Fancy boots

When I buy clothes I don't buy fancy things.  I buy something solid, sturdy, but cheap.  I always thought it absurd to pay a lot of money for clothes, because why spend cash just to put on a display?  Being dressed up and being around people who are wearing expensive things makes me feel out of place, so I would rather avoid situations where that is required.

A few years ago Wendy bought boots.  It was quite odd, because she brought me with her and got my opinion on the colour and fit, but then asked me to hang out outside the store while she paid for them.  I wasn't sure why, until she explained that she wanted to buy them before I looked at the price and had a heart attack over it.  Blundstones are excellent boots, she told me, but the $250 price tag would have made me weep.

I wouldn't try to talk her out of buying such a thing, but I definitely would have choked and sputtered when I first saw the tag, that much is certain.  Spending more than $70 on boots?  Madness!

But recently my inlaws told me they wanted to buy me boots for Christmas.  My old boots were perfectly fine still, as they only had a couple of 5cm holes in them, but other people have different standards than me, I guess.  I know they would prefer I buy something of high quality and damn the expense, so I went out and dropped a giant pile of money on boots.  It made me twitch a little, slapping down my credit card, but I did it.

For the first time ever I am wearing fashionable boots in winter.  Aside from dress shoes for work and formal events I have never actually worn footwear that I would consider stylish, but now it is happening on a daily basis.

Perhaps these things aren't stylish where you are, or maybe they aren't practical, but in Toronto in the winter these boots are where it is at.  You need a little bit of insulation for the 0 degree weather, and you need them to be waterproof for the slush, but you don't need gigantic boots that go up to the knee either, we don't have enough snow for that.  These boots are exactly it, good looking, trendy, and completely practical.

I have even gotten reactions to them from other people.  Those reactions have all been "Dude, you paid real money for clothes?  What has happened to the Sky I know that wears all cheap stuff all the time?"

It is bizarre to be walking down the street knowing that some people would look at the stuff I am wearing and think that I am the sort of person that buys things because they are a symbol.  It is like I am some sort of different person entirely.  Who is this man?

There is a Sam Vimes theory of boots that says that you need to buy expensive boots because they will cost four times as much but last ten times as long as the cheap ones.  So far Wendy's boots have stood up extremely well, so the theory is working for the moment.  Perhaps I have been foolish all these years, buying cheap stuff that only lasted me five years and these new boots will last me twenty years and be worth every penny.

Perhaps not.

In any case I am going to wear them until they are a pile of leather scraps, because I certainly don't want to buy a second quality pair of boots in my lifetime.  One should do!

To cheat, or not

I recently joined a facebook group called polyamory memes.  Mostly it is a bunch of people sharing meme pictures about how the world doesn't understand their relationships.  I get it, but I am ruthless about pruning my facebook feed until only the best stuff remains, so I will probably leave the group again shortly.

Today though there was a post there which got me thinking.

“Watching porn isn’t chea-“

Cheating is anything against the rules those in the relationship agreed to. In some relationships, porn is cheating. In some relationships, getting triple penetrated by strangers in a truck stop bathroom is totally ok.

The dishonesty and disrespect for your partner’s boundaries is what defines cheating. Not a list of actions."

Obviously the comments were a mess of people arguing for and against this position.  I think that this particular disagreement, like many disagreements, quickly falls apart once you correctly unpack the details.

People can have whatever agreements they want.  Certainly if you and your partner agree that watching porn is cheating, then for you, it is.  Fine.  Most of the time this is done for ridiculous reasons that reinforce sex negative cultural norms, but some people obviously have fair reasons for this sort of restriction.  Personally I would laugh at anyone who planned on policing my porn watching or masturbatory habits, but you do you.

The key is that when people say porn isn't cheating, they aren't generally talking about a relationship where one person lays out early that they have huge issues with porn, and can't abide a partner that watches it.  When people say porn isn't cheating, they mean that it shouldn't be taken as automatically cheating in the absence of a specific discussion on the matter.  Mostly the exact details of what constitutes cheating in a given relationship are never discussed.  Both people assume that the 'triple penetration in a truck stop by total strangers' scenario would be cheating, and that having sexual thoughts about someone other than your partner is not cheating, but many of the details in between are undefined.

'Watching porn isn't cheating' is designed for the situation where two people get together, don't talk about their expectations or limits, become exclusive, and then get to arguing about what their agreements should have been, long after those agreements were already in place.  In that situation people should not assume that porn is cheating - you have to define that specifically.  You should not, three years into an exclusive relatinship, tell your partner that by the way, you define porn as cheating, and if they watch it, they are cheating.  You have to get that kind of thing on the table right away.

Of course we should get all of our stuff on the table in a hurry.  We should discuss monogamy or not, kink or not, 24/7 D/s or not, tickling feet or not, and all the other dealbreakers we have before anybody commits to a relatinship in a serious way.  

What we should be saying, rather than 'Watching porn isn't cheating' is 'No one gets to claim their partner is cheating or otherwise violating their trust just for watching porn unless that person agreed not to and violated that agreement.'  

It is absurd and destructive to decide that your personal relationship boundaries are going to be written simply by following cultural norms.  You can do better than that!  But if you are going to follow cultural norms and refuse to think for yourself, then don't go into a relationship and assume you can use that as leverage to prevent a partner from watching porn unless you get their enthusiastic buy in at the start.  (Even if you do get said buy in, get ready to be disappointed when they break that rule anyway.)

In the absence of a detailed discussion, porn should not be assumed to be cheating.  You should have that detailed discussion though, no matter what your expectations are.  If you then prohibit your partner from cheating and they accept that, ethically you are in a fine place, but you should definitely plan on what to do when they go ahead and break that rule anyhow.

Lastly, if you are going to rail against something on the internet, try not to strawman quite so hard, mkay?

A conflict of trains of thought

I am watching.

When I am on the streetcar here in Toronto I can't help but watch people board to see if they paid their fare.  Mostly they do, but there are a significant number who simply walk past the pad and don't tap a card.

Some are under 13 and are free anyway.

Some have already paid on another leg of their route and don't need to pay again.

Some are just refusing to pay and cheating the system.

It bothers me to see this, but I can't look away.  I haven't ever done anything about it, because obviously I can't distinguish between the people who are transferring from another route and those who are refusing to pay, but it irks me and I can't help but leaping to conclusions. 

Doubly frustrating is that I halfways agree with those who are skipping out on paying.  Public transit costing money is stupid.  We waste huge amounts of money just collecting that money.  Installing card readers, taking payments, having people standing around to explain how to pay, all of these things aren't free.  We should just tax more and make all public transit free!  Why did we start wasting so much time and effort collecting tiny fees for this anyway?  We don't do so for roads!

I know why.  The poor can't be allowed to just get things for free!  Roads are for those with more wealth, public transit is for the poor, and giving the poor a free ride is anathema.  Rich people already have it easy, might as well keep on with that. 

We have bus fares because of classism, pure and simple.

(If you have been around here a while, you will note that "Because classism, obviously!" is my answer to most things.)

I do think that while we are all generally paying for transit you should pay for transit.  Dumping costs onto other people is a shitty thing to do, especially if paying those costs isn't a serious burden for you.  But I can't help but hope that the new system is a step on the slow road to getting rid of paying for public transit altogether.

I will definitely continue hoping and advocating for free public transit.  Yes, it will cost me in taxes, and yes, I will happily pay those taxes to avoid the waste that comes with collecting tiny fees.  But in the meanwhile I will keep watching to see who pays and who doesn't.  Not because I should, but because I can't stop.

Ratchet up the intolerance

Recently I stumbled upon a fascinating little bit of writing that got me riled up about relationship anarchy.  The piece I read is a summary of things that happened at a relationship anarchy conference.  For years I have identified myself as polyamorous, and while that is still technically correct, it isn't the best possible descriptor of how I view relationships.  Relationship anarchy is definitely a better box for me to be in.  Polyamory, in the sense of multiple loves, is definitely true... but it also doesn't cover just how much I want to change the way people do relationships.

I don't buy into everything the document says.  The writers have lots of views on economics that can be charitably viewed as highly optimistic, or realistically viewed as naive and absurd.  However, their views on the way monogamy is intertwined with consumerism, colonialism, and religious oppression are right on the mark.

As the years have gone by my attitude towards monogamy has continually shifted.  Initially I saw it as the only way to be, then as the most practical way to be, then as the easy default.  Eventually I stopped doing monogamy and I saw it as not my style, then as a troublesome concern, then as a disaster.  These days I largely see monogamy as simply wrong.

Don't misunderstand - I don't think anybody needs to love or have sex with lots of people.  Any number of partners is fine, from zero to all.  The problem is forcing someone else to have a specific number of partners.  The older I get the more angry and intolerant I get of doing that to anyone.

I have said it before and I will probably say it again - if you told someone they were not allowed to have other friends, or other relatives, or other people that have any sort of relationship, you would be widely viewed as abusive, delusional, evil, or all three.  The same would be true if a friend insisted that they had the right to dictate how many romantic/sexual partners you have.  Certainly people would agree that such demands should be ignored.  But society does the opposite for romantic/sexual relationships, for no good reason.  We by default grant one person power that nobody should have, and imagine that it is not only acceptable, but even necessary or virtuous.

There are reasons monogamy is so popular.  It is because the *&$@?* christian churches controlled Europe while Europe colonized and controlled most of the world.  The church wanted to make sure that the only way people could relate romantically or sexually was with one man owning one woman in a structure *controlled by the church*, and its influence on powerful states covered the world in a wretched pall, removing freedom and flexibility in pursuit of misogynistic ownership of humans.

That isn't a good reason.

Pushing back against this is fraught with issues.  There are all kinds of people I like who are monogamous, and I risk alienating them when I rant against their lifestyle choices.

But that worry is losing out to the worry that I might be wasting my opportunity to do the right thing.  I might be placating the monster when I ought to be taking up arms against it.  I have 45 years left in me, roughly speaking, and I don't want to get to the end of that and look back thinking that I didn't speak the truth.

I don't usually like the plans the anarchists come up with.  I do like their principles though, and placidly plodding along, accepting the status quo as inevitable though not ideal does not fit with those principles.

There are people out there who are going to be smacking their foreheads, thinking "Geez, he is going to get even more confrontational and nonconformist?" 

Yes.  Yes I am.

Maids and cooks and chauffeurs for all

The internet has been shovelling ads at me for food delivery.  Uber Eats and Skip the Dishes in particular have paid Google a small fortune to try to get me to buy food on the internet and have it delivered.

It is all a scam, a show, a grandoise lie.

These companies want me to believe that I can have servants.  I don't have to do the dishes, cook food, or drive.  Best of all, this is all extremely cheap!  It is almost too good to be true.

It is too good to be true.

I can have servants, yes.  I can get food delivered to me, I can have people show up to drive me places, and I can skip on the whole 'paying for it' bit.  But somebody always pays, and in this case it is the people doing those deliveries and driving those cars.

Notice how no company is offering food delivery services where employees that get a salary, benefits, and vacation do deliveries using company vehicles?  Know why that is?  Because no customers will pay the cost associated with such deliveries.

People doing these deliveries are doing so out of desperation or ignorance.  The amount they get paid isn't nearly enough to pay for the costs of car maintenance, gas, and a reasonable wage.  They get an hourly wage that works for now, and then they get hit with all the bills later, and the companies that hired them get rich off of the depreciation of the workers' assets.

If you think food delivery can profitably happen for $5, you are delusional.  Companies aren't offering that because they are efficient, they are offering that because they are ruining the lives of the gig workers who do the actual deliveries for them.  This isn't a company coming in to do things better, it is just another scam to siphon money off from those who are desperate and funnel it upwards.

What Uber and Skip the Dishes and Lyft are doing is simple.  They aren't employers paying people to deliver a service, they are banks offering loans to poor people at heinous rates.  They are doing the same thing as Cash Money and Money Mart and other similar payday loan businesses do - finding someone who is desperate for cash right now and leveraging them for profit.  They ruin people.  That is the *only* way their business model works.  If you had to pay the real cost of your Uber ride you wouldn't do it, and old style taxis would come back into vogue.  If you had to front the actual cost of your food delivery you wouldn't bother because it would cost as much for the delivery as it did for the food.

We can't all have servants.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to exploit you, or the servants.

You actually have to cook.  Or you have to drive.  Or you have to fucking *pay* for those things.  If the deal seems to good to be true, it is.