most banal and trivial music of the era being touted as "good" music, although it mentions it. I host a dance event that is specifically themed around music of that exact era. I *like* that era of music.

But let me tell you about some of the crappy ass music put out in that era. Nonsense lyrics, repetitive and simple melodies, formulaic writing, mediocre performances. Meanwhile, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Kesha, Miley, and all the rest are fucking performing their asses off to music with hooks that are catchy and enjoyable.

You don't have to *like* them, just know that they're not any worse than any other era of music. Music of previous eras that you only know about today because it was *popular* enough to have survived through the years, I might add.

These half-baked rants always remind me of the Harper Hall Trilogy from the Dragonriders of Pern series, where a truly brilliant and talented singer and songwriter goes undiscovered for years because people think her tunes are "just little twiddles". But the reality is that her music is *memorable* and able to evoke feelings in the listeners.

In a society where education is passed through music, the ability to write music that listeners can remember easily and attach emotionally to is an incredibly valuable skill that tangibly benefits the entire society. The more classical orchestral pieces might be rich and complex, but they are only accessible to a small percentage of the population. While that has some value too, it's certainly not the *only* thing of value in music, and I would argue that inaccessibility actually *decreases* its value - if it's only "good" when it's not "popular", that means fewer people *like* it, which means it's less accessible to fewer people. What good is "good" if nobody but you likes it?

I'll tell you what's banal and trivial - music snobs who think their particular genre or era of music is the only music of value. You're not some highly evolved specimen of taste and discernment that raises you above the masses. You have limited imagination and vision and an undeserved ego who is missing out on a whole range of pleasurable experiences that the rest of us are fortunate enough to have access to.

It's a supremely arrogant, classist position to think that, just because lots of people like something, it must not be good and the only things that have value are things that are out of reach to most people. And to think that music of a bygone era is somehow always "better" than modern music is the result of several logical fallacies including Confirmation Bias, Rosy Retrospection, Declinism, and most importantly Survivorship Bias. Older music is only "better" because only the "better" stuff stuck around long enough for later generations to hear it. The far more numerous "crap" got buried in obscurity over time.

Refusing to like a kind of music just because a lot of other people like it, or a specific kind of people like it, makes you just as much a slave to "demographic brainwashing" as those you deride because you're still being told what to like and what not to like on the basis of outside pressures, not your own personal enjoyment. For more on the arrogant, classist segregation of musical genres, see:

www.runoutnumbers.com/blog/2015/11/16/everything-except-country-and-rap
www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/3/27/its-not-country-youre-just-classist/
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150603124545.htm
https://junkee.com/time-stop-calling-pop-music-guilty-pleasure/110264

#FormerMusician #YearsOfMusicalTheory #Dancer #YesILikePopMusicAndClassicRockMusicAndClassicalMusicAndMusicFromOtherCultures

www.quora.com/Is-there-a-difference-between-a-dominant-and-a-true-dominant-in-a-D-s-relationship/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Is there a difference between a dominant and a true dominant in a D/s relationship?

A. Yes, a "true dominant" is someone who doesn’t have a fucking clue what BDSM is all about and is using the language and the culture of kink to hide behind and excuse just being an asshole.

Everyone else understands that we all have a variety of tendencies and preferences and kinks and interests, and when someone's tendencies lead mostly towards the collection of behaviours and interests that are generally categorized under the heading "dominant", they can take on that identity label if they so choose.

But anyone who tries to gatekeep what a "true dominant" is, or calls themselves that, is anything but.

www.quora.com/Is-there-commitment-in-a-polyamorous-relationship/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Is there commitment in a polyamorous relationship?

A. I always find it weird and disturbing that people seem to think that sexual exclusivity is the ONLY thing people can commit to, when it's is CLEARLY not the only thing that they commit to in their own relationships.

If you have any question at all about how polyamorous people commit to each other without sexual exclusivity, I have to wonder what your monogamous relationships look like. Did your wedding vows consist entirely of "I promise to never let anyone else see or touch my genitals" and nothing else? Does your relationship not have any sort of promises or agreements or desires to be there for each other, support each other, encourage each other, through sickness and in health, richer or poorer, good times and bad?

Can you honestly not think of a single thing that people can commit to each other that doesn't have to do with sex?

I've written an entire page detailing all the kinds of things that I commit to in my relationships. It's true, some of them may not be the kinds of things that you would commit to, maybe haven’t even thought about it, or maybe you choose to commit to other things that I don't. I’m not saying that every single person commits to exactly the same things as every other person.

I'm saying that the notion that sexually non-exclusive people can’t be "committed" to each other because of that lack of sexual exclusivity is either a shocking lack of imagination on your part or you are being disingenuous.

Because if I turn the question around to you, and ask you what could you possibly commit to that isn't sexual exclusivity, I know that you will have some answers of things that you commit to in your relationships that don't involve your genitals. So you KNOW there are other things to commit to.

You’re just not applying them to us. But we're people too, and our relationships are every bit as real as yours.

www.TheInnBetween.net/polycommitments.html

www.quora.com/What-can-I-do-if-my-wife-teaches-my-daughter-piano-but-I-want-her-to-do-gymnastics/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What can I do if my wife teaches my daughter piano but I want her to do gymnastics?

A. What does your daughter want?

She’s a human being. Her desires for her body, time, emotions, etc. are the only ones that matter here. If you’re funding her activities, you can technically be allowed to place limitations on them based on what you're willing to pay for, but as for encouraging her what TO do (as opposed to what not to do)? That’s all her.

Your interest in your daughter pursuing gymnastics is completely irrelevant. So is your wife’s interest in teaching her piano.

Find out what YOUR DAUGHTER wants to do and stop treating her like an extension of yourself that you get to force into doing whatever it is you’d rather be doing but, for whatever reason, aren’t doing yourself.

If she wants to learn piano, then that’s what she should learn. If she wants to do gymnastics, then that’s what she should do. If she wants to do both, then find a way to allow her to do both If she wants to do neither, then suck it up and treat her like the human person she is, and encourage her in her endeavors like a responsible, loving parent.

She is not your doll, to dress up in the profession and hobby you want her to do. She is a person. She gets to make the decisions about how she spends her time and what she puts her body through.

Honestly, these parents who think their children are extensions of themselves instead of human beings in their own right! This is how you get adult children who stop talking to their parents.

Respect her autonomy. She’ll be a much more loving daughter if you respect her.

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.

I do not believe in "converting" people to polyamory, or any other relationship style or sexuality for that matter. I don't believe it can be done and I believe that attempting to do so is inherently coercive. I believe people have the right to choose whatever relationship style or sexual behaviour they want, no matter what it is or why they choose it, with the exception of anything that violates other people's agency (sorry, you don't have the right to choose to force young boys to give you blowjobs behind the alter just because you're their priest, you just don't).

You can *introduce* people to new things, but I don't think you can *convert* them to something they're not or don't have their own internal motivation to try and become. And I would rather not have these people being pushed into my communities because they flail around and smack up everyone who gets near them. If you don't want to try it, then don't. Please, don't. Stay out of my communities unless you actually want to be there.

www.quora.com/How-can-I-convince-my-husband-to-let-me-sleep-with-other-men-He-has-slept-with-many-women-before-our-marriage-and-I-am-jealous-that-I-did-not-have-that-experience/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How can I convince my husband to let me sleep with other men? He has slept with many women before our marriage and I am jealous that I did not have that experience.

A. You can't "convince" him. At worst, that would be coercion. You can lay out your desires and your reasons for them, and then you can A) accept his decision to not consent to an open marriage, B) accept his acceptance of an open marriage, C) cheat, or D) leave.

You have to decide, ultimately, what is more important to you - having other sexual experiences or remaining married. When you know what your answer to that question is, then you will know how to proceed with talking to your husband about deconstructing and reconstructing your marriage into an open one ("Opening Up" A Relationship Doesn't Work, Try This Method Instead - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/375573.html)

If your marriage is more important, then be prepared for him to say that he does not want an open marriage and you will have to give up your fantasy. If the sexual encounters are more important, then be prepared for him to say that he does not want an open marriage and you will have to divorce him if you want to remain an ethical person.

You are allowed to have your desires. But he is also allowed to only consent to the kind of relationships that he wants to have. Once you know where the line in the sand is drawn, you can share that information with him so that he can make an informed decision about what kind of relationship he will engage in with you.

Just be careful not to make it an ultimatum (Can Polyamorous Hierarchies Be Ethical pt. 2 - Influence & Control - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/349226.html). This shouldn't be a way to control the outcome of the discussion. You shouldn't go into it thinking "you better let me have other sexual partners or else I will divorce you!" That's punitive. If you are relying on the threat of divorce to get your way, that's coercion.

But if his "no" is an equally acceptable answer to his "yes", then saying "honey, I love you, but this is a thing I really need to do for myself, and if you don't want to share this journey with me, I'll understand, but I do have to travel this path one way or another and I hope I can share it with you" is not an act of coercion, it's an act of love and acceptance and of giving him the information he needs to make a decision. He might not feel that way in the moment, though. Sometimes it's hard to see the difference.

There are tons of books and forums and websites everywhere that can help people wrap their brains around open relationships. I'm sure others will share those resources in the comments. You can try giving him those resources and see if that helps. My favorite is the book More Than Two (www.MoreThanTwo.com).

But ultimately, you cannot "convince" someone to have an open relationship. Dragging a partner into any kind of relationship they don't want grudgingly makes things much worse. That goes in both directions, btw. You staying in a monogamous relationship grudgingly will make everything worse for you both too. Should you decide that your marriage is ultimately more important than having extramarital sexual relationships, make sure you own that choice. Make that choice *yours*, not something he forced you into. Don't frame it as "he won't let me have sex with other men", frame it as a choice you made to be with him. Otherwise, you might end up losing the marriage anyway.

First, look at all the worst case scenarios - you have other lovers and get divorced, you stay with him and feel resentful, you cheat and damage your integrity, his trust, and possibly get divorced anyway, etc. - and decide which worst case scenario is the one you are most willing to risk. Then come to your husband with that in mind. Lay it all out for him, including the consequences for what happens if he doesn't give his consent, so that he can make an informed decision.

And then live with your choices.

www.quora.com/What-is-the-safest-most-discreet-way-to-find-a-suitable-man-for-my-wife-to-have-sex-with-We-are-new-to-this-type-of-open-relationship/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is the safest, most discreet way to find a suitable man for my wife to have sex with? We are new to this type of open relationship.

A. For the love of whatever you find holy, don't "find a suitable man for [your] wife". She is an adult woman. She has her own preferences, desires, opinions, needs, wants, and boundaries. And since it's her body and her experiences that'll be involved here, none of those things have anything at all to do with you.

I know, I know, "but she's my wife! What happens to her affects me!" Sorry, but in this case, it has nothing to do with you. She is the sole arbiter of her. Only she should have any say at all in what she does with her body, mind, emotions, and time. If she loves you, she'll take into consideration how her actions with another affect you, but ultimately, this is something that is happening *to her*. It's something that *she* is experiencing, not you. You are not relevant in this equation.

Therefore, you should not insert yourself into this experience for her - not to "find a suitable man" for her, not to control or dictate the encounter, not for anything. This is all about her, not you. Stay the fuck out of it.

As for "safe" and "discreet", several online dating apps are adequate for people looking for hookups. Your wife (and her alone) can create a profile sharing what she (and only she) is looking for, and she can be a grown up and do her own homework on vetting potential partners.
She chose you, didn't she? Either she is capable of finding her own partners that are good enough for her, or she isn't. If she isn't, that says something about you. If she is, then let her go about her business and trust that she loves you enough to take care of her relationship with you.

Relevant:

You Can't Be Trusted - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/294586.html

Before We Open Up, Let's Discuss Some Boundaries - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/359151.html

It's Not All About You - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/313759.html

Don't I Get A Say In Their Relationship? - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/311860.html

But We NEED Rules To Keep People From Lying To Us! - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/310810.html

What Kind Of Partner Will You Be When Your Partner Wants To Do Something Scary? - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/371654.html

How do you bring a healthy third person into an existing marriage? - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/368069.html

It Is Never OK To Restrict Someone Else Even If They "Agree" To It - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/363349.html

On Autonomy And Agreements And "Boundaries" In Poly Relationships - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/359626.html

I Love You, Just Don't Disrupt Anything - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/275094.html

www.theatreartlife.com/technical/performing-arts-overworked-staff

"We need to stop pretending we're okay. We're not. We're tired, and crying in the dimmer room. Let's come out of the shadows into the light and do something about it."

I am pretty sure I know how I will die. It will likely happen one of two ways - I will suffocate to death because of the fucking chronic respiratory problems I developed after getting whooping cough when vaccination rates dropped, or I will be killed in an accident or die from something related to my shitty eating / sleeping / overworking habits on job site.

We have a saying - there are no old stagehands. I mean, of course there are, but so many more of us die early than we should, and most of the time it's preventable. We eat crappy food, we don't sleep enough, we stay awake too long doing dangerous manual labor, we work physically harder than necessary (dude, we have a forklift to unstack those!), we drink too much and do way too many recreational drugs.

One year, I actually stopped keeping track of the number of conversations I got into that started out like "hey, did you hear who died last week?!"

Our employers want to treat us like real employees when it benefits *them*, with dress codes and long lists of behaviour rules, but then turn around and treat us like freelancers in the monopoly days when it doesn't, with "oh, you can just push through one more hour without a break, can't you?" and "the show starts in 2 days so we will stay as long as necessary to get it going rather than schedule an extra couple of days for a reasonable work day length" and "sorry, we don't compensate for the $25 parking fee" and "no you can't wear that piece of clothing for medical reasons because it doesn't match our aesthetic" and and "but we gave you 8 hours between shifts, that should be plenty of rest even though you have to drive 2 hours each way and have things to do when you get home!" and "what do you mean you need a different person for each job position? Can't you do 3 job roles by yourself?"

No, we need a break every 2-2.5 hours, with a meal break on the 4-5 hour mark. We need OT for ever hour worked past 8-10 hours, and we need days that don't go past 10 hours *regularly*. We need enough time between our shifts to GET 8 hours of sleep, which includes our commute time and eating dinner when we get home and doing laundry and showering, not exactly 8 hours from the time you stop paying us to the time you start paying us again.

We need enough guys on site to accomplish the job safely, not as few as is *possible* to set a Guinness record. We need equipment that works. We need heavy equipment to do the heavy labor, like forklifts and scissor lifts, not rickety A-frame ladders and 4 tall dudes just because you think "tall" = "strong enough to lift this case that you used a forklift to stack back in the shop".

WE NEED ACTUAL MEAL BREAKS. 30 minutes is barely sufficient if food is provided and sitting there, hot and ready, the moment we go on break. An hour is the minimum if we have to go off property to find our own food, because it's still a 10 minute walk to the parking lot and another 15 minute or more drive to find food. And no, the solution to a crew who is not doing a satisfactory job is NOT withholding meals, but sending them home. If the crew is truly doing a poor job, you don't get to keep working them 10 hours without food. Fucking send them home and hire another crew.

And the clothing! We're fucking backstage! As long as our clothing is protective and not hindering our abilities, IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER WHAT WE LOOK LIKE. I can lift the exact same amount of weight in a polo shirt as I do in a tank top. Except in a tank top, I won't overheat when I lift. I can run my camera to the exact same skill level in a jacket as in a dress shirt. Except I won't be shaking the camera with my shivering if I'm warm enough and I can focus slightly better when I cut the wind from the a/c blowing in my face and drying out my eyes. When we are not in a public-facing customer service position, our attire does not matter past the point of legality or job performance.

If you want to pretend like you're a &"regular corporation" with all the rules and shit, then I want a fucking annual job performance review where someone sits down with me in an adult fucking manner and goes over my accomplishments and my areas for improvement, training opportunities, and a goddamn annual raise every year I work for you. I want anonymous supervisor surveys. I want salary standardization. I want an HR department that holds the company accountable for not treating people well. And I want some structure.

If the company can't provide all that shit, then don't pretend you're like a regular job. We're freelancers, either we get the benefits of freelancing that go along with the shit, or we get the benefits of a regular corporation that goes along with that shit. We should not get the shit of a corporation with the shit of freelance.

So stop treating us like shit.

#backstage #AVTech #AVLife #roadies #stagehand #entertainment #IMayHaveSomeOpinionsAboutThis #SoTired #AndYetStillSoPoor

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/Should-I-be-offended-that-my-friend-of-about-8-months-didn-t-tell-me-that-she-s-a-lesbian-Do-I-bring-it-up-or-wait-for-her-to-tell-me/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Should I be offended that my friend (of about 8 months) didn’t tell me that she’s a lesbian? Do I bring it up, or wait for her to tell me?

A. She didn’t tell you because:

A) It’s none of your business
B) Straight people don’t announce their straightness to their friends, so why should gay people?
C) She might have thought it was obvious that she didn’t need to make an announcement.
D) She didn’t know you well enough yet to know if you were safe enough to come out to.

In any case, who she chooses to love or who she is attracted to has nothing to do with you and is all about her, so you getting offended at how she handles her sexuality is pretty selfish and self-centered of you.

Let it go. Stop making her sexuality all about you. If you’re not going to be up in their genitals, what they choose to do with them isn’t your business. Even your friends don’t have to tell you anything about themselves that they don’t want to.

www.quora.com/Are-you-in-an-open-relationship-If-so-what-is-the-most-challenging-part-for-you/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Are you in an open relationship? If so, what is the most challenging part for you?

A. Having to constantly answer questions about how “difficult” my relationships are, or people wondering how I deal with jealousy or scheduling … basically dealing with other people thinking that I’m doing anything at all different in my relationships than they’re doing.

I have relationships, just like everyone else. Some of them are effortless, some of them take work, some of them are totally wrong for me, some of them are bliss, pretty much all of them are some combination of the above, just like everyone else.

The only difference is that I have more than one romantic relationship at a time. Everyone has more than one relationship at a time - you all have parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, in-laws, relatives, exes, co-parents, etc. You all have to manage and juggle multiple important people in your lives. Those relationships are all different from each other, even when they have similarities.

We are having all the same relationships and they feel the same way to all of us. I’m just overlapping my romantic ones, that’s all. There’s nothing more or less challenging about my multiple romantic relationships than about any of my other relationships or about other people’s relationships.

www.quora.com/How-do-I-decrease-jealousy-to-a-minimum-when-in-an-open-relationschip/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How do you personally deal with jealousy in your open relationship?

A. The same way I deal with any negative emotion - by introspecting and talking it out until I find the root cause, and then I address the root cause.

Honestly, it’s like people think jealousy is some magical mystery compulsion that comes over people from out of nowhere and totally takes them over like a brain-eating parasite or something.

Jealousy is just an emotion. So is anger. So is sadness. It’s not magic, it’s not a curse, it’s not a parasite or a disease, it’s just an emotion. We have emotions, we deal with them. Monogamy never prevented anyone from feeling jealousy either, I just don’t try to control my partners when I feel something negative. I look at it head-on and actually solve the problem.

-But I'm just being honest!- That's right. You are JUST being honest. You are not being compassionate, or considerate, or thoughtful, or loving, or polite, or even pleasant. Just. Honest. There are times when someone has to deliver an unpleasant truth. There may even be times when that person is the -just being honest- fanatic. But so much more often, unvarnished honesty is unnecessary, unkind, and unwarranted, and a little thought put into the delivery of the message would go such a long way toward making it valuable and constructive feedback rather than a shattering blow. Most people who insist on being -brutally honest- enjoy the brutality much more than the honesty.

This is the problem I have with the Radical Truthers. Much like NVC, I tend to only see it being used by people who want to be assholes and pass off responsibility for how their behaviour affects other people's feelings.

You can be truthful AND kind.

But if you're going to be truthful without being kind, at least be honest *about that*. I am quite often not kind. But I'm not going to defend myself by blaming the other person's hurt feelings on "but I'm just being honest!" No, I am trying to make people feel consequences for their actions, so I will say things intended to be *felt* because that's my point.

But when it comes to interpersonal relationships - those connections that I value among people I want to keep in my life such as friends, partners, and family, there is no need to "just be honest". I can be both honest and kind.

That doesn't mean that it will never hurt, even if I'm trying to be kind. It means that I am delivering my honesty with compassion and understanding of the impact of my words and I'm not saying "truth" just to say the truth. I'm taking responsibility for the effect I'm having on the people around me.

Honesty is not a virtue. Courage is a virtue. "Just being honest" is not being courageous. Being compassionate, considerate, and thoughtful is being courageous. Take the Path of Greatest Courage and don't hide behind "just being honest". Honesty, by itself, is not enough.

Everyone gets this shit wrong. Personality Type Systems are extremely limited and narrow in scope, but within their very limited range, can be very useful. People just keep wanting to widen their applicability, and that's when they turn to shit. These are not newspaper horoscopes, putting you in boxes and telling you how to run your life. They're merely a set of language that *you* decide which describes you, that can help you understand yourself and others *in narrow ranges* that you can use to better communicate with people who you want to understand and who you want to understand you.

ttps://www.quora.com/How-should-one-view-their-Myers-Briggs-type-Would-it-be-wise-to-base-your-relationships-and-employment-on-what-it-says/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How should one view their Myers–Briggs type? Would it be wise to base your relationships and employment on what it says?
Joreth Innkeeper, teaches workshops on Type Systems like MBTI & 5LL

A. MBTI is, at best, a communication tool. It should not be used to make any kind of decisions for anything. It can be used to explain to another person how you work, so that they know what to expect from you, and to then offer you some shorthand to reference these points later.

For instance, I am an INTJ. One of the characteristics of this category is that I really like having my plans on the calendar and scheduled, and I get very uncomfortable and anxious when the plan is changed.

My former sweetie, who works with the actual institution that controls the MBTI (not one of these knock-offs that just make up online quizzes based on some workshop they once took on MBTI), introduced me to the “hit and run” method.

This is when we have plans, and suddenly something comes up that has to change the plans, like if we were going away for a weekend vacation and on Friday morning his boss tells him that he will have to stay late instead of leaving after lunch for our trip. So then he would have to call me and tell me that the plans have changed.

For someone of his type (ENTP) to be dating someone of my type, we often had scheduling challenges because I prefer more structure and he is very spontaneous and can more easily roll with change. So this might be mildly irksome to him to have his boss delay his vacation plans, but to me it would be a huge deal. I would have a lot of strong, negative emotions about it when he would be over it already.

So, he would call me up, say “sorry, sweetie, plans have changed, we have to leave tonight instead of this afternoon, oops, gotta go bye!” and let me stew by myself. Then my own processes would kick in and I would get back to planning a contingency and backup plans, which alleviates my anxiety about the change. By the time he would call me back in an hour or so, I would feel better because I “solved the problem” by creating a new plan. He would ask how I’m doing, and I could say “OK, here’s what we’re gonna do…” and lay out the new plan.

I would be happy because now I have a new plan, he would be happy because he doesn’t have to plan anything, and even though things wouldn’t be our ideal, we would have solved the issue.

If he had stayed on the phone with me, he would have had to listen to me get upset at the change in plans, and the anxiety of “what are we going to do now?” He would have wanted to try and reassure me or console me and try to tell me to relax, to just roll with it, everything will work itself out.

For someone with my type, telling me to just relax and not worry, to just let things work themselves out, would be the wrong thing to say. But to someone with his type, it would have made *him* feel better if the situation was reversed. So he would have been upset because I was upset, and then I would have gotten upset because he wasn’t helping me figure out a plan and he was making things worse by dismissing my concerns.

The “hit and run” worked a lot better for us. Once we realized that our conflict was a product of our personality types, we could come up with a solution. And then later, I had some terminology to explain to both him and to other people how to solve this problem with me in the future.

When I started dating other people, I could tell them “I am an INTJ, which means I feel this way about scheduling and change and plans and organizing.” They could tell me how they feel about those topics, and then if they happened to also be one of the categories that likes spontaneity, I could say “OK, then, if this situation comes up between us, the hit-and-run method is the best way to deal with me.”

Then, later, when I am faced with a plan change and I start freaking out about it, if the new person is just standing there looking lost at me, wondering what to do, I can remind them “I’m just being INTJ right now, remember how this goes?” and they can say “Oh, right, we talked about this - the hit-and-run, OK then, I’ll leave you to your planning and not take your freaking out about this as personal or as something that I need to fix for you”.

Knowing the processes going on behind the behaviour and the emotions helps two people communicate with each other and helps them to find solutions that work for their particular dynamic. MBTI is one system among many that offers language and a structure to facilitate that communication and solution-finding process.

But it is absolutely not meant to help you make decisions. MBTI is not a set of boxes that we all fit into. It’s more like a spectrum of handed-ness. If you were to draw 2 lines from left to right, one line on top of the other, and put 0 on one side and 100 on the other, and then place an x somewhere on the top line for how often you use your right hand, and another x on the bottom line for how often you use your left hand, you could use those two lines to determine if you were right handed or left handed.

Handedness is a category. People are either right or left handed (let’s leave out ambidextrousness for now). But that doesn’t mean that they don’t use both hands on occasion. And it doesn’t even mean that there is a spectrum with left handed use on one side and right handed use on the other. You have an individual spectrum for each hand. The one that gets used the most is your dominant hand, but if you added up the amount you use each hand, you would get more than 100% because the amount you use each hand overlaps.

Same thing with types. You are not in an either/or box. You are on a spectrum of each individual trait where you use some more than others, or where some come more easily to you than others. You will still use the others a little bit, and you can learn to use the others the way you can learn to use your off-hand if you want to.

In addition to that, our experiences throughout life teach us skills in those traits that are not our dominant traits. Many of those experiences come very early in life, so it can be difficult to tell if your skill with those traits are “natural” or “learned”. Scheduling, for example - our society encourages good scheduling skills from our very early days in primary or elementary school.

Many people learn how to schedule well, whether it’s “natural” for them or not. That same partner I was talking about above has diabetes, so as a young child, he learned how to schedule his day around his eating needs, to prevent any diabetic complications. Yet scheduling is not “natural” to him and not something that he likes doing. But he’s very good at it … when he wants to be.

So you can’t make decisions based on your category because there are too many things that can influence individual people - life experiences, deliberate training, where on the spectrums they fall, etc.

DO NOT use MBTI to make decisions about who to date or what kind of job to take. I can’t stress this enough.

DO NOT MAKE DECISIONS BASED ON MBTI.

Use MBTI for its intended use - as a communication tool to better understand yourself and the people you are relating to such as partners, family, coworkers, etc.

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."]

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

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

Next panel - I continue to stare at them aggressively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May be an image of 6 people and people smiling

This is partly why I cuss. I deliberately and consciously include swear words in my vocabulary for 2 reasons:

1) to point out the arbitrariness of assigning an "offensive" value to a collection of sounds when a different collection of sounds with the same meaning is acceptable;

and 2) because of this. I'm swearing because the topic deserves to be cussed out. I swear because the content is worthy of all the rage and offense that comes with "bad words". I swear because fuck you if you are more concerned about those 4 letters in that order than about the violence, brutality, and evil I am using those 4 letters to talk about.

My all-time highest shared post was also one of my angriest. It was a cuss-laden rant about fuckers adding anti-trans bathroom bills to their local legislation. I got bombarded with "I like the sentiment but you shouldn't use so many bad words because I can't share this on my timeline" and "well I would agree with you but your language is so foul that it turned me off your argument".

Unfortunately for them, I also got bombarded with share notifications. It may not have gotten news media attention and re-shared by celebrities or buzzfeed or whatever, but pretty much all of my shares are in the double digits or less, while this one hit 4 digits.

So fuck them and fuck you if you are more concerned with the comfort of the reader over language use than what that language is used to say.
The N-word is "bad" because of what it *means*. "Bitch" is bad because of what it *means*. "Shit" is not bad because it's acceptable to say "poop" in its place. If the meaning stays the same while the letters change, then clearly the meaning is not bad. "Asshole" is not bad when you're talking about an anus, but probably bad when you're calling someone one because the first is a neutral meaning and the second is a deliberate insult. The meaning is what makes the word "bad".

"Fuck" is not bad when it doesn't mean anything you wouldn't want to say anyway, just as long as you don't use those specific 4 letters in that specific order. If you are so uncomfortable over the presence of certain letters than the topic being discussed, then you're just looking for a reason to not hear the message.

Because this shit is far more disturbing than a bunch of arbitrary, random sounds that we've designated as "bad".

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.

www.quora.com/What-are-the-simplest-things-you-had-to-explain-an-adult/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is the most surprising thing you've had to explain to an adult?

A. I find it very surprising that I have to explain to adults that my body belongs to me and nobody else. And not only my body, but my time, my emotions, my money, my labor, and my attention. For some reason, a lot of people seem to think that I owe them things that belong to me, or that they get to have a say in what I do with the things that belong to me.

Some people seem to think that their dearly held desires for my things are at any way equal to my own dearly held desires for my things, and that what I want to do with my things somehow affects them even when it doesn’t, just because they happen to have strong feelings about my things.

And also that the things that happen *to my body* and *in my body* are also things that only I should have any control over. If I can prevent you from harvesting my organs even as a corpse, and if I can refuse to give you my organs even if it would save your life *even as a corpse*, then anything else I do with my own body even if it involves someone else’s life is my own business too.

And no, not even my spouse owns these things. Even he does not get a say in what I do with the things that are mine.

Another thing I was surprised to have to explain to an adult was that women don’t get “crotch rot” from living on a submarine. Yes, seriously.

You see, his CO explained to him that women can’t live on submarines in the Navy because they get “crotch rot” *specifically from being underwater* and it’s too expensive to keep resurfacing to get them proper medical treatment (and, by implication, men don’t get this because it literally has to do with vaginas being under water, they don’t have medical personnel or equipment onboard, and that subs never have to surface for men’s health issues, with or without this dearth of medical treatment capabilities).

I was also surprised to explain to an adult that the people who utilize the county health services facility for things like STD testing and counseling are not all homeless, diseased, drug addicts (not that those people deserve to go without medical treatment either). That this is an affordable medical service and all kinds of people utilize it because that’s what it’s there for.

Another surprising thing to explain to an adult was that two people speaking Spanish in public in his vicinity was not an offense committed against him, nor is it “rude” because they might be speaking about him without him being able to tell. I had to explain to him that we were talking about those same two people behind *their* backs, so if merely talking about people “behind their backs” was rude, he was equally as guilty.

But besides that, people have every right to privacy in a conversation, even in public. We may or may not be able to hear or understand what they’re saying, but we don’t have a right to insert ourselves into the conversation just because they happen to be *in* public, when they are not addressing us or the public.

Also that people do not always have the luxury of learning to fluently speak another language before moving to the country. And that you have no idea if they live here or are visiting, and lots of tourists (especially in Florida, where we live) do not bother to learn an entire language before vacationing. And also maybe they *are* learning the language, but he just happened to cross paths with them at a point early in their education.

I am frequently surprised at how often I have to explain that monogamy doesn’t prevent people from feeling jealousy, so there’s no reason to be biased against non-monogamy on the basis that the people might feel jealous in non-monogamous relationships.

I am often outright shocked at having to explain to grown adults that just because it’s a woman doing it to a man, hitting one’s partner, threatening them with knives, throwing things at them, *and attempting to run them over with their own trucks* are all examples of physical abuse. I’m actually losing count at how often I have to say, specifically, that attempted vehicular homicide is abuse. Property damage is abuse. Controlling your social circle and isolating you from external support is abuse. Name calling is abuse. All the things that men do to women that is abusive is still abusive when women do it to men or when any gender does it to any other gender.

I can’t believe, in this day and age, that I still have to explain to grown adults that evolution really happened, that “just a theory” is nonsense and then I have to explain what “theory” actually means, that vaccines do not cause autism but lack of vaccines do cause mass death, that the planet is really round(ish), that magic sugar water will not cure anything, that the fad diet du jour or “miracle food” is not going to help you lose weight or get healthy *except inasmuch as generally eating better and eating fewer calories than you burn does anyway*, that you can’t “boost your immune system” and even if you could you wouldn’t want to because that’s what allergies and rheumatoid arthritis are … I could go on and on and on for literally years about the kinds of bullshit that I regularly have to explain to adults (I know, because I have been going on for years about this bullshit). I still find it surprising though.

I am disappointingly, heart-brokenly surprised every time I have to explain empathy to adults. When I have to explain that we shouldn’t do a thing simply because it hurts other people, and especially when I have to explain I don’t need the threat of eternal damnation to prevent me from doing things that hurt other people because I have empathy and I just don’t want to hurt people, I feel deeply sad and surprised at the same time.

Basically, there are a lot of things that I am surprised that I have to explain to adults about.

[Edit] Because apparently people can’t quite get past this part, I’m going to clarify. The asshole with the crotch rot story is not talking about any legitimate medical condition. He was very specific that vaginas *rot* under water and in a pressurized cabin, and that the treatment for this “condition” could not be taken care of with the medical supplies and personnel aboard a submarine, so the sub would have to surface regularly to get people with vaginas to proper medical treatment.

Because people with other sets of genitals also get things like jock itch and bacteria infections, and these things can happen to other body parts too, and if humidity or pressure was a contributing factor to it happening in a vagina, it would also happen to other body parts. As pointed out in some of the comments [on the original post], foot fungal infections are quite common and pretty much anyone who could serve on a military sub has feet.

This asshole also never served on a sub himself, nor was he affiliated with any medical training. He was a ground-pounder who got dishonorably discharged. He is not smart enough to be anything other than cannon fodder. We’ve had many other arguments about many other topics. It’s astounding the complete lack of basic knowledge this fucker had. I’m honestly surprised he can tie his shoes in the morning.

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/For-women-would-you-move-into-a-house-with-a-couple-that-share-a-3rd-female-and-that-would-make-you-the-4th-female-All-share-a-bed-and-have-sex-with-each-other-Why-or-why-not/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. For women, would you move into a house with a couple that share a 3rd female and that would make you the 4th female? All share a bed and have sex with each other. Why or why not?

A.

I could not live with people who “share” other human beings like they’re a milkshake to be shared on a date. I could not trust them to treat *me* as a human being, because they have clearly shown they are willing to dehumanize people for their own gratification.
I could not live with people who call women “females”. There’s a whole body of literature on what’s wrong with that term.
I could not live with people who assume that cohabiting automatically means “would make you the 4th female”. The question assumes that “move into a house” necessarily implies a polyfidelitious arrangement. I’m not sure what kind of houses y’all have been living in, but I’ve had a number of roommates and housemates, some of whom were also romantically involved with each other, and never was simply “move into a house” defined as “would make you the 4th female”. In order for that to happen, there would have to be an invitation to join their polyfidelitious relationship, not just live under their roof.
I am straight. I am not sexually attracted to women.
I have autonomy. To require me to have sex with anyone, even if they were the gender of my orientation, is coercive. Even when I do enter into a romantic and sexual relationship, I still retain the ability to give and revoke consent at any time. Sex is never a *requirement*. If, at any time, someone is required to have sex with anyone in order to maintain their housing, that is deeply coercive indeed. Certainly I would never get into a relationship with someone where sex with *other people* is required in order to maintain the relationships I want. That’s really fucked up.
Even though I do enjoy group sex, I do not enjoy it all the time. Every relationship needs to be nurtured on its own, which means that each of the 4 people in that house needs to be able to explore their individual relationships with each other person independently and each of those relationships needs to be able to grow in whatever ways that relationship wants to grow. Forcing all of the relationships to be the “same” is also coercive and codependent. So even assuming my orientation matched *and* I was interested in a sexual relationship with each person, I still wouldn’t join a group that expected group sex all the time.

I was actually in a relationship that did that in a defacto way. It was quite toxic and insidious. They never said that group sex was expected or required, but they all insisted on spending so much group time together that nobody ever really got any alone-time with each other, and every time someone had sex without the others present, somebody would have some kind of emotional crisis about being “left out” or “abandoned” and it took weeks of tears and arguments to make everyone feel better again. It was so bad that I eventually lost interest in sex completely because it was a minefield.
I have several sleep disorders. I do not co-sleep well. I always have my own bedroom for my own health and sanity.

In short, there is absolutely nothing about that scenario that is appealing and everything about it is a red flag for an abusive situation. And I say this as someone who has a spouse that is a straight man who has (at least) 2 other partners where the 4 of us get together and have some kind of kinky group sex.

The difference is that there is no cohabitation, no expectations or requirements of co-sleeping, definitely no coercion where everyone is required to all have sex together (the 3 of us women are not actually in direct sexual relationships with each other, we are just all in a relationship with him), and none of us are treated as objects to be “shared”. We all respect each other’s autonomy and see each other as human beings, not “female” animals, sex objects, need fulfillment machines, nannies, bang-maids, harem members, or possessions.

Every word in this question drips with entitlement, assumptions, misogyny, and co-dependence. I wouldn’t enter into a scenario like this if I was homeless and desperately needed a place to stay for survival.

#PSA: The United States Postal Service offers a special service, free of charge: If you receive mail for someone who does not live at your address, you can write on the outside "return to sender" and "addressee unknown" and put it back in the mailbox. The post office will then return it back to the person who sent it for no additional charge.

If someone who used to live at your address is now currently doing everything in their power to not be contacted by you, the correct thing to do when you receive their mail is to return it to sender, not contact everyone you know who knows them and tell them you have their mail.

If the mail is important and it gets back to the sender, then the sender will try alternate means of contacting them.

Too many people use mail or packages as a tool to further contact someone who is trying to escape them. Don't do that.

Return that shit to sender and let them figure out how to get it to the addressee.

I know it's not possible for people to remember every single lesson they learned in school for their entire scholastic career, but this is something that was actually taught in school. If you've forgotten it, now you know it again.

#InOtherWordsStopMessagingMyFriendsTryingToContactMeYouFuckingAsshole

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.

Had to explain to someone the other night that the fact that "what happened to my ancestors doesn't affect me today" is exactly an example of that white privilege he claims not to have. I pointed out to him that black people today, in Orlando, are poor and have poor health, because of deliberate racist decisions made by the city in housing zoning, railroad building, and freeway construction. Their outcomes today are directly affected by what happened to their grandparents.

The fact that his white ancestors probably kidnapped George Washington (a story he seriously told me as evidence of how hard his ancestors had it in the past) and were outcasts during the Civil War and yet he suffers no setbacks from that because he "works hard to get what he has" is EXACTLY that "privilege" that the coworker he shut down was talking about.

My parents were refused food service and housing because they were a mixed marriage. They still managed to be lower-middle class in the '80s, but how much further could they have gone if racism wasn't a thing? If my dad could have used his forestry degree instead of working in a machine shop to support his family? If my mother wasn't relegated to "secretary" job positions? Where would I be today if sexism and racism didn't exist and didn't hold back my parents?

Maybe I'd be in the same place, I dunno. The economy was completely fucked by the Boomers, so maybe I still would have chosen this career and still been thrown into poverty because of a gig economy. But maybe I wouldn't be. And maybe I, personally, would have but statistically people with my heritage would have *on average* better outcomes because their own parents and grandparents were not denied housing, jobs, or subsidies.

When your grandparents are funneled into ghettos, and then your parents are given crap education because schools are funded by property taxes, who then have shit jobs so that you grow up malnourished and without the opportunity for skills or clothing to impress employers, what happened to your ancestors very much affects your present day.

When your great great grandparents were paid for the slaves they lost, and when they were hired right off the boat because they were white and already spoke English, and when they were given the opportunity for free or low-cost land that other people were not afforded, so that each generation after them started with a walk to first base, what happened to your ancestors also very much affects your present day.

And the fact that you can look at some individual hardships that some 3x-removed uncle once suffered and say "see? My family had some shit too, but I don't let it affect me, I just work hard and earn my stuff"! and not see how that's actually reinforcing my own point, that's exactly what privilege is.

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.

How Not To Break Up With Someone:

"I totally can't do this polyamory thing. What if you find someone better than me?!"
"Nvrmd, I totes can! I'm definitely ready to try polyamory! Let's do this!"
"JK! I'm getting back together with my ex and she won't allow me to be poly, so I'm blocking you now."

How Not To Break Up With Someone:

Spend a solid week convincing them to give you a chance over their concerns that you don't have enough relationship experience for them.
Make a date with them explicitly to discuss whether or not you can date each other.
Stand them up for that date.
Block their methods of contact so you aren't tempted to respond and they don't know that you're not getting their attempts to reach out.
Leave them a message on Facebook to read when they get home after spending all night wondering where you are, saying how much you learned from them about ethics and personal growth, but sorry, you can't ever talk to them again in any capacity.

#ThisIsWhyINeverAssumeAnyoneIsLyingInADitchSomewhere #TheyAreAlwaysAtHomePlayingXboxJustAvoidingMe #GhostingSucks #BreakingUp #HowNotToBreakUp #EthicalBreakups #YallHaveShittyBreakupSkills

https://www.quora.com/In-a-polyamorous-relationship-how-does-your-wife-or-husband-differ-from-your-other-partners/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper/comment/84318016

Q. From your PoV, what changes would you like to see to the current legal requirements and benefits to marriage that would make life easier or better for you?

A. I would like to see there be absolutely no legal benefits, punishments, consequences, ties, connections, or anything at all based on *romantic* relationships. I want the government out of the relationship regulation business.

I would like to see all the possible and existing benefits, requirements, etc., available as regular civil contracts, to be entered into by anyone who can otherwise enter any legal contract, and to have a few different “package contracts” with some of the more popular benefit/requirement combinations lumped together in ready-made contracts.

And then these would all be legal for anyone to enter into with whomever they choose. They would not be reserved for romantic partnerships, they couldn’t be broken based on whose genitals touch whose (or don’t touch whose), they would be regulated based on relevance to the contracts’ various contents.

That would make my life much easier and better than one giant suite of benefits and requirements (which differ from state to state) that I can only enter into with one person who is obligated to be in a romantic relationship with me in order to provide those benefits that have nothing to do with romance, and for which the government can nullify if some government agent thinks we aren’t sufficiently “romantic” enough or doesn’t like what we choose to do with our own genitals in our spare time.

https://jezebel.com/rewriting-the-fairy-tale-adoption-narrative-1831433433

Adoption is not the "abortion alternative". It's an industry (yes, I use that term deliberately) fraught with corruption, racism, and capitalism.

I had a pretty good adoptive experience. But growing up, everyone else I heard about did not. My own sister spent her entire life feeling abandoned, grieving for her bio-parents, and turning to drugs and sex-too-young to fill the void. My uncle met my aunt when she was pregnant. She gave up that child and later was found by the child. The adult-child's story was pretty bad - neglectful adoptive parents, drug use, abuse ... They've tried to maintain a friendly relationship over the years but it's always been rocky.

I say that I was better off for my bio-mom not parenting me. It's one of my main arguments in favor of allowing people to opt-out of parenting. But the adoption system is not conducive to stories like mine. Far too many people are not "better off" for the parents they ended up with. Or, possibly they still are, but they still didn't get a good deal out of the arrangement.

Adoption is its own reproductive rights fight. The system is terribly flawed and desperately needs an overhaul. It is not a safe "third option" to avoid the issue of abortion.

I am glad I had an abortion. I am more relieved by it every passing year. It was absolutely the right choice for me. Adoption was not. I didn't want to avoid parenting, I needed to avoid *pregnancy*.

And the bullshit "gotcha" thought-questions about "what if we had transporters that could take the fetus out of your body and put it into someone else's, would you support that over abortion?" DO NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Or, rather, they might possibly remove one objection, but they introduce a whole bunch of other problems.

Look, I had signed up to be an egg donor at one point. So I *also* get it from the standpoint of "my genetic offspring will be out there, somewhere, being raised by someone else". Clearly, I'm OK with that possibility. But the irony of people, particularly white men, who insist that they want to have "a child of their own", posing this gotcha question and suggesting that women give up "their own" child for someone else to raise, is thick.

Adoption is not an "abortion alternative". Adoption is its own issue and the adoption system is fucked up. If you really want to reduce abortions, support preventative care and post-natal care.

Oh, but that would be "socialism"!

Yeah, well, you care so much about all those little "babies", then fucking pay for their parents to care for them or to better avoid having them in the first place.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-helpful-rules-youve-ever-seen-or-used-in-an-open-relationship/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper?ch=1&share=5b18055e&srid=B7tY

Q. What are the most helpful rules you've ever seen or used in an open relationship?

A. I’ve never seen any helpful rules. I’ve discovered that if a person wants to do a thing, a rule against it won’t stop them. If a person genuinely wants to be the person you want them to be, then you don’t need any rules telling them how to be that person. The most successful open relationships I’ve seen in all my decades in the poly community as an activist and educator tend to not have “rules”, if by “rules” you mean “you agree to this kind of behaviour and I agree to this kind of behaviour”.

The most successful open relationships I’ve seen tend to have good boundaries. By “boundaries” I mean “this is how I want you to treat *me* and I will pay attention to how you want to be treated by me.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/Baej7f5BbtB/

But rules where the people’s behaviour for anything other than how they treat each other? I’ve never seen any that were helpful. As I said, if a person naturally didn’t want to do something against the rules, then a rule isn’t necessary, which means it’s not helpful. If a person does really want to do a thing that’s against the rules, then the rule won’t stop them, which means that it’s not helpful.

People only follow rules for as long as they want to. If they want to, they don’t really need to make it a rule. If they don’t want to, the rule won’t stop them.

https://www.quora.com/Do-polyamorous-people-have-a-partner-that-they-love-more-than-the-other-others/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper?ch=1&share=406a3090&srid=B7tY

I really fucking hate this question.

Q. Do polyamorous people have a partner that they love more than the other/others?

A. Do people with multiple kids have one kid they love more than the others? If we’re being honest, then yeah, some parents probably do. But they would generally be considered bad parents by everyone else if they ever uttered that out loud, even though we really can’t help having the feelings that we have.

But do parents of multiple kids love each of their children *differently*, since each child is a different, unique, individual human being? That’s probably more common, and also not considered to be bad parenting.

Some people who call themselves “polyamorous” do put limitations around the amount of feeling they have for various partners, most notably those in hierarchical relationships (where the “primary always comes first”). These are generally considered by other polys to be people who are unsafe to get into relationships with because, as already established, we can’t help our feelings, so we know right up front that our feelings are not safe with them as we will be discarded if we ever catch feelings.

Other people who are polyamorous develop qualitatively different kinds of relationships, and hence have different sorts of feelings, for different partners. We can’t “rank” them into who we love the “most”, we just love people differently in the same way that most people love each of their parents differently, or love their sibling and their best friend “equally” but “differently” from each other.

Our feelings and our relationships are built on the unique combination of ourselves and the other person. There is no other relationship in the world that will ever look exactly like any given relationship because it’s made up of the people in them, and the people are unique individuals. Therefore, the feelings that go along with that relationship are a completely unique blend of a variety of emotions that will never be replicated with anyone else.

In addition to that, emotions and feelings change and flux over time. “Love”, for whatever definition anyone uses (which, incidentally, is *also* unique and individual), waxes and wanes and is influenced by and affected by all sorts of other feelings. How anyone feels on the first week of a new relationship and how they feel 10 years in is going to look and feel different. Which feeling is “more”? Well, the intensity and passion was probably “more” that first week, but the security and comfort is probably more 10 years later.

Each poly person loves in their own way, and each relationship they have is unique to those two people in that relationship. Just like monogamous people. So there is no way to answer a question about how all polys “love”, or do anything, really.

I, personally, do not have any partners that I love “more” than anyone else. I love people differently. A partner that I have been with for many years might qualify as someone that I “love”, while a person I just started dating is probably too new for me to say that I “love” him, so when those are the circumstances, you could possibly say that I “love” my long-term partner “more” than the new partner.

But the new partner still has the *potential* to also reach those same stages of love if given enough time and we wind up being compatible in those ways. The longer-term partner isn’t defaulted as the one I love the “most”, it’s just that this relationship happens to have lasted long enough, and we are compatible in the right ways, to reach that level of deep, intimate, all-encompassing love, while the newer partner isn’t there *yet*.

Sometimes a newer relationship hasn’t yet reached that stage, so in the snapshot of that moment in time, I might “love” one more than the other, but that newer relationship will grow into that stage eventually. Other times a relationship never quite reaches that stage, as we find out that we are not compatible and we break up before getting to the “love” part.

This is not a yes-or-no question. It’s both yes, no, and, to quote Marissa Tomei “nobody can answer that question, it’s a trick question”.

To single poly people out by asking if they love one person more than another is to imply that nobody else does, when the reality is that love can maybe be qualitatively described but we have no measuring tools for determining quantity of love. It’s not something that we can measure.

Love between different people looks different from each other. Some love feels strong, some love feels soft, some love feels deep, some love feels gentle, some love feels hard, some love feels like a liquid that seeps into every nook and cranny and some love feels like a solid mass crashing into everything and taking up all the space. And an awful lot of the time, love looks like all of the above, but at different times and in different moments.

Which one of those loves is “more” than the others?

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Joreth

The Inn Between

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Country Swing Dancing And The Systemic Obliviousness Of Men - A Compliment Becomes A Metaphor
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August 2024

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