Falseness

The messages our culture sends about female sexuality are a mess.  In large part they are completely wrong, and they almost universally assume that our cultural norms are universal instead of arbitrary.  For example, the idea that straight women just want a man who is a good provider, steady, and reliable while straight men want a woman who is young and attractive is wildly off base.  Women aren't really in it for the sex, we often hear, they just put up with the sex in order to get the other benefits of relationships like security and support.

I bought into these stereotypes when I was young.  They came cloaked in 'science' and a Darwinian understanding of nature.

But then I had sex with a bunch of women, and talked with a bunch of women, and noted that these stereotypes did not well explain the women who were desperately horny, the women who had male partners who weren't interested in sex, and the women who wanted all kinds of wild, kinky sexy stuff that had nothing to do with safety or sustenance.

Plenty of women want sex, (though obviously some do not, which is true of any and all genders) and the myth that women are mostly asexual is just another consequence of patriarchy.

I read Untrue recently and it ably covered the reasons to think that women's sexuality is wildly misunderstood, and happily smashed most of the standard stereotypes to bits.

Wednesday Martin attacks the issue from multiple angles.  She includes lots of science and interviews with experts to bolster her credentials but also talks about her personal experiences with infidelity and desire.  She goes to polyamory conferences to discuss open relationships, attends sex parties for mostly straight women who want to try out sex with women, and otherwise pushes her own boundaries surrounding her monogamous commitment to her husband.

One of the core theories in the book is the idea that the plough and how its development and use affected women's sexual liberation and general autonomy.  It turns out that societies that used ploughs relegated women to a much lower status that societies that did not, probably because of the high upper body strength requirements and issues with child rearing that came along with use of the plough.  The issue is probably more complicated than Martin makes it out to be, but I completely buy into the general thesis that specific styles of agriculture changed society in ways that were bad for women and the problems that those styles of agriculture created remain tenacious to this day.

If you are interested in understanding the history of women's sexuality and examining what science tells us about it, I highly recommend this book.  It is accessible and easy to read while be well researched and informative.  I like the line it walks between trying to be fun and provocative while being strict about the truth.

There is one thing that bothered me though, and it isn't specific to Untrue.  So often in conversations about relationships and sexuality people seem desperate to bring primate behaviour into the mix.  We seem to need to talk about bonobos and their orgies, bisexuality, and promiscuity to justify such behaviours in humans.  A large part of Untrue is dedicated to studies of primate behaviour that strongly support the idea that female sexuality in other species is NOT passive, straight, monogamous, or secondary to male sexuality.  However, this whole thing about primates is just a diversion from the key facts:

1.  Humans having relationship structures that aren't straight, monogamous, or vanilla isn't a problem for other people.

2.  People doing stuff that isn't a problem for other people should be left to do their stuff without interference or harassment.

We don't need to justify our relationships or sexuality by proving it is 'natural' because other primates do it.  We don't need to prove that we aren't the only species that wants to do all these things, because even if we were the only species that had orgies or queer sexualities it would still be fine for us to do it.

If some fool tries to tell people that women shouldn't be promiscuous because females don't do that in nature you can be all scientific and tell them 'LOL wrong!' or you can just circumvent that argument entirely and say 'so the fuck what?'  It is false, but even if it were true it wouldn't be relevant.

It is all well and good to study primates, but let us not think that we need primate behaviour to tell us how we ought to treat one another, or what the range of acceptable human behaviour should be.

Down low evil

I went to vote today in Toronto's municipal election.  There are times when I vote and I am excited, thinking that the person I am voting for might win, that change might be in the air.

Not so today.

John Tory is the mayor of Toronto, and as of this morning he was polling at 60%, with his nearest opponent polling at 30%.  You can see that there isn't a lot left for anyone else, so I have no doubt that Tory will be the mayor of Toronto again, despite the fact that I did not vote for him.

I can't tell whether Tory is an improvement over his predecessor.  The previous mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, was an international laughingstock - the crack smokin' mayor of Toronto.  He was a jackass, a buffoon, and a terrible mayor.

Tory isn't an international laughingstock.  He is bland, boring, and if a person could be beige in character, Tory is.  When asked to reveal a secret about himself, he responded that he had played trumpet in a band in his early years.

Trumpet.  How... exciting.

Tory has plenty of terrible policies, but he knows how to mutter platitudes and be inoffensive.  It seems like a huge upgrade over Ford's endless disaster, but I can't help but wonder if that is true.  Ford got sidelined in council and largely ignored, but Tory has managed to keep lots of people on his side and I have no doubt that he is being effective.  Unfortunately for the people of Toronto he is being effective in the traditional conservative fashion - push to solve problems by lowering taxes and hiring police.

Ford made progressives like me sad in a bright, savage way.  We were so upset by his blatant evil that we tripped over ourselves trying to hate him more than the next person.  The sadness Tory brings is a trembling, grinding sadness.  A sense that his kind of terrible governance is inevitable, unstoppable.  We can't rally the middle against him because he is careful to not upset them.  Ford could be easily called a disgrace, but that is a harder word to stick to Tory, no matter how much you might believe it.

The world does continue to get better.  I believe that, without doubt.  But I can't help but be discouraged that Tory is able to so easily get by simply by virtue of not being anywhere near as offensive as the previous mayor.  I wish the bar were higher than that.

A taste of the high life

I have always thought of personal trainers as one of those things that rich people do.  A luxury mostly afforded by celebrities and CEOs with lots of cash and no time.  Certainly a thing I would never have for myself.

Yesterday I had a session with a personal trainer for the first time and I gotta say I understand the appeal.

I didn't actually pay for it, of course.  I haven't suddenly become the sort of person that spends money for luxuries!  Last year at a charity auction I found a workout package that had a bunch of stuff in it that I wanted, and along with it came 3 personal training sessions.  The whole thing cost about the amount I would pay just for the physical objects normally, so I bought it and I finally got around to using the training just this week.

This first workout left me really sore.  There are multiple reasons, but high on the list is that I push myself harder when there is someone else around to see.  I don't want to be that sort of person, but I have to admit that I slack off a little when it is just me around.  I cap out at 31 pushups on my own, but when the trainer told me to do pushups so he could check my form I cranked out 35 - social pressure is a force to be reckoned with.

It wasn't purely social though.  The trainer got me to do exercises in ways that I am not used to and his way of doing things burned my muscles a whole lot more than my way.  Instead of just yanking the weights through the distance with my arms he got me using my whole body.  I am sure that doing it his way is a far better workout long term because everything we did used a whole variety of muscles and burned me down in places I am not used to feeling it.

I like this whole personal trainer thing!  I don't need it for the motivation to get into the gym, that part I have nailed down.  But the motivation to do all the exercises properly, to keep my form on point, this is a useful thing for me.  When I am alone I just get the reps done rather than take the extra mental effort to constantly evaluate exactly *how* I am getting the reps done.

I have often said that if I won a lot of money I wouldn't know how to spend it usefully.  I suppose that is slightly less true now - if I suddenly got rich, I think occasional personal training lessons would be great.

But I am not rich.  So until that changes I will just take my lessons when they are free.

Never ever enough

Round numbers have a lot of appeal.  I imbue them with extra importance in my workout regimen, and big numbers divisible by ten somehow become gateways to greatness, benchmarks that will tell me when I am finally strong and powerful.

That feeling of hitting a new benchmark is great, but it never lasts.

I have been doing sets of 28 pushups for most of this year, from about April to August.  I realized that I had gotten in a rut and I decided to increase my frequency from working out 2 out of every 3 days to working out every day at the start of September.  At the start of October I increased all my rep counts by 10%, which put my pushups to 31 per set.

For so long I recall distinctly the idea in my head that 30 pushups a set is the amount a strong person would do.  When I got there, I thought, I would finally be big and strong and powerful.  That first set of 31 felt great, and there was a rush of triumph and a sense of real progress.  Two days later I went back to the gym and did 31 again, and my brain told me that seriously strong people do 40 pushups.  Maybe someday I would get there, but for now, I am not strong.

Talk about moving the goalposts!  I barely got 2 days of satisfaction and exhilaration at my progress and I was back to striving for another completely arbitrary goal.

This is just the way I am it would seem.  No matter the strength, no matter the size, I feel skinny.  I see muscular men out in the world and wish I had arms like they do.  Hell, I probably do have arms like many of them, but I just can't see it.

I knew all of this ahead of time.  This isn't the first time I have noted that my self perception doesn't change with my body, and my ideal appearance is unobtainable.  What surprised me was just how *fast* that transformation from celebration to inadequacy happened.  I figured I would get at least a couple of weeks of good feelings!

Working out is good for me though.  I need exercise and this is the only regimen that has ever stuck.  I am sure that working out hard has improved my mood and longevity, even though those changes are things I can't see or measure.  Given that, I might as well think of my neverending, unquenchable need for progress as a useful tool for getting me into the gym day after day.  It is foolish and puts my irrationality front and centre, but it does make my life better, so I might as well run with it.

Serious Medicine

I was at a marijuana dispensary earlier this week, and what I saw there amused me to no end.  I wasn't actually buying MJ myself, just accompanying someone else to get her own supply.  I was under the impression, prior to going, that dispensaries were regulated and serious, supplying medicine to people who needed it.  Also they were clearly just selling to anyone who wanted to pay.  However, I expected some sort of cursory screening process and at least a pretense of officialness.

I didn't even get a pretense.

The dispensary had a board of daily specials.  Now I may not be any kind of medical expert, but I feel like daily special such as "Hash Wednesdays!" aren't quite selling the 'serious medicine' thing.  Nor was the plate of cookies, the trance music, or the checkout clerk vaping in the corner.

I don't mind any of that of course.  MJ shouldn't be illegal and there is no compelling reason why people should have to jump through crazy hoops to get it.  It should be sold with just as much hucksterism as anything else.

But that contrast between the fact that MJ is clearly being sold as a recreational drug and the official line that it is still illegal here is staggering.  The government is maintaining the line that MJ is dangerous and that it is under control so that all the pearl clutchers can stop worrying about reefer madness while at the same time officials basically ignore MJ being sold openly.  We have this foolish, destructive, hypocritical system that can't decide if MJ should just be lightly regulated and otherwise ignored (it should be) or if it is a dangerous drug that has to be kept away from people no matter the cost.

A week from now MJ will become legal here.  We will finally be able to use it without worrying that we will be tossed in jail, our lives torched in order to prevent us from feeling sleepy and snacky.  Naturally the government is rolling this out in a completely idiotic way, using a single government supplier that won't even have any brick and mortar locations in the beginning.  The lack of competition in supply and the lack of freedom of purchasing means that people will continue to buy from illegal sources, funnelling money into organized crime.

Legalization is a good first step, but the Ontario government is still proceeding as if they can prevent MJ usage by simply making production by the private sector illegal.  A cursory examination of any part of human history can teach us that this is foolish in the extreme.

There are a lot of things that the free market is bad at, but providing MJ is one of the things it would actually be good at.  Tight fisted government control just makes things worse.

At least there is some measure of progress, and in a week I can wander down to my local dispensary and fill out an official looking form to buy my weed without worrying about being imprisoned for my troubles.  That much, at least, is looking up.

Sexy education

Homeschooling requires you to teach all kinds of things.  With so many subjects and so many topics, what to do first?

Why, sex ed, of course.  Otherwise I wouldn't be me.

This year I am teaching Pinkie Pie at home.  It is a difficult transition for us, but we are slowly getting geared up.  Since sex ed was the first thing on the agenda I decided I should split it into two parts:  Sex for making babies, and sex for fun.  You have to have both things, I think, and the school system currently swings way too far towards sex ed as being reproductive biology and attempts to scare kids into never having sex.

I talked about all the basic biology stuff in day 1, covering menstruation and puberty and how babies grow from conception to birth.  Pinkie Pie was fascinated and *horrified* at the videos of sperm I showed her on Youtube.  The idea that she might someday have such tiny creatures thrashing and swarming inside her was nothing short of terrifying.

Which honestly is a pretty reasonable response.  I mean, if I wasn't completely used to the idea by now it strikes me as the sort of thing that would give me shudders.  

Sex for fun was actually harder for her though, I think.  She gets the idea of needing to know about biology and reproduction, but she isn't the least bit interested in sex or love or relationships.  It surely made her twitch to see her dear ole dad talking about masturbation and sex as a way to bond and express love and even *ewww* talking about the various ways that people have sex.

Parents are supposed to be sexless, passionless automatons, who somehow received children through a sterile, scientific process!  This whole mess of emotions and bodily fluids, yuck.

It went well, I think.

One thing I read recently on the topic of sex ed really depressed me.  It was talking about how people study sex ed and what sorts of science we have done on the topic.  The takeaway is this:  People want to understand what sex ed is good and bad and how we should approach it, but the only thing we have studied is how effective various sex ed types are at preventing STIs, babies, and sexual frequency.  The entire thing we are doing with science presupposes that our only goal is to keep teenagers from bangin' each other.

That shouldn't be the only goal!  Preventing STI transmission and teenage pregnancy are fine goals, sure, but the real thing we should be aiming for is how to promote healthy relationships and satisfying sex lives.  We should try to make sure kids grow up with the tools they need to have the sex the want, and avoid the sex they don't want.  Big picture, we want them to be happy, not celibate.

But it is hard to measure happiness like that.  It is easy to measure number of sex partners or STI treatments or abortions, so we go and measure that.  Unfortunately people then try to pretend that this stuff we are measuring is a perfect representation of the success of sex ed, when they should instead acknowledge that a big part of what we are trying to do can't be easily measured.

Using what we can measure as a metric for success is a problem all over, but I think it is acute in the case of sex ed.  Unfortunately I don't have much in the way of easy solutions.

The luckiest man alive

At a wedding this past weekend I had some interesting times trying to explain my relationships to people.  You see, I took my girlfriend to my wife's exhusband's wedding.  Like a lot of my current relationship status it makes perfect sense when you look at how it came about, but the one sentence summary boggles people's minds.

I ended up talking about that with a couple of different people at the wedding and I got the usual sorts of reactions.  Some assumed they had misheard and couldn't believe what was going on.  Some pretended to be okay with it but had no idea what to say.  Others leapt to conclusions that just aren't true.  The last one decided I must be some kind of superhero with magical powers of seduction.

The reactions to my polyamorous relationship web are massively charged with gendered assumptions.  People don't suddenly think "Wow, Sky's wife and girlfriend and other lovers are super lucky!"  They always leap to "Wow, Sky is the luckiest bastard alive!"  I can only assume a lot of them are assuming I have done something nefarious to manage to be in this situation.  What they don't do is assume that the other people I am involved with have much in the way of agency, or that they get anything out of it.

It just always seems to revolve around the expectation that the men involved in open relationships finally get to bang whoever they like, and the women put up with it for some inexplicable reason.  Obviously this stuff comes from common social assumptions about men and women, it isn't a mystery, but every time it smacks me in the face I get grumpy and try to push back against it.  I know lots of women who are in relationships where they want all the sex and their partners do not, and they struggle mightily with their desires to have more partners or more variety.  The baseline cultural assumption that they *don't* want those things also makes it extra hard.

The reaction that an open relationship is a windfall for me but a burden to the women I am involved with at the moment makes me angry.  It takes away agency from them and makes me out to be someone who is just taking advantage.  It puts me at the centre of it all, and my partners on the periphery.

I want my relationships, no matter the structure, to be something that works for everyone and makes all the participants happy.  It is important to me that the way I structure how I live is desired for everyone, not a burden to be borne because of the inevitability of my wandering eye.

I don't want to be seen as that lucky bastard who sold a bunch of women into grudging acceptance of his unending lust.  I want to be seen as a guy who works hard to make his relationships bring happiness to everyone involved, no matter if that means being conventional or not.

Just one more reason to storm the barricades yelling "Down with the patriarchy!" as if I needed more reasons for that.

A red wedding

This weekend I was at Full Throttle's wedding.  It was an odd thing, because he got married ten years ago, but only now decided to actually do the whole ceremony and party bit.  I struggled some with it because it was in a church and I had lots of internal issues with the religious and gender based stuff in a wedding I went to during the summer, and I did not want to run the God gauntlet again.

It is a tricky beast.  I don't want to tell other people how to live, or what sorts of ceremonies they should have to mark their important moments.  I also don't want to sit in a religious service silently seething at the ways it cements and supports entrenched sexist norms.

I ended up just skipping the ceremony and going to the reception.  I could have easily made up any number of lies to get out of going to the ceremony but I felt like I had to pick one thing or the other:  Either Full Throttle is someone I am close to, or he is not.  If he is someone I am close to, I should tell the truth about having problems with the venue and composition of the ceremony.  What possible good is being close to a person if you have to lie to them about things that are important to you? 

On the other hand if he isn't important to me and thus lying becomes more palatable, then why go to the wedding at all?  It makes no sense, to me at least, to go to a wedding if you don't care about the people getting married.

The wedding was Game of Thrones themed.  There were lots of swords for decoration and the music constantly had me imagining tiny cogs and wheels.  Part of that theme was the 'get the couple to kiss' rules, which were that you had to fight and win a duel with a plastic sword, and each victor of a duel had to take the couple's cause in the next duel.

A chance to make an ass of myself in public *and* fight with a sword at the same time?  Sign me up!

Iolo and I decided that we, as the groom's gamer nerd buddies, needed to break the system.  Iolo fought the first duel against the head table, so he ended up becoming the next champion.  I challenged him, and he simply held his blades aside so I could whack him gently and defeat him, forcing the couple to kiss.  This made me the new champion, and while Iolo could simply have challenged me and had me concede we decided that we had already broken the system this way once - no need to do it again.

The next way to break the system was for me to go up and challenge again, while I was still the champion.  I would have to fight myself, and I could just whack myself with the sword, and both win and lose at the same time!  I would both have to retire as champion and be the next champion, so I can only assume this would have spawned a singularity and swallowed up the earth had I done it, but before I put this plan into action I was challenged by somebody else.

Unfortunately this challenge did not go well for me and I lost, getting stabbed savagely in the stomach.  It turns out that plastic swords can do little damage with a slash, but a stab in a vulnerable region is quite another thing entirely.  I was in a lot of pain immediately, and even three days later my stomach is still hurting.  I don't think I have any permanent damage, but it is not comfortable.

This strikes me as quite appropriate.  Much of my relationship with Full Throttle was about playing football in university, and we played full tackle without any protective gear.  I spent many a day limping about, barely able to move after savage hits in our games.  That I would be injured at a Game of Thrones wedding, with Full Throttle as the groom, feels entirely appropriate.