gender

Being Mis-moralled

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Like all my answers, this one arrived breach, backwards, started with the free-floating thought that I had been personally mis-moralled, treated as hostile when I wasn’t. Will you allow the expression?

I understand mis-gendering, the negation of our own self image and expression in favour of someone else’s idea and role for us, I have always been at some distance from the male end of the gender spectrum and have always felt unseen when someone includes me among the manly sorts of men. I’m a “he,” but of course “they” doesn’t bother me – “bro” bothers me. I don’t feel the solidarity it suggests, don’t want it, I do not offer my support to much maleness, much of it is toxic.

But you know what? Not for reasons of sex. That’s not the part of being gendered or mis-gendered that doesn’t fit, and I really don’t take offence if you think I love the ladies, I want to use a strong expression, an anatomical expression, but you know what I mean. I’m not ashamed of my heterosexual leanings, not horrified to be accused of them. My offense is about the other male things, the strength, the violence. A lot of that is directed towards sexual things, conquest and such, and people generally maybe see the sex in that and maybe manage not to see the violence in it, but I am not that way about it. I have this childish idea that some things are more important than sex and gender and that the violence should be the thing that sets off alarms for us instead.

There is enough love and sex in the world that even a little pacifist like myself should be able to find some love, and I did – although maybe my lovers had mis-gendered me, assumed I was tougher than I was, and perhaps some would like to take it back. I found some on my own terms anyhow, I thought, but the general mis-gendering has cost me far more than it’s paid me in the long run. There is a certain amount of testosterone being sexy, but there is also a lot of pain and resentment around it.

I feel being called “bro” like an accusation, I hear “every man is a rapist” In it. I hear “we are all assholes together” in it, I don’t hear “we all love the ladies here” in it, sort of the reverse. It’s more like “we hate everyone, everyone hates us and we’re winning this fight,” that’s what I hear, and I’m not happy with this situation generally, life as a fight. I’m a man, basically, and a white one to boot, supposedly the pinnacle of privilege – why is my life a war, why am I a soldier, fighting and dying in some war and if we’re winning, why doesn’t it ever end?

I feel mis-moralled, that because we white men are winning the war, everyone thinks I’m happy about the whole deal or something. That because men run the world, people think that my life is an exercise in dominance, I don’t have feelings, and want to hurt people or something.

Of course, being “mis-moralled,” being subjected to treatment that is based in assumptions, in this case not about your gender or sexuality, but about something vaguer and more basic, your “morals,” well, that is a part of all of it, isn’t it, this sexism I try to rebel against, that if I’m a man, I’m aggressive, or of regular misogynist sexism generally, and racism. All of it tends to mis-moral the target group, doesn’t it? All of my life I’ve been frustrated about people’s, ladies’ assumptions about me, that I’m some sexist player, when I have always known myself as a person who always tries to good and no harm.

I am absolutely certain that this is a tiny portion of the same feeling a good, clean living Christian black American feels when some white, bigoted obvious sinner lets them know they consider them to be automatically somehow ‘immoral.’ Women generally, looking after everything and everyone and being told by the evangelicals and the old fashioned doctors that women are somehow less developed or less moral, less fit to run the world than the men. Moral efforts seem to count for nothing in this world of group conflict, all try, none get credit, except that within our racist little groups, we are rewarded for good, moral work within and for bad, violent work outside of the group, all under the name of morality.

Bros before hos is “morality” for the bros. Not an endorsement, hence the irony quotes.

But I think this is what hurts, this is the core of it. Mis-gendering has been confusing me some, how is every stranger supposed to know, and why does every stranger need to be familiar with my complex personal sexuality? But it all makes sense this way, that the point of all discrimination is simply the judgement, and the filthy slide into what we call “morality” from matters of other, discreet things, sexuality, race, gender, age, name it. Red headedness. It wouldn’t hurt, and it wouldn’t serve the dominants’ purposes to say, “you’re gay and that’s weird;” it’s always this “you’re wrong” business, the moral othering that makes things dangerous and awful, and it doesn’t matter to a bigot that I might be working hard at being the very best, most moral gay person I can be, making all the right choices.

It’s like when it comes down to it, morality isn’t about choices, isn’t about making moral choices at all, great swathes of humanity are just born “wrong,” to the very people who preach the most about moral choices.

Interesting to me, that again, as the having it easiest demographic there is, an old white male, that I too have suffered this disregard all my life, that there have been almost no-one that ever acknowledged my efforts to be a good fellow. Not saying “me too, I get it,” of course I’m still in the best possible position. My point as always, I think it’s science. That even the best role in this play comes with a large basic serving of bullshit and being hated, even the best served demographic doesn’t have to look far for a reason to be miserable.

This is a hair’s breadth away from white apologism, and I don’t want it to be, I want to say whites are dominant, in charge, causing all of the trouble and strife and we don’t even have the self defense excuse the racists pretend to, this is all our fault. All I want to add is, most whites are getting screwed over too, yes, even as we continue to screw everyone else around. We do not have some working, racist system where all the dominant race’s members are happy and free, and I don’t want one, of course. I’m just saying, this is not a system, as the trolls on Twitter might have you believe, that makes an entire race happy and free.

This is horrible for all but the .01%.

Most white folks are not with the racist cops, mostly, we too are terrified of them. As I said, social media might give you that awful impression, like all whites are happy with Trump, like it’s all white folks against you, of course it’s not, it’s just a few percent of us, against all of us poor folks, of every shade and sexuality. These are not democratic elections, half of no country ever votes for a plague, do they. Never mind the actual vote tallying, actual democracies do not exist awash in misinformation. Actual, human voters in Canada and America aren’t valid, informed voters, a prerequisite for group rule.

I’m trying for it not to be, it always seems to me that to talk about all of us is far more important than to talk about me, but this is very personal for me.

Like I say, I am not black, or female or any seriously persecuted sort of a person, but I have managed to get myself into that situation, where a life of moral strivings means exactly nothing to someone, to the few someones I dedicated my life to being good to, and looking back, maybe from all the ladies in my life ever. White as I am, I am starting to understand invisibility and erasure. Thirty years, entire human beings came into existence and lived lives, in my house, but not in my world, my good self had been erased before they were born.

There are lines not to cross so as not to incur any further abuse from the world, but there are lines that no amount of good behaviour can ever cross and when you “are” wrong, you can’t ever do anything right.

I can’t keep my blogs separate, it’s all one, humanity and me, we have the same problems.

It’s a little bit funny, out of my white guilt and the privilege I have enjoyed, failing upwards or level, I would say, like any white liberal/progressive that I join the disenfranchised voluntarily, that I defend the LGBTQ folks and all oppressed races and such, happily say it, join indeed on paper, in my writing . . . it’s my privileged chickens coming home to roost that the matter has sort of been taken out of my hands, that I stand now, thoroughly marginalized out of my own life.

Jeff

Dec. 28th., 2020

Primal Scream

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I know it’s infantile. This is not me, blindly immature, refusing to accept the fact of the world, it’s me, cognizantly immature . . . and refusing to accept the fact of the world.

I know it’s genderless (which, being fair, comes free with infantile) when I’m singing “I Feel the Earth Move.” That is not me, blindly in the closet, “accidentally” liking a female song, complete with the at the time most common euphemism for the female orgasm for a title and a chorus. That is me, acknowledging both women as well as my own feminine side – I know, I don’t look it while in my Dockers and band T-shirt, partially bearded. Having already lived a fairly full cis life and been driven mad with boredom by it, I’ve decided I belong with the freaks – no slight intended – but I’m sort of undemonstrative. The man costume doesn’t give exactly the right impression, but I’m trying not to be too hung up on costume and impressions. I always do something, weird haircut, some bright jacket no-one would touch, to give the clue.

These days, I’ve quit cutting my hair, I’m retired/unemployed, may as well let my freak flag fly, and it’s sort of genderless, long hair. I’m straight, I’m just not militant about it, genderless needs space.

I look pretty straight, if not at all tough. You’d think I have negative opinions about non-straight or non-white people, but I don’t, I so don’t. I’ve been bullied and terrorized by straight white males too, in my life that’s where all the trouble comes from too.

I expect I look more like a grownup than I feel also – but again, not blindly. Infantile is a conscious choice – I mean as well as a psychological disorder, it’s my disorder of choice, because “mature” means hard, mature means antisocial, mature means killed feelings and going about the business of killing things. You being mature means you do not care when I cry, or worse, you prefer that. You and me, Ma, still in that standoff, no I won’t fucking “self-soothe,” that is your job.

The crying will continue until treatment improves.

I know it’s still that baby cry I’m making every time I dissent, every time I fight something in life that most folks don’t object to – I know it internally, I mean every time I cry out, part of it is that I am still waiting for an answer to the first scream, that I look at it like if I never stop crying and if someone comes to see what’s wrong, ever, then I was heard eventually and not permanently ignored. I haven’t lost hope, you see, you all still have a chance to make this right! I mean, Mom’s gone, but you still can! Maybe you see this and think I don’t, but I see it:

I think growing up means giving up, of course I do.

Perhaps when I was young I had less of an idea of giving up on what exactly, but I think that what I’ve been  looking at, putting off, is giving up on is you, people. I suppose that was always it, but I’m here working through this because something has finally budged, something in this is moving for me a little and it’s not that I’m giving up now and the struggle is over, at least it doesn’t feel like that bad ending I’ve been fearing. Maybe I can give up without it being the end of the world, is what it’s whispering to me today.

Maybe writing y’all off isn’t the end. I’m still here, after all.

It’s a moral capitulation for me. I’m infantile, I know it, but I’m not a child. When I decide at nearly sixty that the rest of you are swine and not worth talking to until you prove otherwise, that is not going to pass as infantile, preverbal rage, is it? (Do you see it? I’d better cop first – I think that’s a lot of peoples’ true excuse for the same decision, that they made at the more appropriate time, like early childhood.) It was never my way to disregard someone, never the plan. I lived, heart on my sleeve, trying hard not to be defensively protecting myself from the people in my life, immediately either bringing them into my moral circle and trying to understand them or simply running away from them, not having them in my life. I don’t want to fight.

A lot of folks didn’t think so, because I like to talk and debate and philosophize and psychologize, but that is central to my dilemma here, I was treating them all as peers and equals and worth talking to and giving my honest thoughts and feelings . . . I think this is “regard,” me caring what you think, wanting to know what it is and sharing any information I think I have that I think you may not. I give any little wisdom I have away for free and if anyone would listen I would hold nothing back, talk myself straight out of a job, empty myself completely.

I wasn’t able to lie, protect myself that way, I was bad at keeping secrets, because I keep almost none of my own, I am always offering my privacy and my foibles in trade, hoping for some honesty and intimacy in return, TMI is my middle name. This I see as my function in the world, lead by example, be vulnerable, be embarrassed, don’t fear judgement and don’t judge, share the knowledge.

I lack boundaries.

But I find myself trying to remember if my honesty and humility ever did bring any reciprocation, and I can’t think of a single instance. I may have gotten a reputation for being “nice,” which in the words of Lone Watie, Chief Dan George’s character in the Outlaw Josey Wales, “I think it means we’re easy to sneak up on.” Beware of people who compliment you for simple honesty and then complain that you talk too much. Also old men who want to teach you the thing they could never learn!

That’s called “mansplaining,” a sub-category of the Dunning Kruger effect.

Sorry about that. Come back and read that to me tomorrow and every day for the rest of my life, would you mind?

Anyway, enough about my sainthood and how I can’t ever learn to hate, the point is, I think I may have found a way after all, I think I may finally see a crack in it, I think I may be able to separate things ever so slightly, have a boundary without having to start a war. I mean, not for what I would call a good reason, I just think I’ve finally been hurt enough to get it. This infantile, naive fearlessness crap will get you killed.

 

Jeff,

Feb. 22nd., 2020

Beyond Feminism

Jeff/neighsayer13 Comments

A land beyond feminism, somewhere over the rainbow, that’s where you’ll find me . . .

Kidding, of course.

I got into this in a recent one, the March of Science, I believe, about our human “meritocracies,” yes, sarcasm quotation marks. I am trying to make the point that despite human specialization and the existence of probably thousands of different human skills, there is mostly only one measure for competence in anything, and it is best summed up in the word “toughness.” Normal quotation marks.

I have made allusions at least, to the effect that this measure of violence, aggression and battle-competence colours many areas, and that it is basically another version of what feminists call the patriarchy. Not risking ant sort of quotation marks!

If we can break this down, just what is the patriarchy doing – violence, intimidation, mostly – well, rapists auto-selecting themselves for propagation also – then we have something we can work with, behaviours, education, laws, strategies. If we decide that’s just how men are – and basically allow us to let ourselves off the hook for it – then we are getting nowhere. Of course, nothing is “just how it is.”

I’m sorry.

I understand that every man you ever met was indeed like this. I understand that the only safe stance to have is that we are all like this and not be caught out alone. Of course I would never advise some stupid “trust us” line. We have to change. But that does mean people talking as though that were actually a thing, though, change. To say, “men gotta change” to fix things, and then turn around and say “but they can’t” is some awful bait and switch game that . . . well, how’s it working out so far? We’re not really telling the rapists no-one expects them to change, I hope? That doesn’t sound like the best idea, does it?

I mean if telling and expecting mean anything. That would be some form of nurture, I guess. If it does, then yes, this should be part of our nurturing, that rape has to be actually, functionally illegal!

Now, sex shouldn’t be illegal. Clearly, it’s the force, the intimidation, the stuff we cannot bring ourselves to outlaw about ourselves, gentlemen. That has to be wrong, actually wrong. Like, not, “OK, wrong, but we are your protectors, so you want this,” no, wrong, because this is what we need protection from! It is not better for your female friends, for your wife, mother, daughters, all of them, that a protector, “one of us” raped them and not some “other,” which is all this arrangement ensures, nothing but selecting our own criminals over criminals that belong to some “them.”

That sounds extreme in my dysphemistic way of talking but make no mistake: a common solution for in-group rape has always been marriage. The ladies hate it and rightly so, but apparently the people in charge think this is a preferable situation over women choosing their own lovers and so having the possibility of them choosing an other. In some places, the ladies who cannot tolerate this solution are killed – apparently the folks’ in charge’s less preferred “solution.”

Crimes are activities, not people. You have to agree, that if you use force, if you rape someone, that you should face the law. Do you?

Is whether or not you actually agree a matter of your father’s rapist or not genes?

Nature VS nurture again, really?

No, that wasn’t the point, right! Today’s topic is the ‘toughness is the only meritocracy’ meme. The patriarchy.

It’s exactly what the MRAs and the macho IDW types and the sexist children like Shapiro are stating is foundational, right? It’s also the unapologetic central meme of fascism, if you can, that is permission, might is right, and obviously, when you think that as a society, that’s what you get. But it’s exactly what I’m arguing about, it’s exactly what isn’t really true, at least not until some hammerhead points his gun at you and you must agree, yes, this mindless bullshit is true, not mentioning any names.

I understand we’ve had to abandon attempts at psychologizing our past selves because exactly these fools have commandeered the idea and turned into nothing but a simple machine game theory with no psychology provided or required, that we’ve had to cut off that arm of science to save the rest of the body. I finally get that, I am sorry if I sounded like I was on the wrong side of things. Honestly “evolutionary biological theory” is better anyway. I think somebody ran with calling it evolutionary “psychology” at the start with a view to removing it from science curricula and discrediting it and therefore science (I know, not intuitive, don’t believe me, but simply harping on the term “theory of evolution” has legs, so), generally, leveraging the division between “soft” and “hard” sciences, bring the biologists on board, but really as part of the general anti-intellectual, anti-science stuff. Then when these penis-centric idiots ran with it, everyone else let go and distanced themselves – with me last and lost, as usual.

Like I say, “evolutionary biological theory,” sounds better anyway, even if it does sort of imply the smaller version of “theory,” because in name or not, there is going to be a certain amount of psychology involved. We are trying to understand our clearly psychological selves.

Not a tangent. What I’m getting to is, it’s not foundational, toughness being all that matters and crime be damned, it’s a real part of the psychology, sure – but absolutely not foundational. It is a policy decision adopted to deal with foundational concerns, predation, group conflict, death, and this is exactly what policy is: a decision made earlier regarding foreseeable problems including basic ones, by the boss, maybe that’s you, maybe not – and a policy is not an environmental condition, not “foundational,” at least not to the boss. His option, your “foundation.” If you’re the boss, same – your option, that maybe you call your “foundation.” Policy, the prior decision, now the default stance, all meanings retained – a stance we took, a position we chose.

Choice. Now THAT sounds like psychology, doesn’t it?

This argument almost holds up for lions and tigers and bears, I mean couldn’t we just breed and run like everything else? But no, we wanted to settle down and hold our ground, surely there was a choice somewhere along that journey? But clearly when the threat is us that is our “foundation,” sorry, no choice? I am your threat, we have no choice? We’re back to nature and toxic game theory? No. That was a choice, right there, “I am your threat.” No, you could just run, like everything else. Usually I say “aggression” is a choice, a policy decision; same conversation – aggression is the name for a policy of fight over flight, so “having aggression” means you chose to have it.

This is the difference between natural disasters and human-made disasters: individually, we are as powerless against one as the other. But collectively, we cause one and not the other (OK, at least there are natural disasters we don’t cause, if not all of them).

Honestly, what good are nouns, attributes, “properties,” in Platonic terms?

Hey, there’s this problem I have, we can’t stop the violence. You want to figure that out for us?

Sure – ah, OK, here it is. See, what you got there is “aggression.”

Problem solved! I learned a new noun. Sorry – what was the problem again? Right, violence. And why? Right, aggression. OK, cool, here’s your money, thanks!

Say it again, add a word, can’t stop the male violence – see, what you got there is men.

Terrific, thanks again. The usual price? Automatic deposits alright?

You want to solve something, you look for thoughts, actions, something happening – a chance to possibly intervene. You want to protect something, it’s a noun: sorry, it exists. End of story. It’s another brick in the wall – “Men are aggressive, so you can’t have no rape! How can you have no rape if men are aggressive?”

Like I suggested earlier though, the hammerhead with the gun whose guiding light is violence, he creates this reality. If he and enough of his developmentally arrested friends decide that nothing else but toughness matters, then that signifies the peak of that civilization because almost every other skill humans have will have to be suppressed for the constant antisocialization required for the constant state of war that results. It’s a self-fulfilling policy that way – it’s true when they prove its true.

All I’m saying is, if we didn’t prove it, it wouldn’t be.

That’s our clue that we’re in social science territory, psychology territory, “truths” that must be proven constantly, minute by minute, these are only social truths, and that line is ruling all of our lives, always certainly, but today more clearly than ever, the rational versus the social. Perhaps all of our meritocracies are real, but only rational, and as such, taken with a large grain of salt, while the social meritocracies are few, but far more serious. I mean, sure ladies are clever enough to build you an atomic bomb – but are they crazy enough to deploy it? Or do the fairer sex simply lack the social skills for war?

If only male lions were aggressive, we would still find out how fast we can run every time we saw a cub or a lioness, because they all live together in social groups and the presence of cubs and lionesses means lions also and they would still be a species to avoid generally. Aggressive males means an aggressive species. I believe I’ve seen lionesses rejecting an incoming would-be alpha, I think if there are enough ladies in the pride, they get to select their males – and as things stand, the males are big, nasty bastards. That’s an aggressive species and if the ladies never let a claw out themselves, it would still be an aggressive species – which is maybe how this narrative about us is supposed to go, right? Aggression is the province of men, a property of maleness, not of humanness?

I suppose it would be completely true if all men are rapists, if a substantial portion of people are the children of rape, and so it is true to a degree, because there absolutely are rapists and their children. That’s a problem – I just worry it’s not the only problem, I worry, that not unlike the lions, when our ladies get a chance to practice some sexual selection, we still end up with big, nasty bastards (or little ones that make up for their size with extra nastiness). You don’t think? OK, here it is, at last.

The ’not all men’ urge was very strong with me, I got in trouble a few times on Twitter, trying to defend myself, trying to fight what I felt was the determinism in memes that say it is indeed all men, all men are rapists, all men supposedly agree with this latest disgusting ramping up of misogyny that came online along with Russia, and I lost, and I gave it up, telling myself it truly doesn’t matter if a few men abstain, does it, if they don’t or can’t stop it? But maybe I have a legitimate critique, the above thing:

When the problem is a noun, there is no solution, and no-one expects one, right?

If it’s “men,” all men, then what are we to do, eliminate them? So a feminism that actually believes in a solution, in  the possibility of change might not want to go with that, but the smart folks know that, it’s the other side of that coin that is pertinent today: evil trolls absolutely want that. Misogynist men absolutely want the problem to be a noun, even if that noun is them, because men are never going to implement a solution for that.

So stick to the script, behaviours, laws – rational things – and reject arguments about whole groups of people like “all men,” (and of course reject slander of more oppressed groups also) which is social and so serves the bad guys, who fear truth and rationality above all else.

 

 

 

 

Jeff

Oct. 27th., 2019

About the Abusive Ape Theory

Jeff/neighsayer3 Comments

That is not going to be the final name for this idea – but maybe. It does put me ahead of the Aquatic Ape Theory in the dictionary of good ideas that got ignored, so there’s that. The one I really like is Murphy’s Law of Nature, but I’m saving the filename and the title for when I finally get it down in a form that works for anybody. I still like Antisocialization Theory, too – I swear to you, this idea works in all jargons and disciplines, but the Abusive Ape Theory might be the label that most hints at the idea within.

Quite a few of the primates abuse each other, of course. I heard Sapolsky say he would never choose baboons for friends, that they are total jerks, and chimpanzees show the same sort of hierarchical structures with structured lines of abuse to match. Other social predators seem to do this, lions and hyenas and wolves – these self-abusing species are a fearsome list indeed! It may be too soon to suggest it about dolphins and crows perhaps, but there are hints that these creatures may have a dark side for one another too. I can’t speak to social insects, or fish, but folks are studying them, perhaps we will see. I think it’s safe to say that the species who treat one another with violence are not otherwise or generally docile, with the possible exception of the Tasmanian devil, which apparently when plucked from the melee for tagging and health checks by researchers are calm and easily handled. There’s always one, isn’t there? Well, scavengers, not predators, maybe, the devils, but there are probably some social hunters that break my rule.

I don’t care. Rules are rules, the fact that it is possible to break them doesn’t invalidate rules generally, despite what the NRA trolls would have us think. The rule: nasty, dangerous, aggressive social creatures are nasty, dangerous, and aggressive to each other, too.

It would appear the two go together in social animals, predation and abuse. Certainly they both employ the same skillsets and share many of the same rules, and fighting is fighting – and this is where the Abusive Ape Theory would like to direct your attention: abuse is not “prosocial behaviour practiced on in-group members” as opposed to the antisocial behaviours we use on the out-group. Abuse is antisocial behaviours practised on the in-group. Saying, “well, at least you’re not dead,” while it does make the experience of abuse sound relatively benign from some scientific distance, calling a beating “prosocial” is not explanatory. These are antisocial forces at play here.

This is an argument against any who still hold with ideas about group dynamics, that we treat the out-group and strangers badly and treat the in-group well – that is going too far. It may sound like opposites, but this is only a fixed disparity and not an inverse proportion. We treat the in-group badly and the out-group very badly – that is the truth of the function, and those two boats rise and fall together on the same tides. The harder things are at the border, the harder things are at home, and vice versa. This because as all of us good scientists know, this is not Psychology Today after all, there is no nurture; this because as we all know but somehow cannot process, there is abuse.

I expect this line of talk finds some resonance among the psychology-minded people – but I am coming to believe that the evolutionary scientists are blind to it. Punishment is a conscious selective pressure we apply to reach our conscious goals, they say, it wouldn’t be pressure if it didn’t hurt – but I don’t hear any more about the hurt, same as when talking to a parent about spanking. They only care when the hurt is avoided, when the deterrent works and the behaviour is modified – they can’t seem to care about the hurt. This is technology, applied science: the by-products do not interest them.

By-products like arsenic and carbon dioxide and pain.

It is exactly this non-caring that abuse has been proven repeatedly to produce, basically the most replicable finding in social science – blind to it, completely. I swear, I have asked a few real luminaries, famous science authors, what about the pain, the trauma, and they appear to not understand the question and direct me to read their explanations about modifying behaviour, like any hockey mom. We shouldn’t be allowed to do anything in the world until we’ve had our psychotherapy, and maybe especially we shouldn’t be allowed to direct humanity’s accumulation of knowledge, either as a parent, pundit, or world-changing scientist.

Really, we can bring this conversation right home, right back to the farm where we grew up or the one on television where we think we did, it’s a straight up, old time cliché gender role thing: Mom says you need to learn something, but when Dad is giving it to you in the woodshed, he confides that everything may not be not right about that, but that this will toughen you up.

From what I have been able to glean, biologists are on the Mom side of this ideological rift, behaviour regulation and ignoring the collateral damage, and I am your Dad, telling you the awful truth.

I won’t hit you, though!

Just because it’s the truth doesn’t mean I endorse it. Awful truths need to be changed or destroyed. As I told you all a few weeks ago, you are tough enough, by an order of magnitude. I don’t want to be thickening your calluses or pissing you off any further.

There is an irony, sort of, or it would be if that isn’t just exactly how these things work, that Mom is about the world of surfaces and things, conscious behaviours in this conversation, while Dad is about the psychology, the nurturing, the changing of personalities, whereas in an adult secular conversation we associate nurturing and psychology more with the ladies’ side of life and men with things, money, cars and footballs.

This, I guess, because among the uninitiated, there is nurture, so everything is backwards.

The Abusive Ape Theory is about your Dad’s truth, and it will take up between a quarter and a half of every pie chart showing our knowledge about ourselves, when we get one right, because, one more time, as I said a year ago in one of my favourites,

Abuse is in our DNA.

Maybe that’s the label I’m looking for.

 

 

Jeff

Feb. 15th., 2019

 

That old fave: https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/07/03/biology-buries-the-lead/

I know. I spelled it right in the text, LOL

People of Earth

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

We have to talk.

OK, I have to talk. You have to shut up, I heard you already.

Your friends don’t tell you to shut up, your friends support you, look after you, try to keep you feeling good about yourself. That is not me, I’m not like that. I’m not worried about your feelings. You can trust me to tell you the truth; I hate you. Now shut up and listen.

You’re tough enough.

You’re way too tough, you are ‘step across this line and I will destroy all life on this planet’ tough. You’re a mutant psychopath that hates the world of life that spawned it. You are Rand’s sick hero, destroying everything just to prove you don’t give a fuck, no-one can hurt you. When it’s all gone, perhaps someone will remain to admire what a tough, fearless motherfucker you were, but probably not. Maybe sometime long after, some alien archaeologist is going to remove his Tilley hat in respect and whisper, “these tough bastards didn’t back down, did they?” – but probably not.

You are tough enough, but in typical fashion, it’s never enough for you. Getting tougher is all you care about, toughness is the goal, if you can ever be tough enough, then you’ll be safe from all these other tough bastards – but you’re not one of them. For you, this is defense. You are a super tough moron, is the thing – but I’m not some elitist IQ fetishist, we’re going to try not to focus on your stupidity today, I think the two things are in direct proportion and if we can affect your obsession with strength and toughness, the other thing will improve too.

Just stop it already, the violence and the . . . worship of it.

If you’re not engaged in literal war, then it’s “sports,” which is not “metaphorical” war as we pretend, but actual war training, and the skillset is always toughness. Why the Hell would every schoolboy have to acquire football skills when they are mostly staying home working on the farm or spending their life in an office? Just in case something goes terribly wrong in world politics and a giant international football game breaks out, I suppose?

Every few years, some luminary makes a beautiful speech about peace, but all day every day, your son needs to be more aggressive about taking that quarterback the fuck out. All day long, kids nowadays don’t have it tough enough.

It’s the only game in town, I get that, I do. Your kid needs to be tough or he’ll be eaten alive, I know, I was one of you once.

You are the motherfuckers setting it up, and you don’t get that.

I know, we have to be tough because of the enemy, the Islamists, the Russians. I’m talking to all of them. You Islamist warriors, you Russian strategists, you Canadian hockey moms, I’m talking to you all. You are all tough enough, cut it out already. We all have to lay down our weapons at the same time, that’s how peace works, the rare, special times that it does.

Stop with the endless “strength” rhetoric, please. It’s like listening to Charlie Sheen wax on about the joys of cocaine and prostitution. You have a problem. A see it from space, life consuming and destroying problem, and it is the very “strength” and toughness that is the only solution you ever tried and the only thing you care about that is the problem.

We’ve quite given up, in case you thought anyone was working for world peace, no, that isn’t what’s happening. I mean some are, many wonderful organizations, but basically governments have settled into endless war. Man is aggressive, it is a good life if you don’t weaken, and there will always be someone starting trouble – war is an organizing principle for society . . . they hope to control it, they hope it doesn’t go to the nuclear winter, but basically, war is a part of human life. No serious person thinks that is going to change, I don’t think. I think we’re pretty sure détente is as good as it gets.

And for that, you have to be tough and ready, so in what should seem ironic to us but somehow does not, the only peace we are able to realistically imagine requires that we all can never be tough enough.

I’m not asking people to lay down their arms before an enemy that won’t reciprocate. I’m only asking that we continue the conversation, that just because there is always some swine who’s “heard enough talk” and starts shooting doesn’t mean that some of us can’t keep talking, try to work through to the next bit of logic: OK, so it’s not possible to disarm ourselves one at a time, then how is gradually disarming us all simultaneously going to work?

My first answer is, toughness needs to be taken off its stupid, brutal pedestal and seen for the necessary evil that it has always been. I mean, you look like such a moron, fawning over the type of hammerhead whose great skill is the ability to cut you down with a stroke of his sword. That sort of strength should be admired from a safe distance, like how we admire it in a bear or a lion, it shouldn’t be brought into our homes and nurtured.

 

Jeff,

Jan. 14th., 2019

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2019/02/04/people-of-earth-part-2-conservatism/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2019/02/06/people-of-earth-part-3-liberals/

Who I Am

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I’m a regular guy. I’m a middle-aged, recently retired white working guy in a stolen white country, like so many white folks in places outside of Europe. I got most of a basic public education, worked, married, had a couple of kids . . . and then lost my mind. You know the story . . . I became disillusioned, started spending a lot of time online, withdrew from social things. I became dependent on drugs, to the exclusion of all else. When my family tried to intervene, I chose the drugs and abandoned them.

I was abused as a child, so although it’s disappointing, it’s no surprise.

It was only a matter of time. It’s a good thing we parted ways when we did, because when a man unravels, bad things happen. I was going to put them all on the six o’clock news, and frankly, while the intensity of the original split has lessened, on some vector time and frustration only increase the pressure for guys like me to do something decisive and violent. It seems likely as not that when women push an escalating man away, it’s only a deferment, and some awful timer has been started.

True to form, I won’t get help, either. No-one thinks they are big and powerful and dangerous, or rather, the men that do feel in charge are even worse than guys like me, guys that don’t think they are. Of course, I think I’m the victim. Of course I think it’s everybody else that’s wrong, and if you think that, no-one can help you. Clearly, I do not want to be helped. So now my family is down a salary and dealing with the damage, while I’m online still, spreading my toxic message with the rest of the crazy boys, talking game theory. God knows the world needs more of guys like me, right?

This is me, apparently, the me that world can see, the me that the world will acknowledge, this is the me I must be if I wish to be seen.

 

Jeff,

Oct. 28th., 2018

Alpha-ism

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Damnit, America, actual elites are bad enough, you had to go and replace them with this gutter slime? That’s what was wrong with our overlords, they were just too damned nice and affiliative, right? Fuck Political Correctness?

I’m sorry. Twitter rage.

It’s all one.

The stolen presidency, the Russian influence on social media, the apparent ubiquity of men overstepping their bounds with women.

America had hypermasculinity before, but the myth of America, anything that was any good about America – it wasn’t this alpha-ism, this brutality that isn’t different from what it is among our primate cousins. The PR version, the face of America was of a benevolent beta, someone who stood as a bulwark against the knuckle dragging alphas of the world. America carried a big stick, but it spoke softly, and friendship and tolerance were possible, apparently achievable goals.

I said it in a tweet, yesterday or today, so I needed to flesh it out a bit: it wasn’t these hammerhead alphas that made humans what they are, that helped us dominate this world and create anything that may have been decent about people, and for evidence, I point to every other species, mammalian, primate, what have you, any species plagued by these alphas and ask you to show me how that caused them these huge brains and these skyscrapers. You wanna organize anything, you need to reign those random, self-serving idiots in, and somehow humans do that, sometimes. We’re evolved that these are our leaders, these alphas, and really, if one of them can get his paws on you, you’d better do as he says, but humankind has moved beyond that bit of our hardware. We know we need better than pre-tool alphas to lead us anywhere we want to go these days.

Except right here and now, in “the West,” apparently. I do think this alpha-ism is imported. I’m not very religious, but I’m a cultural Christian, and I do believe that if there were a Satan trying to lead us off of an eternal moral cliff, that he would play to men and their masculinity, that form of vanity – which, of course, the totalitarian dictates of bronze age warrior tribes naturally support whole-heartedly. So whole heartedly in fact, that modern ideas about statutory rape doesn’t seem to put a dent in it for a lot of people. So, this was the attempted message of my previous blog, that somehow a hundred people at least began to read:

Alphas are not leaders in today’s world.

Your sports heroes, movie heroes, mythological heroes – they have elements of the alpha, and that’s how our patriarchal leaders talk about it, but these heroes are all in combat situations, they are heroes because they win fights, now that is absolutely an alpha trait – this is what alphas do. You elect one of these, or a troop of idiots who think they’re all alphas – and they will take you straight into a fight. It’s the only place they look any good, and that’s all they care about.

Gonna end this one with a question:

Is that the way to divide our politics? Not so much Keynes VS Hayek or Marx VS Smith, but alphas VS betas?

That’s worth its own blog, I think.

 

Jeff

Nov. 24th, 2017

No Room in the Warrior Society

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. . . for a boy who won’t fight. I thought I read it in The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris, but I can’t find it. It may have been in one of some shorter papers I’ve read by her, or one of Steven Pinker’s books, I’ll keep looking, but it was in one of those very popular science books, so the idea is out there. If it was in anything I’ve read, then it wasn’t one of those author’s own papers originally . . . I’ll have to find it to cite it, won’t I? Anyhow, I think the story was in support of the Nurture Assumption’s main idea, that parents do not create child culture, and she describes how in some straight-up forest warrior society, that warrior training occurs in boyhood and timid, won’t fight sorts of boys are abused and goaded into fighting. Those that never do, in this group, according to these anthropologists – Mead? The Yanomamo? – those that never return the blows, are killed as the logical end of the process of fighting them to make them fight. I believe it was the author’s punch line I’m paraphrasing in my opening. No room for weak links, we might need you some day.

Not that I think it would have helped, but I wish I’d had a man around to tell me that fifty-some years ago. Between that and a little info on inherent family conflicts, maybe I would have had a chance not to believe everything Momma tol’ me.

I’ve been a good boy, tried hard and mostly succeeded, but by women’s standards, abused women’s standards. In the boys’ culture of game theory, in the warrior society where I’m supposed to be a man, I am useless. I mean, I passed the tests, the boys’ tests, when I was little, I was a fearless little Irish terror for a while there, but that ended at the beginning of puberty, apparently. The fights I got into after I was twelve or so, I never had any interest in, and I talked the fellow down when I could and avoided him if it seemed like the encounter was destined to imprint the warrior life on my pretty young face. I absolutely let fear rule my life, I switched high schools once and wound up giving up school entirely after that. There were other reasons, but that was absolutely one of them. I just realized something.

I never fantasized winning the fights I avoided.

I mean, I fantasize fight situations, I’m a man, I run little simulations, I tell myself that if some badass walked in my door to do me in, that I would have a chance, a plan – but I don’t think I have ever had a daydream where I won a fight against these bullies from my life. Realism may be a factor, I really had zero chance, size, experience, and everything else would have been a hundred to one sort of a thing. My only chance would have been to surprise them with a knife or something, and even then, size and experience. Plus, these dudes guaranteed had switchblades of their own – and experience. But to never fantasize a thing like that? My gonads aren’t working, right? I lived in terror, changed my life – but I wouldn’t want the fight even if I knew I could win it. It’s not like I’ve been going around getting into fights I think I can win either! Are we there yet?

No room for me in this world, is what I’m saying. No room for a man who won’t be a man. Maybe I was nine or ten when I stopped fighting, it was one my childhood experiments, I guess I thought I’d try to unload on someone.

There was this Zeta (I better look that up too) juvenile male, the one everybody seemed to unload on, it seemed that everyone beat this kid, I don’t know why, but he was my age, nine, ten, and he looked like The Battler already, anything that was going to flatten out or break on Rodney’s face already was, you know? This is certainly an unfair characterization; it’s a childhood memory and I know I’m using Rodney now for my own ends. I’m sorry, Rod, if you’re still out there. All I really remember is his wide forehead and hard, sharp nose – he kept his chin tucked, I guess. I’m not happy with my impulse in this story, all I can say is, I’m happy it only happened once.

I decided I would unload on this kid, that I would give beating someone up a try, see if I liked it or something. I don’t think I thought “unload” at the time, that’s how I see it now, having taken from schooling from the Master of Stress, Dr. Robert Sapolsky. I found him after school or something, cornered him and started throwing punches at him, hurting my hands on him and then I just had this WTF am I doing moment right in the middle of it and I stopped, apologized, told him I had no idea why I was doing it and I think I promised him he’d have no more to worry about from me. I think I also realized at that moment that he was five times tougher than me, and to this day I count myself very lucky he didn’t turn the fight around and give me the stomping I deserved.

It looks like deep wisdom to me now, Rodney, you schooled me, let he who is without sin, kind of thing. You were a huge influence on my mind and my life – is it Brown, Rodney Brown? White guy, Mount Pleasant Elementary, around 1970? I was a fledgling bully for a second there, and my first victim was an experienced one, a goddam expert. Maybe I’m giving too much credit, but the last guy in the world who had any obligation to be modelling peace for anybody accepted my apology and that was the end of it, which, in hindsight was Mandela-esque. I don’t know how life’s been or if you’re still out there, but you sure did right by me, even if I’m romanticizing your agency in the matter. You probably had fighting back thoroughly beaten out of you, no doubt what made you so attractive as a victim, right?

You hear that? Me, thanking Rodney and the Academy for my pacifism?

Truth to tell, I lost track a little there, memories intruding; I was supposed to be complaining about my low-T, not bragging, but that’s it, isn’t it? I’m talking about the downsides of my own attitudes. I have a low testosterone attitude, and proud as I may be of it, society doesn’t reward that sort of thing – just abused terrified women like to encourage that sort of thing, for obvious, understandable sorts of reasons, that don’t help me in my situation at all. So here I am today, with a fuzzy, half-formed consciousness of the origin of my passivity, and I know it exists for someone else’s survival strategy and is almost certainly detrimental to my own, meaning my morality is the morality provided for me by abused and fearful women, it’s all based on the idea that men are beasts or something and all their desires should be denied, me and mine expressly included – what are my options?

I’ve said it before: I looked at something I oughtn’t to have. Having questioned punishing, and so force and dominance, all of that, I don’t really think I have the option of just changing my mind, I mean it’s not a change of mind, it’s a learning thing. I am not going to just start trying to dominate anyone (sorry – it’s coming up soon, I mean I can’t start exercising any traditional male power in my family now, having never done so before. I found myself with no place in my female household, and standing up and demanding one wasn’t going to get me one the same way just complaining and asking didn’t), bring the people around me around to my way of thinking, like some young man who simply believes in himself, simply believes he deserves to and should dominate anyone. Even if I need some control to mitigate my own stress, even so, my having some share of dominance may be a biological need for me, I have seen the downside of that sort of attitude in the world, and it is no longer available to me. It always comes back to Bluebeard for me, you’ll never get any killin’ done if you go around thinking all the time – this is a piece of social sort of advice that I simply cannot take. I assume Sapolsky has come to the same conclusion, he seems to be a genuine fellow, despite of, or because of his revelation that he and all his famous professor author peers are alpha types.

In practical terms, it means the MRAs and the howl at the moon sorts of men’s retreats are exactly the opposite of what I’m looking for, save your invitations to the brotherhood. More importantly in my personal life, because those guys are not going to be part of it, it means I didn’t and can’t sit my girls down and tell them how it is going to be, I cannot make anything happen, despite that it seems to mean that the right thing isn’t happening, despite that all our lives are destroyed because an adult has supported a child’s decision rather than making an adult one themselves. I know I’m talking about both of my kids’ parents, I know it was an immature sort of decision of mine to abstain from my male power, a shirking of the responsibility for that power . . . should I have been normal? Should I have dominated my girls, which is normal, to make sure something like this could never happen to me, that I would get voted off the island and my kids would somehow have been used to do it? You know what it means, right?

Maybe my kid would have been domesticated, maybe when her teen conflict came up, she’d have toed the line and submitted, stayed home and in school – and maybe not. How much of the choice I didn’t make is right and proper and works for our goals, and how many of those folks’ kids simply move out into poverty? In those terms, I can’t and couldn’t make a different decision either. I had given up the option to act like a man and put my foot down about anything at the start of the child-rearing experience. That wasn’t going to be a solution at this late juncture, in fact, the girls all seemed to think that’s what I was doing already, or that I was getting ready to, and so any manly thing I might attempt would only prove their case; I did raise my voice a few times and it was over, they feared things were going to get worse and they had me leave, “to get better and then come back.” They’ve made it clear that they feel my attempts to communicate with them as manipulative and aggressive, so for me to prove I’m not trying to hurt them, I am left only the option of never speaking to them again – and I am very committed to proving it to them, so there we are. I love you girls, and to prove it, I’m going to do what you say and take half our money and leave forever.

(To my mind, that is sort of the fatal, mountain to climb to forgive sort of a sin, that they cut off communication with me. It was clear to me immediately that both there was nothing to “get better and go back” to, I’d given away my spot and my voice was forbidden, and that “getting better” from this, being abandoned by the family during a breakdown, wasn’t the most likely outcome. I begged them on this basis, to deaf ears. I know, they were scared, and if I have to tell you that knowing it was their fear, my wife’s fear that was the matter helped me not a fucking bit, then welcome to the second level of the conversation. You may defer to her fears if you wish, they have nearly killed me, and the outcome is not yet assured.)

I’m not looking for sympathy and I’m not trying to recruit anyone to my side of my divorce fight, I’m only laying it out to demonstrate what happens to a man who won’t play the dominance game, a man who recuses himself of authority, a boy who doesn’t fight. OK, there is something under my skin. We’re invisible too, boys who don’t fight. Life sucks for us because we are like Pit Bulls, it’s not what we do, it’s what we can do – I recused myself from the rewards that a strong man receives, but recusing one’s self from the liabilities, that doesn’t seem to be in my power. My soon to be ex-wife never seems to have understood or believed me that that is what I am, despite that I am the only man she ever heard of who wouldn’t so much as “pat a kid on the bum,” as they say.

All men must be treated as armed and dangerous, we must all be muzzled, apparently, and a life of good behaviour doesn’t change that. I gave it up for nothing, a liberal principle, and my daughters are as fearful of men as they were evolved to be, as though I had beaten them spare. There is a whole lot more to it, mostly just more reasons why they couldn’t have felt otherwise and maybe more of me saying I couldn’t have thought otherwise, a lot of reasons why I need to find a new way forward. Men are indeed dangerous and I worry that by responding to my ouster with passivity and obedience, I am teaching my girls a lesson that will get them hurt the next time they attempt it with some more regular fellow. It was an experiment, my life. It was looking like a spectacular success until suddenly it was over.

I hope the results can help someone someday, because the cost of this experiment was the quality of life for all of us.

 

 

 

Jeff

September 15th., 2017

Familiarity Breeds Blindness – When We Can’t See the Concepts for the Words

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It’s a sad thing when words lose their power, when we have lived with them for so long that we’re no longer impressed by the things they signify. I think it was when I was reading “Midnight’s Children,” (set in India) when I was shocked, first by the expression ‘sister-sleeper’ and then in “White Tiger” when it was the stronger ‘sisterfucker’ and I realized that our version, ‘motherfucker’ had lost its punch, that I was no longer feeling the image it evokes. I started saying and writing what I think of as the Indian version in order to take advantage of its freshness and power. (Interestingly, my Canadian Microsoft Word is also accustomed to the mother version, but is flagging the sister version for a spell check.)

Show a man a photoshopped picture of himself in coitus with his own mother and he’ll react – but the word for him in that image just means somewhere between ‘dude’ and ‘swine’ these days, at least for some of us. ‘Sisterfucker’ isn’t a more disturbing concept, it was just unfamiliar to me, so my mind looked at it a little closer, and the image was a nasty surprise. I must have quit paying attention to what ‘motherfucker’ means. Now, in case anybody’s concerned that I’m switching gears, don’t worry. Here it comes.

I re-posted one of my older child-rearing, anti-punishment blogs on another site and it started a few conversations with a few people, a man or two and some ladies, some mothers. The conversation came around to my controversial stance that ‘corporal punishment’ is a misleading phrase, that in fact (‘fact’ to me at least), without a willingness to get physical there can be no punishments. Hold on –

early on while writing my blogs and my book on the subject, I looked up ‘punishment’ to get a somewhat official definition. The dictionary ones were pretty straightforward, but the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy went on for many pages. What I came up with, in the shortest form, is that punishment is the imposition of an aversive in order to lessen an unwanted behaviour. ‘Aversive’ means an unwanted stimulus, a term I usually change to ‘unpleasantness,’ and ‘imposition’ means to put something on someone without any condition as to whether they want it or not. So a punishment is something you don’t want and is put on you without your consent, in order to change an unwanted behaviour of yours.

That, just in case ‘punishment’ is a word that we don’t examine anymore, just in case we’ve forgotten the meaning or never really heard it in the first place –

So I spent a few comments trying to convince some people that all punishments depend on force, that their children weren’t likely to have been taking their non-corporal timeouts and such from a place of willing agreement, that their kids probably had learned, either the hard way or by inference, that the non-corporal punishment wasn’t going to be optional, that if they didn’t take it, it would wind up being forced upon them, that the punishment would escalate.

I’m trying not to generalize about gender here, but interestingly, among these very few people in the discussion, the most vocal man made no bones about it. Damned straight, was his attitude, a good smack will put them right. Kids don’t understand talking; that is what they understand.

The ladies, though, they didn’t believe in hitting or corporal punishment, and while they did believe in punishment, they insisted they didn’t back it up with force. Trying to make my point, I asked repeatedly if their punishments were optional, if there was any way the punishment wasn’t going to happen, or if it was going to happen by hook or by crook. One of the ladies assured me that it wasn’t optional, that if the child simply walked away from his or her timeout, that she would simply bring the child back to it, as many times as it took. I didn’t argue that ‘bringing the child back’ was a physical act, and I didn’t ask how forcefully it might have to be done if the child was stubborn about it, although these are certainly important parts of the puzzle for me. I just asked again, if it’s not optional, then the parent is going to make it happen by whatever means necessary, right?

One answer struck me as pretty schizoid, but maybe it’s just this language thing, maybe the words in the response had been said so often that the meaning had been lost: in an answer that said ‘punishments are not all backed up physically’ someone said something like ‘of course you have to follow through.’ Now that last phrase is familiar indeed, ubiquitous even – we all know it. But unexamined it must be, because otherwise how can someone say ‘of course you have to follow through’ and feel it is somehow a contradiction to ‘I am willing to do whatever it takes to make this happen?’ So that’s what’s happening, I think, when I try to make this point, it’s the same as my opening example, like we hear the deadly, incest accusation of ‘motherfucker’ all day long, and it’s all in fun, harmless, like a friendly ‘cabron’ between pals, but when I say that all punishments are backed up with force . . .

well it’s like I said ‘sisterfucker’ loudly during a moment of quiet at a church barbeque. Shock and horror. The deer-in-headlights blank stares of the good peoples’ moral indignation.

So I’m the bad guy. All right, I’ll play that role, I’ll crash your barbeque – what time again? Oh right, I remember. It’s always happening.

A Conflicted Society – Rape, Part #3 – Yes Means Yes

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I’m examining a few aspects of rape in this series. I know that rape is to a great extent a violent crime and not so much a sexual one, and I do try to deconstruct the roots of violence generally elsewhere, particularly in a series titled “It All Starts . . .” but I am focussing on the sexual elements of rape in these posts, because it seems to be the sexual aspects that make rape so much less prosecutable than other violent crimes.

Here’s the first posts:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/12/09/a-conflicted-society-rape-1/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2015/01/17/a-conflicted-society-part-4-rape-part-2/

I think this, from Part #2 needs some development:

“My advice: let’s make our lives more conscious, let’s drag sex out into the light. Maybe we lose some of the excitement, some of the mystery, but maybe we also lose some of the rape.”

That sounded good to me – I mean I love the sound of my own voice. If no-one else reads me, I will – but it needs a little more detail to be of any use, so here goes. No means no, of course it does, but if it can also mean ‘yes,’ then that could be part of the problem. Yes, I’m going there. This series is getting progressively less PC. I’m sorry, but if you have reason to feel that the politically correct voices on this subject have it all under control and that this problem is close to being solved, you’d better share it with me. Otherwise, I’m just going to push on. (Good Lord that sounded bad! No evil pun intended, really. Those things keep cropping up, and I’m sorry.)

I don’t think I’ve ever pursued a girl in order to bed her, I don’t think I ever tried to talk a girl into bed, sold myself to a girl – that always seemed humiliating to me. I guess I was lucky, I looked good enough as a young man that there were partners often enough without me having to work for it. I think I’ve had sex with maybe ten girls and women, I mean, I had some lonely years too, when I was no fun and the girls seemed to sense it. If my confidence was abysmal then, I suppose it was never high enough to pursue a girl and risk the rejection. The girlfriends and liaisons I had when young always came about through mutual attraction, naturally – well, I guess a few of the girls pursued and bedded me. (Life sucks – and then you die!) Those relationships didn’t last long; I couldn’t hide my indifference, I guess. But I’m a freak and that’s not the game as we all know it, is it?

The game is, or has been, boys chase and girls choose.

Right?

And Good Girls Don’t, right, so a girl isn’t supposed to say ‘yes’ right away . . . Good girls don’t. That idea is still out there, and it’s part of the problem. The boy is supposed to work for it. I hate to tell you, folks, and it’s a good thing I have no reputation to lose, but unfortunately, that situation, – the State of the Union, if you will – means that sometimes ‘no’ means ‘yes.’ If we can’t see how that is a part of this complex problem, then God help us. Why the male players in the game like this arrangement, I can’t say with any certainty, I personally don’t like it, but maybe it is a natural thing, the aggressiveness of testosterone, the thrill of conquest, or maybe it’s a less natural, more modern, psychological power game, and probably also things I have no idea about. As for women, well, same sort of thing I suppose, a natural priority women place on their desirability, or perhaps some less natural function . . . of course, also, any number of things I don’t understand. I’ll swallow my ego and try to face the possibility that such things exist.

Of course, those possible factors, natural and possibly unnatural power dynamics, for both genders exist on a continuum the far right end of which means rape and the rape culture. If being an object of desire has a positive feeling, if it’s an ego boost (which, I know, ladies, it is if the fellow is attractive enough, not so much if he’s not), and if the uptick in our self-esteem produces a feeling of well-being, perhaps this leads to sexual and/or emotional arousal. Or maybe just the presence of another person’s desire creates some arousal, maybe a pheromone thing. Honestly, that’s my theory, really basic:

Sex is sexy, desire is sexy, simple like that. Another person’s desire is a turn on. Referring back to Part #2 again: this is probably why rape is possible without injury. Carried to an extreme, if another person’s desire can create our arousal, then perhaps there are times when another person’s extreme desire, a desire so strong it will not be denied, can produce a strong response, the sort that makes reporting a rape and believing the victim, uh . . . problematic. Come on – if this stuff was simple, we’d have solved it already. Right?

Oh, I’ve lost track. All of the preceding two paragraphs belong in Part #2. Where was I?

Oh, yes. No means No. I’ll just skip to the end.

The thing is, in the culture of Good Girls Don’t, when a girl knows she’s supposed make the boys work for it or risk being labelled, reviled and ostracized as a ‘slut,’ there really isn’t always the ‘yes’ option for a Good Girl, is there? Fine to say ‘no’ means ‘no,’ but that’s a bit of a setup when there can be no ‘yes.’ I mean, when ‘yes’ is not an available option in the real world, we have left ‘no’ to mean both ‘no’ and also ‘yes.’ That is a foundational element of the rape culture. So here’s my idea.

First, as a child of the sixties, I can’t believe I have to say this, I thought we’d had the sexual revolution already, but the more things change, the more they stay the same: sex is not evil. Rape is, because it’s violent, but unforced sex is natural and normal. This is clearly true, and people should remember it when they’re dealing with their own and other peoples’ sex lives, in their real lives. This is what we should teach our children, and slut-shaming should be a thing of the past.

So, ladies, here’s the thing: say ‘yes’ when you want to have sex. Break out of that bind, reject the idea that good girls don’t. Clearly, good girls do, everybody does. Learn to say yes. I’m not saying fuck every guy who asks. I’m just saying say ‘yes’ to the guys you do have sex with. That would clear things up immensely, and could make some progress for us all in the fight against rape and the rape culture. Now a word for the boys.

When you’re trying to bed some girl, maybe it’s a pick-up scenario, maybe it’s a love story, whatever. If the girls says ‘no,’ let it be no. I mean of course, when it’s really ‘no,’ it means ‘no,’ all the anti-rape folks will tell you that, ‘no’ means ‘no,’ damned straight, but the other times. When it’s the game, when she just feels she must make you work for it . . . hold her to it. Just walk away. It could really mean ‘no’ of course, so leave her alone, but, and here’s the thing: if she’s bluffing, call it, call that bluff and walk away. We have an opportunity to help these ladies break out of the Good Girls Don’t bind, to set our ladies free. We can help bring them out of the game that supports the rape culture and into a more honest life.

We can let them know that if they want it, they must say so. Of course, it’s normal and natural to say yes. Our ladies need to know that, and they need to do that.

It’s good for us, too, fellas. I think we’d all want to know when we’re wanted, wouldn’t we? Are we beasts? Are we happy to leave every sexual encounter not knowing if the girl really wanted us? Well, we can usually know their bodies wanted us, I suppose – but wouldn’t it be nice to know that they wanted us consciously? That they knew that they wanted us?

If that seems like a stretch, at least we possibly agree that shining a light on our sex lives in this way could go a long way in making a net increase in the honesty in all our lives, and so, again, create a dwindling habitat for the scourge of rape.