More Weighing In on Dowd

Oh, good. Feministing takes on Dowd. My favorite paraphrase from this one has to be "Feminism isn't a fucking dating service."

That one's going on my quote list.

Amanda's got some good reactions as well, and links to others, who aren't so good. She points out that we're still seeing articles and "studies" with a focus on male desire, on "what men what." We've gotta find other ways of talking about this (in fact, the guy she links to, and the guy he links to, both Assume this Truth: there's no talk of equals, but What I Want, What Makes Me Look Good. I don't see any talk of partnerships or mutual affection in their rants, just assumptions that they should be patted on the head for dating women who have subscriptions to The Economist).

Sweet Home

Stumble home, unpack, pile up laundry, try and find a fourth frickin' quarter... turn the house upside down to try and find a damn quarter, nothing, fuck it, these kicking pants are clean enough, leave `um to air out.

Pack wraps, belt, shirt, towel, (boxing class tomorrow) ignore two coffee cups in the sink (at least somebody in this house is getting laid), grind coffee, stumble toward bed, find that my roommate left me a fucking birthday present, goddamn it. I hate this. I'm so bad at getting people stuff.

Find she's left me a dragonfly pin, oh! Excellent (long story)! Open other pacakge to find --

Holy fucking christ.

Golden States, by Michael Cunningham. His first novel. I have literally read and re-read The Hours over a dozen times. I bring it on trips with me, as comfort reading. I read it before bed on bad days. It's the book of the hours, of life, and I'm crazy about his other stuff too, but you can't get Golden States because apparently he absolutely hates it, refuses to have it reprinted, and doesn't even list it on his list of "books by the author" page.

Fuck, where did she get this?

"It'll Cost You More Money."

The age-old battle between the people on the ground and the people heading it all up from on-high:

When corp. comes in next and tells us how incredibly complicated we need to make things, we've collectively agreed to use this knee-in-the-gut retort:

"It'll cost you more money."

Gets `um every time.... Makes our jobs easier. Gets work done.

The end.

Blah, Blah, Continuing Bullshit

Man, I love it when other people tackle stuff that pisses me off, so I don’t have to.

I read this piece in the NY Times by Maureen Dowd yesterday. She’s pissed about the recent “study” that “proves” that men are “naturally” drawn toward subordinate women (again, I want to see the study where it’s biologically advantageous for women to be attracted to men who beat the crap out of them – we can put them right next to the “studies” that say that kids born to “mixed-race” couples are “naturally” stupider than those of “pure-race” couples), and I just sort of snarled at it and moved on.

Brendan, however, took it on, mashed up some other recent news bits with it, and has a good look at “guy culture” and society’s tendency toward assuming what’s happening in relationships right now and on TV must be “natural.”

He brings up a couple of good points worth chewing on, one of them being the fact that “equal” relationships are really fucking hard. When you look at the news media, at “guy culture,” hell, at Cosmo, what you’re going to see are the same things that Dowd sees – men looking for subservient mates, women trying to trick men into thinking they’re stupider than they are; insecure women dying to get married to just about anybody, especially Desperate Smart Women; insecure men who find the idea of a woman who makes more money than them unnerving.

Whether or not these things are “true” isn’t the point – governments spoon up “truth” every morning. That’s why we can send House representatives to Iraq who have no idea what it’s like for people living in Iraq. They’ve been given a different truth – and it’s not the real one.

When you grow up looking for an equal sort of pairing with somebody (or a couple of somebodies, depending on preferences), you’re not going to see many examples of it on television, in the movies, in books, plays, etc. You’re going to see a lot of unequal powerplays: evil scheming women trying to manipulate men, or evil scheming men trying to manipulate women, or subservient women trying to please evil men, or mediocre men, or men trying to please the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, so he can then marry her, own her, and show her who’s boss (my favorite. This is why I’m so fearful of being Greek-Goddess-Worshipped by men. The other side of this coin is. “I won her. She’s mine. Now I can show her who’s in charge”).

If you’re lucky, you’ll grow up watching real people in real relationships, and odds are that though some of them will mirror our media stereotypes, and a lot of them will be crappy, some of them won’t, and you’ll find one that intrigues you.

My parents were married just out of high school, my mom was 18 and my dad was 20, and they’d been dating on and off since my mom was 15 and he was 17. My relationship myth, growing up, was this magical romantic one: my mom met my dad in French class. He was the guy in the back of the class wearing the leather jacket, slouching in his seat. When the French professor asked him to stand up and introduce himself, my father did so – in perfect French. He was one of five children raised by my GI grandfather and war-bride French grandmother, and spent the first seven years of his life in France.

My mother was smitten. As the popular version of the story goes, she ran to her best friend immediately after class and said, “I just met the man I’m going to marry.”

There was a break-up, a jealousy play or two, and then my mom finally said to him, “Are we going to get married, or what?”

They got married.

They’ve been married for something like thirty years.

The trouble was, they got married too young, and they’ll be the first to tell you this. Every time they have an argument it’s like watching a couple of 18-year-olds. And I don’t know that some of their life goals corresponded as well as they could have. All my dad really wanted was to have kids, my mom really didn’t, she flirted with the idea of joining the Peace Corps. They waited five years, and had kids. Though they still share some core ideas about love and commitment - which has kept them together - it’s been a long hard road. Such is the nature of relationships.

So though I admired my parents and was really taken in by this Grand Idea of the One True Love, the One True Love idea got me sorta stuck in my first relationship, as I was basing my life on a set of mythos I learned from my parents, and that mythos isn’t gonna work every time, and especially not in high school, especially if you try to force it. I really, really wanted a One True Love, and a great “I fell in love with him right then” story, but I honestly didn’t have one. I had these two warring ideas in my head: the One True Love from high school whose love was so powerful it superceded everything else you wanted to do with your life, and what I was actually looking for…. Growing up, the place where I saw my ideal sort of “I want to live that kind of life, with that kind of person,” example was that of my Uncle Steve and Aunt Kris.

The popular mythos is:

They met as exchange students in Thailand. She was from Ohio. He was from Washington State. Should have been doomed from the start. How many people would you really fly halfway across the country to be with?

We didn’t hang out much, so my idea of their relationship has been formed in pictures, and the one that always clinched it for me was a picture of the two of them coming up out of the water in their scuba diving gear. They’re probably about the age that I am now, and they’ve got their respirators in their hands. As the water ripples around them, they come together into a fun, half-laugh, half-kiss.

And I remember thinking, when I saw that picture: that’s it. That’s what I want.

My uncle worked as a television news anchor for awhile, and in his study, there’s a picture of him in a flight suit, stepping out of an Airforce jet he got to ride in for a news story.

Here were these images of this life, of this way life could be, and something about it really connected with me. How truly egalitarian and buddy-buddy their relationship is now, I don’t know, but I remember those images, and that hope I had that yes, really, there’s another way for things to be. You can have a big, full life with somebody who wants to have a big, full, life with you. It’s possible. You don’t have to backbite and backstab and blame each other for everything. You don’t have to sacrifice your life in order to be with somebody you like.

And it’s that hope for another life that’s kept me happily single for so long. If that’s not what I get, I’d rather have nothing.

I’m an all-or-nothing sort of person.

And when you’re raised in a society that doesn’t encourage those sorts of relationships, they’re really fucking hard. Brendan says this nicely:

Perhaps the hardest sort of relationship to maintain is a true meeting of equals. All relationships have their own internal power dynamics, terms and quirks, but a relationship whose core substance is true regard for and communication with another person respected as an equal requires a level of emotional maturity and openness that's almost wholly absent from popular discourse in this time and place. We tell neither men nor women to seek these sorts of relationships as the/an ideal, nor give them the tools and encouragement necessary to enable them to develop and maintain them. What we have instead, in the broadest terms, is a usership culture around relationships- what can I get out of this other person. Sometimes it's financial, sometimes it's emotional, sometimes it's status. In some respects this is also the child of marketing, in some ways the child of reductionist evolutionary explanations where a relationship is simply about fulfilling needs and obtaining resources and services.

The most equal buddy-buddy relationship I’ve had has been the one with my roomie – non-sexual it may be, but though we’d been friends for about five years, since the Clarion days, there’s a whole other dynamic involved when you live with someone, particularly somebody you really like and connect with on a lot of levels. One of the most difficult things for me to learn was actually how to tell her when I was upset about something, when something she did bugged me, to open up about why I was feeling down. I’m not a big talker (she calls me the “strong and silent type”), but she’s really good at asking questions and keeping open lines of communication so I don’t build up these huge resentments – against her or myself – and we can resolve conflicts pretty quickly.

She gets all the kudos for this. I’ve always considered talking about “feelings” to be a weak thing, and sometimes, I’ve even hated myself for feeling the things that I feel. I’ve just recently gotten to the point where I can go, “Jenn, I hate myself for feeling this way, and I know it’s adolescent and foolish, but this is sort of where I’m at with this, so if I seem down and snarky, know that it’s not about you, it’s just this stuff I’m trying to work out on my own.”

And she’ll go. “Cool. It sucks that you feel that way. You are a great person. Let me know if I can help you with that.”

It has made our domestic life much easier.

And it’s taken me a while to get used to.

Because I have a very guy-like mentality when it comes to talking and showing emotion. You get me and a guy who has the same guy-like mentality together, and bad things happen.

I didn’t have any existing framework of an open-communication relationship before, one where I was with somebody who was just as smart and capable as I was and didn't want to suck the life out of me (again, that "I worship you until you're mine, at which point I will destroy you!" mentality that a lot of women-worshippers have). Even with a lot of my old friends, there are things we Just Don’t Talk About. Sometimes I think we’re all trying to pretend that we’re a lot saner than we are because we’re afraid of what our friends will think of us. I know me and my best buddy Stephanie don’t talk about a lot of things, or slide over them very quickly, usually the Dark Teatime of the Soul things, though we’ve known each other for over a decade now.

I remember going out with her around Christmas, and we were sitting outside Moonstruck on 23rd in Portland, and she said, “I’ve been married for a year. I think I’m becoming boring and domestic. Would you still want to hang out with me if I was boring?” And though she said it with a half-joking little laugh, it was only half-joking.

I sort of looked at her, dumbstruck, and said, “You’re not boring. You won’t ever be boring. I don’t hang out with boring people. You know, there are these people in your life you want to know until the last breath leaves your body…? You’re one of those people.”

It’s funny, how we don’t have a social system that really teaches ushow to talk to each other, friends, lovers, relations. Unless you’ve got a family that teaches it to you, you won’t learn. You won’t get it from the media, or from school. You’re supposed to be looking at people as things, as what they can give you, instead of just people, the ones on this journey with you, the ones who have seen you through the shit and back again. The ones you want to see out to the end.

So when we talk about hetero relationships, and their inequality, I also find myself turning toward looking at other relationships, at how I’ve been taught to handle them, and I realize I come up lacking.

I don’t know that you can assign blame or fault for this: it just is. I have to be aware of what I’m getting fed from the media at large, and decide if one of the reasons I’m uncomfortable on a date is because what I want isn’t what’s being fed to me.

That’s not good or bad, it just is.

Realize that most of this stuff is bullshit, it’s somebody selling something. The minute you start interrogating these “studies,” they all unravel. It’s in the best interest of money makers to keep us unhappy. It’s in the best interests of the government for me to worry more about being smart or fat than who we’re bombing in Iraq and where all the money’s going.

It doesn’t mean that’s how we have to be.

Night Thoughts, Denver

"Yes, Clarissa thinks, it's time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families...; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagent hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows those hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

Heaven only knows why we love it so."

- The Hours. Michael Cunningham.

Living Out of Hotels

Put in almost 2.5 miles on the treadmill, without really getting tired. And wow, do I feel a lot better. They've had shitty food in our warroom the last two days, and the Boys are living on brownies, and I haven't done any exercise beyond get out of my chair for two days. Endorphins are great.

It's so funny, how your body gets used to stuff. When I first started doing these jogging days, I felt like I was going to die after barely a mile.

My record is still only about 4.1 or 4.2 (at which point I thought I was gonna die), so I'd like to average out at 3, but in the hotel fitness room, somebody had put the TV on CNN, and you can only read so many transcripts of the Michael Jackson molestation case before you get nauseous.

There are some images that not even a loud CD player can drown out.

You know, the FCC fined Howard Stern and kicked him off the air for talking about adult sex acts occuring between and among consenting adults, but CNN is blaring out all the lurid details about a teenage boy having his genitals rubbed by Michael Jackson, without penalty. Cause it's, like "news" or something.

Yea. Right.

Yes, we need to cover "news" - like the outcome of his trial. We don't need to read a kid's statement about being molested on prime time. That's the jury's business.

You want to talk obscenity, FCC? This is it. Bunch of frickin' hypocrites.

Anyway, I'm off to shower and heading out to the Mexican place across the street for dinner. Then to bed, to bed. Or maybe play a round of Myst IV.

Anything but watch CNN.

Right Cross to the Face

Feministe has a post up about the man-hating feminist myth and the “has feminism gone too far?” argument that men like to argue about – you know: feminism must be going too far not because we’re making more money than men or are able to keep tabs on our reproductive health without legal or social consequence, but because men aren’t sure if they should open the door for us or not.

This one tugged at me because one of the architects for the project here in Denver is - let’s call him Juan – the same guy who gave all the women in the office Belgian chocolates for Christmas and forwarded all of the women in the office a hysterical “women beware” e-mail.

He’s the sort of guy who does these little things that irk me. Just these little moments where it’s like he’s trying to remind me, “You’re different than me. You’re a woman. I’m a man.” Like if he didn’t remind himself, he’d forget. I don’t mind people holding doors open for me, because I hold them open for them – it’s a politeness issue. You treat everybody around you with respect, no matter their gender. And yes, if you really like someone you’re going to probably treat them even more respectfully than you would other people. What bugs me is when guys go out of their way to show me how different I am from them, like the world will implode if I don’t get told I’m pretty for a day.

Juan gave me and the other architect a ride to the office this morning for our hotel, and stopped the car in front of the door to our building. I thought he was going to back into a parking spot, so waited.

“You can get out,” he told me, “I figured I’d drop you up front so you wouldn’t have to walk.”

Um. OK.

The other architect, of course, did not get out behind me, but waited to park with Juan and came in later.

Did I jump and scream at Juan and tell him he was weird? No.

I realized that he’d been taught certain ways to act toward women, and I let it slide.

Did it bug me?

Yea.

Last night, at dinner, he made a “I get to be here with two beautiful women,” announcement. It’s a generic statement, he says such things around all women. There are guys who’ve been taught that being nice to women means speaking softly to them and telling them how pretty they are.

No, I don’t like it, but I don’t bitch to him about it. He’s operating on a different system.

Why does it bug me?

First and foremost, because we don't know each other well, I'm not attracted to him at all, I have not invited any sort of attention from him, and don't pretend that we're "close." His comments imply an intimacy that's not there, and I think it's rude.

And, more in general, when people give me “special” attention, or “special” treatment, I feel that they’re trying to highlight my difference from them. If this is a real physical difference – my graduate degree advisor was just over three feet tall, so I walked at her pace, made sure to put things within her reach – then so be it, but if it’s just a matter of, “I realize that I must acknowledge your womanliness by treating you differently than everyone else in this car with two legs,” then it feels condescending. It feels like some guy’s going out of his way to remind me that I might be taller and stronger than him, but I don’t have a dick, so I’m incapable of looking after myself.

But would I ever, ever snipe at somebody for opening a door, moving out of my way, or saying, “I’m so glad to be with such beautiful company tonight”? No. I wouldn’t. And if it was somebody I really liked and was attracted to, it wouldn’t bug me at all, because there would actually be a mutual respect and affection.

When I start bitching is when hands go where they’re not invited, and “beautiful company” becomes more explicit phrases heavily laced with sexual innuendo – or just outright sexual.

Then I’ll turn into a man-hating bitch.

In fact, I’d react to such unwanted attention in about the same manner a guy would –

A heated verbal tirade to combat the verbal violence –

And a right cross to the face the minute he touched me.

In Which the Protagonist Pretends to Work For a Living

I'm so incredibly bored. I'm an under-utilized resource.

The good news is: I'm being paid for it.

Sign Up in the Corp. Hallway:

"It is better to be careful 100 times than to get killed once."
- Mark Twain

I know I don't belong here, because I'd say:

"It is better to die once for something grand than to live a hundred years doing nothing."

I'm such the romantic.

"We Didn't Know How Bad It Was."

There are days when I’m embarrassed to be an American. Days when Americans with all of the best intentions don’t do their homework, and end up looking like idiots. Why do we keep doing this? Why do we keep going into places to “fix” things without doing our homework?

I was asked in a previous comment about whether or not “democratic” elections would improve the situation of women in Iraq. Women can vote in Zimbabwe: I don’t know that things are exactly fun and games over there. Women can vote in this country: have been able to do so for just over 80 years, but “getting the vote” didn’t immediately translate into more women’s rights. It’s taken 80 years just to get to where we are now, and we've gotten this far because we fought our fucking asses off tooth and nail every inch of the way, and continue to do so. Sure, things are better for women than in the 50s, but we’ve got a long bit of trucking to do, because we’re still trying to work in a system that says “men” and “male” are the norm, are equality, are what we’re striving for, and "men" and "masculinity" are just as fucked up and socially constructed as "woman" and "femininity."

So "equality" is a lackluster goal, when what you're comparing yourself to is just as socially constructed as you are. Not that I’ve got any sort of Grand Feminist Overthrow of the System Plan or anything. That’s why I write fiction.

In any case, “voting” doesn’t equal equality. Look at the civil rights campaign in this country. It took African Americans a hundred years to get anything like the right to vote - a hundred years after it was legally guaranteed. The people you want to control are the people you don’t let vote.

You can say a lot of bullshit in sound bites, on paper, but at the end of the day, it’s Iraqi women, not clueless Americans, who are going to have to stand up, run, fight, and come to grips with what they want. Yes, we should provide them support, open up dialogue, but you can’t tell women how to do it. You can’t tell them what they want. You go there to listen to them, not to preach. They’re likely going to be a fuck of a lot stronger than you know.

The huge Iraq problem is that it's an occupied country. You can't force democracy on an occupied country. This entire campaign has been so fucked from the beginning that I honestly find the idea of equality in Iraq as imposed by the US laughable.

It's the Iraqi women who are going to do it. But don't think for a minute that this administration gives a fuck about Iraqi women. The cluelessness of these legislators speaks volumes about what a Grand Fucking Priority the state of women in Iraq is to the United States.

The United States could give a fuck.

"WASHINGTON — It was billed as a trip to teach Iraqi women who are running for office the rudiments of campaigning. But for the members of Congress who traveled to the Middle East over the weekend, it turned out to be a harrowing lesson on the sometimes painfully high price of democracy.

The U.S. lawmakers brought with them banners, bumper stickers and T-shirts to share with their Iraqi counterparts at a two-day retreat with 20 aspiring female legislators. They quickly set aside the campaign paraphernalia when the Iraqis disclosed the grim facts of their political lives.

The biggest challenge Iraqi candidates face: how to avoid getting killed."

No shit. Who briefed these Congress members on the situation in Iraq? “Embedded” reporters working for CNN?

"In eight years as a member of Congress, I've never had an experience like this," said Rep. Kay Granger, a Texas Republican who led the congressional delegation. "These are some of the bravest women I have ever met."

Never been to an occupied country? Do you read the newspaper? Do you keep informed of how the hell the policies you’re voting on effect real people? Do you have any idea how women live in this country, let alone the one you’re cavorting around in? No? Then you should be fired. This is your fucking job.

The four House members who made the trip — three Republicans and one Democrat — came prepared to discuss the practicalities of political life: campaign tactics, and techniques for getting publicity and for getting out the vote.

They quickly realized that much of what they planned to tell the Iraqi women "didn't pertain to them," Granger said. Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill., who brought along her favorite campaign giveaway — a sponge bearing her name — added that after hearing the women's stories, "it seemed kind of frivolous."

Yea. Frivolous. Who briefed you on this trip? Sweet fuck, and she’s from a goddamn blue state.

Under the law setting up the Jan. 30 elections for a national assembly, which was written under American supervision, at least one-third of the candidates on the ballot must be women. That provision has provoked bloody opposition. One female candidate, Wijdan al-Khuzai, was found murdered near her Baghdad home in December.

The one-third provision is a cool one, actually. They did this in South Africa. With a national assembly, you’re voting on a party, not a candidate, so the actual party has to then fill the seats with 1/3 women. South African women fought like hell for this provision – they originally wanted ½ of all seats reserved for women (makes sense to me…), and shut down talks by stubbornly singing freedom songs and refusing to move onto another item until they got what they wanted. In the end, they got 1/3 of the seats reserved for female candidates.

They’re tough fuckin’ cookies, those South African women.

Not unlike these tough fucking Iraqi women.

As Election Day approaches, many female candidates are sending their families out of the country, said Manal Omar, who directs a program in Iraq on behalf of Women for Women International, a non-profit organization established to provide financial and other support for women in war zones. Omar said she spoke to some of the Iraqi women who attended the meetings with House members and that they were "frustrated" by the American politicians' apparent naiveté. "They were amazed (the Americans) didn't know how bad Iraq was," Omar said.

Americans are uninformed. We listen to CNN, that feeds us bullshit in short sound bites, and are far more interested in our waistlines than foreign policy (I’m not any better, you understand – how many posts do I write about weight, and how many about bombing foreign countries? Yea). But you know what, these are members of the United States fucking Congress. It’s their goddamn job to know what the hell they’re walking into. I’m pissed off at their cluelessness. The media fucking sucks.

The only soundbite from this encounter I won’t snark about:

For the Americans, it was an emotional encounter… Said Granger: "We went over there to encourage them. I think they ended up encouraging us."

As well they should.

Waking Up to CNN

Turned on CNN, and found one of the Iraqi presidential candidates using all the catch phrases, "pockets of resistance," "free and fair elections," "cival war," "if Osama Bin Laden, Zalawi and Saddam don't want us to have elections, then we have to have them," etc. My favorite, "All we have to do is make sure that 50% of Iraqis can vote. That's the number of people who vote in most western countries."

Well, no, actually, that's the number of people who choose to vote. Choosing to vote and being able to vote are different matters entirely. And the scary thing is that the US and "insurgents" get to decide *who* gets to vote.

Bah.

I think they're working on the old premise of: if you lie long enough and often enough, people think it's true. Oddly enough, this does sometimes work. But there's a fine line between hope and delusion.

Next up after the break: the scandel that's rocking the world - Prince Harry dresses up as a Nazi for a party, and the government has new weight-loss tips to share with the American people.

Gag me with a spoon.

Is it any wonder I changed the channel to the cartoon network?

Interesting Stuff From China

Thoughts on fantasy fiction, from China Mieville.

Also, Vandermeer is back from hiatus, and blogging again. Yay.

And It's Just More of the Same

All day meeting (as a nice addendum to yesterday's desire post, I spent most of one presenter's speech deciding whether or not I'd go to bed with him. This made it really difficult to take notes), Blaine took off early, Yellow's not there, and the expected and much-hyped big drunken dinner is apparently big-wig invite only, so of the twenty of us in the room, only about 6 are heading out for client debauchery. The rest of us are on our own. Denver fucking sucks. I want to go back to hanging out with the Indy team. They were way more fun.

What the hell's up with a stingy dinner?

Well, a lot, actually, but I won't go throwing rumors in, cause you know how that work-blogging stuff goes. Suffice to say, dinner tonight has gone from high-class back-smacking to a couple of beers with me, Sarah the construction manager, and a couple of the architects from the Chicago office. Not as snazzy. Though Sarah's cool, once again, I wish I could have picked my own friends' list for dinner.

Oh well. Better luck at my 30th, when everybody's invited.

Shit You Don't Want To Hear From Your Pilot When You've Been Circling Denver For 20 Minutes After Being Delayed an Hour And a Half Because --

"Well, we still have zero visibility in Denver, but we think we might have figured out what's wrong with the equipment here in the cockpit, so we're just going to go ahead and attempt a landing."

At this point, you've just got to sit back, relax, and turn up your CD player.

In fact, the visibility is so bad here in Denver tonight that my cab driver got lost in the business complex where my hotel is.

Denver just isn't my city.

Off to To Denver

I'm off to Denver. I'm bringing my own personal laptop, which doesn't have so many problems with wireless internet, so I'll be in touch...

Bah

I just can't believe people spend money on crap like this.

Oh, well, to each their own. Good luck getting your kids to college.

In any case, here's a couple wins for those who think fascism sunks.

Some Thoughts on Attraction

Amanda's taken on the "do women actually have sex drives"? crap, and since it's something I've been meaning to say a lot about, I'll dive off her post and take the opportunity.

I'm tired of arguing biological crap about differences between men and women. The big difference is, was, and for a while more at least, will be only this: most women can bear children. Men can't.

Because of that, we're going to view some things differently, particularly the sex thing, cause if women get pregnant, guess who's got to spend nine months giving blood and breath to creating a kid, and who's gonna be stuck raising that child? And women, built as we are, are also more suseptible to STDS. You've just got more surface area. It sucks, but it's true. For these two reasons alone, I'm incredibly picky about my sexual partners.

But let's not forget our social pressures, shall we?

And how fear of the female body and its desires can really fuck you up into thinking that women aren't people.

I was always pretty nuts about boys. In kindergarten, I had two "boyfriends," which I remember thinking was pretty risque at the time (looking back on it, it's funny, because the boys, Nick and Brian - damn, I remember their names 20 years later - were great indicators of what my grown-up taste would be. Troubled home lives, one of them skinny, smart and dorky, the other one more punkish, stout, with the spiked hair and leather jacket - seriously, his parents suited him up very well in kindergarten) and I spent most of gradeschool forming gangs of girls who would chase boys around the playground and tie them up to playground equipment with our scarves.

Later, as I got plumper and dorkier, I attached myself to good guy buddies. Dorky Matthew and Aryan Adam were the two biggest ones from this period. I had very few female friends because it's tougher to find girls who won't play the girly game when you're in gradeschool, since that's the time when you're all rushing around trying to fit in.

After kindergarten, I always formed crushes on one boy in particular, and stuck with that crush for years, sometimes. Not only because it was expected of me to give an answer when asked what boy I had a crush on, but because it helped me narrow down the playing field. It just didn't seem appropriate to go wacky over that many boys, and I do think that I'm sort of hard-wired into serial monogamy. The idea of polyamoury just never worked for me on an emotional level, though there was a point in highschool when I did consider "sharing" a boyfriend with a girl I was hot on. This never happened for a number of reasons, but the big one was just because I couldn't do it, emotionally. I'm not built that way.

Highschool, I was pretty much just batshit insane. I hit highschool theater and there were all these available guys, and suddenly they were actually interested in me *back.* I'd never gone so wacky over so many guys in one year. This was also the first time where I could honestly say that, looking back on it, I had a crush on a girl - let's call her Mistress, who had this amazing, girl-next-door sexual appeal to both men and women, and who made the most of it (she was the one who wanted to share a boyfriend with me [which I couldn't deal with], and then she later got married, and invited me into a threesome with her husband. I was so drunk at the time that I told her, "You know, I'm totally cool with you, but your husband freaks me out. Maybe if you'd married somebody else...?"). Ah, batshit insane.

Undergrad was my second real girl crush, the one that was so incredibly wacky that every morning I woke up wishing I'd become a boy so I could date her (this is where my "and that girl in Speech class wasn't bad either" line comes from). After that, my last two years of college were a frickin' boyfest, which I won't go into detail about because my parents read this blog.

We had a lot of fun in Alaska.

The funny thing is, I always thought I was really weird for liking boys as much as I did and for thinking about sex all the time, and the masturbation thing for women is really tough to figure out because our culture's focused so much on penetrative sex. So you're kinda like, "OK, I'm doing that, that's not doing it for me. And it's kinda messy. Is there an easier way to do this? What's the trick, here?"

The trick, of course, is to gear yourself out of the "penetration" mode, and go for the "What would lesbians do?" mode.

There's a lot to be learned from watching lesbian porn.

You also get a lot of "fear and disgust" of the female body thrown your way pretty early on (there's that crazy moment at puberty when you suddenly realize you're not a real person after all, you're the "other" you're one of those *women*), so you're also battling a lot of "don't touch yourself, ewww gross" stuff. To be a woman in a society that says women are weak and icky can be... tough. To say the least.

So you don't learn how to masturbate in sex ed, and it's not as incredibly obvious as men's masturbation, which always seemed to me like it would be easy to figure out. If you know the mechanics of penetrative sex, you're going to try and simulate it. Trouble is, stimulation for women is mostly about the clitoris, with the penetration part a sort of added bonus for most people.

Luckily, once you figure that out, honey, it's all over.

Funny thing is, though I was always sure I had a serious sex drive, I was always worried about it. Most of the women I talked to in high school didn't actually like sex. Or, they said they didn't. It was something they sort of "gifted" to their boyfriends to keep them happy, they said.

This never made sense to me, as I was always happy to jump on my boyfriend (`till things soured, of course)... and would have been really happy to jump on other people in highschool, too, but women have that "slut" label hanging over their heads. Once you sleep with a guy, you've gotta keep on for a "decent" period in order to be... decent. As previously discussed, this one got me into a lot of trouble, and I stayed with somebody far, far longer than I should have.

It's only been recently that I've fessed up to my attraction for real and allowed myself to stare at boys on the train - never face-on of course, as that "invitation to harrassment/rape" thing is always over my head, too (look at all these social inhibitors to the visibility of female desire) - but you better bet that when the tall, pretty guy in well-fitting suit turns around, I'm totally checking out his ass.

And for those women who keep track of such things: during the four days a month or so when I'm ovulating, I know it - sexual drive spikes on par with any guy's at any time of the day, because suddenly all boys everywhere are beautiful "and that sweetheart female cello player on the train with the short hair isn't bad either." I want to bundle up all the boys and take them home and shower them in kisses. When I'm ovulating, even Blaine the football player looks damn good for a night.

It's really awful.

And it took me forever to come to grips with it, because "girls aren't supposed to feel that way." Girls aren't supposed to think so much about sex, and though I'm still emotionally a serial monogamist, I recognize that the myth of the libido-less female just doesn't apply to me in the least.

I think we're raised to be afraid of our bodies and what they desire: sex, food, strength, and so we don't listen to our bodies and acknowledge what we want.

If you want to know what a lot of female hysteria/wackiness is about, I'd say it's this: being taught to be a non-person, somebody who's not supposed to feel any sort of desire for anything at all, and trying to operate on that level.

That'll drive anybody batfuck insane.

Rupert Thomson

Iain Rowan is doing some guestblogging over at Vandermeer's joint, and he's posted an overview of the work of brilliant English writer Rupert Thomson.

My buddy Julian turned me on to Rupert Thomson with one book:

The Book of Revelation.

Read it. The rest will follow.

A true Brutal Woman book - don't say I didn't warn you. Here's an amazon.com overview:

Stepping out of his Amsterdam studio one April afternoon to buy cigarettes for his girlfriend, a dashing 29-year old Englishman reflects on their wonderful seven-year relationship, and his stellar career as an internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer. But the nameless protagonist's destiny takes an unthinkably horrifying turn when a trio of mysterious cloaked and hooded women kidnap him, chain him to the floor of a stark white room to keep as their sexual prisoner, and subjected him to eighteen days of humiliation, mutilation, and rape. Then, after a bizarrely public performance, he is released, only to be held captive in the purgatory of his own guilt and torment: The realization that no one will believe his strange story. Coolly revelatory, meticulously crafted, The Book of Revelation is Rupert Thomson at his imaginative best.

An incredible look at sex and power, sure, but that's only half the book - the other half of this novel is about dealing with what's been done to you, about breakdown, collapse, and finding the strength to live on.

Really well done.

Pirates!

I find this far, far, too amusing.

That's My Nephew

My sister's son Christopher won a year's supply of pickles for being terribly cute, and was written up in the local small-town paper:

PICKLE LOVERS WIN PRIZES

Two photogenic children from Battle Ground are among the winners of the annual Steinfeld's Pickle Pucker Photo Contest.

Christopher XXXX, 15 months, son of Jacqueline Hurley of Battle Ground, won second place in the contest and will receive a one year supply of Steinfeld's pickles....

The interesting part about this article? The interviewer apparently paused upon hearing that my sister's last name was different from her son's, and carefully asked, "Is there a Mr. XXXX?"

I told my mom that my sister should have said something to the effect of, "No, there isn't. He's a 20 year old kid who put in his five minutes, has no job, and doesn't pay child support. This is my fucking kid."

Unfortunately, she didn't. So the guy's name is still associated with this great kid's, and my sister is busting her single-mom ass off to get all her ducks in a row.

After seeing my sister raising her kid, I've got a greater respect for single mothers. These women get nothing but shit from the media - the same media that tells them they're going to hell for getting abortions, but refuse to provide her with free medical care and state-sponsored daycare.

Fuck those fuckers. They don't live in the same world I do.