Feminism and Violence

How is it that Elin Nordegren can (probably) take a golf club to Tiger Woods’ car, and people actually express sympathy for her? If their roles were reversed, no amount of infidelity on her part would be seen to excuse his violent behavior. I recognize that this is one of my personal pet issues, but the willingness of most people to blithely dismiss physically and/or emotionally abusive behavior if the offender is female perplexes and disturbs me. What is it that makes it less offensive? That she’s smaller or less physically imposing than him? I would think a golf club would equalize some of that.

The idea that somehow, one group’s abuses against another can be laughable or unimportant because of the nature of that group is exactly the same kind of thinking that told abused women that they deserved it and was used to justify “fag-bashing”. What if this wasn’t the only time she was violent? How would we know? How could someone as powerful as Tiger Woods come out and say he was being abused by his wife? He’d be laughed out of sports. He’d never live it down. And that is really, truly, deeply fucked up. Because the truth is, there are men all over the world abused by their girlfriends, lovers and spouses every day. It doesn’t fit our idea of masculinity, or society’s current definition of domestic violence as a crime by men against women, so those men are ignored at best and ridiculed at worst.

This issue is important to me precisely because I *am* a feminist. Pretending that women never abuse men is sexist on multiple fronts: It denies that women are capable of violence, it conflates womanhood and victimhood, and it paints men as inherently violent. It's also counter-productive. Women can not simultaneously argue for equality and reinforce a sexist idea of femininity because it makes them feel superior. Well, I take that back, because a lot of them do, but it succeeds in getting nowhere. True gender equality requires acknowledging that both genders have are human, have flaws, are capable of both great compassion and great cruelty. Denying it traps women in the kind of fake feminine identity that feminism has historically railed against. Except, apparently, when it suits them or makes them look good.

Who? Me? Conflicted? Never.

Once again I'm being a lame at non-monogamy.  I'm working 5 days a week for the first time in several years, and my commute is ~1hr each way.  Honestly, I *am* taking care of two relationships – one with the hubs, and one with myself.  I am an only child, and quiet and bookish by nature, I've spent most of my life with a good deal of time where I'm just being – quietly reading or knitting, needing the tv off and no conversation.  It's necessary for my long term mental health.  

Until recently I was at least able to use chat programs at work, and could partially maintain relationships that way, workload permitting.  That's out the window now though, and I've started jealously guarding what time I actually have for just myself.  The end result is that when looking at any involvement, I need to make sure that I'm not going to end up resenting time I don't have alone, and that the time I am willing to share isn't so penurious as to be pointless.   As much as I love flirting, and having new people to play with, I put a pretty high value on time spent baking bread and lying around doing nothing.

More specifically, the drastic decrease in free time means that a relationship sort of fizzled out.   There were a couple things working against it – he was more than an hour away and I absolutely hate driving (and he didn't drive – he did offer to come to me via bus, but that added the necessity of a hotel, etc).   The other issue is more complicated.  Sigh.  I'm very strong willed, to the point of stubborn.  However, this is combined with an equally strong desire for approval.   It's something I'm aware of, and I work to temper it so that I am neither indifferent to the opinions of others, nor am I letting their wishes run my life.  In general I'm pretty good at balancing it. It is definitely something that influences my sex life, and bottoming with a trusted partner is a good outlet for approval seeking behavior.  In both play and real life, though, balancing can be work.  I need partners who are equally strong willed, or I end up either running them over or just finding them completely uninteresting.  However, if they are used to being able to impose their will, either because they're smarter or more stubborn than other people, then the balancing act turns into a tug of war.

It can even be fun, this emotional and intellectual struggle, for a little while.  But eventually, faced with a relationship where I feel like I have to push back all the time just to keep things even – it's going to wear me out, and it's going to piss me off.  I'm not going to allow my less-independent side dominance.  It's simply not going to happen.  It is flattering when someone desires me enough to want that, in a weird way.  And I'll admit that there are days when the idea of just letting someone else tell me what to do is attractive.  But I would never let it actually happen.  The man in question was attracted to that part of me, and believed that I should let it influence my decisions more.  Initially it was interesting, seeing how he saw me, and the two of us pushing at each other.  To some extent, it made me look at the decisions I've made about how I handle my independence, which was helpful.  That kind of pushing takes a lot of energy though, and eventually, feeling like someone else is trying to change me just pisses me off.

It's too bad, really.  He's fascinating, and smart, and deeply perverse.  He paid incredibly close attention to me, and picked my brain apart in ways that were flattering and interesting.  I still ended up feeling like he saw what he wanted to see – not what was really there.  It's something that everyone does sometimes.  In this case, our opinions were different on a lot of things, and eventually, it wasn't friction I really wanted to deal with.   The thing I feel worst about is that I didn't get to explain this to him fully – I'm rarely on chat now, and when I am he's not, so I've taken the easy way out and not forced the issue. Although  he's not exactly chasing me down either, so I'm guessing the struggle stopped entertaining him too.

No, you're doing it wrong

Why is it that monogamous people always imagine that non-monogamy is some kind of non-stop parade of exotic sex? Do you people somehow imagine that because I have multiple partners, I've also invented a way to split each 24 hour period into multiple mini-days wherein I work a full time job, spend sufficient time with my wife, pursue my hobbies and interests, AND have orgies with international women of mystery?

Bullshit.

Time and energy are both finite resources, and in many ways, finite resources are the natural enemy of polyamory.

Discuss.

I'm a very bent person.

I've been kinky, I would estimate, for my entire life. My first erotic memories are of watching video game characters get beaten and tortured by their antagonists, not understanding why it was that the bare-chested, black-hooded Executioner figure on the box of Dark Castle pulled so hard at something inside me; why villains, male and female, winning out over male heroes was so attractive. Later, it was slotting quarters into Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat arcade machines just to beat the snot out of Chun Li or Sonya (or to have the snot beaten out of me while playing as them); even later than that, it was the digitized T&A of DOA and the games that came after it. But I'm straying from my point, which is:

I have been kinky for a very long time, and a lot of what's wrong (or right) with me can be laid squarely at the feet of the Internet.

I hit puberty right around the time that the internet really exploded, came of age with Prodigy and CompuServe and AOL and the World Wide Web. Some of the earliest searches I can remember making were for information on BDSM, D\s, and related topics - stories, rules, "how-to" sites, anything and everything I could get my grubby little mitts on. I read voraciously, trying to learn everything the internet could tell me. I cruised the personal and professional web pages of pro and amateur Dom(me)s, looked at thousands of pictures, memorized enromous chunks of text about the philosophies of power exchange and the sancrosact laws of "Safe, Sane, Consensual"; I printed out and pored over long lists of suggested activities, scribbled all over "contracts" designed to help people find common ground in submission, and checked off item after item on "rules for submissives." Like I said: voracious.

And I read stories. I read stories by the truckload, the bus load, the boat load. I read a Library of Alexandria's worth of stories, maybe two Library's worth, maybe three Library's worth. I read until my eyes practically fell out of my skull -

- but I never thought the stories I was reading were real. From the first, even at 13 years old, I knew that this was *fiction*. This was *fantasy*. Even at 13, I knew myself well enough to know that I would never want to be submissive to another person 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I knew that stories about fantastically rich dominants who had stables of slaves and spent all day engaging in absurdly overheated discipline training sessions were classic examples of wish-fulfillment pap at its worst. I understood that dank stone dungeons were, unless you lived in a real castle already, just a myth.

I remember something I read, a long time ago, by a woman who was apparently pretty active in the early BDSM internet. Her name, sadly, escapes me (it's been 10+ years), but she talked about meeting someone for a scene, and how she had to reconcile the fact that being tied to a futon in a stuffy 3rd floor walk-up wasn't the same as her fantasies about being a maiden in a dungeon - and the fact that, once the scene started and got good, *it didn't matter that she was tied to a futon instead of chained to a stone castle wall.*

So, where am I going with this? Well, lots of places, most of which are conclusions I leave you to draw on your own, but there is one thing in this little ramble that I feel it's absolutely essential that everyone walk away with:

When I realized I was kinky, and that there were other people that were kinky, the very first thing I did was *research.* Lots and lots and LOTS of research - using whatever non-fiction I could get my hands on. I read, and read, and looked, and read, and watched, and read, and still didn't think I'd gotten it all, or nearly all, or even a thimble-full of "all." There were whole oceans of information out there, and I was a very small fish to be swimming in them.

I'm older now, and a LOT wiser, and a much bigger fish when it comes to BDSM, its philosophies and its activities - and I know that I'm still far from the biggest fish in the sea. I'm a medium-sized shark, not a great white or a hammerhead and certainly not a whale. I still learn new things (although these days I learn a lot more from people than from the internet), I still surprise myself, I still see room to grow.

So what am I saying?

I'm saying that, no matter how much you think you know, there's always more to learn.

I'm saying that stories are fantasy, and while fantasy is well and good, it's a lousy way to prepare for reality. A little common sense and an open mind are much better preperation than a whole library of erotica could ever be.

And I'm saying that to think otherwise - to think that reading a few overheated sex fantasies where the men are all called "Master" by pneumatic PVC-clad blondes and the women are all addressed as "Mistress" by submissive bodybuilders with 10-inch cocks - is to be arrogant, closed-minded, and foolish, which are three things no dominant worth having wants in a submissive and no submissive worth being had wants in a dominant.

There's your food for thought. We'll see you fine kinky folks next week.

State of the World

What happens if you take a poly girl, someone who's spent most of her adult life around other poly and/or open friends, and move her to the Philadelphia suburbs and a whole new batch of people? Sometimes, she goes crazy. If she's as paralyzingly shy as me, she just does it quietly. Then, three years later, she realizes she's making herself miserable, that her lovers from Texas are not moving up here, and she needs to "Get over her shit" as the Husband says. Cue online dating hilarity!

First, there was the guy who sent me unsolicited, badly written vanilla erotica. (Yes, vanilla. No, I'm not, we'll get into that later - one deviant habit at a time!) I never replied to it, it just kept showing up. Finally I sent back several of them with spelling and grammar mistakes fixed and he stopped.

More recently, there was a young man who wanted to, well, essentially, be my bitch. He was volunteering to do my laundry and clean my house in exchange for which I would have sex with people who weren't him, and tell him about and make fun of his (apparently) small penis. I know, I know, sounds like a dream deal, right? Except that 1. the guy is obviously nuts to be contacting me, since nowhere in my profile does it suggest I'll top anyone, 2. I have a husband, this guy being the cuckold really doesn't work, 3. It's just fucking creepy, and I know I'd end up putting the lotion in the basket or something. I sent him a very polite refusal, and didn't respond to further arguments. The Husband thinks the guy was actually trying to get a really bitchy rejection that he could then spank his little subbie heart out over.

The Husband is probably right about that one, but if someone can manage to make a request in clear, correct, polite English, I feel like I ought to at least send them a "No, thank you" note. Just because I think they're nuts is no reason to be rude.

There have been some better, less bizarre interactions. I've started using the dating site to try to find other poly couples to talk to, hang out with, etc. That's going semi-well although there's hilarity there too. One of the gentleman I contacted because he's been in a successful very long-term poly relationship instantly assumed that I was contacting him for purposes of getting boned stupid. I haven't actually figured out a way to dissuade him without being a bitch, so currently I'm letting him chase me and hoping he gets tired. Alternately, I'll think of a way to explain to him what I was actually trying to do in terms he'll understand.

The most successful so far I went and met last weekend, I'll call him Epsilon. He's about an hour's drive away, not too bad, but not convenient either. He's not creepy, or demanding, or lying to his girlfriend. His perversions line up pretty well with mine. He's a programmer, which is nice because it's not something the Husband really enjoys talking about. Essentially, Epsilon is that most important thing - someone I'd talk to and spend time with even if I didn't want to go to bed with him. It's funny how that works. Of course, we ended up necking in the back of a car, which just goes to show how mature we are. Also, how excellent we are at planning ahead.

There will definitely be more about both of those last two as the situations develop. Tune in next week, same bat time, same bat channel.