Among Us

This is post 3 in my Coming Out series.

When I first started realizing that I was pan/bi/queer I wanted to write about it immediately.  I process feelings best by putting them down in text, particularly when I am shipping them out to the world.  However, I decided that I shouldn't make a big coming out post until I had actually, you know, had sex with a man.

I should make sure I actually know what I am talking about before I go and make a big scene about it, or so went the thinking at the time.

Trouble is, I started thinking about how I would go about having a first time, and that was stressful and felt bad.  It didn't seem like the right thing to do for some reason.

While I was wrestling with the right way to approach this situation I ended up watching the queer musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  When the movie ended I was awash in tears, struggling to contain the emotions swirling within me.  The base emotion was all about the queer men in the show, feeling connected to their story and struggle, feeling their fear and joy.

That base emotion led to a further emotion of tremendous vulnerability.  Now I have a trait that can reduce me to tears effortlessly, and make me weak to attack.  Now I can be more easily hurt, but honestly I am not worried about people coming after me for being queer.  What hit me hardest was that people could use that as a lever against those I protect.  A cornerstone of my identity is myself as guardian of those I love, and the feeling that now I am worse at that because of my vulnerability was a tough thing to cope with.  My loved ones deserve an invincible juggernaut holding the line, not a weepy mess.

I knew this vulnerability existed before, for other people.  I could have described it clearly.  There is a big difference between *knowing* a thing and *feeling* a thing though, no doubt about that.  I have spent my life having so much privilege, and having some of it suddenly vanish was quite a thing to adjust to.

The next feeling in the cascade was a terrible case of impostor syndrome.  Why do I deserve to claim this identity at all?  I haven't actually gone out and had sex with a man, I haven't been discriminated against because of queerness, how can I be having all these feelings when I don't really belong?  I felt like a ridiculous fraud, trying to be in a space I had no business occupying.

This feeling makes no sense logically.  When I was 19 I had never touched a woman in a sexual fashion, but I sure as hell knew I wanted to have sex with Gillian Anderson.  (Scully from the XFiles).  I didn't need to have sex with her to be sure!  I have friends who are bi/pan/queer who have only had sex with one sex/gender and I certainly accept their identity, because you don't have to have sex to have the attraction.  If someone tells me their orientation I accept it, I don't ask for pics as proof.

So why do I have such a harsh standard for myself, when I would never apply it to anyone else?  I know what I want and who I am, and that is all that is required.

Of course I can determine logically that my feelings are irrational, but that isn't exactly a ticket to not having feelings anymore.

What I can do though is decide that I should write a coming out post regardless of what I have or have not touched.  I can proclaim an identity that I couldn't prove in a court of law, but which I know to be valid and true.  I can also just accept that there is no need to rush, no benchmark that must be met.  I can run out and get it on if I want, or I can wait five years for just the right man to show up and rock my world.

I don't know where the path leads, but I am on it, 'qualified' or not.  Here I go. 

Words are hard

This is part 2 of my series of posts where I came out as bi/pan/queer.  Describing what happened to me is weird and complicated and language does not do a great job of letting me say what I mean.  Note here that when I say attracted in this post I mean sexually, not platonically / aesthetically or otherwise.

The most obvious example is that I now describe myself as bisexual because I started being attracted to men.  Seems fairly obvious, but men refers to a gender, and gender has never been a thing that affected my attractions.  For a while I have used Christina Hendricks (a curvy, conventionally attractive actress) as my model of the physical ideal, in terms of my attraction.  If she asked me for sex I would sure say yes, and if she followed up with 'also, I am a man' I would say 'sure thing sir, shall we smash genitals then?'  Pronouns, clothes, roles, performance, all that stuff that is part of gender simply doesn't register.  Bodies, on the other hand, do.

Okay, so I could say instead that I wasn't attracted to males, and now I am.  Still, then we run into the problem that I don't mean XY chromosomes, because I don't know anybody's chromosomes, and I don't mean what gender someone was assigned at birth, because that doesn't matter to me.  How a person appears now matters, but how they appeared in the past isn't a factor.  Sex and gender are complicated, and while they have a bimodal distribution, they sure aren't binary.

To be actually precise I would have said in the past that my attraction was strongly oriented towards people that have the set of physical secondary sex characteristics common in female humans.  That doesn't exactly roll off the tongue though, and I am sure some people would find it offensive that I reduce my attractions to simple body parts.  Clearly there is a lot more to it than that, as the brain is always the sexiest thing.

So this helps some in describing what changes have occurred in me.  Nowadays I could say that there are still bodies I am attracted to and others I am not so much, but the ones I am into don't conveniently correlate with biological sex or gender.

All this mess and struggle is why I aesthetically like queer as a descriptor.  It says I don't roll the way the standard man does, which is true, but it doesn't make any attempt to narrow it down.

On the other hand, the word bisexual gives the average person a pretty accurate picture of what I am like.  It just has all this stupid baggage that irritates me.

I am attracted to some humans and not others.  There are patterns in who I am attracted to, but those patterns are complicated and finicky and I don't even know what they are, not really.  English (and every other language, I think) simply doesn't handle that stuff well at all.  Each attraction is different, and so maybe I need a word for each one, which obviously is stupid and impossible.

The key takeaway here is that every time I use a word for an orientation, gender, or set of characteristics you can be sure there is a whole blog post of backstory and clarification behind it, and I just can't possibly fit all that stuff in.  I want to communicate, and English is the tool I have, so I am going to try to do communication with it, even when it is messy and wrong.  I really want a society where gender and sex and orientation just aren't a big deal so if our words are slightly inaccurate that doesn't matter much.  I want them to be like colours - sure, 'dark blue' isn't super accurate, but mostly we get what it means, so whatever, no problem.

That isn't the society we live in now though, so for the moment I am stuck obsessing over terminology surrounding attraction and knowing that no matter which thing I choose it is going to be wrong somehow.  There is no right answer, no matter how hard I look.  I know what I like, I just don't know how to tell people what that is!

Crooked

In August 2023 something new happened to my brain.  I felt it clearly, and described it as 'A key turning in a lock, and a door opening'.  I felt a clear image of a door slowly rumbling open, looking like a tomb door in an Indiana Jones movie.  I could feel the dust shaking down, and just barely begin to see through the crack... and what I saw behind the door was pretty gay.  Not gay as a perjorative, but gay as in 'Damn, men are *cute* now!'

I have always been straight.  I tried a few experiments with men over the years, admittedly fairly modest experiments, and the result was simply 'meh'.  It wasn't objectionable, it just didn't have the magic.  I have liked the idea of being bisexual / pansexual / queer for a long time, but my instinctive reactions just didn't do the thing.  I figured that is just how I am, the way I got built.  You can be as comfortable with skydiving as you want, but if you feel bored when you jump, find a new hobby.

Over August and September I consciously felt my brain rewriting itself, smashing old pathways down and opening up new ones.  Every week I felt more comfort with attractions to men, more desire to try that out, and identified more with queer men in media.

I haven't even acted on this yet in any physical way, and yet I am organizing queer musical nights, watching Elton John biopics, and then deciding I *have* to get myself some of those clothes.

I have also felt my emotions changing.  For many months now I have been more overtly emotional, more easily brought to tears from shows or speeches, and regularly overwhelmed just by thinking about things in my life that used to be no big deal.  It isn't that I am unhappy, far from it, just that the highs are higher and the lows are lower.  I suppose that might not be linked to the sudden change in orientation, but the timing certainly looks suspicious.

What I haven't done is stopped being interested in women.  I haven't suddenly gone full gay, I just flipped over the menu and saw some great new stuff on the back I never knew about before.

The thing I really want to know is why this happened now.  I have been thinking hard about the various things that happened to me over the past year, and there are a few candidates for causes, but the evidence is circumstantial at best.  I got a rainbow tattoo, at the time as a show of solidarity to the queer people in my life.  I painted the fence of my house rainbow for the same reasons.

That painting job was neat in that the children seeing it loved it, and most of the adults thought it was cute... but a couple adults saw the rainbow and absolutely lit up with joy.  You sure could tell the adults who were queer and got hit right in the feelings.

But none of that is a cause for a brain rewrite.  I just don't know why this happened, and I don't know why it happened now.  I was raised in a homophobic era, with the AIDS epidemic combining with regular old bigotry to make 'that's gay' the standard default insult.  My family was comfortable with touch and accepting of differences, but the kids at school and media at large told me the rule is:  You don't touch another man except with a closed fist, you don't talk about feelings, and you don't ever admit you might be attracted to a man.  Even if you get good messaging at home, that sort of thing leaves marks, and maybe it just took me 30 years to tear those walls down.

Again though, that is an explanation, but there is no proof.

One thing I think about is how my story feels different than most I have heard.  Mostly the story I have heard is 'I knew I liked women, but I couldn't really admit it to myself, and definitely couldn't admit it to others'.  My story doesn't sound like that.  I was straight until I wasn't.  That doesn't make it wrong or anything, just different.

I also didn't hesitate to write a coming out post, even though I haven't actually done anything measureable yet.  Several people who are close to me couldn't quite puzzle through why I would do this.  They don't think I should lie or anything, they just didn't understand why it was anyone else's business.  Nobody should care, and I don't owe the public anything, basically.

I have two reasons for writing this.  The first is my desire to set an example.  Every person who comes out makes it incrementally easier for the next people to do so.  Every example of living loud and proud removes a small burden from those who wish to follow that path.  I don't claim that everyone is obligated to be out - it is a personal choice for each of us.  I, however, have partners who love me, family and friends who accept me either way, and security from the rest of the world.  If anyone should be out, I should be first in line.

The second is that I only want people in my life who know me.  I want to spend my time with those who know all of me and love what they see.  If someone doesn't want to be with a queer man, then I absolutely want them to go away.  I think many people are afraid that is they come out, their friends will go away.  I, on the other hand, am afraid that if I don't come out I will spend time around people who don't like the person I am.  I want to live openly and truthfully, and I know there are people that will want to be with me as I am.

Words can be tricky.  Bisexual is the most accurate, clear term.  Pansexual is pretty similar, but less well known.  Queer has a lot of aesthetic appeal, but lacks precision.  I figure I will use them all depending on the circumstance.

I intend to write more posts about this.  There have been some powerful emotional moments over the past few months and I want to talk about them.  Also this transition has given me new insight that I want to share.  I do hope that the renovations in my brain slow down a bit though - it has been a lot these last couple months.

Algorithms for horny middle aged men

Facebook has been sending me friend suggestions for lots of 20 something women.  It also sends me friend suggestions for other types of people, but I noticed many months ago that this demographic made up a big chunk of my suggestions so I paid close attention to see if it continued.  After monitoring it for a half year or so I can safely say that 75% of my friend suggestions are adult women much younger than me.  A few were sex workers or scammers, but the majority of them were real people with one or two friends in common with me.  

Facebook's motivation for doing this seems obvious; get the middle aged straight guy to click on profiles of young women he wants to have sex with and increase engagement metrics.  However, that might be me leaping to conclusions.  Maybe Facebook just sends young women to everyone in friend suggestions... I don't know.

If my initial assumption holds true, then it is a sad thing indeed.  Getting messaged and friended by some older man who just wants sex is not something younger women on social media want or need.  They can get an infinite supply of that trivially, if they are interested - they can even get paid.  It seems like Facebook is trying to get me to engage more by encouraging crappy behaviour.

However, I would like to be sure that this is what is happening.  The four things that leap out to me that may be relevant are age, gender, sexual orientation, and relationship style.  Is this limited to men, middle aged people, straight people, or polyamorous people?  Perhaps some combination of all of the above.  Certainly Facebook knows I am in a relationship with a woman who is nine years younger than me as well as my spouse and perhaps that influences the algorithm's choices.

I would appreciate anyone replying here or on Facebook with your experiences in this.  Ideally include age, gender, orientation, and polyamorous or not, but if you don't want to include any of that just knowing if you have similar experiences to me would be useful.

I must find out the nature of our code overlords, and what they want they think of me.

Number Five

Planning orgies in Ontario just got a lot more complicated.  They aren't the easiest thing to plan at the best of times, but right now the challenge is extreme.

The government just announced that gatherings of more than five people are banned.  This leaves the door open for orgies, but just barely.  Three people is a threesome, four is a foursome, and five or more is an orgy, so orgies are still just barely legal.

There are some tricks to this though.  If you invite exactly five people to your orgy you have the problem that if anybody ditches you don't have an orgy anymore.  You might still have a grand time, but an orgy it is not.  During the best of times getting everyone to show up to an orgy is rough, and right now it is extra difficult between covid-19 and anxiety about covid-19.  Invite seven people and you might still not have enough, but if they all show up you are breaking the law, to say nothing of being extreme disease vectors.

However, we can get creative.  Hitting exactly five for an orgy is tough, but there are some exceptions in the government's five person policy that could potentially get us a venue for a larger group without breaking the law.

We could, for example, hold an orgy with up to ten people at a funeral.  I met The Flautist at a funeral so you can definitely pick up in that atmosphere.  A funeral orgy would require some real planning, but the flexibility to invite ten people and still proceed even if some of them decide to just mourn instead of have sex is useful.

Another exception we could use is to hold it at a child care center for front line workers.  This has some ... other challenges.  I suppose we could just invite ten people to a closet in a child care center, but I don't know that actually completing the orgy would be likely.  For some reason I imagine the police would have something to say about that.  The funeral plan looks a lot better.

The last possibility is holding it amongst your household.  Households larger than five people are allowed to hang out together, and nothing prevents you having an orgy amongst everyone living with you.  You just need a household where you have at least five adults willing to have an orgy already living together!  There is side benefit that if they accept the invite they can't beg off by claiming it is too far away or they don't have time - they are already there, and what else were they doing anyway?

It has been a long time since I lived in a household where an orgy amongst the residents would have been possible.  It wasn't ever going to happen in any case, but it would have been legal for us to do that back in 2001-2002.

So in Ontario it seems that your orgy options are quite limited.  A regular orgy ignores social distancing protocols, funerals are a tough sell for some people, and child care centers are full of children.  The only reasonable chance is to live with at least four other people in a household who all want to have an orgy with you.  Of course, if you already live in that situation you have it pretty good as far as orgies go!  Another example of the rich getting richer, it would seem.

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?

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.

Is it just me?

In my experience dating various people while being polyamorous I have found meeting metamours to be a challenge.  (Metamours being people who are dating someone I am dating.)  In the early going there were a couple of times that I definitely felt intimidated by a metamour, but only prior to actually meeting them.  The millionaire pilot who was also taller than me was a stand out example of this - I never actually met him, but I felt that insecurity, no doubt about it.

But every time I have met someone I always ended up feeling a sense of comfort and relief upon realizing that this isn't some superhero, just a person.  Someone who has strong points and weaknesses, stuff that is pretty and stuff that is not.  No need to be worried!

When people have met me in this situation though there has been a consistent reaction including some combination of insecurity, jealousy, and fear.  I have been mulling it over the past little while and I just don't know if this sort of thing is universal, mostly just among straight / bi guys, or if it is particular to me.

In theory people don't need to treat this like a competition.  I have lots of friends of widely varying looks, skills, attitudes, and personalities.  There is no need for a friend of mine to be worried about me meeting a new better friend and leaving them behind!  Romantic or sexual relationships could be just the same... but they don't generally seem to be.  I blame culture, mostly, and our instinctive reactions that treat attraction like it exists in a environment of scarcity rather than abundance.

I don't have the experience to judge if this sort of thing pans out the same way amongst women or nonbinary people.  That isn't my life!  My guess is that it is worse among men, in large part because of the way online dating works these days, with women bombarded with offers and men desperately seeking any response at all.  I don't have data to back that hunch though.

I also can't tell how much of it is me, or even what parts of me might be contributing to other people's struggles.  It is easy to see how you could describe me in ways that would contribute to insecurity - "Hey, I am dating a new guy, he is a tall, musclebound weightlifter who studied math in university and designs his own games.  Also he has the sex drive and self confidence normally associated with mythological deities!"  That is a recipe for creating insecurity, and while it does not paint a really accurate picture, it is close enough to the truth to be a problem.

A significant part of it is the emphasis that men place on height and strength, I think.  It doesn't even have to be conscious to be there, a deep primal worry that if you get in a fight with this person, they will crush you.  Tell people that this is a silly thing to worry about all you want, it won't stop them thinking about it.  Thing is, I know that size matters in the creation of insecurity and jealousy, but I don't know how much it actually affects the final outcome.  Do people just find something to be insecure about, no matter how innocuous the person they are considering?

My guess is that insecurity, worry, and jealousy before meeting or at an early meeting is worse among men than among non men, and I further guess that it is worst among straight men.  Also me being big probably makes that even more so in my specific case.  But there isn't anything I can do about it, really.  I already don't have any intention of stealing anybody from anybody, but that rational assessment has jack to do with how people end up feeling.  I wish I didn't create such feelings in other people, but there is no way to achieve that.

A lot may just come down to feeling like you are enough.  If you feel that, truly believe it, you have little to fear.  Even if a person decides they aren't going to be around you any more, there are other people.  Life goes on.

If you don't think you are enough, then you are probably doomed to be insecure no matter what sort of people are involved, and there is no way I can make you feel like you are enough.

I don't want to be different - I am fine with the way I am.  I do wish though that I didn't create these unpleasant waves in the world around me just by existing. 

Want what you want

I just read a Savage Love post that got me thinking about what people think is okay to demand in a relationship.  In the post the letter writer complained that twenty years ago his wife said that she would never kiss him or give him oral sex again, and he was looking for permission to divorce her.  (Kinda late, though, wouldn't you say?)

Dan basically told him he could divorce his wife if he wanted.  Because obviously if you are unhappy you are allowed to get a divorce!

The comments afterwards though were interesting.  Some people thought that withdrawing oral sex in such a way was unacceptable, some thought that it was fine but withdrawing kissing was unacceptable.  There was a lively debate about exactly how much physical intimacy should be required in a relationship.

I think so many people, nearly all the commenters included, miss the boat on this one.  The key is this:  There is NO universal standard.  There is no thing that your partner has to do such that not doing it is righteous and proper justification for breaking up.  You can break up righteously any time you want, for any reason or no reason.  You do not owe anyone a relationship.

There are the basic decencies we owe everyone, of course.  But a partner can demand kissing.  Or they can demand no kissing.  They can demand flowers every day, sexy Santa/Elf roleplay, living in different cities, or eighteen children by age 40.  And you can demand your own things, and if each person's demands are not met, they can leave.

I would say that we do owe each other honesty about our demands.  Trotting them out only after a partner has made a critical commitment is shitty.  On the other hand, people do change, and we don't have to be the same person for our entire lives.

In so many relationships, in advice columns and in real life, I see people asking the question "Is this thing my partner did so bad that I am allowed to break up with them now?"  They don't phrase it like that of course but this is truly what they are asking.  We have ingrained this idea that relationships must be forever and it is so destructive.  We idolize the idea that a relationship that ends has failed, even though there is no sense in that - a relationship should be judged on what it brings, not whether or not someone died.

You can end a relationship any time you want.  You don't need permission, and you don't need an ironclad reason aside from 'I am not happy with this relationship'. 

I wish more people thought this way.

One track mind

A couple days ago I went to a sex club.  I won't actually be talking about the sex though, because the non sex stuff was actually more interesting.  It revealed some things about my brain, and made me wonder if other people are like me in this way.  I don't actually know!

Part of the evening was an icebreaker event to get people comfortable and mixing it up.  This is a great feature for me because while the idea of sexing up a bunch of hot randoms at a club sounds fun, I know a lot of women get approached way too much in these situations and I don't want to be *that guy* who makes things shitty for them.  Having a structured way to get familiar with people is ideal for me.

The first icebreaker was sock wrestling.  Two people get a sock each, put on that sock, and then wrestle.  The winner is the one who gets the other person's sock off first.  Of course being a sex club the crowd ranged from people wearing something to people wearing nothing, so the potential for sexyness was high.  I, of course, was naked, because fuck clothes.

The organizer started it up, and she challenged us, asking who would wrestle her.  A woman about the same size stepped in and they fought.  The organizer won convincingly, through a combination of raw athleticism, aggressiveness, and practice.  Then she asked for more people to wrestle, and naturally I waved my hand about.  Pick me, pick me!  Ooh, ooh, pick me!

She picked me.

I was the tallest and strongest one there by a fair margin, so I wanted to be the first into the ring.  If someone was going to fight me, I wanted them to know what they were getting into.  A woman immediately stepped forward to fight me.  She was pretty average in size, but she gave me a 'IMMA CRUSH YOU FOOL' look that made me optimistic that this would be a good fight.  Also she was super hot, both because she was conventionally attractive, but additionally because her aesthetic was exactly my style.

But her attractiveness and nudity had no effect on me.  Normally in this sort of situation I would be wound right up, incredibly sensitive to any touch.  I would be acutely aware of exactly how we touched, and every nerve would be trembling, waiting to fire.  Not this time.  The only thing in my brain was the desire to compete, to fight, to strive for victory.  The organizer said go, and we rushed each other without hesitation.

It became instantly clear that my opponent was fast, strong, and flexible.  Also she wasn't holding back in the slightest, and neither was I.  Normally if you ask me 'hey, did you touch a boob in that situation?' I can tell you *exactly* how much I touched a boob.  The fucking memory is seared into my brain.  In this case I have no idea.  We were wrestling for a little while so I probably touched lots of things, but I couldn't tell you what they were at all - my brain was entirely occupied with winning.  That what we were doing might be sexy didn't exist; it was eclipsed by the struggle.

She was faster and more agile than me, but I had a large reach, mass, and strength advantage, and I ripped her sock off without allowing her to get to mine.  She kipped up easily, demonstrating that agility, and I shook her hand and said "Good fight."  Afterwards we talked about it, and she seemed really happy that she had a real challenge, as that was why she immediately volunteered to fight me.  We were both pleased that it was tough and close - losing wouldn't have bothered me, but I wanted a challenge, and I wanted an opponent who was able to take my best efforts, and I got that.

*Then* I got horny, and unbridled desire set in.  Other people wrestled, but only had limited attention to pay.  Hot is great and all, but combine that with physical competence and a "I will fight you, no matter how big you are!" attitude?  Ker Pow.

But there was more icebreaking to come.

Twister is a thing children do at parties.  Also a really solid icebreaker for mostly naked adults.  During round 1 I got bumped out fairly quickly, as you tend to when there are 10 people on a twister board.  On the final round though I managed to hang in there until it was just me and the organizer left, and she made it her mission to get me out.  You can do this in twister by just hanging out on your end of the board and trying to win via physical supremacy... or you can get in right on top of the other person and make it interesting.  Also sexy.

I am not particularly good at twister.  My flexibility is suspect, though my reach does help.  But I am bloody determined, and I managed to stay in despite the fire in my muscles ramping higher and higher.  My opponent decided to make things more difficult for me by distracting me, so she ground herself against my leg and rubbed her breasts on me.

I noted the grinding and touching, and thought that she was doing a good job, getting the crowd into it, and making sure the people were entertained.  But it had no effect on me.  I was going to WIN.  I even thought "Well, I will remember this fondly later, once the match is over."  My legs were twitching with strain and I could feel that I was not going to be able to continue - it was becoming too much. 

Finally things came to an end.  She was underneath me, both of us all tied up like pretzels, when she just lifted her body up, hoisting me off the ground a little, and my hands lost contact.  Game over dude!  Whether or not she was cheating by the official rules of Twister I don't know, but I was happy to accept the end of the game either way.  I told her I was glad to lose because I was about to die and stumbled off.  I spent the next hour struggling to walk because my leg muscles were too beat, so I am glad it didn't go longer.

Now in retrospect that was hot as fuck.  But at the time?  Ice cold.  No reaction.  I think for some people that would be expected but I am the horniest man alive - that old silly stereotype of men thinking about sex every 5 minutes makes me go "Hah, amateurs."  But when competition is in the offing, that totally shuts down and the only thing I think about is striving for victory.

It isn't the winning that I aim for though.  It is attempting to win.  Pushing myself as hard as I can go.  Running to the edge of my capabilities.  Win or lose, the key is to play with all you have.  That is where the greatest joy is found.

Winning is nice and all, don't get me wrong.  It just isn't the key to capturing my brain like intense competition is.

I suspect most people are happy being partly in each world.  Sexy games can be fun because you are both playing a game and flirting, doing each in part.  But I don't do halfways like that.  If I am competing, that is the only thing I am doing.  If I am having sex, that is the only thing I am doing.  Straddling the line between those worlds is not a thing I do.

This has a lot to do with my divided mind.  Director can multitask to some extent - usually trying to accomplish something while worrying about other things.  Passion though?  He does only one thing.  Nothing else even exists.  While I was wrestling and twisting I was totally Passion.  Doing exactly one thing with all my focus.

Maybe if I ever go back to work I will skip sales and go straight to organizing sexy events.  Getting paid to play naked twister seems like a pretty sweet gig to me.

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.

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.

Like a shoe

This past summer I had my first experience of having sex with a male.  I had big plans for a blog post after the experiment, figuring I could talk about how much or how little the label bisexual applied to me now.  How bi am I? seemed like an appropriate title.

The answer to the question is:  Basically not at all.

Afterwards I described the experience as being similar to having had sex with a shoe.  I don't personally eroticize shoes at all, they are just an object, and this was similar.  It wasn't horrifying or bad, and no internalized homophobia manifested.  It just didn't do it for me.

This should not be read as though anything said male partners did was wrong.  Honestly the experience for me had little to do with what they did, because the physical sensations were perfectly good and expected.  I don't think of them as objects in other ways, but as far as sex with me goes, the magic thing that normally happens just wasn't there, in the same way it wouldn't be there with any other thing I don't eroticize, like say my own hand.  Apparently I have a strict hierarchy of experiences:  On top is sex with females, then masturbation, then sex with males.  Masturbation is superior to sex with males because I can quit when I want and I don't need to be concerned with anyone else's needs, which is convenient, though it does sound ruthless and selfish.

It turns out that all my years of double takes at exposed cleavage and open mouthed awe at wide, curvy hips really did indicate that female bodies are the thing that launch my boat.  I wasn't really doubting that, but I figured there might be a little bit more flexibility in my orientation if I gave it a try, and now having tried it I am forced to conclude that I am really quite straight.  Heteroflexible is a reasonable term since it would be fine if I had sex with a male, but I don't see much reason to pursue that.

All of which is too bad because I really liked the idea of being bisexual.  I know it is hard for lots of people and there is plenty of bigotry out there, but given who I am and how my life is I expect it would be an upgrade for me.  Turns out, that ain't happening.

I am glad to have given this a try though.  Learning is fun!

One odd consequence of this is that I cannot legally donate blood in Canada now.  Men who have had sex with men are banned from doing that.  That rule goes away after one year, presuming I stop having sex with men completely.  It is perfectly safe though if I have lots of sex with lots of women... or so goes the theory.  I haven't ever donated blood anyway, (which I should have done, really) but this ruleset is still troubling to me.

Keeping score

Recently I found a fantastic Youtube channel called ContraPoints.  It is, as the star says, a scholarly study of online bigotry.  It is also funny as hell, and mixes educational material about racism, sexism, and all the other isms along with dark and dirty humour.  It is definitely not safe for work, and it is not safe for work in ways that I quite enjoy.  The video I watched today is this one about pickup artists who call style themselves 'alpha males'.


The thing I found most interesting in the video was a description of the end goal of pickup artist seduction techniques.  I always found pickup artists loathsome but this gave me some insight into how you get from where I am to where they are.  I like sex, I am a straight man, I am fine with casual sex, and in the periods in my life where I wasn't having sex I was unhappy about that fact.  This might suggest that I would be the sort of person who might employ their tactics.

But no, never.  The reason is that pickup artists aren't actually in it for the sex.  They are in it to try to soothe their intense feelings of inadequacy and self hatred by having as big a score as possible.  If they were just looking for good sex they would figure out how to be in a relationship and find some woman with a massive sex drive and call it a day.  But that doesn't inflate the number of people you have slept with much at all, and that number is the way in which they keep score.

For me sex is the point, score isn't.  The interplay of mutual desire, the ratcheting up of excitement, these are the things I want.  Having sex with new people is fun in general but the really important thing is that the sex be *good*.

Whereas for pickup artists no time is wasted on how to enjoy sex, or how to bring your partner enjoyment.  Once you get your penis inside a vagina your score has ticked up, so the remainder of the encounter is not particularly relevant.

Now I get it.  It wasn't just that pickup artists were gross before, it was that they made no sense at all.  They were clearly evil, but it was an evil without a point, which confused me.  Now that I realize that their goals were entirely different from mine it all falls into place.  Pickup artists aren't pleasure seeking hedonists like me, because wasting time in bars trying to get reluctant people to have shitty sex with you isn't pleasureable.  They just want to win the game, and they are willing to win it in a way that is sad for all people involved.  The game of keeping score in life by the number of one night stands you have had is sad and destructive and I want no part of it.  I am going to keep score by trying to be the person who generates the most fun for me and the people around me instead.

Not a word of a lie

I often end up thinking about when people have an obligation to disclose information to others about relationships.  This is a thing that comes up with non monogamous dating from time to time - when you first start seeing someone, when do you have a moral obligation to tell them you are already involved with other people?

I have gotten myself into some real arguments about this.  The crux of the matter seems to be what people are entitled to assume.  Most people assume that anyone they date is monogamous, and statistically speaking that is reasonable.  Statistically speaking you should also assume they will cheat on you, but people tend to gloss over this and look at idealized behaviour. 

However, it isn't reasonable to put the entire burden of coming out on marginalized people.  Saying that all the monogamous people are allowed to assume everyone is like them and that everyone else must immediately disclose puts extra problems in the hands of people who already face discrimination, and that isn't fair or good.  It also helps entrench cultural norms further and I think that is a definite negative.  Of course people need to be honest with their answers, and be open, but I think everyone will be far better off if we establish a baseline that you have to ask questions yourself if the answers are important, rather than just assuming things are the way you want them to be.

There are lots of questions like this.  For example, in Savage Love this week there was a dude asking about his obligations in a complex situation.  He is in a dom/sub arrangement where his girlfriend is allowed to have sex with other people, but only when he commands her to go and do so.  She comes back and tells him about the encounters afterwards, and they both enjoy this dynamic.  Do the two of them have an obligation to tell people that this is what is going on when she goes out and has a hookup?

I don't think they have a moral obligation to disclose.  They tell people she is involved with others, but not the details of their arrangement, and that seems like a fine compromise.  I imagine there are lots of people out there who would be horrified that someone they are dating has to ask permission to have sex with them, but I don't think they are entitled to that information before they say yes.  They are certainly entitled to the truth if they ask 'so, what is the deal with you and your boyfriend?' but without an ask that information is sufficiently out of their circle that they shouldn't expect it to be volunteered.

Kink is kind of like being in an open relationship in a lot of ways.  Telling random people about it is a real risk, and so it isn't appropriate to expect everyone in such a situation to be obligated to talk about it constantly just so it can be more comfortable for the 'normal' types.

Of course this kind of stuff is mostly academic when it comes to me.  I wouldn't get involved with someone who wasn't okay with all my stuff, and I already yell about it on the internet, so if someone is getting down and dirty with me they already know the deal.  I just don't like to put people who aren't in the secure situation I am on the spot and make them cope with the problems that cultural norms create for those of us who don't fit into them.

My recent experiences and thoughts about Relationship Anarchy feel like they support this position too.  RA is all about pushing back on assumptions about how relationships work, and you can't do that while you set up different rulesets for people who follow the norms and people who don't.  Honestly is required, and people should tell other information they are likely to want, but I won't impose a rule on the marginalized few that the mass of humanity completely ignores.

Bash those genitals, stat

At Polywood this weekend I had a discussion with a few people about whether or not it would be physically possible to have sex with all the people.  That is, would it be possible to have sex with every living person on the planet?  If so, just how fast would you have to have that sex in order for it to work?  Would those people be coming in at you so quickly that it is merely inconvenient, or are we talking about sonic booms being created by onrushing sex partners?

Time to math.  And by math, I mean make all kinds of guesses and approximations and not worry too much about rounding errors.

First off we have to define sex.  Sex is widely variable of course, using many body parts, but I am going to just assume for my first approximation that it involves bashing groins together, since that is a pretty common form of sex.  The world has roughly 7.6 billion people, and I am going to guess that 2/3 of them are able to consent to sex, which is 5 billion.  I don't want to spend too much time on this, so let's assume I need to get it done in a year.  No holidays though, I am not a slacker, but I do need 8 hours of sleep a night.  I don't need time to eat, as I can just do that while the groin smashery is going on.

So, with 365 days available I have to have 'sex' with 239 people per second.  I will assume each person has to move 1 meter in towards me, move back and forth 10 cm three times, and then get 1 meter away again in the allotted time.  This gives them an average velocity of 620 meters/sec, or a cool 2233 km/h.  This is closing in on Mach 2, which means that every person doing this is going to be generating massive sonic booms with every bash of groins, as well as their movement.  Also just getting 239 people per second next to me is a major problem logistically.  Even if you could somehow get an infinite line of people walking 239 abreast, when they get close they suddenly have to accelerate to the above speeds, and setting up a situation where you have an infinite line of 239 people walking abreast is a massive undertaking on its own!

Another major problem is that this is assuming average velocity.  People are, in this simplification, making instantaneous changes in velocity and we know you can't do that... acceleration takes time.  This means that it is certain that their maximum speeds are going to be drastically greater than that, likely capping out around Mach 4.

Now we get to the real problem - the G forces on the people involved.  If you are moving at 4466 km/h and then have to decelerate to 0 m/s within a space of 5 cm that is a LOT of Gs.

And by a LOT, I mean 1,500,000 Gs.  Now there is a lot of debate over exactly how many Gs a person can survive for a really short time.  Maybe it is 50.  Maybe it is 100.  But what we are sure of is that 1.5 Million Gs reduces a person to a fine red mist instantly.  There is no 'sex' because all that happens is a bunch of miniscule organic particles fly into me at enormous speeds and I am killed by some combination of nano missiles that used to be a person and shockwaves.

Okay, so given that this experiment would destroy every person within hundreds of meters of it instantly, let us try to back it off a bit.  Let's assume I have thirty years to complete my sexual journey, I start with the oldest people first so they don't die before I can 'sex' them, and I have sex with five people simultaneously using a variety of body parts.  This decreases the required speed by 80% for the additional sexing outlets, and another 95% because of the increased time allowed.  (This is a guesstimate based on the fact that more people come of age given that this takes a lot longer so I have to have more sex than before.)  That gives me a 99% reduction in speed for the incoming bodies, which hopefully reduces the lethality of the situation.

99% is a big reduction, right?  It solves all the problems!

Not so much.  One advantage is that people moving this way are no longer creating sonic booms as nobody is breaking the sound barrier.  This reduces our destructive potential greatly.  It also means that you only need an infinite line of people walking twelve abreast, which is *way* more manageable.  Still requires some logistics, but it should be possible with enough money and effort.

The trouble is still the G forces that those people experience.  150 G is drastically smaller than 1,500,000 for sure.  It even puts us close to the survivable level of G forces, given that the times involved are extremely short.  But going back and force with those levels of Gs is going to paste your brain to your skull and kill you, even if your skeletal structure can stand the strain.  Is it possible that a human survives such a thing?  I suppose, but I think the expectation would be that everyone involved would die.  I think the corpses would remain intact, largely speaking, but I would expect near total fatalities.

Given that, I think you would find it extremely difficult to convince people to take part in a serious effort to have one person have sex with all other humans.

There are other techniques you could employ to make this go better.  You could collect all the voyeurs in the world and just have them watch and call that sex.  You could assume you have longer to live, or decide that you are only doing this with people that want to (which pretty much solves the problem immediately, really.)  New assumptions mean new calculations.  However, given my basic assumptions we can safely say that you absolutely cannot have sex with all the people in the world in one lifetime, even with an outrageous apparatus to support it and nearly infinite money at your disposal.

Sorry to disappoint.

Poly in the woods

This past weekend I went to Polywood with Wendy and The Flautist.  Polywood is an event whose name is appropriate and evocative - it is a bunch of polyamorous people getting together camping in the woods.  It has been going for three years though this is the first time I have gone.

The event takes place at Raven's Knoll, a small private camping ground in Ontario.  The grounds themselves were kind of new to me as I am used to provincial parks and backcountry camping but this park was something quite different.  Instead of campsites being really separate and carefully marked it was just a mixture of open grassy areas and woods.  We could set up anyplace we wanted, and that was new to us.  While it was a strange setup, I liked it.  We didn't pick the best spot for our site, but now that we know the location we will do better next year.  Raven's Knoll has a great river for swimming, slow moving and warm, and the weather was absolutely ideal.  Unfortunately the river had a bible camp just upstream so skinny dipping was out of the question.

But all that sort of stuff is background, really.  The interesting bit is what exactly did all those poly people get up to in the wilderness?  From the writeup I wasn't quite sure what to expect.  It was clearly pitched as a family friendly event with lots of talks and socializing, but I have met a lot of poly people and I am definitely not the only one who thought 'orgy in the woods!' when I read about Polywood.

Some degree of hooking up with people happened, I am sure, but the event was really about learning and community, and not about the orgies.

That whole learning and community thing went really, really well.  The best talk I went to was one about Relationship Anarchy, where I learned that RA is pretty much exactly the things I believe.  I suspect I am not a normal looking RA type - being a straight cis man married to a woman who I have a child with isn't really the standard there.  RA is about setting aside the relationship escalator and pushing back on all sorts of relationship norms and rules that society sticks us with.

There is nothing wrong with being married, or being straight, or having kids, or any of that.  The problem (as far as RA is concerned) is the assumption that you should do these things, or that those things are any better than the alternatives.  RA insists that we should refuse to place romantic or sexual relationships first by default, and that we should find our own ways express our feelings rather than simply doing the thing we see in romantic comedies and in greeting card shops.

I love all of that.  Everything in the RA talk seemed obvious, correct, and helpful.  Over and over it said "Figure out what things you want and do those.  Refuse to let societies norms push your relationships into boxes that don't work for you.  By the way, here are a bunch of ways that it tries to do that.  Think about them."  Here is the RA manifesto, if you want a far more complete version of what it is about.

All this made me think that maybe I should relabel myself.  Polyamory does describe me in the sense that I maintain and an open to multiple loving, romantic, sexual relationships at once.  It is accurate.  However, RA is more specific and honestly more precise.  I think my life looks a lot like what people imagine when they think of polyamory, but the philosophy of RA appeals to me more, especially when I consider all the poly styles that I find troublesome.  It is tricky sometimes to figure out what to do in this situation, because polyamory is more useful as a shortcut when discussing with random people (as RA is a more niche term) but among people who really understand both I would rather be known as a RA practitioner.  I intend to think and write a lot more about this in future.

The pushback against assumptions was baked into Polywood in a big way.  When people introduced themselves at talks we all stated our pronouns.  The people running the event stated up front that all gender expressions and identities, all sexualities, and all relationship styles were welcome and accepted.  Consent was talked about often and explicitly.  All of this was superb, and it made the space feel like a spot where people could relax and be themselves.  The pressure to conform, and the pressure of worrying that people were leading with assumptions faded.  It will never be gone entirely, of course, but Polywood was really successful at beating those assumptions back.

It wasn't perfect.  One woman lead off her introduction with an obvious unicorn hunting scenario, and that is all kinds of icky.  There were other views there I wasn't happy about.

But. 

The levels of unhappy I harbored were tiny compared to the rest of society.  It wasn't just a pile of people with identical ideas to my own, and so surely some of those other people disagreed with my ideas just as I disagreed with theirs.  But all of the ideas were close enough to my own to make the space in general feel welcoming and happy.  I learned a lot, met some fantastic people, and I want to go again.

And maybe next year I will see about arranging to combine learning and community building with an orgy in the woods too.  Because I am greedy like that.

Put the shotgun away

When I think about Pinkie Pie eventually dating people my mind is filled with images from movies and shows where a teenage girl's father brandishes weapons and menacingly threatens the boys she is going on dates with.  Of course Pinkie Pie may not be dating boys, or at all, but this is what springs to mind when I think about it.

It is horrible, really.

I read a great article about this and it agreed with my views on the subject completely.  The idea that I must threaten people she cares about and chooses to associate with is insane.  Just as absurd is the idea that I should explode with rage should her heart get broken.  While I would spring into action to defend Pinkie Pie from some kind of physical assault I find the idea that I must get revenge on anyone who causes her heartache completely absurd.

Love hurts.  Sometimes it hurts just being there, and it usually hurts when it ends.  That is just a part of the price of being vulnerable and seeking big wonderful feelings.  Figuring out how to navigate that is a part of growing up, and there is no room in that education for angry fathers bent on revenge.

It is practically inevitable that she will feel hurt, cause pain to others, and have relationships that are messy and messed up.  Welcome to humanity.  While I do not wish her to be abused, I know that meddling directly in these sorts of things isn't going to help, and if anything it will hinder her growth.

I know plenty of adults who haven't learned how to navigate protecting themselves while opening up to other people, and I have a distinctly non scientific sense that parents inserting themselves into people's relationships helps create these problems.  You gotta suck, fail, and suffer to figure that shit out, is my experience, and you learn best when you make the decisions yourself and cope with the fallout.

So I won't be caressing a shotgun or sharpening an axe when Pinkie Pie's first romantic partners meet me.  I won't make veiled threats or overreact when they do something stupid and hurt her feelings.  All you can do, if you want to help your kids, is love them and pick them back up when they fall.  Even if blustering threats worked to prevent pain, which it doesn't, it is a shitty thing to do.

Won't somebody please think of the children

Ontario is in a bad situation right now.  The Liberals are currently in charge, and they are beset by scandal and have been in power long enough to have the public wanting to give them the heave ho.  The issue isn't that the Liberals are on the way out - it is that the polling suggests that the Conservatives are headed into power in the election that is coming up soon.

I always expect Conservatives to come into power with visions of doling out money to the rich and stomping on the poor.  They will try to fill the prisons with people who are harmless and encourage cars as the default mode of transport.  That is all awful but I know it is coming every time the pendulum swings to the Conservative side.

I just saw that the newly minted Conservative leader Doug Ford (Yes, he is the brother of the famous crack smoking mayor of Toronto) has some new talking points, and they include his desire to roll back the public school curriculum to the 'good ole days'.  He wants to get rid of the updated sex ed curriculum to go back to the old style where children are taught that sex is bad, queer people don't exist, and the only thing we should be teaching is making babies.  Ontario's new curriculum is a huge improvement over the 'good ole days' because it openly talks about all kinds of different people and addresses consent even with young children.  Unfortunately religious groups don't like children having information and don't want them taught that being gay is ok, so they campaign against it under the guise of wanting more consultation.

"I want more consultation" is, as always, code for "I want things my way".  No matter who is saying it.

Ford also wants to go back to old style mathematics.  Rote learning and drills are the way of the future, he thinks.  The fact that endless drills don't provide the best learning for anyone doesn't seem to dissuade him.  Neither does the fact that inflexible styles are terrible for many students who don't fit neatly into a factory teaching style.  Usually the pitch is that drills make students more prepared for the real world, but there aren't employers out there desperately clamoring for workers who can sit at a desk and fill out worksheets full of arithmetic problems.  There are employers out there who want workers who can tackle problems creatively though, but that isn't Ford's concern.  Let's be frank:  This is about conformity and obedience, a desire to have children who do as they are fucking told and are convenient.  It has nothing to do with effective education.

These potential changes to education are really getting to me.  I know all the economic insanity the Conservatives will get up to if they win, but knowing that they intend to step in and trash education makes me so ANGRY. 

This election the Conservatives are openly and brazenly appealing to people's desires for conformity and obedience.  They are making it clear they want everyone to be religious, straight, and deliver shareholder value.  We can do better than that, and we should.

The Liberals have screwed up big time in plenty of ways.  The Conservatives are actively campaigning for dystopia.  I am going to support the NDP in this upcoming election as they are the party that closest aligns with my values, and if you are in Ontario I hope you do the same.

Slutting it up

I just finished reading the book Slutever by Karley Sciortino.  The tagline is "dispatches from a sexually autonomous woman in a post shame world", and that mostly gives you a sense of what the author is trying to do.  The book is a combination of two things:  First, a rambling story of all kinds of weird and interesting sex stuff that Sciortino got up to over many years of promiscuity ranging from drug fuelled orgies to sex work to BDSM.  The other thing is a well informed discussion of sex and feminist related issues touching on all sorts of topics including sex work, slut shaming, and kink.

This mash of types works really well.  The author makes it clear that her stories are meant to be more like cautionary tales rather than examples of good behaviour, and then links all of the mistakes she made to things she wants to change in the world.  As Sciortino goes through all of her struggles and travails she slowly learns how the world works, how her own brain works, and how our society could better handle sex and sexuality especially when it comes to women's sexuality.

I really like Sciortino's take on the issues.  She communicates easily and clearly while making the process fun for the reader.  Her brand of sex positive feminism is one I like, and I appreciate someone who can talk about complex topics without gumming up her prose with excessive jargon or convoluted writing.

For someone like me who has read a lot on this topic there wasn't anything new to learn really.  The political stuff all was right up my alley but this book is more aimed at the mainstream audience in terms of the teaching portion.  I agreed with it, but I didn't come away any more informed about sexual politics or cultural sexual issues.  I enjoyed the stories and the read was fun, but it was aimed at people who know less than I do about the topic.

That isn't a criticism, just a note!  I think the book does a great job at what it is trying to do, which is to educate normal people about feminism and sex.  It isn't trying to be a scholarly piece, informing the elite about something entirely new, and it lands exactly where it is trying to.

So if you enjoy stories about wild and unexpected debauchery, or if you think reading a feminist take on sexual politics would be informative, then go for it.  The book is super easy to read, quick, and on point.

If everyone read Slutever I suspect it would help change attitudes in a positive way, and it manages that while being fun.  Two thumbs up.