..and that quiet, decorous, rational reaction was,
WHAT THE FUCK?
If you get past the part where the author is just doing the Lord’s work, y’all – trying to get women of the world “to realize they must improve themselves (lose weight, get better attitudes, stop playing games) in order to have a better chance to get a quality male” – then this screed might be a touch inflammatory to those of us on the double-X side of the fence.
(Gawd, I kinda hope it upsets a lot of you on the XY side of the fence, too.)
(side note: I find the “stop playing games” part wildly amusing and ironic.)
I mean, where to start, exactly? With the contempt he shows women – especially women who don’t conform to his vision of beauty?
(Because what’s the point of women, really, if we aren’t pretty, thin, heterosexual, docile and infected with the disease-to-please?)
Nah. That’s not really unique to a pick-up artist. That’s our society, writ large.
(I think this is why it takes women thirty-five years to even start to unlearn this stuff. Because it is everywhere.)
Let’s talk about the intent of a pick up artist (or at least, the intent of this particular site’s authors):
The overall point is that, outside of arrangements like marriage, only 20% of the men lay 80% of the women. You either want to be in the that 20% or not. And, unless you’re already a natural at it, you’ll need to learn what it takes to get you there. That’s what this web site is for.
1. I would really like to see the research supporting this fact.
2. So now we’ve got two things. Blatant misogyny, idealization of a narrow sliver of female humanity, and a naked urge to have sex with as many of the pre-approved (HBs or “hot babes” or “hot bitches”), socially-acceptable ones as possible.
3. Again, this is not new or unique to the Seduction Community.
So although all of this upsets me wildly, I’ve written lots of papers pulling apart the dynamic of sexism and this is just part-and-parcel of living in our society. It is ugly. I hate it. But isn’t novel and these guys didn’t invent it.
What these guys did invent – or at least name and practice and preach – is The Neg:
Imagine a guy comes along and says “nice nails. are they real??” she will have to concede, “no. acrylic.” and he says (like he didn’t notice it was a put down “oh. (pause) well I guess they still LOOK good.” Then he turns his back to her. What does this do to her? Well, he didn’t treat her like shit and INSULT her. He complimented her but the result was to target her insecurity…
You didn’t take her shit. OH, and when she asked you for a beer, you said, ” no. I don’t buy girls drinks. but you can buy ME one”. You are qualifying HER now. If she buys you a beer, this is symbolic of her RESPECT for you…
A NEG HIT is a qualifier. The girl is FAILING to meet your high expectations. It’s not an insult, just a judgement call on your part. The better looking the girl, the more aggressive you must be with using neg hits. A 10 can get 3 neg hits up front, while an 8 only 1 or 2 over a longer time. You CAN go overboard if they think you are BETTER than them You can drop the self-esteem right from under them (just like most 10s do to guys) and this isn’t good. You have to get as close to the breaking point as you can without crossing the line. Once you have gotten her RIGHT THERE, you can start appreciating things about her (NEVER LOOKS). There is a mutual RESPECT now. Something most guys never get from the girl.
This is how you remove a bitch shield. 3 neg hits oughta do it within 2 or 3 minutes of neutral chat. Once it is down, you can from a mutual respect place, seduce her.”
(That is from Mystery – the dude with the show on VH1.)
So this is the kind of advice that makes me deeply unhappy with the world we live in. Insulting a person – sort of – until they respect you. Making her insecure so she’ll want to prove her worth, sexually.
But you know what? Putting myself in the shoes of both the man and the woman, here, I’d say this probably works.
I know it works. Let’s say we call the ‘neg’ a backhanded compliment. I don’t hang out in bars or have acrylic nails, so this particular scenario might be about ten years too young for me, but BIG SECRET: I actually love that kind of stuff. I like a guy who is cocky but funny and not afraid to say something unexpected – and who doesn’t make me feel responsible for entertaining him by looking at me with puppy dog eyes while his tail wags expectantly.
I like self-possessed. I like witty. I like a guy who doesn’t kiss my ass unless asked. I don’t, however, like disrespect or a deliberate attempt to structure our interactions so that you’ve got the upper hand and I’ve got to earn your attention.
(I will note, however, that while this stuff might work, initially, these techniques are kind of like a resume and an interview in a job search: they get you in the door. Once you’ve got the job, and want to keep the job, and do the job well, an entirely different set of skills are required.)
All of this is to say that I, personally, like “cocky but funny” – and cocky and funny is pretty much the Pick Up Artist’s playbook.
Now, since I realized this and read up on it, whenever I encounter a guy running cocky-but-funny on me, I wonder about it.
I once asked a guy – a witty Brit – who had cocky-but-funny all nailed down, if he’d ever heard of the seduction community or read The Game.
Looooooooooooooooooooong pause.
“No.”
Yeahfuckingright.
~
Now, to be fair, what I just quoted is the absolute worst of the community, but it is also what ranks highest in searches (thanks, Google!) and so, presumably, is some of the most popular, “authoritative” (and we all know my issues with that word) stuff available.
The mainstream pick up community is pretty fucking awful, in my opinion. But if you dig in, you’ll find all kinds of examples of people engaging with human interaction, psychology, dating, and ethics in really interesting, intelligent and soulful ways.
~
So, when I started learning about The Seduction Community and techniques practised by pick up artists, I had pretty strong and intensely negative feelings about it.
Truth is, though, I recognized these techniques.
I have looked at a man, smiled wide, and said, “That shirt looks awful. I don’t like it at all. You don’t look hot and it doesn’t make me want to kiss you. Not even a little bit.” And then kissed him.
I say things just to surprise. I absolutely wear hot shoes or big bold jewelry and people do talk to me about it and that’s probably the point. I set hurdles for you to clear so it will be clear to me whether or not you’re interested in me. I understand that my appearance is telegraphing a message. I tell a story with my body language. My mission in life is to make you laugh because when you laugh, you’re comfortable, and when you’re comfortable, you like me, and of course I want you to like me. I hope you like me.
And with all of that, I’m essentially doing what PUAs teach their acolytes. I just don’t name them or think much about them. They’re instinct. For me. Because I’m a woman and a flirt.
holyshitnewsflash: PUAs are teaching men how to be attractive to women using the techniques usually employed by …women.
Is this true?
I googled it. Apparently it is common knowledge in the Seduction Community that the teachers derived their techniques by modeling women.
Implicitly, they’re acknowledging that women control the initial game.
So the techniques I’m having a reaction to – that I think are manipulative and gross and sexist and exploitative – come from women.
In the Seduction Community, men learn how to attract women by observing how women attract men and then use those same techniques on women so that men can attract women.
And women – like me – get all pissy about it and say that’s manipulative, exploitative, controlling. And dude, that’s my territory. Getoffamylawn.
Still, we can’t get away from the misogyny. In addition to the negs – which, to be fair, not all PUAs endorse – we’ve got a whole lot of talk about punishment:
Have your rules. Tell the chick – and they’re always chicks, unless they’re HBs – the rules, and punish her if she violates them. Take your attention away. Slight her. Stand her up. Drop her.
Because women don’t already have enough rules to follow or enough people telling us how to behave. Now we need some guy in a bar or a bookstore or a coffeeshop dominating us in exchange for a $4 latte and some truly high-priced male validation.
This kind of ”punishing” the “target” – the practice and the language itself - is common to both The Seduction Community and heterosexual pornography, and the overlap, I argue, is no coincidence.
Sam Benjamin is heterosexual; shooting heterosexual porn turned him on; but he had to quit because it was just so damn awful. Despite his best intentions, the heterosexual porn he was shooting was about punishing women. So he quit.
And then he was broke and asked for his job back. It had been filled but there was a spot available filming gay porn – was he interested? Initially, he was hesitant and even a little intimidated, but to his surprise he found that
gay porn was so goddamn simple that it approached a type of Zen beauty. I mean, this was guys taking on guys, in every shape and form imaginable, for the most part in good humor and absent-minded lust. They may have stuck to roles of “tops” and “bottoms,” but in the dressing room, we all seemed equals, on the same team…
… I’m saddened to think that the only path to the absence of hostility and anger in porn is to remove women from the equation. It doesn’t bode well, especially for a world in which men and women must continue to co-exist. In the first half of my porn-life, I lived inside of a world where it almost seemed like an entire gender was being denigrated, like that was the whole point—where very young women were choked and slapped and written-on with lipstick, simply for the crime, it seemed, of being a woman.You should have slept with me, seemed to be the unspoken message. Now see what I have to do to you.
I think Sam Benjamin is on to something.
You should have slept with me, seemed to be the unspoken message. Now see what I have to do to you.
Let’s think about this: according to Neil Strauss, as many as 70% of the guys who start studying the art of pick up are just geeky guys who aren’t very comfortable – or successful – with women. They’re not getting laid and they’re not happy.
You should have slept with me, seemed to be the unspoken message. Now see what I have to do to you.
I’m repeating this point for a reason. Maybe some of the misogyny in the pick up community is the result of a whole lot of guys working through their collective resentment that pussy isn’t tap-water.
You know what?
Women do this too.
We get frustrated when we’re not getting what we want. I know you know what you’ll hear on this party-line: There are no available heterosexual men. They’re all taken, married, gay, dating teenagers, or playing Warcraft. Or, if you do manage to find one to date, he’s probably an inexpressive, emotionally-repressed, sex-crazed, commitment-phobe who not-so-secretly wishes you looked more like Megan Fox and less like, well, you. They all do.
It is the drumbeat that underlines girls-night-out conversations.
But that’s not sisterhood. That’s misandry.
~
Dirty secret: We – the sistas – and I’m talking ONLY about myself and my real-life friends and sisters here, not The Feminist Community with which I express my affiliation but cannot Speak For – often construct our “independence” and don’t-need-a-man-ness (even though most of us are married and are now, or have been, completely financially dependant on a man) and divine feminine connection with each other on the back of man-bashing.
No, you’re awesome, honey. He just can’t see it. He’s a bastard. They all are. That’s why we’re so awesome. Thank goodness for girlfriends. Otherwise we’d have to rely on them.
~
If that kind of talk is a two-martini girl-bonding Friday night for me, why am I so shocked when I encounter misogyny in the Seduction Community?
This kind of misogny and misandry – the kind that collapses The Other into a caricature – is a burlesque. We parody and mock The Other in order to defuse the power they have over us.
Because sexuality, and sexual love, is primal, spiritual stuff. It is dangerous and divine. We can harm or heal each other, and most often, we do both.
So, in heterosexual, binary-gendered, conventional world – which is to say, my suburban milieu – groups of heterosexual women get together to bitch about men so that men are less threatening to our hearts and heads. Groups of men get together to figure out a way to manage women so that women are less threatening to their heads and hearts. And then we all go home and drunk-dial our exes.
~
In a way, what the Seduction Community is doing is no different than say, The Cult of Sex and The City. (And it is a cult. I believe, I believe.) We’re all trying to understand each other while getting the upper hand so we can get what we want and not get hurt.
So maybe the dehumanizing – the misogyny and misandry – by both campsofboth camps is the same thing. Maybe.
Or maybe it is not the same thing.
Misogyny scares me and for good reason. It has very real social consequences: rape, assault, abuse, inegalitarian and spirit-snuffing romantic entanglements, The Beauty Myth, and $0.72 on the dollar.
So a group of men getting together to scheme about how to make women do their bidding while referring to them as targets and valuing them exclusively in terms of their attractiveness: yeah, that’s pretty fucking terrifying.
Still, there are two parts here:
The social. The Seduction Community both reflects and reifies the misogyny of our culture. In other words, that shit comes from somewhere. The Seduction Community’s (sometimes) fucked-up attitudes about women come from our society’s fucked-up attitudes about women.
The personal. Some smart but socially awkward guys just want to find a way to connect with women, get confident in their company, and maybe even get a girlfriend. And that – well that’s pretty damn sweet.
________________
this 2,700+ words is about a third of the essay. There’s way more and I’ll post the rest this week.
And please play nice in the comments. Pretend we’re all at a raucous, liquored-up dinner party at my house. It is fun, and we can get real and we can get tawdry, but we’re not talking shit about each other. Criticism? Yes, absolutely, and YES PLEASE. Hating? No.
I am a risk-taker in relationships. In addition to being a risk-taker, I’m doggedly committed and don’t give up on a teetering romance until I’m well and truly and certainly done with it. As a result, my friends, family – and, I’m sure, more than one potential suitor – sigh and shudder and worry and are not-so-secretly convinced that I put myself on the line because I’m lonely, fat, a single mom and therefore should be lacking in self-esteem due to my apparent unfuckability (oh, if only y’all knew) and desperation for the security of a relationship.
They would be wrong. I’ve always been a risk taker: fat, skinny, younger, older, before and after kids, always. I take risks because I know I can handle it. I’m resilient. I have faith in myself. Even if I get my heart broken, even if I’m stung by love’s yellow jackets and swell up and take to bed for three days to nurse my hives, cracked heart, fractured ego and assorted existential wounds, I’ll come out of it okay. I usually learn something, too. I stretch. I grow. I expand my emotional range. I go wide and deep. I love.
This, I submit, is the opposite of low self-esteem and desperation.
But, I admit, I’m breaking the rules. It is not always comfortable. It is not always easy. And so far, I don’t have the happy ending to point at, chant “see, nya, nya, I told you so”, and then legitimately launch polemics against tepid dating and soulless relationships and the patriarchy.
So I break the rules. I own myself and my feelings and act on them. I try to connect and I call when I feel the need to do that, which can be a lot. I think that is as it should be. When you like someone, you want to talk to him. I don’t wait around or corral myself into a good girl box of chocolates hoping a man will choose me. When I like a man, he knows it. When I love him, he’s lucky. That sounds like empowerment, and it is, and sometimes I say things that feel honest and powerful to me but which are interpreted vastly differently by the people who live outside my head. Things like this: I need a man. I am lonely. Arguably, being honest about those things does not makes me pathetic or weak. In fact, I think the opposite narrative, the one that says “I don’t need a man, I want one” is ridiculously boring and weak. I get it, but it is not compelling. It goes like this: you can pay your bills. You’re doing fine. You have hobbies and friends and a cat and if you died tomorrow, you’d be satisfied that you lived a good life.
Those things are sort of true for me, too, except that I don’t have a cat. I like my upholstered goods on the unshredded side. And even with the ability to take care of myself quite competently for the rest of my life without male assistance, I still need a man, and the fact that I am marginally solvent and reasonably capable in most adult matters means that I can be shameless about expressing my needs. Admitting to needs – requiring companionship and savouring love and partnership – does not diminish me. So there, nya nya, I told you so (again. Am I undermining my credibility as an adult?).
I need a romantic, significant, long-lasting relationship. I think most people do. Relationships – friendly, romantic, platonic, passionate, familial – are the juice and the juju that a growing life demands. Being one half of a passionate partnership presents challenges and struggles and magic and love and I need that. I need to give that and exchange that and grow in that. And I’ll risk the lectures about how I should be an independent woman (I am! and it is not all self-sufficient sunshine and egalitarian roses!) to say so. Because the risk is worth the reward.
So fuck risk-managing potential relationships. I’m frustrated with that and this is the core of my exasperation with dating and the our boring cultural discourses about dating: one of the axis that it turns on is a glib, therapized, risk-managing approach to relationships. And yes, my darling reader, you ARE so prescient. I do have thoughts on the matter and I would love to share them:
I highly doubt that everyone out there who is dating has gone to therapy and explored the issues and done the work. Actually, I don’t DOUBT it, I know it. Most of us speak therapy but we haven’t really been therapized.
All the risk management and red-flagging paradoxically creates risk. Every step is a mine-field of meaning. Codes are being signalled and transgressed. Everything becomes a Big Freaking Deal. Relationships halt based on a poorly timed phone call. As proof, I offer you my recent, deep, and time-consuming research on the after-sex call. This is what I did: I googled ‘after sex call‘ and the results cracked my lid and my brain made a brief, panicked, screaming run around the living room. There are more than 80 million pages advising you when to call, when not to call, what it means when he calls on Sunday (you’re girlfriend material), Monday (he’d like to sleep with you again but you’re not relationship material), or Friday (you’re a booty call). Let me repeat it: EIGHTY MILLION pages of results on this issue.
The patriarchy. Oh, the patriarchy. The sexism. The double-standards. The give-a-cookie, get-a-ring theory of dating.
The dating rules. OMG, The Rules.
#3 and #4 are in fact the same thing and my brain is now making crop-circles in the dining room. Which is tough to do because despite what you’ve heard about Vancouverites, BC and our main agricultural export, not all of us grow grass in the dining room.
Let’s talk about The Rules, which is not just a way of talking about the stupid rules of dating but an actual book that articulates them in 35 (!!!) easy-to-remember points (!!!!) by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider.Or let’s not. I’m sure you know them and all their evil, anti-feminist clones like He’s Just Not That Into You, Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (which uses cookies as a metaphor for sex and advises women to dole them out sparingly, and not at all in the first three months) and, most recently, Be a Hepburn in a Hilton World by Jordan Christy. All of them essentially advise the same thing: don’t put out, don’t call, don’t require much, and maybe, if you’re lucky and you wait around quietly looking pretty, he’ll marry you. In short, don’t be you.
So that is what is supposed to guarantee me the Happy Ending. The Wedding (which incidentally, I don’t even want. Marriage: yes. Wedding: no). The Husband.
But what kind of husband would I land with those rules? What kind of relationship and marriage would that be?
The answer to this not-so-rhetorical question is this: not the kind I want.
In Canada, you can marry anyone you want, as long as you’re only marrying one adult person at a time. This, in the world according to Kelly, is as it should be. So I have no issues with marriage. If gay and lesbian and straight people and everyone who identifies themselves in between or outside of those categories can marry, then I too can marry in good conscience because I’m not accessing a privilege allowed only to those who accidentally, luckily, have sexualities deemed socially acceptable. So, yay, Canada. Yay, marriage.
If I am to marry – and I hope that I do – I would want to marry a man who thinks like that, too. And I highly motherfucking doubt that a man who thinks like that would
be ‘caught’ by The Rules;
require a woman to play by The Rules;
get off on the chase;
like it when a woman doles out sex like the forbidden cookie, to be earned with virtuous, chivalrous behaviour and a mainly no-sex diet;
think I’m an unmarriageable slut for expressing my sexuality and acting on my desires;
interpret my ability to be real and raw and vulnerable as desperate and unappealing;
be reeled in through a prescribed course of intense manipulation;
need to be manipulated to feel valued; and
insist that I contain my needs for connection and companionship with him.
Because that would mean that he’s wired like a wannabe patriarch. And this is would be a problem for me because how I feel about fucking the patriarchy (pro) is wildly different than my feelings about fucking the patriarch (con).
So, sadly, dating is still a gender-trap. And, paradoxically, even as dating is a dangerous trap, it is so gdsafe. We talk about dysfunction and reflexively screen out anyone lacking a career or a physique that will pass muster with friends and family and who doesn’t call by Wednesday. We’re risk-managing ourselves out of hypothetical heartbreak but into one-bedroom apartments and solo-Christmases.
Recently, someone said to me “…but I never enjoyed dating the way you do.” And I was stunned. I embrace the risks that relationships entail but I hate dating. I like people, I adore men, I like meeting people and connecting and getting excited about seeing the world (and even myself) through their eyes, but dating and me – well we are not in love and never will be. It is too coded. Too mined with gendered expectations and signals and social assumptions. Too uncertain. So, yes, with one side of my mouth I bemoan the rules of engagement while with the other I freely kiss and confess that I adore being wooed. It is a very, very good thing when someone showers me with attention and affection and never makes me wonder: Do I call? Do I not call? Is he just not that into me if he doesn’t call? What does it mean if I call? To me? To him?
And that’s it. That’s the dichotomous, insane space we live in. As women, we’re supposed to be empowered and beyond The Rules. As naked, vulnerable, brave and needy people, we need to connect and be adored (or at least I do). And the dating manuals that make me crazy live in precisely that crazy-making space: they directly address the need to be feel adored by prescribing formulas for discerning adoration while in the same breath and with lipstick-slicked, barbed kisses they re-inscribe a pointed, confining, prescriptive cultural narrative about gender roles and heterosexual relationships.
About women, that narrative says this: Women should wait. Women should let men take the lead. Women should not be demanding or difficult or insist on getting their needs met by their male partners. Women should contain their sexuality. Women should be tricksters. Women should not expect anything other than the social outlines of a contractual relationship. Women who do all of these things will be rewarded with a ring. Being single is a prison you can earn your way out of with good behaviour and yes, your man is your Warden.
About men, that narrative says this: Men are hunters. Men do not have emotional needs or require friendship from their partners and if they do, they should never admit it and definitely not call before three days have elapsed because that is just unattractive. Showing you like a woman will scare her off. Don’t care for her, conquer her, because, after all, men have an inherent need to conquer women and the world. Men don’t like themselves so they cannot like women who show them that they like them. A man should marry the woman who likes him the least. A man values a woman who restrains her desires with him, because that means she’ll restrain her desires with other men, too. Men don’t know themselves so have to be tricked into getting what is good for them. Men can be tricked. Men should be tricked. Men are dumb.
How is that for seductive? After you get past the pre-marital, tedious process of risk-management and encoding gendered, patriarchal assumptions, the two of you will ideally end up in a soulless, mostly sexless marriage of convenience where the man takes out the garbage and mows the lawn and the woman flutters around doing sexy domestic things like cleaning the toilet and keeps her mouth shut except when she’s yelling at the kids. Excellent. Fantastic. I’m in.
Confession: Until this year, year thirty-sex, I never really dated. Every significant relationship I have ever had evolved out of ‘hanging out’: out of spending time together, having wide-ranging, unconstrained, passionate hours-long conversations in which we solved the political and social dilemmas of the day, doing things together, with other people, and together, until we were just, organically, a couple or some sort of watershed sexual/romantic/conversational moment occurred that articulated our ecstatic commitment to couple-y-ness.
I suspect that this dynamic is a function of youth and university. I suspect that this is even what universities are for: campuses are covert, middle-class marriage markets. Mostly middle-class families offload their kids there and after four or five years and those kids emerge as qualified adults ready to earn, baby, earn and are likely, hopefully involved with now-degreed, pedigreed, marriageable partners who also have reasonable career prospects and are probably from other middle-class families. Who needs a matchmaker or an arranged marriage if you can send your kids to college?
During the university years, young adults are installed in crappy, overpopulated apartments on a campus with several thousand mostly-single people in the same age bracket, and all of them have lots of free time and (temporarily) very little money. It is a recipe for social interaction that is based on conversation and connection and ideas, and if you’re lucky enough to be surrounded by uberliberal, progressive, smart, thinking people, then the very structures of relationships get talked about, questioned and negotiated. Then, if you’re really lucky, you end up in a Relationship with a man who thinks about these things too, and is willing to go there with you and wonder about The Rules, and fuck the Rules, and just be, and figure out how to be, together. Yessssssssss.
I spent most of my twenties in University. Naturally, I ended up in a Relationship – bizarrely, with a very socially conventional (and very good) man – and spent most of my thirties having babies. Then we split. Now I have a job, kids, a rigid and unbending schedule that requires me to see the inside of 5am every weekday, a cosmic void where babysitters should be, and no classmates or (adult) house-mates with single friends with whom to hang out and eventually fall in love. So now I have to date, marshal time to date, organize an infrastructure that allows for dating, search out appropriate people to date, all of which I do, sometimes ecstatically, sometimes begrudgingly. To me, the logistics and the safe, gendered discourses of dating are the antithesis of sexy. I miss my flophouse university days. I miss organic relationships.
Relationships are conversations. Relationships are messages sent and received and returned. Relationships are primal, biological, electric, evolutionary, revolutionary. Relationships are generative. Relationships are transcendent and divine. Relationships are magic. Relationships are worth the risk.
Too bad that as a grown-ass adult you have to date to find one.
___________
note: I originally posted this piece in September 2009 but I was missing it, lots, so I called it back. It loves me, too.
Here’s something I learned recently*: a guy I know basically has a Facebook enterprise hooking up with good girls gone wannabe bad.
He was a bit of a bad-ass in high-school and now he’s getting all the formerly good girl ass. There’s something about thirty-five and freshly divorced that brings out the wild child in the most sedate of women.
Enter Facebook and high school crushes and oodles of witty banter, for months and months and months and months. I turned down invitations half-heartedly.
Oh yes, this isn’t just a commentary on a phenomenon. I’m embedded in said phenomenon.
Finally, there was a date.
I knew within seconds - hell I knew before – of seeing him again that there was not going to be a Relationship. Or even another date.
I knew when I got to his house, too. The framed hockey jerseys and thousands of dollars worth of expensive hooch made me think: aging frat boy, with money. Not my thing.
Still, there was witty conversation. I’ve done way worse things for way less.
And to his credit, he straight up said this is just sex.
And I wanted to have sex. So I did. It was okay.
And then…(real writers don’t use ellipses) I heard from one of my friends that she was at a craft thingie with another woman we went to high school with who had a similar story about our aging frat boy. I think it was even the same restaurant.
And she, like me, was the formerly good girl in high school now gone wanton. And divorced. Recently.
So then of course we asked around and poked around on his Facebook page. And, like, ick.
I think I’m supposed to be outraged.
I’m not. I don’t really care about the sex part because nothing was extracted from me. I own my sexuality. Sometimes I lend it freely.
The kind of icky thing is the design of it. And the fact that it works.
Which made me get to digging to excavate the dynamics of this operation.
Because I think there are people – women – who would feel intensely betrayed by this scenario. The wooing, the drawn-out seduction.
(Some of us don’t listen when we hear “this is only sex.”)
But none of that is what creeps me out. What gives me pause is the set-up. The profiling.
Yeah, he’s totally in business development.
The sad thing isn’t the ends to which heterosexual men will go to, for sex. The sad thing, to me, is that we raise women, in essence, to be exploited. To be served up as prey to a predatory culture.
We teach them to be swept away. We teach them to be emotional about sex and make sexual decisions based on sweet feelings and seduction and romance, and, basically deception and manipulated.
(Should make a pretty serious mofo caveat here: I am not the Prime Minister of Emotional Land, but that’s only because I got all emotional during the vote and was weeping in the ladies room when it all went down. So I’m not poo-pooing ‘those emotional women’ for being emotional about sex. I know for emo. I live there.)
Here is what fairy tales - and I’m including my beloved romance novels and chick flicks in this genre – teach girls and women:
to make decisions based on chemical cocktails that feel like “love”
to learn to crave being swept off your feet
to know that handsome princes pose as frogs and things are not as they seem and that you can transform the frog into a prince
sex is a cookie to be doled out only to the deserving and that if you have wanton enjoyable rewarding sex then you’re of poor moral character.
In essence: fairy tales teach women to be lied to, to see ‘beyond’ appearances (ie accept men for other than their appearance) make sexual decisions based on possible deception, and to abdicate sexual power.
Fairy tales teach women to be led. To be led into it. Then we can claim: but he lied to me, or I thought he loved me, and be absolved.
That’s the mythological castle we allow our girls to inhabit.
It’s kind of icky, isn’t it? We teach women to abdicate their self-knowledge and sexual power – to be princesses – and then we teach men to game the fairy tale.
It is actually more than icky. It is heart-breaking. We’re all missing out on so much. What’s missing: intimacy. To know and be known.
While it is undeniably true that crap relationships are nine thousand levels of hell, passionate, transformative, loving relationships are the best thing in the world. And some days I marvel that we can fight our way through the myths and the curtains to find each other at all.
Still, I’m not upset that I got snowed into mediocre sex because in the words of my wannabe imaginary altar ego, Mae West, I used to be Snow White but I drifted.
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by ‘recently’, I mean last year. It just occurred to me that as I get older, the scope of my ‘recently’ is expanding. Soon, I’ll be saying ‘why just yesterday…’ about things that happened ten years ago.
touch me. touch my heart. poetry, baby cheeks, curls, smooth bald heads, ideals, principles, tears, pixie dust, deep women of experience, flowers, icy apple juice, smooching, John Cusack and a radio in the front garden. These things might me move. To the shepherd: this nymph would have said yes. I have said yes.
Books and babies and broads and boomboxes. Be still my butterfly heart. But you know what is melting my beeswax these days?
Numbers.
2.
My Gentleman Caller - oh, we go back and forth about the romance thing, but the friendly, loverly calls continue, always, every night, because they’re just so good - suggested something that he thought would rock my business. I was silent. He backpedalled and apologized as if he had stepped over some invisible boundary. You know, by talking about money. My money.
I said, actually that turned me on.
3.
Betty Dodson knows about sex and women and desire and the liberating thereof. She’s the author of “Sex for One” and famous for leading clit-finding group expeditions. I mean workshops. She’s not just a revolutionary, she’s the fucking revolution. Viva la Betty.
Betty Dodson systematically scraped away social, sexual expectations of women and even some feminist conventions to embrace her own desire and stroke her own fire. She talks about sex. She talks about porn. She talks about vibrators. She believe that she deserves pleasure and so do you.
Viva la Betty.
And until recently, Betty Dodson – sexual revolutionary and midwife of female masturbation – was all uptight about money.
Kinda like sex, yes? Porn is everywhere, our pop stars skirt the porn thing, and sex sex sex sex sex. It is everywhere except in reasonable discussions. No wonder our kids are learning about sex from porn.
It is, Alan Moore put it in his long and gratifying essay about the history of porn and art, titillate and condemn, titillate and condemn, titillate and condemn. Getcha all aroused and then make you feel ashamed. Again and again.
We do that, culturally speaking, with sex, and with money.
Money is everywhere. Money is status. Money gets you laid. You should get some more of that so you can get some more of that.
We’re soaked to the skin with messages about money, and challenges to get more of it. It is okay to talk about getting more of it, because that’s just industrious.
What’s a little less acceptable: to talk about the actual sums involved.
Even less acceptable, it seems: to talk about giving it away. We’re supposed to do our charity work under the cover of dark and never mention it in polite company. Never mind online.
Just like something else.
7.
There is no reason to be shamefaced about giving.
Charity: do it however you need to do it. In private. In public. With the lights on or off and with as many people as necessary. Or not. Solo is okay, too.
8.
Because it is a joy to give.
Sometimes there is clarity in generosity. Sometimes, when I don’t know what to do, when my own inner sanctum is a whirring hamster wheel - and that little rodent can run, I assure you – I take a breath and get out of myself. I give. I offer. I support. I compliment. I love.
9.
I am not going to be shamefaced and shuffling about my joy. any of it.
10.
And so, back to women and money and power and pleasure and Betty Dodson and the lovesexymoney revolution.
Sex and money can be avenues to empowerment. Own your liberation, then share it.
dowhatchalike.
do what feels right.
get hot ‘n bothered – about giving and receiving, money and sex. the numbers. the love. the self. the share.
I think it may be clear that – generally speaking and on a regular basis – I love myself the menfolk.
You know how the New Year brings on the urge to rid your home and closets of clutter?
My closets have skeletons. Mostly male. And mostly live. I just like to keep them around.
At any given time, I have new men in line a-waitin’ an audition while the ex’s wait for a call-back.
This isn’t a “ooh I’m so hot, I can get any man I want”, because that is just not true.
Please trust and believe that my ass is way fatter than yours (and I’m wildly okay with that most of the time) and so my admission of more-men-than-I-can handle isn’t a competition or a challenge to be The Hottest of Women Alive because I WILL NEVER EVER WIN at that game.
No, it is way worse than that.
I think I may be a collector. It is a morbid hobby and it consumes most of my available mental closet space.
So my cleaning of closets started last year.
It started in the fall, when That Very Bad Lying Man from the summer came back around and professed to having made mistakes and wanting me back.
There were insincere speeches. There were insincere calls. The last insincere telephone call went like this:
Very Bad Lying Man: Hi. I love you.
moi: Oh Very Bad Lying Man, you do not. Stop this. All of it.
Very Bad Lying Man: Are you sure you want me to do that?
moi: YES.
Very Bad Lying Man: [hangs up. stops calling]
moi: [RELIEF]
And that felt so good. It felt good to just relent and admit to myself that although the words were pretty – of course they were, they were scripted and rehearsed – the person professing them was not.
It felt good to just be calm and decisive and honest and walk away.
When I heard that the Very Bad Lying Man was married, and a fraudster, I was not traumatized. In fact, I was a little relieved. All my suspicions were confirmed, I am not crazy, and what’s more, I called “rain!” long before he was finished the game. I decided this is not good enough and said no more.
That was good. So good that I’m compelled to repeat myself.
Still, I wrote about it and I think it appeared as though I was upset and in a deep, dark place.
I wasn’t.
I marvelled, though, at the chaos the Very Bad Lying Man sowed in so many lives. I even marvelled at how impoverished his own interior and emotional life must be to make him so hungry to rob other people – of their bank and of their butterflies.
But for me: no grief. No anger. Instead, confirmation.
Intuition, standards and judgement: briefly on hiatus, but firmly back in play.
So, with that loop being closed in the most surprisingly unsurprising of ways, other strings started knotting or unravelling, too.
There was a man with whom I had an ongoing, months-long flirtation. He kept asking me out. I kept saying no – but not because of anything to do with him, but because of timing, babysitters, the waiting list, etc. Still, I really was interested. He’s smart, and there was definitely a shiver of electricity between us.
Then, last month, I was excited about a piece I was writing, that really meant something to me. It was about sex. It was wildly enthusiastic.
I told him about it. It went like this:
Mr. Potential: How are you?
moi: I’m in freaking heaven. White wine, chocolate, writing about porn, sex, and love as an ashram. Go ahead. Try and top that.
Mr. Potential: It’s a nice conceit but…[rolls eyes]
moi: Is that at me? What was that about?
Mr. Potential: You’re fooling around with a conceit and academic theory when what you’re really talking about are human emotions and wants and needs.. and it is not just you… a whole body of literature does it.
moi: Sweetie, it is called a metaphor. It is a useful tool for thinking and exploring concepts.
Mr. Potential: I know.
moi: Why is that so exasperating?
Mr. Potential: Because it doesn’t get at the heart of the matter.
moi: You haven’t read the piece. You don’t know if it does or does not. But please, do tell me what is the heart of the matter is, in your opinion.
Mr. Potential: I suspect that you’re not laying out your real emotions and feelings about it. Your conflicts. Your real sense of who you are. Your shame.
(my shame. my shame? MY SHAME?
Please, man-who-wants-to-sex-me-but-has-given-up-and-therefore-no-longer-needs-to-maintain-the-facade-of-friendship – or even RESPECT – feel free to prescribe my sexuality to me.
Go ahead and tell me when and where and of what I should be ashamed. Because I am sadly remiss in that area, that’s for damn sure.)
(also, importantly: “Not having sex with you” does not equal “Ashamed”.)
This – unlike the predictable betrayal by Very Bad Lying Man – was a surprise attack and and it wounded me.
What was it all about?
I knew you’d want to know, Dear Reader, so I asked him, directly.
moi: You know what is kind of disconcerting? When we started talking, I was bubbling over with positivity and inspiration. What was so irritating about that, that you needed to rub the shine right off my lamp?
Mr. No-Longer-Has-Any-Potential: You interest me but you won’t even have a drink with me so I’ve given up on that notion. Now when I talk to you, it’s more like a cat batting a toy. If I thought you were genuinely interested in me…… I would take your words more to heart.
I swear that I am not making this up.
I read somewhere – but can’t remember where, so if it was your blog, say hey! – that if you want to see what someone is really like, don’t give them something they want, and see what happens.
Now, normally, I would disagree with that experiment and that approach to interpersonal relationships. I do not explicitly, intentionally test people. I think it is manipulative.
But maybe I should back that thought right up, because that test, even if accidentally implemented, works.
I didn’t go out with this guy on his timetable and he got impatient with me…and then couldn’t be bothered to keep up the nice guy routine.
Telling.
So yeah, I’ve started being even more direct than usual – and asking, be still my heart, for exactly what I want and need – and as a result, I’m purging my life and my closets of extraneous men. I will no longer be the female Bluebeard of suburban Vancouver.
If I keep cleaning the live skeletons from my closets I may even end up with enough storage space for my shoes.
2010 is looking gooooood. And tidy.
___________________
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On the flight to Las Vegas, Heather, my sassalicious/salacious friend who likes to front like she’s tough, cracked and cried and gushed about how much she loves her husband. To be fair, she’s terrified of flying and was flying (high!) under the influence of two Ativans and three vodka cranberries.
Please note: very very bad combination. Do not try this at home, or anywhere. It gets messy. Heather knocked my laptop off the seat tray and then knocked her drink into my purse and later knocked boots with her camera in the airport bathroom. To summarize: inadvisable.
I digress. This is part three of my Las Vegas trilogy. Las Vegas is all about money and sex and I’ve mused about the meaning of those things already. So now let’s talk about the place – other than Las Vegas – where money and sex unite and ignite: marriage.
Kelly: Do you get butterflies about Tyler? Or is he like an old shoe? Heather: What kind of shoe are we talking about? Be specific. Kelly: I don’t know. He’s your shoe. Heather: Yeah, I do. Last time he went away…when he came back, I got the butterflies. Kelly: Like your stomach flipped over? Heather: I had been alone with the kids for three and half days/years. I was REALLY happy to see him. Kelly: If Tyler wasn’t your husband, would he be one of your best friends? Heather: If he talked more, or at all, sure…you know, we did the long distance thing before we got together. So I guess we were friends first. Kelly: How did you talk on the phone if he doesn’t talk? Heather: He talked then. He worked hard. We talked for hours and hours on the phone. That’s why we had sex on the first date. It was all that talking. Kelly: Can I write that you had sex on the first date in my blog? Does your mother read my blog? Heather: Is it in Canadian Living? My mother only reads Canadian Living. Kelly: We should be fine.
I asked Heather this because she’s my sister from another mother except she’s a reformed tramp. (Reformed in the sense that she only slings it in one direction now because she’s happily married and them’s the rules, usually.) I ask Heather because she’s like me and she’s got what I want. But I ask other people these questions because I wonder – eternally, constantly, with every breath – if passion is a sprint, a marathon, or a long slow walk that keeps rockin’ fifty years later in twin rockers on the porch.
And because love and marriage are everywhere in Las Vegas.
The couple in the row behind us kissed all the way from Bellingham to Las Vegas. In Vegas, there were sex cards galore…and brides. I saw a bride kick a cowboy straight in the shins.
In my head, I cheered on the shin-kicking bride. (I’m a terrible pacifist.) Earlier, that same cowboy was insistently and persistently friendly with me while I tried to have a drink with my colleague and his wife. Cowboy desperately wanted me to meet his friend. He told me his friend had “mustache rights”. This meant nothing to me, but it meant something to my co-worker who got very, very upset.
After Cowboy left, I was brought up to speed on the meaning of mustache rights.
It is not a good pick up line.
Sometimes this human mating game is perplexing and other times just plain unfathomable. Thirty-sex years into it, I’m still figuring out the rules and I like them less and less the more I learn. And one thing that I have learned for sure is that love doesn’t play by the rules – hence our need to make them. We think codes and lines and boundaries and laws will keep us safe. But love is an outlaw.
And oh, how I love love.
Cowboy’s attempt to play drunken wingman for his mustachioed friend interrupted a great love story. My coworker and his wife were telling me how they met and married.
They were high school sweethearts who broke up when he went off to college. He graduated, got married and stayed married for twenty-four years. He got divorced and got married again for twenty-four months.
In the wake of his second divorce, he signed up at Classmates.com. A week later, he had a message from his former sweetheart, saying “I don’t know if you remember me…I’m married and living in Florida.”
He wrote back and told her about his life, his divorce, and his pending trip to Florida, asking “Can I take you and your husband to dinner? I’d love to catch up.”
She wrote back “Funny you should mention your divorce…I’m in the middle of a divorce, myself.”
He called her, and when she picked up the phone and it was like they had never stopped talking.
He went to Florida to see her. He started going to Florida every six weeks. Then every four. Then every two. Then he was out of airmiles and free trips and told her that it was time for them to live in the same place. She quit her job and moved to Washington, DC with him.
And then they got married – in Vegas – on January 1, 2003. Every year since then they end and start the year in Las Vegas, the place where they ended their days apart and started their life together.
My big, burly friend – who, a few days earlier at a company dinner introduced me to filet mignon and the Manhattan (steak and bourbon. I like ‘em. Who knew?) and explained to me in abrupt, gruff detail the meaning of Cowboy’s mustache rights – then leaned over to me and said, “I bet you didn ‘t know I was so sensitive, did you?
No I didn’t . But now I do. And I’m so glad I do.
This story – this long, interrupted, lost and found love story – ran honey through my veins.
It could be straight from the pages of Lost and Found Lovers. In a study of 1001 participants, Dr. Nancy Kalish found that lovers who reunite later in life end up staying together (78%) and have an astonishingly low divorce rate of 1.5% compared to the national average of 51%.
That seems to me to be good odds for a gamble, and better odds than most. When it comes to my heart, I like to know my numbers.
Months ago, I wrote that there is research correlating the length, success and happiness of marriages to length of courtship – but not in the way you might expect. The longer the courtship, the shorter the marriage. A courtship longer than thirty-one months predicts divorce within one to four years. Couples who marry in haste - nine to eighteen months after starting a relationship - make it past the seven year mark and report very high levels of marital happiness.
So – don’t trust me, trust Ted Huston, PhD. I’m just wondering about butterflies and new relationship energy and the recipe for happily ever after. So I ask around. I look around. I get around. I poke around in books and libraries and make queries with my bff, Google. And what I’ve noticed is that the happily loved-up people I know seem to have a couple of things in common: it was passion, right away and they liked each other. Like, really really like each other, like spending time together, enjoy each other’s company, and laugh a lot. They hang out. They would be friends even if they weren’t lovers. But they have to be lovers because of all that passion.
__________________________________
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I’m all about The Sex but Las Vegas is making me feel like a prude. And confused.
Sure, sex is a great recreational activity. It can have bows and tassels and feathers and giggles. It can also be a spiritual experience and a source of reverence. It is also an industry. I know this is not news. I knew it. But now I really, really know it.
On the strip there are people in bright coloured hoodies that say “Girls Direct” handing out business cards for escorts. The cards have naked women on them. These cards are everywhere, on every corner and scattered on the sidewalks. These cards freak me out. The whole thing freaks me out. I’m not even talking about the sex work. I’m thinking about the people handling and handing out the cards. There are women, who probably don’t have work papers, and who probably work all day at some low-paying job, who stand on corners at night – cold nights – and hand out sex cards advertising women for sale. This makes me sad.
I’m not sure if sex work, per se, makes me sad. It kind of does, because I exhalt sex. I wish it could be like that for everyone. I wonder about strippers and sex workers and porn stars – male and female – and wonder if all sex becomes a job for them. Off duty, do they still have loving, incandescent, transcendant sex? Or does it become boring and a chore and the thing you do for work? In other words, work.
So the sex cards and the newspaper boxes filled with catalogs of naked women have made the usually invisible sex work visible to me. And the money. The Las Vegas strip is all about the naked hustle. I liked it yesterday but today I’m overwhelmed.
Today has been weird. Today I was by myself which might have made me look like a stray or possibly prey. It brought out the predators. Some were just harmless, awkward, embarassing pick ups. Some were deeply unflattering drunken approaches. The worst was when I was walking just off the strip. A guy slowed down, pulled over, turned on the interior light and rolled down the passenger window. I thought he was going to ask me for directions. But then I realized that he had pulled up his shirt and was twirling his nipple.
What is that? Is that about sex? Is that really a pick up and does he really think that has a chance of success? Or is the thrill in the scary?
For ten days, a phrase has followed me around like a hungry kitten, mewing plaintively, quietly roaring, threading itself around my ankles, feinting, shadowing me. It wants to be fed.
Two Saturdays ago Lianne Raymond talked to me about women and community and creativity and art-hunger. She said, something is dying to be born.
Something is dying to be born.
It seems such a female thing to say: the flesh poetry of experience. A secret language traded between intimates of the violence of birth and glory of delivery. The wrenching of asunder and the joy of embrace. A story beaten in the pulse of mundane responsibility and cosmic love. Goddesses and bitches and sisters and women. We know this story. It is the story of generation.
It is the story of Kali, goddess of destruction, eater of time, protectress and creatrix.
It is the story of Eve. Of Lilith. Of my feminist friend, Ronna Detrick, who walked away from a church and a marriage but knows with her body, her mind and her faith that all of her leavings have led to profound findings.
It is the story of money. Of power. Of God. He who giveth, taketh away.
It is the story of sex and passion and love, all of which can destroy lives and create them. Women throw themselves on the pyre of love and of loss and say burn me up.
It is the story of Bertha, the mad wife in Jane Eyre who burns down Thornfield, and of the haiku necessity of ember, flame, and ash:
It is the story of cold, clear winter moons and of truths washed clean by icy, white light. It is the story of Foucault and forgiveness, of brooms and brushed floors, and revolution.
Revolution: 360 degees: all the way around. Return. Circles. Cycles. Seasons.
My daughter has one Bratz doll. I don’t love it. Someone else gave it to her.
My daughter has one Bratz t-shirt. I don’t love it. Someone else gave it to her.
My daughter went to a book swap at school and traded in her Franklin and Dora books for a Bratz book. I did not love this.
I made a deal with her: she can keep the book. She can look at it as much as she wants and take it wherever she goes, but I will read it to her only once, and it WILL be followed by a feminist sermon.
It wasn’t so much as a sermon as a Q&A.
Baby Q. Why don’t you like Bratz?
Mama A. I don’t like Bratz because they dress in a way that is not appropriate for young girls and it seems like they’re trying to be women instead of kids. I don’t like Bratz because they show their stomachs to get attention. I don’t like Bratz because there are better ways to get attention, like being kind, making art, helping people, solving problems, discovering things, being a good friend, excelling at school, playing sports, singing songs. I don’t like Bratz because in that book all the girls do is go shopping, worry about looking pretty, and chase boys. I don’t think they are a good example for you. They don’t show you how wonderful it is to be a strong woman with many interests and skills.
Baby Q. But you like Beyonce. And she shows her stomach. Is Beyonce a brat?
Mama A. It is part of the performance. The main show is her talent. I think. Maybe.
This isn’t a simple issue to address. I’m not sure how to address it. I’m pretty sure I did it wrong, because later my daughter showed me her Bratz doll wearing a dress, a parka, and jeans and said: Look, Mama, she’s not showing her stomach! She’s not a brat anymore!
Shopping, vanity, parties, boys, slut shaming, sex and politics and feminism and women being dispossessed of their sexuality. Sex and spirituality. Reverence. Whore.
I’m inconsistent and conflicted.
I’ve been accused of ‘prostituting your cleavage‘, my blog is named Cleavage, I sell a PORN tshirt, I write about pretty much everything through the lens of sex and yet I’m tsk-tsking about Miley Cyrus. And Bratz.
Why? Because the message about sexuality that I get from Bratz is that it is a commodity. Saleable. I am not in love with the message: be Paris Hilton! Only brown! And get that boy! To buy you things!
I think it is not a great example of femininity for a five year old. (Or any year old.) Yet images of women rockin’ their sexuality truly rock my world while stories of slut-shaming make my head explode, twice.
But what is it that I am trying to protect her from, exactly? From predation? Exploitation? Mistakes? Tears? The only way to get to empowerment is to run that gauntlet. It takes time and false starts and pouring your sexuality into the cups of unappreciative others before you abandon that bottle. Before you surrender to yourself and own it.
Maybe – as young people and young women – we grapple with the seeming imperative and challenge of adapting ourselves to society and as adults we stop apologizing for ourselves and just be in the world, as we are.
I think that’s why we have therapy and the word ‘cougar’.
I don’t know. I don’t have a fully fleshed out theory or paradigm to tuck my child-rearing – and my child! – into. I just think that the centre of the “how to be authentically feminine and sexual in a world that consumes and diminishes female sexuality” question is also A Grand Life Question: how do I navigate the constraints and dictates of our society while questing for authenticity?
It is a big, worrisome question. But what worries me even more than that question is this one:
62 people have
