Stummy Rumblings

Squee!

2011-12-15T21:57:00.000-05:00

As a gift for herself, my wife chose to make as sizable donation as we could afford to the Kingdom of Loathing Comic Book for Great Justice! We got to be sexy supporters of the comic book, which included a full page, colored sketch. Well, she decided to choose the parameters of the sketch and let me be surprised. Well, said sketch just arrived in the mail. Boy, was I surprised!

I brought the support; she brought the sexy.

It looks surprisingly like us! Weeeell... The younger versions of ourselves. Three kids has made Quisalas a more substantial woman, and me- I got a goatee and a substantial amount of belly, myself. So, these are more the 'teen' Q&J. The artist never even saw us tho', so you can color me impressed. Maybe all us nerds and sexy blonde dominatrices look alike. (Plus, my sneaky wife changed her eye-color. She always wanted green eyes.) I love how my shirt's rolled a 20. <3 I feel like a rolled a natural 20 on my roll for Partner-Check every time I see Quis. This picture gives me the warm fuzzies all over.

Oh, hey, the comic was pretty good too. :D Very pretty, and pretty funny. Although you'll get the jokes better if you actually play the game. You do play Kingdom of Loathing, don't you?

Can You Believe This Was Going to be One Comment?

2011-12-10T22:36:00.003-05:00

I recently made this statement on No Seriously What About Teh Menz:

I’m in a bit of mental quandary, and I think this blog is a good place to seek opinions, although this doesn’t have to be about ‘teh menz’ per se.

Various levels of gratuitous sexual displays in various media are an issue for a lot of people. It’s fair for those people look at the entertainment medium in question, and make a statement to the effect of, ‘This level of sexual display is distracting and inappropriate to the tone or form of this entertainment. It is subtracting from my enjoyment of, and/or outright drives me away from said entertainment.’

I have heard it lamented, that they’d like people to get over the sexual displays so they can be attracted (romantically) to a character for their talent. What confuses a little, and conflicts me a lot about that suggestion, is why should one insert one’s libido into a situation that amounts to someone minding their own business?

I’m not trying to be naive here. I think it was Daisy D. who suggested on a thread that I might get all hot and bothered about Ginger Rogers hoisting Fred up, or kicking out her moves with an air of hauteur. Oh yeah; guilty as charged. Ms. Rogers is only minding her business (and minding it well) when my id suddenly sits upright and turns into one heck of a backseat driver. I would argue, however, that the brass instrumentals, saucy tempo, swishy skirts, her charismatic partner, and the choreography all imply that I’m supposed to appreciate Ms. Roger’s talents on a level that might warrant more than an adjusted monocle and a gentle golf-clap. I admit, however, that it’s all subjective.

But when I have conversations that go:

Them: “Stop manipulating me into liking this character. Let me judge them on their merits as a character,”

Me: “You’d rather there was no sexual context to this piece?”

Them: “No. I’m pro-sex. But let me find the sexy in how smart, funny, or powerful they are. Stop using manipulative tactics like pov shots, skimpy outfits, exceptional physical builds, heavy-handed banter, or unatural poses.”

I kind of want to reply, “You’re why people write Transformers slash-fiction.” (Love to the slashies! Let your Perceptor/Thundercracker freak flag fly.)

In real life, interaction is what gives people permission to view each other in a sexual light. But art generally doesn’t interact, or only does so in specifically scripted ways. So the subject matter provides context. I get people when they say, ‘this is too much.’ I don’t want anyone feeling defensive about their personal levels of promiscuity/prudishness, but there comes a point for me where the sexual austerity of the medium can stop feeling ‘enlightened’ and be just as creepy for me as the sexual excess of another medium can.

Tl;dr – It’s hard not to feel like you’re taking the moral low road when you’re ‘mansplaining’ your artwork to someone.

I got several responses, and they were good. One of the commenters was nice enough to link me to this article-

The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and Their 'Liberated Sexuality'

I’d read the article before and it’s good. I think people should read it. I recommend it. I believe I largely agree with the theme of it. And now, I’m going to pick at it because I’m like that.

For me, the author of that article is guilty of a little dishonesty in the way she makes her case.

This is not about these women wanting things; it's about men wanting to see them do things, and that takes something that really should be empowering -- the idea that women can own their sexuality -- and transforms it into yet another male fantasy. It takes away the actual power of the women and turns their "sexual liberation" into just another way for dudes to get off. And that is at least ten times as gross as regular cheesecake, minimum

Except, that's all that cheesecake is. All cheesecake of any kind. Present me an erotic image and I'll tell you how the artist took someone else's power and came at it from an angle that the viewer is supposed to get their groove on with.

Example: People are born with eyes to see and mouths to ingest breathe, and communicated, but if I draw someone smiling at the viewer then suddenly it’s all about you.

Have a nice day! You selfish ass.

Actually, that's what every narrative is. When you watch Old Yeller getting shot, it doesn't matter whether you cry, laugh, or spank one out; you were using the image of someone else's life to pleasure yourself. Of course, the artist is supposed to place context within the medium to guide the viewer towards the appropriate reaction, and this author's put all of this in a shaky context for me with that paragraph.

Yet, even though I assert there'd be nothing bad happening if we were using women’s power as another way for ‘dudes to get off’, I have to admit that the author did say:

It takes away the actual power of the women and turns their "sexual liberation" into just another way for dudes to get off

That would mean Starfire is rather powerless as a character aside from her use in this storyline as a vehicle for male pleasure. And I agree. The author does say in the article what some of the problems are: a larger market saturation, lack of variety, a lack of revolving viewpoint that gives Starfire a turn as narrator, a lack of respect in the dialogue that discusses the character, and twenty or thirty other things I can't even think of right now.

I would not blame a Starfire fan for picking up this title, curling their lip, and returning it to the shelf, and that’s just based on the dialogue alone. I know I would. I also couldn’t blame anyone, especially a woman, for picking up this title, rolling their eyes and, again, returning it to the shelf after taking one look at its contents even if they’d never heard of Starfire.

Too bad that’s not what happened:

Comic Sales in October

Red Hood and the Outlaws is coming in at #35, having picked up another 3 grand in readers since issue #1. These numbers are not negligible – The title’s beating out Birds of Prey, every Ultimate Marvel line (if only barely squeaking ahead of Ultimate Spider Man), and running neck and neck with long-time established character Green Arrow. Catwoman? Did even better, beating out Supergirl and breathing hot on the heels of Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel’s flagship character. (Who has been justifiably hemorrhaging readers for a while now.) On the bright side, Wonder Woman is still queen bee at #13, Batgirl’s right behind at #14, and relative newb Batwoman is owning at #15.

So, one can’t exactly discount the fact that a lot of dudes like getting off and will pay good money to do so. That or they love Red Hood so much they’ll overlook any level of sexism to see him fighting crime, maybe. You know what, it’s probably the getting off. Maybe we could find a way for dudes to get off on women who remain actualized women the whole time said dudes are doing their off getting. That brings me to the other criticism I had for this article.

I think the author slips up with her presentations of 'good sex!' vs 'bad sex!' The Batman/Catwoman sex scene is crap to me, but I get what the creator was going for: a sex scene. A scene with sex. The author gives this one a thumbs down (so do I), but then she presents Empowered. Empowered is a parody of comic sexual tropes that she doesn't consider a parody because it is a sexual comic. Well, that’s not a disqualifier. The Simpsons and Family Guy are sitcoms that parody sitcoms. Futurama is a science fiction show that parodies science fiction. And last I checked Empowered, casts prurient male desires as the culprit of every joke (even if long suffering Emp is the butt of most jokes) and has no actual sex scenes.

She also recommends a female POV scene between Black Cat and Spiderman that has Black Cat getting dressed and leaving Spidey in his skivvies, also largely played for laughs and Spidey-shame. So, for her a good sex scene is a self-aware parody or joke that contains no actual sex scene. Those are not alternative a bad sex scene, but a condemnation of sex scenes.

If I may beat my Old Yeller metaphor to death; I don't think the best boy-to-man coming of age story would be something called "Cummin' of Age!" where Audience N. Sert turns to the camera after he shoots Old Metaphor and says "It's sad Maw, but when your beast starts spittin' foam you gotta grab yer rifle and fire one out to get it to lay down. And that's what makes you a man."

Funny, but meta-humor, lampshade hanging, self-parody, and genre savvy self-aware dialogue are largely used to deconstruct genres, not construct them. Maybe I’m being petty; I also think Empowered is an enjoyable, sex-focal comic. I contend, however, that it's not sex done right, or sex done wrong; it's sex done funny or funny done sexy. When I’m having a nerd-rant about how much comics at large are sucking (and I have ‘em, boy howdy) I wouldn’t pause to say that my one exception is The Tick.

I think the author should just be honest and say that she's tired of male-targeted displays of overt sexuality, prefers most of her sexual scenes with diffusive humor, and that she doesn't think sex scenes belong in comics because that’s what I’m getting. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but some people like sex scenes, would rather the scene not be played for laughs, and would prefer to have their libidos pandered too instead of teased. There’s nothing wrong with them either. There’s no better mentality there, but there is a lot of sexism in comics (its not even entirely directed at women!) and it’s creating too many female characters with too little substance way too often. Watching it derail a character I actually liked just plain hurts.

An Essay on The Societal Dominatrix Part 6. Epilogue - (or Time to Say the Safeword)

2011-11-29T17:52:00.001-05:00

And so, I stick the Patriarchy and Feminism out in the garden to scare away inattentive birds because it’s time to bring things to an end. As things draw to a conclusion, anyone whose read this all the way through might be thinking, “Wait. Why is it wrong to compare feminism to a dominatrix again?” Well, if you recall, I sort of cheated my way through that question already. It isn’t! If you frame it correctly.

I would use dominatrices as metaphors all the time if I wasn’t afraid of making folks feel unsettled. For me it means something fun and at least a little sexy but too powerful to pretend that you’re the one who has total control of the situation. Here! I’ll prove it.

I should've been a political cartoonist! Except every cartoon would just be this picture with the text changed.

On that note, credit is due again to Quiet Riot Girl, my muse in this essay. I was never trying to accuse her of a bad metaphor, just trying to work out in my head why I've seen the metaphor reoccur in various discussions. I've been reading her work long enough to know, unless my reading comprehension skills are that terrible, that she’d never make anyone’s person-hood contingent on virginity or some other form of supplication like society tries to do to the societal Dominatrix. Quite the contrary! Feminism rather seems to chafe her because she often sees it either failing to recognize, help prevent, or outright furthering restraints on male sexuality. I've also bumped into her comments on enough of the pro-kink sites I lurk around on that she does her homework, and makes her statements from a place of education, not ignorance.

One of QRG’s favorite dragons to slay is metrophobia, the fear of the metrosexual (and not a fear of cities, in this context). The term metrosexual was popularized to describe those men who preferred to don the suit of a cultured (or at least pop cultured) man about town as their blatantly constructed sexual identity. They were the sort of men who would have probably been described as gentleman, dandies, or slick city dudes in the past. The term was originated by Mark Simpson, the same clever author who created Miss Whiplash, Feminism-Dominatrix incarnate. (If QRG was my muse, I suppose that makes Mr. Simpson my Apollo.) He’s a very smart man who noted that men were very much constructing identities for themselves (e.g. macho man, nerd, twink, bear, father, hooligan) and performing them in life, often as sexual roles. Mr. Simpson was titling a new ascendant (or possibly reascendant) role and I know he didn’t mean it to exclude gay men, or be exclusive to gay men. I've seen, for what I assume are homophobic reasons, the term simultaneously used to describe a man who was ‘doing gay things’ but was really for real straight, or the new epitomic gay man who may just be buried in the closet. The word 'metrosexual' was being used as a shield to hold gay at bay, and a sword to bring accusations to bare. For other people, either free of homophobia or at least conscious how homophobic the accusations were getting, the word was still being used as a slur. Suddenly it became about narcissism or a way to duck out on all the hard work it takes to be a real sexy man. We had pure metrophobia. People began to construct retrosexual identities in defense against the metrosexual, rather hilariously missing and enforcing Mark Simpson’s whole original point. Metrophobia existed because, since it was new, loud, and well funded, the desire of men to be desirable had never seemed so dangerously obvious in society’s collective memory.

Society needs men to do their jobs right and has always cast its eyes around to find examples of men doing manhood incorrectly, to show people the price of failure. One of the threats and insults that society likes to hang over men is perpetual virginity. Metrosexuals desire to be seen as desirable and on their own terms. If they can succeed on those terms, then the threat would become hollow.

Society is largely okay with kind attracting kind; it’s rather expected that the ethnic men sleep with ethnic women, poor men with poor women, dim men with dim women, shallow men with shallow women etc. Sometimes relationships don’t follow that script. There are also men where kind doesn’t make sense to attract kind or, if even it did, the man in question would still be winning because the trait they have is desirable in women. For instance- Pretty men, virginal men, feminine men, shy men, submissive men, etc.

So society attempts to socially pillory such men, publicly scapegoating them. If we can’t succeed in shaming such men into good behavior, then at least we might make everyone else afraid to associate themselves with such an obvious failure. And the whole time we’re doing it we assure everyone that he’s the threat and we’re the victims in this scenario.

When the cobblestones and rotten vegetables are raining down on whichever male archetype has fallen into disfavor, we can always count on a certain woman to put on the best show. She laughs the loudest. She kicks the stocks. She really grinds her vegetables into the man’s face and hair. She offers him a cup of water and then wantonly drinks it herself. Her favorite trick, and the crowd’s too, is to twirl and dangle the keys in the prisoner’s face and casually fiddle with the locks, even going so far as occasionally slide in the wrong key now and then and test it in the lock.

That’s why society loves the Dominatrix.

Wait… Isn’t she enjoying this just a bit too much? She’s not going to actually let him out is she? Why would she do that?

That’s why society hates the Dominatrix.

An Essay on The Societal Dominatrix Part 5. Fear of the Submissive Man (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Domme)

2011-11-25T00:39:00.002-05:00

Let me tell an anecdote:

I was at a party where a man, gay, was telling a story about his fun experiences with butt-plugs. Several ladies were affirming their positive experiences with anal sex and laughing along to the anecdote. Another man, straight, adds that he also thinks butt-plugs were a lot of fun. (P.S. Not me! I swear. :D If I had anything to contribute to a story like that, my wife would have happily bragged about it well before I would have.) The ladies in attendance got creeped out, and his girlfriend got a little embarrassed. For what it’s worth, the previous narrator rolled with it.

But what was that? You can’t call it femiphobia, anal play was just fine from the ladies and the original narrator. Homophobia is also out because of the narrator. It’s not simple misandry, unless gay men don’t count as men. That’s why I stretch for a term like hypandrephobia. Hypandrephobia? it’s my attempt, my work in progress, to create a word that means “fear of a submissive male.” Why would anyone be afraid of the submissive male?

Femiphobia, misogyny, racism, classism, and ableism do play heavily into the various prejudices against the submissive male. As examples, the fairly disgusting term ‘gimp’ is a synonym for a submissive male, and ‘bitch’ is often used for a man who winds up as the ‘girl’ of a relationship regardless of who his partner is. Sounds like a very Feminism-friendly narrative right? That maybe all this submissive flack is caught primarily because of misogyny and femiphobia. Feminism’s focus is rightfully on women, but certainly Feminism shouldn’t object to a man fighting the heteronormative narrative. Feminism must love things like harem anime, magical girlfriend anime, and manic pixie girlfriend stories where very ordinary boys and men gain the attention of women much more powerful, intelligent, and/or capable than they are through sheer dint of character rather than Patriarchy approved exceptionalism. Why, maybe Feminism even produces such media itself.

Oh, stop laughing at me. Rather than anything I suggested, Feminism has a tendency to tell men to step up and be strong with, that they have to earn female affection, with lines so similar to those of the Patriarchy you could practically hear them speaking in unison. In the meantime, magic boyfriend movies like Twilight certainly get chastised by Feminism, but mostly for reasons like ‘stalker’ behavior and fear that a woman can only actualize her own awesomeness via men. His hotness and power however are perfectly acceptable, even strongly recommended. Show’s like Buffy where the main character sleeps exclusively with superhuman males are much more acceptable fare for Femisnism (it doesn’t even matter if 2/3rds of her partners are, you know, murderers.) Ah well, it’s certainly no sin on the part of Feminism. I’ve enjoyed that exact narrative myself, and I think I’d also enjoy it quite a bit if the genders were reversed.

It may be homosexuality, and homophobia, that is most intrinsically bound up with the submissive male, and not just in the way one might think.

Many social structures have made allowances for men to sleep with men within the right narrative. ‘Proper’ homosexuality is occasionally to control submissive males. There were the Spartans, men so manly that they needed other men to be their women. The Spartans practiced a rigorous, infant-scrutinizing eugenics program, routinely terrorized their helot serf/slaves, and in addition to making their wives cross-dress , captured their brides and locked them away to be constantly watched by a bridesmaid. What did all these things have to do with each other? Maybe nothing. Or maybe there’s the fact that Spartan women, with all the free time away from Spartan men, were known to romp with helots.1 On long war campaigns it wasn’t unknown for Spartans to come home to entire generations of half-grown nothoi (children of slaves and citizens) living in their homes. (Note: The half-breed offspring of helot women and Spartan men were just A-Ok, generally living as Periokoi – non-citcizen free men)

There are the pretty, femme bishi-boi twinks of slash-fic and yaoi 2 fame. They’re safe for girls to cuddle and gush over before they are ushered off to have same sexual relations in some corner that is blessedly free of their penises touching vagina and all the paradigms that would threaten. Such fetishized forms of homosexuality are perfectly awesome ways for someone enjoy their personal kink. They may just be a way to do a little speculative voyeurism of an alternative lifestyle, or a way to get as many penises into a relationship as possible, or to just try and get in touch with your inner male. But there’s a hypandrephobic aspect to the practice as well. Gay porn , slash, and above all yaoi (with its seme/uke relations) consumed and produced by people who aren’t homosexual men is often a way for someone to see ‘the butch’ brutalize ‘the femme’ in a way that will leave misandrists relieved that no women are being hurt or exploited. They are also a way for women to sexualize submissive males by letting the woman slip into their imaginary man suit so they can dodge criticism when they dominate. The sub will touch neither breasts nor vagina, those symbols of succor and procreation, and the highest rewards the Patriarchy and Feminism propose to offer. The dom can fuck him safely knowing that the submissive male will not reproduce or exist as a submissive heterosexual.

Bisexual erasure 3 follows this trope as well. Many people advocate against the acceptance of homosexuality, stating that the gay men will ‘recruit’ since they can’t reproduce naturally. Hilariously, even if a man is 100% homosexual he is suffering from bisexual erasure, because his natural options to have children are being denied by the aforementioned homophobes. There is surrogate motherhood, adoption, partnerships with a man who already has children, being a parental figure for children that you are not necessarily the legal guardian of (like nieces, nephews, and children of close friends) and for the less than 100% homosexual, there’s always good ol’ fashioned hetero sex. That’s why bisexual males are even worse for the homophobic; they can submit to men and reproduce. Submissive males bring a new kind of gay to the table, the threat of an abhorrent male that may find a way to reproduce just like a bisexual can.

The submissive male has his place in society, is even very much needed in fact. Slavery, castes, castration, conscription, bullying, Rites of Manhood, religious condemnation of various types of sexuality, inheritance: all ways to have the submissive male, but control male sexuality and keep out the undesirables to the greatest extent possible. Optimally the submissive male is forced into his role; he has to clearly be losing to someone else. Societies create hierarchal protocols to constantly reaffirm the winners of their status. The sub is allowed pride, of a sort, as incentive to submit, but he’s not supposed to have pleasure in what he is (especially not more than the real winners). However the worst sins are those of self-actualization and avenue to reproduce without restraint.

You see, subs scare society quite a bit. I touched earlier in my discussion of monsters on how the Dom is made scarier and more detestable by adding notes of submission to him. Some monsters are submissive all the way. They tend to be small and creepy. A common theme is the avoidance of light, religion, and morality as if the creature is too weak to stand up to reality and power. Insanity of the monster and the monster’s victims is common. The submissive monster frequently taunts and weakens its victims over great periods as if they could not take down a safe, healthy one. Numbers. They frequently target children and/or are childlike themselves. They use deception. They twist heteronormativity. They lack ‘valid’ sexuality and family structure (this is important). They are frequently led by the unusually exceptional leader. They very often come in and attack in superior numbers, and in fact it is usually the concept of the sub being able to reproduce out of control that is the truest fear at play.

Some examples of monsters that threaten from a position of weakness:

These monsters all have much more specific meanings : Gremlins - Foreigners; Zombies - Consumerism, Communism; Secret Alien invasion - Communism, Foreigners ; Orcs - Souless Industrialism, Progress without heed to consequence. However, these monsters, like the submissive male, represent things that no one should really be afraid of because the public is dealing with them from a position of power, like foreigners, or only afflict the weak-willed, like the Industrialism and Consumerism. It’s a fear that something that can’t really hurt you could find a way to hurt you, if it can find a way to reproduce and grow out of control. It's the human desire to always cast oneself as the victim, even if you are in fact much more powerful and established than the impending threat.

The Dominatrix… She is the potential naïve townie who gives her mogwai a bath. She’s a potential Lady Sauron ready to raise an army of orcs. She’s Ishtar decreeing, “I will break in the doors of hell and smash the bolts; there will be confusion [i.e., mixing] of people, those above with those from the lower depths. I shall bring up the dead to eat food like the living; and the hosts of the dead will outnumber the living,” right before a zombie invasion. She’s Pandora about to open the box, Eve about to bite the apple, and above all she’s Lilith, refusing to let Adam be on top, and mothering all the demons of hell after she’s banned from the Garden.

An Essay on The Societal Dominatrix- Part 4. Loving and Hating The Dominatrix (or Are You a Good Witch, or a Bad Witch?)

2011-11-23T00:20:00.003-05:00

So the Dominatrix is here in our hearts and minds, readily available whenever we to put a sexy face on a naughty fetish. However, in those rare instances when she’s brought in do a little more than grace us with a sneer and whip crack, then suddenly there are rules for our leading lady. Just a few conditions like: perpetual virginity, the understanding that she’ll give up her career upon the initiation of a relationship with a male, only romantically acquiescing to peers or superiors, homosexuality, possessing secret longings to be the submissive or a ‘normal woman,’ a professed distaste for her job or the clients she services. If none of these conditions are met, then you can measure an improper Dominatrix’s media lifespan in seconds. She either suffers tragedy in the forms of: violence, death, or death of character potency by becoming a marginalized joke character - because it is only in comedy (the loudest form of tragedy) that such a character may exist.

Dominatrices that even get speaking parts are rare but let me bring up a few to try to illustrate what I mean:

Ghost Talker's Daydream – Saiki Misaki – A virgin who is malcontent with her job as a dominatrix that part-times as a necromancer. Oo! Subtle metaphor! She’s someone who has the power to exert control over the scariest, creepiest, most repugnant things imaginable without them harming her. She’s also a necromancer.

Soul Caliber titles – Ivy Valentine – A virgin who is malcontent with her status as a corrupted being. She labors to find a way to expunge herself of evil and refuses to have intercourse lest she procreate said evil.

Various Batman Titles – Cat Woman – Largely only interested in Batman, a man who is a more powerful person than she is, whom routinely defeated her when she was villainess and largely rebukes and chastises her during her anti-hero phases.

Various Batman Titles – Poison Ivy – (this one’s even a stretch to include, Ivy’s largely been more of a pure temptress) Virginal, her touch killing anyone she contacts.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – Lady Heather – A professional dominatrix who falls in love with one of the main characters, Grissom. Lady Heather is shown to be an anthropologist using her profession as research material. She does not engage in BDSM with her ‘real world’ lover. In one episode she kidnaps her daughter’s murderer to torture him to death, using her role to punish rather than reward, and Grissom switches her off with a safe word to defeat her. Heather advises that in a BDSM relationship the slave is really in charge. She then retires to become a sex therapist

Red Sonja’s Red Sonja- Virginal. The prize of her sexual favor is contingent on a man defeating her in fair combat, or she will lose all of her Goddess-granted power.

What’s the reasons for these conditions? It’s to normalize the Dominatrix. The princess in her tower, guarded by a dragon – it’s one of the most typical narratives we have. By defeating the challenge, and freeing the princess from her prison, we prove to the princess, her parents (or guardians, get it?) and ourselves that we deserve that attention. The Dominatrix is only allowed to exist as another princess. She has to either act as her own guardian, or her lifestyle has to act as her tower. Whether she’s defeated or freed, she’ll drop the whip, assure her hero that the princess is in this castle, and rush to them for some good ol’ fashion vanilla sex, her Dominatrix outfit no longer any more meaningful than a Halloween costume. She’s defeated, she’s trapped, or she’s a virgin. Those are the Dominatrix’s only approved options within society.

Not that it’s inappropriate for our leather clad subject, but why the love/hate relationship? Ostensibly the Patriarch hates her for her power; that doesn’t belong to women. Ostensibly the Feminist hates her for her lack of power, as it comes from masculine vindication. She’s just another lust-contingent sex object to fulfill some masculine role reversal fetish. But there’s something even more primal than that at play.

The hatred comes from the Yin to her Yang, that opposing force to complete her circle, shaping her and being shaped by her, containing some of her within itself just as she contains some of it within her. I’m talking about her counterpart, the submissive male. If he should force her by dint of a Patriarchal enforced fetish, or tempt her with money, power writ to paper, then that’s a little easier for the rest of the world to swallow. What’s impermissible is the concept that her whip is just a way to make him be weaker and cry louder, her bonds a way to make him even more helpless, and all before she enjoys him exactly as he is: a man who doesn’t deserve the reward of female sex/vagina/procreation. That’s right; we’re looking at another kind of slut shaming. However, she’s a particularly nasty permutation because she’s not just a free ride, like her oft maligned sister. She’s not only letting the wrong kind of men on board, she’s seeking them out to the exclusion of the good ones, and if he’s not submissive(bad) enough when she finds him, then she’s going to fix that issue herself.

The Dominatrix is trotting up and down the beach kicking down sandcastles of Masculinity and her victims are thanking her for it, and begging her to do it again. Feminism and the Patriarchy may loathe each other, but they’ve shook hands and agreed on the Success Model before they decided to fight tooth and claw over it. It’s not easy to convince people that Masculinity is such a privilege when people are paying, begging, and running for the opportunity to be free of it. It must be a pain trying to convince someone their corset is a sexist prison when a member of the opposite sex is begging to be strapped into one. It can’t be easy selling the concept of female hypergamy as an incentive to ‘man up’ with the Dominatrix talking about how she likes the shy ones because they’re more likely to cry.

The Dominatrix is a metaphor for a woman doing womanhood backwards, and she’s got the strap-on to prove it. She’s the woman who sleeps with men who are the wrong color. She sleeps with men who are poor. She sleeps with men who are too young for her. She sleeps with men who are too old for her. She sleeps with men who are pretty. She sleeps with men who are ugly. She sleeps with men who are dumb. She sleeps with men who are creepy. She sleeps with men who are short. She sleeps with men who are thin. She sleeps with men who are fat. She sleeps with bisexuals. She sleeps with men who are submissive. She sleeps with men who are girly. She sleeps with men who are weak. She does it of her own free will, without penance or repentance, and she loves every minute of it. She pity fucks without an ounce of pity, mercy fucks without a drop of mercy, and threatens to create more of herself and her partner whenever she does it.

That really, really seems to scare people, as I’ll try to demonstrate in my next post.

An Essay on The Societal Dominatrix- Part 3. The Dominator (or What About Teh Dominant Menz?)

2011-11-22T00:20:00.001-05:00

So, I discussed how the Dominatrix got her stiletto-heeled foot into the societal door. I also mentioned the condition being set for her entry, but before I continue in that vein, I’d like to discuss some of the company she can expect to keep.

Her masculine contemporary is the Dominator, though his name is generally shortened to the asexual ‘Dom,’ because we have a sexist tendency to assign the masculine as typical. Although he is prolific in the media, a valid archetype in his own right, he is much less of an icon than his sister the Dominatrix because his sexuality is considered little more than an extension of what is considered normal. Apparently, a Dom is just a man only more brutal, honest, or cruel, take your pick. For the Patriarchy, he’s an alpha; for Feminism, he’s a Patriarch.

His imagery is little more than a man affecting smugness, coldness, or outright hostility while wielding some instrument better suited for causing pain than damage, whips and crops are the most common because of their associative use against cattle (and chattel), but the variety is prolific. He almost invariably wears some sort of formal (often even opulent) dated, periodic clothing. Nothing too ancient mind you, the suggestion is supposed to be that this concept of man as de facto master with free reign to cruelty is behind us (but not too far behind us).

The Dominator’s motivation is generally for more of what he already has- control and power. Wealth, as an object representation of both, is also quite standard. Sex may occasionally be his motive, but that’s quite rare. Usually if there’s a woman involved the goal is more to overpower, own, or possibly even destroy her in some fashion. The assumption is that the Dominator gets all the sex he wants, so why should it drive him? Sex is the de facto result of his power; the Dominator will often be disinterested in sex or outright wallow in it to excess as a simple environmental fact of his prowess. He only bothers to focus on people who challenge him, women included.

Some examples:

Ah, but you’d point out that Darth Vader's lightsaber is plenty lethal? Really? He never deals a lethal blow in the original series. When he tries to wield the blade against his own morally just father-figure , Obi-Wan simply ascends. He only uses it to torment his own son as he attempts to get Luke to follow Vader’s morally unjust father-figure, Palpatine.

Captain Hook is one of the most Freudian and honest Dominator’s I’ve ever seen. Disney’s version even has the same voice as Wendy’s father. He is the Patriarchy, trying to torture and murder Wendy’s inner child/fantasy boyfriend/Marty Stu author avatar to get her to grow up before Time (the Crocodile) devours him.

Lex Luthor started life as just another mad-scientist throw away villain for the anti-intellectuals to enjoy being defeated . But put him in a snazzy suit and a kryptonite ring and suddenly he’s clawing himself to the top of the Man of Steel’s enemy roster.

‘What Jay? Are you going to tell me the cigarette is his weapon?’ Oh, I could make a case for that. But not with Don there. The cigarette is just a prop to stand in for his implement because it’s not easily held. If he were a more modern Dominator of his it’d probably be a cellphone in his hand. See, Don there is sitting in his instrument of torture. It’s his wealth, specifically his corporate wealth. As this picture points out, he is swimming in it (and possibly drowning in it as well.)

Do I have to explain this one?

But Jay, you may say, two of your examples are just wearing business suits. So? The suit was once a well worn and standard article of clothing for any man who could afford one. Now we rent our tuxes as prom and wedding costumes. NSWATM: Suits Part One - Suit as Costume I don’t even own a sports jacket anymore. Half the business owners I know (including the one I work for) show up to their meetings in shorts to show how casual and approachable they are. In other words, they’re out of uniform. NSWATM: Suits Part Two - Suit as Uniform Suits may be a bit of boring Dominator costume, but it doesn’t disqualify a Dominator.

It’s when we need a different sort of antagonist from the Dominator that the costume begins to change. Let’s take the Dominator and mix him with his same-sexed sexual-opposite the male submissive. This new creation will be collared, ‘gimp’ masked, enlarged, cuffed and/or chained, muted, leather clad, and/or display various piercings or other forms of ‘self-mutilation’. He is made creepy and monstrous; he’s no longer the ‘sane’ and ‘natural’ sadistic male, but the completely insane and unnatural sadomasochistic male. The sadomasochistic Monster-Dom is used in media to invoke the male sex drive, rape, homophobia, sadism, masochism, ableism, and racism; often many or all of those at the same time. It’s the horrible thought that something powerful would debase itself with willful submission (to pain, to lust, to poverty, to solitude) or that something powerless would be escalated to a position of power.

Unlike the natural Dominator, the Monster Dom is very, very often motivated by sex, although that’s very likely to be clouded with metaphors. He’s tainted the beauty of the natural Dominant and so physical force is often required.

Some examples:

From Left to Right: Dracula, Freddy Krueger, Pinhead,
Pyramid Head, Frankenstein's Monster, Jason Voorhees

I’ve tried to arrange them from left to right, to reflect their progression on the Dominance vs Submission, or Sadism vs Masochism spectrum. Dracula’s so close to the Dominator that it’s hard to include him here, and Jason Voorhees hits very many notes of the Submissive, with only a couple of exceptions. Pinhead and Pyramid are very much the perfect archetypes of the Sadomasochist, or Monster Dom. They dominate, but the mix of submission makes them horrifying, in contrast to the sexy natural Dominator. For the Patriarchy, the men above would likely be beta wannabes, perverted and excessive men who don’t understand why they should have been content with their position in life. Discipline is supposed to be for control, and only lightly enjoyed from time to time, but the Monster Dom doesn’t know how to deal with power and hurts others when he tries to use it, usually without even getting what he may have wanted from it. For Feminism they’d likely be personified threats, agents of the Patriarchy to frighten women into controlling their own sexuality. I rather agree with Feminism, but Feminism tends to dismiss the inherent slur the Patriarchy is making about men because, well, it’s about men. They’ll concede that the Patriarchy hurts men too, but the idea that unpalatable men should know their place in the hierarchy is a message Feminism isn’t above making itself.

They have submissive monsters too, and I’ll talk more about them later, which will help explain why some of the sadomasochists made the grade. But the dominant monsters show the sort of archetypes the Dominatrix can expect to rub elbows with when it comes to grabbing for a societal representation of sexual power. Of course her acceptance to the club is contingent on certain conditions…

An Essay on The Societal Dominatrix- Part 2. The Herstory of the Dominatrix (or Education is Awesome for More Reasons Than You Think.)

2011-11-21T01:51:00.002-05:00

The Evolution of the Dominatrix

This whole comparison of Feminism to a dominatrix seems to come from the idea that the male feminist, or any male seeking to court women for his product, is hungry for the approval of Feminism. Feminism is not easily impressed, but is easily offended and is quicker to hand out discipline than approval, and what approval Feminism does hand out is patronizing and condescending. It matters little because many of her most ardent supplicants enjoy the lambasting as much as the praise. Men who court Feminism are considered weak by Feminism , and men who don’t are considered outright antagonists; the supporters of Patriarchy if you will.

The Dominatrix has been around for centuries, and has cemented herself as an archetype and an icon, but as an icon that represents what? An evil woman? Something you thought would be wonderful, but hurts instead? Something tempting that wise people avoid? Something that hurts, but you sort of like it despite that pain (like spicy food)? Something that only freaks would be into? I’d say yes to all of the above as the need fits. The Dominatrix is alternatively presented as a mistake to be made (whether by herself or the persons who would partake of her charms) or an indulgence that hurts so good (this one’s usually limited to the audience, rather than the dom herself). In other words, a Dominatrix is, for the casual narrative, a mistake and/or vice.

The look of the Dominatrix has become fairly standardized. She’ll most likely be in black to mark her as dark and evil, high heels to make her tall and sexual, and her uniform’s material typically involves something unorthodox like leather or rubber. It’s an attempt to balance the intimidating and the tempting. They will vary this a bit, either feminizing her to make her more tempting, or blurring her gender with masculine garb because of our society’s obsession with associating power and masculinity. She has the power to hurt, but she must be sexually tempting, or she would have no power. She must have bait to bring people to her switch. People love to use the Dominatrix because she is, in her own way, a symbol for the societally acceptable form of the worst sort of woman- a woman who realizes her sexual prowess and will either painfully ward people away from it or use it to control others.

The Dominatrix standardized look is the first clue to her origin. Picture, if you will, her pointed bustier, corset, and stocking height high-heeled boots. From the Georgian Era to the 1960’s all one needs to turn an image of a western woman in her formal underwear into the Dominatrix is a black marker. I don’t choose those times lightly. The word ‘dominatrix’ itself was popularized in the 1960’s. 1 Before that, the terms varied a bit, female flagellant was common, but the title that really betrays the truth of things is ‘governess.’

Europe had been fighting for some manner of public schooling for centuries. The church mandated free education for the poor in the 12^th century which resulted in major universities seating scholars who could teach students too poor to pay university fees. In the 16^th century Lutherans began advocating compulsory education so that Protestants could read the Bible for themselves. Scotland passed several acts in the 17^th century decreeing that a school be established for every parish. Still, the whole movement was a mixed success . 2 Children were still too important as a labor source for society to commit their time to schooling. It wasn’t until the early years of the industrial revolution in the Georgian Era, and the resultant blow to an agrarian and skilled trade based society, that households began producing children with too much time on their hands (at least, in major metropolitan areas). Attendance in dame schools and charity schools became de rigueur for English families. Boys and girls from even the lowest social strata were able to experience en masse what had been restricted to nobles, the wealthy, families with children to spare, and children lucky enough to land jobs as household servants. Prior to this, for more years than I can count, boys had been yanked from their homes to grow up as laborers and apprentices in the monosexual work environment. Female relations were largely limited to whatever literal female relations they might have had. Now, boys and girls alike were able to experience educated, authoritative, female disciplinarians that they were not related to, and during their formative years no less. The Enlightenment and The Industrial Revolution came hand in hand with freeing people in body and soul, and what many of them got with their education was a taste of female authority that they hadn’t even known they were starving for and they became fast addicted to it.

Although there were accounts of men hiring prostitutes to cane them as far back as the 16^th century (you know, back when the Lutherans thought that the church should start getting out of education? Or is that education should start getting out of the church…). Femdom would explode into a full blown kink (or ‘lech’ as was the term at the time) without any signs of stopping after the spread of education. Luther wanted people turning to God, but many of them had gotten a hint of Goddess. Governesses were featured more and more in brothels, books, theater and art. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, would write ‘Venus in Furs.” 3 It is a book about a man who attempts to cultivate a woman up into a harsh goddess. He’s rather successful for a time, but his goddess falls for a dominant man, who then humiliates the protagonist. Having no taste for male-dom, his passion withers and he abandons his Venus to her new role as submissive. Although Leopold’s character is specifically attracted to femdom, his enjoyment contingent on his dominant being female, Leopold’s name would become the source of the word ‘masochism.’ Masochism is the condition in which sexual gratification depends on suffering physical pain or humiliation. It eliminates any and all references to male submission or female domination, to become the answer to Sadism. It is very much the start of a trend.

Athena was one of several Greek representations of Ishtar, or Astarte, the Babylonian goddess of many things, among which were war, knowledge, and sex. When their Patriarch (Zeus Pater, lit. God Father) swallows Thought (Metis) his mind is constantly tortured until he calls the Outcast God of Skilled Labor (Alternately Prometheus or Hephaestus) to crack his skull open to let the pain out; Athena, a beautiful dominatrix of education and victory, is born when the Outcast Skilled Laborer kills the Father who can’t handle Free Thought. The Greeks took one look and removed her most dangerous power, her sexuality, sentencing Athena to an existence of virginity. We weren’t smart enough to the same thing when the Dominatrix happened to us, and we’ve been trying to fix that since.

An Essay on The Societal Dominatrix- Part 1. The Introduction (or Quiet Riot Girl Said a Thing on the Internet)

2011-11-20T02:34:00.003-05:00

So, a couple of days ago Quiet Riot Girl went and rattled my brain-cage and set my thoughts a-squawkin' (You know, I’m beginning to suspect that she isn’t even really all that quiet? Maybe she just really liked “Cum On Feel the Noize.” I’ll have to investigate further.) She started it all when she compared feminism to Miss Whiplash, a hypothetical dominatrix that punishes the Average Joe who doesn’t tow the feminist line, and rewards the Average Joe that does tow the feminist line. Rewards him, that is, in ways that would practically count as punishments themselves for a saner man. Observe. (Edit: QRG pointed out a big gaffe on my part! Ms Whiplash is originally the creation of the very brilliant Mark Simpson.)

When you frame it right, it’s an apt enough metaphor and one I hear quite a lot. I’m rather used to dominatrices being compared to things unfavorably, and I’m used to feminism prompting people to find something unfavorable to compare it to. As for why those things happen, especially the former, well … I’m unsure. But after bothering my keyboard for days I have, much like a long-haired cat who licks himself too often, come up with something. Unfortunately for everyone involved, dominatrices are rarely far from my mind. Or the rest of me, when I can help it. (I mean, I married one and everything. ) So the end result was rather long. Before sallying forth, I’d like to set down a couple of disclaimers.

I don’t lay claim to the title ‘feminist.’ I never took a single class on the history or structure of feminism. I’ve never attended a political rally aiming towards feminist goals. My blog, my art, and my fiction frequently involve gender tweaking, and I don’t like most forms of sexism I run into; so I frequently find myself running alongside a self-identified feminists. However, I’m also pro-kink, pro-sex (y’know- perverted?), a huge nerd, into a lot of boyish pursuits (cartoons, baby!), rather meek, shy, and submissive, have some psychological issues, and some actual higher education in the field of psychology. I’m a big unapologetic advocate of Free Speech, and I’m very anti-censorship. Those aspects of my nature also frequently have me running alongside a lot of self-identified feminists! Aaaand alongside some self-identified anti-feminists. And non-feminists. And also running against a lot of self-identified feminists. Like, a lot of them. Often.

How frustrating, that people can be so hard to categorize. Like we’re complicated or somethin’.

I prefer to just limit my internal definition of feminism to, “a movement that continually advocates for the establishment and/or protection of human rights for women,” while acknowledging that a mindset with those goals can operate in many, many different ways and, like any movement, it can frequently be used to great effect, or misused to ill effect.

I present a lot of opinions in the following posts about how the society I live in views several different things in the culture I live in. I occasionally specify two opposing opinions. I could call one side the feminists and the other side the anti-feminists, but I’m going to use - The Patriarchy and Feminism (with a capital F). Why? Because the two opinions actually, to me, exist in our cultural/societal subconscious, but aren’t very likely to be held by any actual person. So I use the more respectful names each side has designated for the other to represent these non-persons (who both contain more than a little bit of straw.) I am not talking about you, your Feminism 101 professor, any major historical feminist figure, the president, your favorite AM radio conservative talk show host, your mom, or your dad. Honest.

The Patriarchy, Feminism, and The Dominatrix

Domination isn't just an excuse to be mean.

2011-11-18T00:05:00.000-05:00

Domination in a healthy, committed relationship is a difficult concept to delineate. If I tell Jay to do something, am I being dominant, or just pushy? If I don't want to do the laundry and I force him into doing it, am I reinforcing our consensual domme/sub relationship, or merely taking advantage of him to enable my laziness? When Jay and I get into an argument, rare as that seems to be these days, I do not automagically win just because I wear the strap-on in the relationship. If I treat him genuinely poorly and he objects to it, I can't just use the cop out of scolding him for being a bad sub and always get my way. Domination isn't a position of power, it's a position of trust. When I have him tied to the bed, he has to trust that I will make the right decisions about his well being, both emotional and physical. Submissives, by their very nature, are very easy to hurt. They've put trust into their dom/domme and that trust can be so easily lost or broken and it's a damn hard job getting it back.

But wait, I just said domination isn't a position of power. Isn't it? Oh, I get to order him around, step on him as it suits my fancy, force him down to the bed and tell him how to please me, but he has boundaries that I have to respect and I have to communicate with him. You can't just walk into the room with your sub and then yell at him when he doesn't know what it is that you want. If I tell Jay to feed me and he makes fettuccine alfredo when I was in the mood for baked chicken, he hasn't disobeyed me. He may have displeased me, but he hasn't disobeyed and if I don't communicate my wishes to him, I can't hold him accountable for not fulfilling them. Now, obviously, there are lots of little things that I don't have to say because he and I have been together for almost 10 years now. He knows I don't like for my cheese to touch my mayo on sandwiches, but he still usually asks how I want my sandwich done because I am particular about it. He knows I don't like for my breasts to be sucked hard anywhere except the nipples, so if he does that wrong than I am free to discipline him for the slip-up. But by and large, if I don't communicate to him what I want, than I have failed to dominate him, he hasn't failed to submit to me.

There are things I don't and won't do as a domme. I don't physically dominate him in front of other people whatsoever because it embarrasses him. I'm not the psychological/humiliation type of domme and he is definitely not that type of sub. Because of his history of abuse and bullying at the hands of his peers, it's not a fun sexual game to him, it's just more meanness. I avoid being mean to Jay because he is, far and above being my sub, my partner. My mate. My other half. He's not my pet or my slave as the primary delineation of our relationship, that is simply our private play and enjoyment. He is a human being first and my plaything a distant third to fourth. When I cross a line, he tells me I've done so. That isn't him acting out of hand as a sub, and me allowing him that freedom isn't me being a lax domme. It's human dignity. When he calls me on something, I back off and jot that down in my little mental list of boundaries.

Whenever I talk to people about having boundaries in a relationship, they go one of two ways. Either a relationship should be so perfect that you should never have to put anything into the “off limits” category, or they feel that openly talking about what you like and what you don't like takes all the mystery and romance out of a relationship. I can see both perspectives, and in my crazier days I have ascribed to both schools. But it's not about writing down a list or rules or just obeying whatever the other person says. Communication is a beautiful and very necessary thing in all relationships. When you put on your turning signal while you are driving, you are communicating to the people around you your intentions, and this communication makes everyone a little bit safer and a little more aware and understanding of each other. Without that communication, when you swerve into my lane I don't know if you've fallen asleep and are drifting, suddenly spilled coffee in your lap and are apt to do some more crazy shit while dealing with it, or if you were just changing lanes. Communication establishes expectations and understanding, both of which – when reasonable and sane – help to facilitate a good relationship and a comfortable foundation from which to build on.

First Two Part Post! Part: The Second.

2011-11-15T02:32:00.001-05:00

In my last post, I metioned that some women seem to make partner decisions that some people find confusing. I think a possible answer occurred to me when I told my wife a story. One time at summer camp (not band camp), when I was about twelve or thirteen years old, we were having some very wicked weather and we went to our cabins well before bunk time. Now, the boys’ cabin and the girls’ cabin were technically one building, each attached to either side of a large common area that contained a rec room, activity center, and the mess hall. Well, all activities had been suspended, again because of the weather. We had a back-up generator, but it only kept the kitchen, nurse’s cabin, some outdoor lampposts, and the manager’s office running. So that meant the lights were only working intermittently. Most of the boys were in the boys’ cabin happily playing various forms of unsupervised grab-ass in the chaotic lightning. As a lifelong nerd I knew this was a natural environment for some serious bullying and tagged along behind a friend of mine to the common area.

Most of the girls were clustered up there in the rec room. The manager had run an extension cord from her office to the rec room’s television and the girls were trying to watch <i>Dirty Dancing<i> as best as they could in all the ruckus. I went ahead and sat down in the back, I couldn’t hear much of anything because of the wind, thunder, and giddy bouts, but it didn’t matter to me. As the son of a single mother, I could’ve recited that movie from memory. I wasn’t the only boy in the room, there were two others happily snarking on the movie. This far back in the rec room, most of the girls were talking more than watching themselves, but it didn’t stop them from hissing at the boys to hush. Even I contributed with a line of conversation here and there, and man do I sure wish I remember what was being said.

At one point the lights went out again. I felt a girl move to the seat next to me. I thought she must be pretty terrified so I remember turning to ask if she was okay. I think I touched her arm. I remember getting a pretty casual “uh-huh,” and then getting pounced for one of the more intense kisses of my life up to that point. I adopted the usual freeze, blush, and submit tactic that was my natural response to surprise kisses. I’d never been kissed by a complete stranger before, much less one I couldn’t see. I was very, very surprised at myself when I started kissing her back. You could say I had the time of my life, and I never felt that way before. And I swear it’s the truth. After a couple minutes of that, she bit me rather firmly on the neck and I gasped pretty loud. I didn’t know about biting before that. I don’t know if that spooked her or satisfied her, but I got a quick ‘Bye!’ puffed into my ear, a goodbye kiss on the corner of my mouth, and then she disappeared into the darkness. When the lights came back on you never saw a boy scour the audience as hard I did, but my stranger in the night was either playing innocent or had left the rec room entirely.

I believe my position is listed in the Karma Sutra as
"Timid Rabbit Hears a Twig Snap." Works every time.

Wasn’t that an interesting story? I asked my wife after the telling why the heck a girl would do that. I’d thought she was scared at first, but that’s not how it played out. My primary thought for a very long time had been ‘She was dared.’ I didn’t offer that theory to my wife though. She gets rather pissy when I suggest things like ‘a girl would only kiss your husband on a dare.’ And if it was a dare, that girl sure took her dares seriously. But why kiss me in the dark and then disappear? Does Patrick Swayze have that much falloff charisma? Did I have a painfully shy stalker? Was it a nerd-targeting lady vampire?

Quisalas thought about it for a half a second then casually offered, “It’s the anonymity. He can’t reject her. She can’t be teased for it by the other girls. And she can’t get caught.“

In other words, it is safer. Caution is the marked ability of an intelligent being to learn from their experiences and observances and then make informed decisions based on what outcomes could probably result. People can be very smart. Women can be very smart. People, thus women, are also very complicated; I don’t doubt that somewhere out there is a woman who just loves big ol’ jerks for the sick addictive thrill of it. If I can get sick thrills from a little responsible, occasionally irresponsible, boundary pushing, why can’t a woman? And like everything that exists, such an impulse could exist to an intensity that classifies it as a self-destructive vice. I do think that it’s unlikely that there are so many self-detrimental ladies running around that it could warrant such a large, or possibly just vocal, percentage of all mankind complaining about how women only sleep with jerks.

No, if we look at the way people like to play it safe, things make a lot more sense to me. Different people feel braver in different ways. A woman might just like herself a big alpha jerk because she’s not afraid to hurt his feelings. (I’ve heard these exact words before.) She can treat the relationship like it’s only good for one thing and no one’s feelings, well, no one whose feelings matter, will get hurt. It’s much safer than sleeping with a friend. If one really insists on comparing human activities to how our lizard brains have developed via evolution, and we go back to the proto-human straight out of the ooze who wanted babies that wouldn’t get eaten by carnivores, maybe modern woman does have some part of her that sleeps with a pushy jerk because if the tryst results in babies at least they’ll probably be big and healthy. It’s safer than sleeping with someone who seems like they’d make weak offspring. If we move a little closer to ourselves, once proto-human has developed a proto-society, and bigger pushier proto-males helped keep dangers away, then maybe modern women do see big pushy jerks as someone who can protect them from other big pushy jerks. It’s safer than sleeping with someone who doesn’t stand up for anyone, and may not stand up for her. Getting away from the pitfalls of evo-psyche; say what you want about a big loud jerk, but if that’s how he’s presenting himself he’s probably honest about who he is. It’s safer than sleeping with some guy one suspects is only being nice to get into one’s pants.

People like to feel safe. Maybe all my aggressive little suitors felt I was safe to approach because: I didn’t seem like I would say no. If I did say no, then I would do it gently. I wouldn’t think less of them for their aggression. They could be the one controlling the flow of the relationship with me. If they went a little too far, I couldn’t (wouldn’t) hurt them for it. Maybe I looked like I’d enjoy the sort of fun they had in mind.

I do know, that from my own perspective, if some woman heard me complaining about my love life and then beat me over the head about how it’s because I only date jerks, well I don’t think I’d feel safe sharing much of anything with her, least of all physical intimacy. Unless she had a great rack.

Hello? My eyes are over here!

First Two Part Post! Part: The First.

2011-11-13T21:26:00.000-05:00

There’s a very popular topic running through a lot of internet conversations I’ve read. To make a long story short, it revolves around some men talking about how they can’t catch a romantic break because women prefer alpha type men. The narrative then continues to alpha types being ‘winners’ are very competitive and have ‘jerk’ qualities that help them achieve these social victories. The men in question are dominant and assertive, in other words. With the word jerk attached I would think that such men are dominant and assertive to excess, which would actually make them social losers, but whatever. That meme is then tied to the meme that women are attracted to ‘bad boys.’ It’s pretty easy logic to follow; bad boys are jerks, alphas are jerks, so it’s all part of the same women love jerks spiel. So there are men who practice Pick-up artistry, a.k.a. ‘the Game,’ and there are men who slip onto various tracts of the internet to complain about women not liking nice men and being addicted to the sick thrill of dating bad boys, sometimes even going onto sites that are not about that topic to derail conversations with it.

Well, I have sympathy with that trend of complaints, I guess. Social narratives are hard to shake and I very clearly remember being very young and thinking that, since I was shy and meek, I was never going to have any success with girls. Unlike the ‘girls love jerks’ train of thought, I wasn’t trying to assign any negative motives to the girls, tho.’ See, I’d compared my own internal fantasies to what essentially every form of media ever was telling me I was supposed to want from relationships as a man, and they just weren’t matching up too well. My fantasies were better aligned to the feminine.

Short term male indulgent fantasies seem to consist of strangers using porn language to be openly receptive to you for sexual encounters that add up to less than a one night stand. It’s an assumption that I automatically want sex with every nice looking girl I meet, and I’m just waiting for permission. It’s nice that she’s into me, I guess, but with absolutely no emotional foreplay it’s a very boring scenario outside of a visual medium like actual porn where it’s all a pretense to see nudity anyway.

Long term male indulgent fantasies are worse; they tend to involve rescuing someone you barely know from some sort of terrible situation and getting rewarded with sex. The classic save the princess scenario’s not the worst example. I mean, sex you just killed an evil wizard for is going to be some sex you appreciate, right? And post-murder boot knockin’s the best kind, or so I’ve heard. What’s really rough are those times when the monster you have to beat is the prospective fantasy woman’s own attitude. Whether she’s some super popular girl who can’t see you as a prospective romantic partner, some kind of otaku-punching tsundere, or it's just mutual hate at first sight until you kiss during the middle of an argument, I loathe these first opinion overcoming-attitude adjusting scenarios. It’s like you’re saving her from her own self-delusion about how awesome you aren’t. Like I want to sleep with self-deluded women I have to convince that I don’t suck.

Heck, the only popular male fantasy scenario I related to much was the prospect of being dragged off by fantasy amazons for tons of ‘Snoo-snoo,’ but even now I chuckle because as I kid I would think, “Gee, after the first one or two I’m going to be pretty useless and that’s just unfair for Amazon #3 and up.” Seriously, where’s their much-coveted skinny little under-aged nerd sex? Being an unrealistic figment of a puerile adolescent imagination is no cause for unfairness.

No one said having a thing for assertive, self-determined women and an overactive imagine was easy.
Oh, the one on the far left is from the local REM Sleep Dreamazon chapter. You really don't want to mess with those ladies unless you want the cause of your next nocturnal emission turning into Santa Clause halfway through the act.

So, I found myself wondering about myself. I wondered if, rather than actualizing desires, I was creating impossible scenarios that would get past my shyness where I couldn’t. I wondered if I was gay, but somehow so deep in the closet that I was substituting women for men in my own fantasies. I wondered if I might be transsexual, but rather than imagine myself as female I was self-defensively assigning a female image to the more powerful partner to assuage an inner concept of being female as superior. I wondered if I was transgendered, even though that meant assigning gender to submission and dominance which I found to be rather sad. I came up with dozens of half-baked Freudian schemes to try and figure out why I wasn’t matching the bigger societal narrative.

And I was actively ignoring my own personal experiences the whole time.

I wasn’t the initiator of my first kiss. I wasn’t the one who made the suggestion to play doctor when I was young. The first love letter in my life was from someone else to me. I wasn’t the solicitor of the first date I went on or the first dance I went to. The girl who gave me several of my landmark sexual ‘firsts’ was older, larger and taller than me and very much the aggressor. I didn’t even solicit my first cybering. The first time I finally had sex it was very much a mutual decision, but it was after months of someone persistently earning my very reluctantly shared physical trust. (I was the one who proposed to Quisalas, tho’. Conventional masculinity score!) All this female aggression that I was the tickled recipient of and I couldn’t see the forest because several other people were telling me there were no such things as trees. That’s just how tenacious a social meme can be.

Say, didn’t my first paragraph have something to do with pick-up artists? Well, if women want ‘alphas’ and/or bad boys then what’s the explanation for me? Am I a jerk? I’m damn sure not an alpha. Did I just meet an odd number of near-sighted proto-lesbians? Am I a stealth super hotty? Do I exude some kind of pheromone that only dominatrices can smell? Maybe there’s a fairly common fidgety blushing ginger fetish I got to reap the benefit of.

(Stay tuned for the rest!)

I Can't Shut-Up About Cartoons!

2011-11-08T21:26:00.003-05:00

So I spent my last post harping about what Disney does wrong with its representations of men. I’m not trying to claim title to the most oppressed sex. Just because the female role is a bit more indulgent with the idea that society is hard on women and gets in the way of them being awesome, while privileging men to be wrong about everything, doesn’t mean that our roles don’t indulge us in other ways. We tend to get all the good action sequences; action oriented women mostly get to beat up mooks, fight other girls, set traps, or trick baddies into defeating themselves. Essentially, because the world isn’t afraid to put men back on their heels and knock ‘em around a little bit, men tend to get all the fun and drama of a desperate situation. Disney fights aren’t hard core by any stretch of the imagination, but even in a militant movie like Mulan where the character has many opportunities to fight, Mulan barely gets her hands dirty. Her major achievements largely consist of her action with the avalanche and a trick with a fan, and there’s only the occasional sense of urgency. The final fight with Shan Yu is okay, but it’s so slow and staged.

Props for Disney when they’re due, tho’. I love this scuffle between Tala and Sabor which, if Sabor’s sex is the same as it was in the book, is technically between two females.

Cat Fight!

Tangled and The Princess and the Frog do alright in their action sequences and at letting the ladies participate in them.
I know! To prove that I can think positive, and not just criticize, I’d like to list my favorite animated movies:

1. The Secret of NIMH
2. The Nightmare Before Christmas
3. Heavy Metal
4. The Last Unicorn
5. Princess Mononoke
6. Wizards
7. Spirited Away
8. The Hobbit
9. Robin Hood
10. Ninja Scrolls
11. Ponyo by the Sea
12. My Neighbor Totoro
13. All Dogs Go to Heaven
14. The Lion King
15. How to Train Your Dragon
16. Pom Poko
17. Aladdin
18. The Little Mermaid
19. Tarzan
20. Kiki’s Delivery Service

So three of my top five have female protagonists (although Tarna is only the protagonist of one Heavy Metal short) and Mononoke is the titular character in Mononoke. Although there are only five more after that, that does make a total of somewhere between 7-9 out of twenty, depending on how you count things. I’m not advocating for less focus on women in animation, but I’d like less restrictions for everybody.
Disney got exactly one of my top ten, and all of five out of my top twenty with only on (Little Mermaid) from their princess line. Comparitively, Studio Ghibli scores a 6 out of 20 and Ninja Scrolls pushes eastern animated movies up to a seven out of twenty. So Disney is good, but they don’t exactly resonate with me as the kings of animation. It’s a pity that they’re nearly the only game in town, with Dreamworks as their only competition, Pixar as an entity that they, thankfully, don’t seem to have direct control over, and foreign animation (and mostly just Studio Ghibli.)

No Seriously, What about the Disney Men!

2011-11-05T22:53:00.005-04:00

There is a video critiquing Masculinity as presented by Disney. Go see! The linked post is at the awesome No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz and by the awesome Ozymandias.

This critique is… really, really flawed. Ozymandias picked up on the biggest one, the lack of context that the more negative opinions of women are presented in. They are bad opinions to have. It also cherry picks scenes in a bad way. For instance, Jafar and Aladdin fight, but Jafar wins. With the oppressive Disney reasoning that is supposed to be presented here, Jafar is the better man. Instead, Aladdin triumphs in the long run, and from a position of vulnerability, because he presents Jafar an opportunity to hang himself by his own greed. Strength did not equal superiority.

And no one should ever listen to anything Gaston has to say, no matter how good he looks saying it.

Quisalas made this and really wanted to put an actual picture of me up with it.
I won this battle, but she knows my blogger password.
And why does making Gaston look like me make him look MORE pervy?!

It also omits that Disney has largely gotten worse and worse in its presentations of strength and male validity, not better. Take Disney’s earlier films with male starring leads –Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi. The latter characters are animals (the first I’ll discuss next) and they are babies, but they are male and they are vulnerable. Bambi is the only who wins a physical man to man (well, buck to buck) contest (in a sexist but uh, you know, accurate portrayal of deer courtship). Even in his fight it should be noted that, the way the fight is choreographed, Bambi wins less because of sheer physical prowess but because he does not back down before his larger and more intimidating opponent, Ronno. Once Bambi begins winning a couple of ‘throws,’ Ronno tumbles down a hill and takes that as a sign to leave. Bambi wins because he is unwilling to give up. Every other victory is taken as Bambi continually flees, not fights, Man and fire. I think it should also be noted that Faline, Bambi’s love interest, is more socially competent and sexually aggressive than Bambi is; she is also more physically competent, but lacks the size, antlers, or natural inclination to fight Ronno when he begins to herd her, so she is ‘nerfed’ at that point as the natural scenario takes over between bucks and does.

The first male human(oid) character is Pinocchio and he tells the first version of what will become the most common, ever more strangling role that men get to play for Disney. He is born, given life but not personhood. He has to earn that through his endeavors. He is supposed to listen to his father and his conscience, but tricksters and lies (played by Fox and Cat) keep leading him astray. They show him the ‘easy’ road to success; it’s the glamorous world of “the theater,” but it’s only a gilded cage where you dance like a puppet while others reap most of the material efforts, and in the end you produce nothing but your own corpse. He is then loaded up with other boys to see Pleasure Island, the trap of destructive lackadaisical adolescence. The boys are taken out to make asses of themselves, and at the end of their indulgent, school-skipping childhoods their only asset is their bodies; they are just laboring pack animals for others to reap the benefits of. In the end, Pinocchio endeavors for his father rather than himself, demonstrates that he is willing to die to put the other before the self, and is given ‘real boyhood’ having proven himself brave, truthful and unselfish. Societally dictated masculine morality is the only male path to personhood, and like the gates of heavens or the realm of the Diva’s you have to constantly work for it while any failure on your part will rapidly, and at times irrevocably, strip it from you.

And then Disney does it again and again. Only where (Disney’s) Pinocchio was at least a blank slate working for his family in order to achieve his validity, most males are generally cast as reckless, selfish and a bit dangerous until the greater societal lesson gets them to let go of their ugliness. Mowgli wants to stay in the jungle, regardless of what Shere Khan could do to him and anyone who tries to protect him; Arthur has to let go of his inferiority complex and obsession with physical strength to make sure he becomes wise and confident enough to be king; the Beast is a selfish angerholic; Aladdin is an unconfident thief who relies on lies to validate himself; Hercules wants the title of Hero without understanding what makes someone heroic (self-sacrifice); Simba is selfish and vainglorious; Kuzco is an ass; Stitch is an ‘evil’ world conquering monster, Naveen is a broke man-child intent on marrying a wealthy woman, Flynn is basically Aladdin again, another self-denying thieving liar; Woody’s petty and jealous; and so on. For the most part, all of the admirable prowess is either physical or talents that are the result of training.

Not all of the men are bad, but when they are not bad they tend to be naïve and lost; Todd thinks foxes can be friends with hounds; Oliver doesn’t know how the real world works; Tarzan is uncomfortable with his differences and doesn’t know how to prove himself. Some men are competent and kind but they are on the wrong side; Phoebus is helping the church oppress the gypsies; John Smith is helping the English to conquer Native Americans; Milo James Thatch is helping a man find Atlantis to rob it; Buzz Lightyear isn’t really a space hero; Li Shang is a willing tool of the sexist Chinese government; etc.

Women’s roles are interesting because they improved without much changing. It used to be that if a woman was kind and remained morally pure, she would persevere through her oppression and receive her reward. Now with women it tends to be if the world would just give her an opportunity, then she’ll prove how awesome she is. Either way, women need relief, help and opportunity to fix the incorrect world. Men need guidance, correction, and discipline to be fixed for the world.

Happy Halloween, Everybody!

2011-10-31T22:10:00.000-04:00

Ah, Halloween. The holiday where you're the most likely to come home with a different number of kids than you left with.

I don't have much to say tonight, but I would have been remiss to let the holiday pass without comment. My children went out as a Dark Wizard, Mario, and a Witch Kitty by order of age. Mario was the biggest hit. (It was such a generic store bought costume; my middle son was quite happy to let everyone know you could find one at Walgreens.) The Dark Wizard nearly got himself run over running ahead of everyone. Witch Kitty did just fine despite the fact that she'd had a fever yesterday that only came down this noon. We took it nice and easy so she wouldn't feel any worse, but she was the one who wanted to stay out well after Mario pooped out on us. Plumbers: no stamina.

I Swear I'm Just Trying to Reconcile the Differences Between Her Show Costume and Toy Costume!

2011-10-28T01:38:00.004-04:00

I don’t like using real names on the internet without that person’s permission, so for the purposes of this story my friend’s name is going to be Kareem, because the article of clothing I remember him wearing the most often was his Kareem Abdul-Jabar Laker’s jersey, and because Kareem is as uniquely Muslim as my childhood friend’s real name.

We were having a discussion one day about He-man and She-Ra’s swords, the sword of Power and the sword of Protection respectively.

“She-Ra’s sword changes into other objects. He-man’s doesn’t really do anything. He doesn’t even really hit people with it,” I stated, and as I spoke, my steepled fingers fluttering against each other frantically.

“He-man’s sword doesn’t have that girly gem in it,” Kareem countered.

Since She-Ra's sword having a gem was going to be my next point in her sword's favor, I fished for something else, “The Sword of Protection gives Swiftwind wings; that’s like a whole new power.”

“You know her unicorn’s name?” Kareem’s eyebrows shot upwards.

“Uh. No.”

Kareem shook his head. “He-man’s sword makes his tiger like, awesomer at what it is. Battlecat gets bigger and grows armor. It doesn’t add on, it intensifies. Plus, He-man’s sword gives him a tan.”

I pointedly looked Kareem over. “Do you need to be darker?” Kareem wasn’t the darkest black kid I’d met, but he was already darker than He-Man.

He laughed about that. “No, but you could use a little sun. Think about this. If I had He-Man’s sword I could shoot my dad’s Charger with it and it would go all Knight Rider and get armor and weapons and get eyes and fangs on the grill. It’d go from Charger to BattleCharger.”

I didn’t exactly know what a ‘Charger’ was, but that did sound kind of cool.

“What would you do with He-man’s sword, Jay?”

At last! I can use flesh-colored band-aids!

“Uh, Jay?”

I realized that I’d been standing there wriggling my fingers and staring off into space again.

“Did you decide what you would shoot?”

“I, uh, would also shoot your dad’s Charger.”

A Quiet Riot Girl Inspired Rant

2011-10-27T18:50:00.007-04:00

So this post by Quiet Riot Girl inspired a nice long rant. The real centerpiece of everything is the embedded youtube video of the Trailer for 'Miss Representation.' Give it a look see.

‘There is no appreciation of women intellectuals- it is all about the body not about the brain’

Not to get speciously philosophical, but the existence of body as female appears much less subjective than the existence of brain as female in the current societal dialogue. That might help parse out the media’s current tendencies.

This video seems to conveniently forget all that fuss about Obama being one of our only sexy presidents with all those shots of him strolling around topless at the beach and poolside. And Clinton?! Yeah, nobody made any jokes about his masculine foibles. Then there’s Bush Jr’s Man-childishness or his being a cheerleader. There’s Bush Sr’s looking and sounding too wimpy (remember that America?) There was Reagan being an actor who worked with a chimp and made bad cowboy movies, or whether or not he dyed his hair. There was JFK’s hypothetical relationship with Marilyn Monroe. There was Nixon looking sleazy and not being as handsome as JFK. Remember how Nixon won the radio debates but JFK won the television debates, even though they were the same debates?

But y’know, this doesn’t even have to be about the men or teh menz , even. The video presents several counter-examples of empowering women (like Oprah and Gina Davis’ character in… uh, was it West Wing?) So there are some, if perhaps not enough, intellectual women in the media and those ‘mind’ women are all characters; most of the um, ‘body’ bits that I recognize (I never forget a … I’m gonna say face) belong to human props. They’re walk-on bit actors who usually don’t get names and disappear from relevance in minutes. That seems to suggest a dearth of female characters who have long-term, impactful, complex interactions with a storyline based entirely on their bodies. Do we just need more female mind props? More white jacket CSI lab techs playing with vials? I think the video is trying to say that we won’t listen to women unless they’re pretty, but to make that point you’d have to have a great big subjective beauty contest between every male and female intellectual, or try to prove that there are a demographically insignificant number of unattractive women being validated as important, forcing the people talking to hang the designation ’unattractive’ on people. If I said, ‘I think Jan Brewer looks like a Jack-O-Lantern left outside since 2007, but they still elected her governor of Arizona’, I’d be a huge ass. You shouldn’t bring up people's looks regarding the validity of their opinions, which makes it insanely hard to argue the evidence that people’s validity aren’t contingent on looks. (And I won't argue that much anyway, because we do suffer from a beauty standard.)

*WARNING* More philosophical wanking:

If you want non-fictional ‘media intellectuals’ (I’m not having an easy time with that concept) then sex would be trivial because, as I already noted, mind is supposedly independent of sex in the current social dialogue; but if you note sex and see # male > # female and then pursue female intellectuals for balance, making sex not trivial, mind becomes dependent on sex. There then comes the trend of the intellectual obsessed with her avenue to intellectuality, her own sex (e.g., women’s study majors, breast cancer advocates, third world women’s rights speakers, feminist theory sociologists), and you only pursue female intellectuals for sex related issues because of their association with those issues. This still leaves intellectuals: # male > # female because the male sex is still equated to everything generic. You’d apparently have to abolish the concept of a sex contingent mind which this video pointedly does the opposite of. My inadequately intellectual mind boggles.

I’m not going to just pile on this video because it wants to help girls. Wanting to help girls is good, but I don’t think the media’s flaws are being presented honestly. See, I feel that there’s a very, very strong anti-intellectual streak in American (at least Stateside American) media. Most of the fictional media intellectuals I see are male, but they seem to also be tolerated because of their mental gifts rather than embraced, cursed just as much as they are celebrated (e.g., House, Monk, Psyche, ‘nerds,’, everyone Robert Downey Jr plays). I think one of the reasons women aren’t getting a seat at that table is because a female barely tolerable genius would either A. Not be intolerable enough because she’s a girl and her little foibles just make her cute or B. Be so intolerable that no one liked her at all because women who don’t play nice are ‘bitchy.’ So there *is* a sexist Catch 22 there.

Look, a generic ‘too much glitz, not enough substance’ message is hard to dispute regarding any aspect of the media, so I can’t say this video is wrong. I agree that only 17% of congress being female is not a good statistic. I wish it wasn’t paired with mind-wank, theoretical bullshit like ‘500 years before parity’ though. How do you get that? 17 % over 236 years of US existence would be roughly 0.07% a year so 500 years later we get just over 51%. But the first US congresswoman, Jeannette Rankin, was elected in 1917, creating a starting point of 0.2% in 1917 to today’s 16.6% (72 of 435 seats) in 2011. That means the increase is roughly at rate of 0.173 percentage points a year. That’s parity in roughly 200 years. That’s still abysmal, but a bit more honest. It’s still not as honest as can be. Observe, 0.2% to 16.6% in 95 years has a compound interest rate of roughly + 4.9% congresswomen a year. That’s parity in roughly 24 more years. 500 years is a disingenuous scare statistic. I’m not happy that my children could be in their 30’s, my age, before they are likely to see a gender-blind congress but hey, if things continue at the same rate it will only be 10 more years before congress reverses the current numbers and then 4 more years before we’re bowing to our Gynocratic Overladies. Who says numbers don’t lie? Seriously folks, I can’t tell if a video that laments women not being presented as smart and capable while using deceptive math is ironic or just incredibly appropriate. It’s hard to give credence to the video either way. It feels like another ‘Sex is bad!’ message which just isn’t going to resonate with me.

Finally, there is a very brief glimmer of an instance of a leather clad woman spanking a maid in this video. I recognize the movie as what I believe to be one of the ‘American Pie’s’, but I do know the smiling man in the background is gay and wearing assless leather pants. I thought that might tickle QRG a bit.

2011-10-24T21:42:00.001-04:00

But the only way to figure sex identity (which sex you identify as) is by knowing yourself. Knowing yourself takes genuine introspection and effort. It is not obvious to everyone, some will argue against it, and some people will think they know better than you (so proof is out too). ~ Sara

The above quote really stood out for me from Sara’s comments. Her comment has evoked so much thought that I believe it warrants its own post.

I think there’s a lot of debate going on regarding nature vs. nurture. It may seem like a recent development, and specifically relevant to hot topics like homosexuality, but the argument has been running for quite some time. Is humanity born with sin, or do we earn it? Are we born good into a world that constantly tries to corrupt us? Are we born selfishly bestial to a world that socializes us and gentles us? Religion and Philosophy have been tackling the problem long before Biology, Psychology, and Sociology jumped into the fray.

Nature vs. Nurture? Personally, I’ve always thought it was a stupid question; what makes orange, red or yellow? Some people will read that and say ‘Ah, he means that it takes both.’ Well, yes, but the real answer is that orange is and is not red + yellow. I can give you proverbial red oil and yellow water and you’ll not get an orange mixture. Orange will not matter to someone who does not have color vision. And I can make a mixture that’s 5% yellow, 95% red and then two different people could well argue about whether or not the color I produced is orange or still red (or deserves a new title like red-orange, being both red and orange, and neither red nor orange).

So, to summarize, Orange requires:

Red and Yellow.
The ability to properly mix Red and Yellow
An observer for whom Orange is relevant and recognizable.
Unanimous agreement that what has resulted is, in fact, Orange

I would hazard that these conditions are sometimes difficult to meet, even for something as simple as a color. I would also hazard that they are objectively impossible to meet one hundred percent of the time. With concepts as complicated and subjective as Nature, Nurture and Sexuality or Gender, I feel that it may only be totally possible, all of the time, in one place: the mind of the person whose gender or sexuality it may be. (And I speak from personal experience when I say it isn’t easy to know yourself.)

This isn’t some ‘whatever makes you the most happy,’ platitude. My ginger skin certainly doesn’t make me happy when the sun is flaying it right off of me. I can’t ignore what’s true for me. Just like I have social apprehension, if I failed to admit that about myself it would hurt me. Pretending they don’t have homicidal or depressive thoughts is what allows serious mental illnesses to encroach further and further on people until they hurt themselves and others. I just couldn’t agree with Sara’s statement more, and I’ve given it a lot of hard thought.

Fun with Typos

2011-10-23T22:57:00.001-04:00

Sorry folks, this joke's been stuck in my head for nearly 5 days.

So there. I've finally managed to get that out of my system.

FYI. Lillith didn't fare much better.

Girl Toys for Boys or Toy Girls for Boys?

2011-10-20T23:28:00.001-04:00

You know what? Let’s drop the “for boys” part and focus on something that’s bothered me since I can remember. I’m a male nerd. I love, and have always loved, things that society has strongly hinted that I should outgrow, like cartoons and toys. Society has odd rules like that: Love toys and cartoons now, but not later. There’s a much more contradictory rule that’s always elicited a bitter laugh from me: Be “interested” in girls, but don’t be, y’know, interested in girls.

Let’s go back a ways to the mid 80’s. Picture, if you will, the interior of a department store. This particular department store was a little unique. It was, you see, what we Air Force families refered to as the BX, not *a* BX, though there are similar ones on every base, but *the* BX. BX stood for Base Exchange, (I believe the term is obsolete now) and when you’re stationed overseas it’s your one, and only, commercial pipeline back to the good ol’ back home US of A. The BX had everything in it that you can’t get at the commissary (grocery store), that your host country would allow your base to import. It had your clothes. It had your electronics. It had your power tools. When the seasons change, the BX had your Christmas decorations and your Halloween costumes. And the BX had your toys.

My BX looked like someone had tried to smash a gas station between a pair of Quonset huts, which meant a great deal of the interior had arched ceilings. It was a smidge smaller than any other major store chain I can think to compare it to. I believe it would have been just little smaller than a Wal-Mart before they started getting prefixed with the word ‘Super,’ but it was certainly larger than your standard dollar store. Every other BX I’d been in before or since was much larger than this one. There was still enough room in there for them to dedicate two aisles to toys, and one of those aisles was pink.

This is the point of the narrative where one should picture a small, red-headed twitch of a boy standing nervously at the end of these aisles. He has his arms circled around a ceramic Bobby, that is a British police officer, who serves as a ‘piggy’ bank, or money box. (The boy doesn’t understand what a Bobby is either; when his mother gifted the bank to him, the boy simply took it that the British police officer was named Robert and, despite the double threat of being British and in law enforcement, wasn’t a stuffy sort at all so you really shouldn’t judge. ) The boy is watching the young, pretty sales clerk with the same look that armadillos use for oncoming traffic; she’s used to this boy by now and she takes her cue to theatrically turn her attention elsewhere. With the coast clear, the boy makes a mad dash down the pink aisle. The boy I‘m asking you to picture was me, of course.

When I was a wee shaver, I got most of my toys second hand from garage sales. I’d managed to build an impressive collection of scuffed G.I. Joes, scraped Hot Wheels, Thundercats with loose joints, Transformers who struggled to hold their vehicle forms, and He-man action figures largely denuded of their accessories. I was very fond of them all, and each day they would rise to fight and brutally slay each other to death, only to cheerfully rise again and repeat the process like the inhabitants of a miniature plastic Valhalla. The problem was, Valhalla needed Valkyries.

In 1985 Filmation released the too awesome to be believed She-Ra: Princess of Power, sister series to the equally awesome He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. She-Ra had a corresponding toy-line. Procuring her villains had been easy; the evil forces of Hordak were sold in the boys’ aisle and were no harder to find than any other action figure. She-Ra and her friends were another story. Either the toy-line wasn’t doing well enough with girls, or girls treasured their toys so much they wouldn’t let their parent’s palm them off on the poor kids because I wasn’t finding them anywhere used, only new. Normally, I’d use Christmas or my birthday to get the odd toy too delicate or rare to find second hand but I was a little embarrassed to ask for stuff like:: This. This. Or especially this. (I never came close to growing nuts big enough to ask for Enchanta but I totally had the other two) It was exacerbated by my mother needing these toys described in exact detail, or she wouldn’t be able to find them on her own. I don’t know if other boys or nerds are as anal-retentive as I was, but I knew there were some long overdue Mistresses of the Universe out there and I didn’t have them. This meant trips to the pink aisle.

I made that particular sojourn into the pink as quickly as I could. When, I returned safe and sound, just like I always did, I slid my prize onto the counter. My cashier lifted the package and examined it.

“Castaspella?” The question was asked with a bemused, but friendly conversational tone and a gentle smile.

“Mmmnyasmbmmrmrm,” I muttered shyly towards the floor while I unlatched the tin opening on the bottom of Bobby’s feet. She-Ra’s line of action figures wasn’t named any more intelligently than her bother’s.

“Is she pretty cool?” My cashier remained unfazed; she was evidently the sort of person who’s only satisfied with feeding wild deer if she can get them to eat from her hand.

I wasn’t brave enough to opine that Frosta was actually the coolest of the She-Ra line, save perhaps for She-Ra herself. Frosta had come with a fan that you could blow air through before you slapped your Hordak toys across the room to simulate her gale force wind assaults. I do think I managed to garble something about waiting so long to get Castaspella because orange was my least favorite color. I finally got the combination on Bobby’s lock right (You turn his key counter-clockwise; it’s easier at home where pretty cashiers aren’t talking to you.) and shook everything I had out onto the counter with a long, sliding jingle .

“Is this enough,” I asked. I was actually quite good with math at that age, but for some reason I had a genuine issue with currency. It was rough equating 25 with a silver disk with an eagle and a George Washington on it, and that 16 of those equated to an action figure. I preferred my numbers on paper.

“My gosh! Do you want to buy the whole store?” It was the same joke she always told when I did this. She casually slid the correct amount away from my pile of change. If there was the slightest malice in that woman regarding small people paying in small change, I never detected a whit of it. I secured Castaspella under my arm and began to noisily scoop my money back into Bobby.

“Still no RC car?”

She had a good memory. My first attempt to find Arcee, the lady Autobot, had been a comedy of errors. The poor cashier had tried to point out that they had plenty of remote controlled cars and trucks and I, completely missing the pun behind Arcee’s name, couldn’t understand the breakdown in communication. The cashier did eventually get that I was looking for a girl Transformer. I was never going to find Arcee, tho’. For reasons I’ll never understand they wouldn’t start making toys of her until after the Beast Wars line, well after I was done collecting such things.

“Er. No. Thankyoubye.”

With my cashier’s “You’re welcome,” lilting in my bright red ears, I dashed home to expand my collection. Action Figure Valhalla had gotten one Valkyrie bigger.

I tell that anecdote because I’d never had those sorts of problems with the women in my other action figure lines because, although they were girls, they were packaged ‘for boys.’ They were also so rare that I can name every single one I owned: Cheetarah and Wilykit from Thundercats; Steelheart from the Silverhawks ; Lady Jaye (who, btw, I loved as a kid for having the same name as me), Scarlet, Cover Girl, Jinx, Baroness, and Zarana from G.I. Joe; Teela, Sorceress, and Evil-Lyn from He-Man; Wonder Woman from the DC Super powers toy-line; Two different Leia’s and Oola from Star Wars; and freaking no one from Transformers thank you so very much. That was it. Sixteen figures over seven toy-lines, and that’s counting Leia twice. I don’t know if I had every woman from those series, but I’ll bet I had most of them. You know who the real disappointment up there? Oh, Arcee may have been the single non-existant action figure that hurt my little feelings the most, but DC Super Powers gets the biggest tsk-tsk. They had Hawk-girl and Jayna from the cartoons and more superheroines that I can count from the comics, but the only one to get a toy was Wonder Woman. Red Tornado got a toy! (I had it and loved it.) So did Captain Atom and Penguin. (I think they may have eventually made a Batgirl from another line but I never saw her in person) Do you know what I would have done as a kid to get a Power Girl or Huntress action figure? I might have made small talk. With people! I suppose G.I. Joe gets the gold star but I’d like to point out that you could have filled a mattress with my male Joes. They easily outnumbered the girls 25 to one. He-man may have broken the one girl, one villainess formula, but it seems a small concession when figures like Mossman and Buzz-Off were quickly introduced for single episode appearances to justify a string of no-name toys being churned out for action figure hungry enthusiasts like yours truly.

Then She-Ra happened and I not only watched and loved her show, but I bought and loved her toys. If she was supposed to be for girls, then man was a starved for some girl toys. The conventional wisdom still seems to be that ‘girl toys won’t sell.’ I remember a nice, long round of snarky complaining I got into on the internet about the lack of good Avatar: The Last Airbender action figures for the amazing ladies of that series. I’m weird, I’m used to it. Girls are less often into ‘ boy stuff’ than boys are. That makes sense. But the weird obsession with slipping in one ‘The Girl’ and at least one villainess for her to fight (because the other male figures won’t be allowed to hit a girl; evil or not) feels like a cheap way to waive off ‘whiny feminists’ or some toy-lines’ way of saying ‘No Homo.’ Can’t we possibly get a little parity in our toys? Was this experiment with interlinking two gendered storylines such a failure? I speak from personal experience when I say that it starts to feel weird when you just vanish or rarify half the human race. Why am I expected to love looking at and sleeping with women, but not talking to them, listening to them, making friends with them, or working with them?

Lillith! (Updated:10/21/2011. Now, with two 'l's. Double your plleasure!)

2011-10-17T18:31:00.004-04:00

Lillith! Wait, I said that already in the title. She's a very charismatic and intelligent friend of Quis and I, folks. Lillith, you're the first person not married to me to post a comment on my blog! You win a... a um... er- gratitude! You win a gratitude. There are some rules you should know, Lillith: your new gratitude hates light, especially sunlight (it'll kill it); never get the gratitude wet; and, this is the most important, no matter what you do, no matter how much it begs, never, EVER, feed my gratitude after midnight.

Have you ever admitted that you don't really know what a word means? Not me, internet. Not me.

Since she was also kind enough to bring me a blog warming link, I think it's only polite to read some of it, so I can discuss it. .http://thecurrentconscience.com/blog/

There. I've read a few posts. It's well written stuff, folks. The most recent article at the time I read it was about heterosexual women faking orgasms. His opinion is that faking orgasms is bad, and I agree with him, mostly. (I've faked a few orgasms myself. Before anyone screams 'Nuh-uh!' or goes 'huh?' I have one word for you: condoms.) It’s a disservice to you and your partner if you repeatedly lie to them about their performance. Your partner's just going to keep doing what they don't realize isn't working and you're going to keep feeling unsatisfied. He makes the good advice, to heterosexual men, that they should inquire after their partners desires and adjust accordingly. Words like "How's that feel? Do you like it here? Do you want more? Slow or fast? Hard or soft?" very, very much have their place in sexual dialogue. That's the good.

So here's the bad. He is saying, "Don't fake orgasms," but he's also saying "He should be asking," and not saying "express your desire." Other words that belong in the sexual dialogue are "Higher. Lower. Slower. Gentler. Faster. Don't stop. Do my <fill in the blank.>" and you don't have to be asked before they're produced. It's very possible to control people with questions; just watch any hostile interview or court trial of your choice. He's advising women to perform honestly, and honesty is usually the best policy, but I think a little 'take charge of yourself,' advice is warranted too. He's kind of giving a lecture, without empowering them with their own solution. I'm not saying he's doing anything sinister. I think he probably feels more like he's taking some of the burden from women and shifting it to men. However, freedom is not the only sort of empowerment that matters, especially when you're looking for a specific result. I doubt a team told to "just do whatever you feel like," during training is going to be the best team at their sport. People without jobs have a lot more freedom in their schedule, but they're certainly not empowered compared to the employed.

He also asks guys to do what women are already doing in asking their women what they want; that feels borderline ironic in a post that implies women are being doubly dishonest with themselves and their partners.

He also leaps to sociology rather than psychology; 'society is telling you to' vs. 'you're feeling like you have to." I actually agree with his sociological assertion; women are too frequently presented as the avenue to someone else’s pleasure, but he should be careful about vanishing personal experiences or assuming sociological tautology. I've seen a lot of people assume a sort of odd society hive-mind exists for everyone else but them (and those that think like them. Ha! Irony) For instance I've seen thoughts expressed along the lines of, "I hate when someone use their sadness to control me after I tell them they're no good in bed," which assumes and plays into an off sort of antagonism. Some responses are purely psychological; others are sociological, but not directly applicable to the dynamic that elicits them.

Final, niggle for that article (promise!) the title was, "He Doesn’t Deserve Your Validation: Putting The Fake Orgasm Out of Business." That implies that he is speaking to people who are forced to fake their orgasms when they have sex with men, to wit women. The only time he addresses a party in the second person he's speaking to men. He keeps women in the third person. He names a female source and lists her credentials; that’s formal. He names a male source as a friend; that’s informal. His title implies that the article is for women and then he spends the whole thing othering women! Sexism is insidious stuff.

I don't think the blog author and I would share many viewpoints in common outside of our mutual attempts to deconstruct the masculine gender and a general agreement of the places where society is shortchanging the feminine gender. The author of the Current Conscience seems to feel that the world has catered to him and other men, implying that his masculine identity is so well performed that it has brought him many social rewards. I've mentioned that I've often felt fairly inadequate in my performance as a "Man," and that has brought me many social punishments. I've found a lot more comfort in my identity as a person, and have found the state of manhood to act as an anchor just as often as it acts as the wind in my sails.

Still, despite all my criticisms the most important aspect of everything I just wrote were the words, ‘well written.’ I wouldn’t recommend this blog to any ol’ person, but y’know… I notice the pictures of people who like his blog are of several ladies, a man bristling with muscles, and a male/female couple. That’s exactly who I would steer toward this blog: women, men very secure in their traditional maleness, and anyone who’d like to stand together and do a little thinking about the traditional gender binary system (but not necessarily to validate it!)

Yikes! Look how much I wrote! Forget the rules, Lillith. Go ahead and dip that little guy in water because you deserve a lot more gratitudes. J

A Bit of My History

2011-10-16T23:39:00.001-04:00

I figure if you're going to write a blog, then it's best to try to get a little something done on it every single day.  I'm not feeling all that inspired, but if you want to get anything done then you have to go ahead and do it.

All blogs feel like they're very little more than vanity projects to me, but that's not a bad thing. I'm going to embrace that and I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself. If you pay attention to any of my links then you'll probably notice something of a theme. I'm a little obsessed with gender. I'm obsessed with it from a social, political, and personal level. Why? I'm not entirely sure, but I think it comes from feeling like I was pretty bad at my own gender for most of my life.

I'm shy; socially inept, in fact. Anyone who may have known me as a child would probably remember me as the vague scurrying motion behind my mom's legs that needed a haircut. 2-dimensional media is not my forte, but I used my wife's Wacom tablet to whip up an "artist's" rendition of a young Mister J.

There you go. That's me at about seven years of age, or so. I was variously diagnosed with manic depression, clinical depression, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, and Asperger syndrome by assorted psychiatrists.  I was a bit off, you might say. I suppose I still am all things told.   Anyway, not too manly, am I right? I was about as popular as you'd expect a skinny, clumsy, twitchy, mumbly, super-shy little ginger with asthma to be.

My mother was enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. She's always been strong of mind, body, and character and very much a tomboy. My mom's older sister told me that mom wanted a child quite badly, and that the previous attempt before me had resulted in a miscarriage. So I'd arrived to a very receptive audience. However, she discovered her husband, my biological father was a bigamist, already married to another woman with several daughters (half-sisters whom I've never met.) He was involved with a third woman, and had another son on the way. He abandoned mom and I when I had just turned two years old.   My only coherent memory of the man was a single phone call from him when I was almost four, right before my mother was deployed to Europe.

The point of that story? When you're in a family where the women are strong and the men weak, maybe it's only natural you'd grow up with a little gender confusion.

Rumble Rumble

2011-10-14T23:44:00.002-04:00

I've never been good at beginnings. What do you do for a first post? No one will be reading this and only a handful of the die-hard fans you hope to eventually gain will actually go back through the archives. Sure, if you draw funny pictures or have a story with continuity people will want to see where it all began and understand the beginning, but when it's a blog and things mostly just boil down to someone rambling about their ideas and ideals, who cares what happened four months ago? Evidently you do, fine reader.

I was commenting on another blog when my wife looked up from her computer (she's every bit as much a nerd as I am. Well, maybe not quite as much. It's close, she gets extra points for being a girl nerd.) and asked me if I was blogging about my ideals. (Link) I hate that commercial, and yet I refer to it so often. I just can't shake the feeling that they use the word 'blog' like they were told it's the hot new thing but had no idea what it actually was. Anyway, then the wife told me I should have my own blog, instead of leaving pages of comments on other blogs. I had avoided the whole social media concept of the internet from a personal perspective until now, something that I'm not sure counts as hipster cred or totally ruins any chance of me ever sipping latte while wearing skinny jeans, an ironic t-shirt, and a scarf. (Who am I kidding? I live in Florida and would die of heat stroke if I wore a scarf.)

The wife, Quisalas, made this blog when I tried to use my ignorance of all things blog related as my excuse to not to make one myself. She was interrupting my dinner with her incessant calls to join her at her computer, and finally I took my plate of spaghetti over to her as she signed in on my account. We hit an early road block; Blogger wanted me to name my blog. You know, the blog I'd been trying to bow out of making for the last twenty minutes. Quisalas teased me, saying the reason I'd never made a blog was because they always want me to name it. After vehemently vetoing several of her attempts at naming this blog in lolcat speak, Q put down Stummy Rumblings and I lost my shit laughing. Seriously, no shit to be found. Stummy is a bastardized and childish attempt at combining stomach and tummy. It's a word I've used lots of times, usually on accident, which irritates her (although, I think she may secretly think it's cute.) After she put that down, I couldn't think of anything else to name it.

Thus, a blog was born. We decided not to circumcise it.

This is a post

2011-10-14T22:35:00.001-04:00

This is only a post. Do not be alarmed. If this were an actual article, this post would be followed by instructions of what to do in the event of an article.