Category Archives: Work

I don’t think that means what you think it means.

Life, Soapbox, Web

In which I go off on victimhood mentality as displayed by a member of a privileged* class.

I just read a huge, long, 40-post tweetfest freakout about “sexual assault.”

The writer claims that she got licked on the cleavage in a hotel bar. She’d gone merely to collect a fork, with which to eat her dinner in her room, and a man demanded a hug and then licked her chest. It was at the DNC, apparently. She went on and on and on about how broken “the system” is, how people “wanted to, but couldn’t” help her after her “sexual assault.”

Help with what?

Well, she wanted the drunk licking-man’s convention credentials pulled, and she wanted him evicted from the hotel. Apparently the very sight of him brought back the trauma of having been licked on the breastbone — very near her nipple! — by a fucking idiot she should have just laughed at for being a pathetic, stupid, neckless loser.

Instead, per her own story, she complained to everyone, over and over, in graphic detail. From other convention-goers, to the hotel staff, to the police, as if it were a horrific crime and not just a super annoying annoyance.

And when people asked her, as she documented in her tweetfest, why she didn’t grab his dick and twist until he squealed, or punch him out, or react in any sort of self-preserving way, what they meant was, why didn’t you react in ANY sort of self-preserving way if being licked on the breastbone was so traumatic for you? Apparently she did and said nothing, just allowed it to happen.

Which is implied consent, actually. I get being shocked into immobility by something truly horrific, like war, but you’re just being licked on the chest by a short, no-necked drunken moron, in public, and you’re just standing there. To use an insult usually reserved for the opposite sex, why don’t you just grow a pair and, if you’re so in need of protecting, protect yourself?

Oh, because you’re an habitual “victim” who needs men to protect her while she simultaneously categorizes poor male behavior as “sexual assault.” Well, you can’t have it both ways. Either all men are assholes and you protect yourself, or all men are your saviors and you let them lick you because you’re weak and helpless.

Then she tweets about going to her room to cry and shower in a vignette designed to make her sound just like a rape victim, clearly seeing no difference between her experience of a drunk idiot’s bad social judgement and the experiences of actual rape and assault victims. Because an entitled, privileged white woman being licked in a convention hotel bar is exactly like being a third world child bride or an ISIL sex slave.

Then she’s upset about being driven to make her statement in a cop car (a ride she didn’t even have to pay for), because apparently she expected cop cars to be comfortable, softly-upholstered, and nicely scented. (She could have taken a taxi, or hired a car, if she needed coddling so much.) She bitches about the interview room because it’s utilitarian and ugly (entirely missing, which is weird for a DNC attendee, that it’s probably under-funded, and that the detective probably hates it too). She calls the disgusting fart who bothered her into a hug and then licked her chest for a few seconds in a bar at two in the morning her “attacker.” She calls the experience of being exposed to a man’s immature and stupid behavior “my trauma,” and she’s shocked and appalled by having had the sensation of saliva drying on her skin. She calls herself a “survivor.”

(Just wait ’til she whelps. The “trauma” of giving up her entire body to something that’s forever leaving various fluids on her skin will probably drive her to in-patient psych care. And if she’s a survivor, I’m literally risen from the dead so many times I’m basically a cat.)

Being licked on the breastbone by a drunk fuck in a bar is not sexual assault. The reason nobody rushed to protect her was that she didn’t need protecting. It was inappropriate, yes, and embarrassing and desperate, but it wasn’t assault. The cops were bored with her because there hadn’t been a crime, just a case of male poor judgement and female social privilege.

After she reports to a police officer, she says she isn’t sure she wishes to file. So why did she report, then? I’ll say why: for attention. If you’re not going to file, why else report? Oh, to document it? Document what? No crime occurred. You were the “victim” of drink and desperation, not rape.

“Sexual assault is any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient. Falling under the definition of sexual assault are sexual activities as forced sexual intercourse, forcible sodomy, child molestation, incest, fondling, and attempted rape.” So, very, very loosely per the first sentence, sure, being licked is sexual assault; I’d imagine if it happened frequently and under some form of actual duress, a victim could use it in court. But once? In a bar? At oh-drunk-thirty, at a convention? I really doubt it, because it falls squarely into what anyone not raised as a victim would see was just dumb bad judgement, quickly and easily quashed with a sneer, derision, and mockery. Something along the lines of, “Hey, guys, look at this pathetic no-necked creep! He just licked me! Have you ever seen weaker game? My God, Walter, you ridiculous loser!” Boom. Problem solved, man humiliated, “trauma” averted.

Telling the hotel management? Whatever for? What were they supposed to do? It’s like blaming the waiter for your own allergic reaction to a dish you didn’t examine before you stuffed it in your life-threateningly allergic mouth. You’re at a political convention and you’re old enough to be in a bar; one assumes you have at least some working knowledge of the world, and yet there you are, whining to the wrong people and demanding your “attacker” be evicted from a room he paid for because he annoyed you?

Now, I’m going to say something and I’m going to use crass language, because sometimes crass language is called for. And before you come back with a bunch of bullshit about nuance and every situation being unique, I’m going to say that I already know that and ask you not to insult my intelligence. But here’s the deal: Men want pussy. And women decide who gets pussy. You’re not the goddamned victim, because you have dominion over what he wants. And this dynamic doesn’t change until and unless you’re under actual fucking duress.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s obvious by his behavior that he’s very, very bad at getting what he wants. (If he weren’t, he’d have learned long ago not to lick girls when they’re just trying to get a fucking fork from the bar so they can eat their macaroni and cheese TV dinner in their room.) If his idea of come-hither behavior is to lick a random chick on the neck, he probably hasn’t been laid, like, ever, and your power in this situation is so obvious your lack of apprehension is laughable.

Bad things do happen, yes. But not, in this case, to you.

—
* Contrary to popular belief held by feminists, a white woman, statistically likely to be educated, attending a political convention and staying at a hotel, is not disenfranchised in any meaningful or measurable way.

Sort of a deluxe cheese crispi sort of a thing

Food, Recipes, Reference, , , ,

In which there’s a recipe.

I’ve been eating these all week.

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They’re really just bean tostadas, but you should make some anyway because they’re fantastic.

This is a strange but delicious guacamole. Make some. (Click on the pic for the recipe.)

Cottage Cheese Guacamole

Now put it in the fridge to chill.

Put some grated cheese — I used a Mexican three-cheese blend — on a fried corn tortilla/tostada shell.

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Nuke until melted. I do mine for 33 seconds.

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Top with, in this order: bubbling-hot refried beans (black, ideally, but I had regular refried pinto beans on hand), diced onions, salsa or hot sauce, shredded lettuce, a dollop of the cottage cheese guacamole, and diced tomatoes.

Eat your tostadas.

IMG_20160623_175305

Here’s a salsa recipe, if you want one. (Click on the pic for the recipe.)

Salsa Roja Recipe

Protesting the fossil fuel industry, are you?

Blurbs, Soapbox, Social, Web, Whining

In which there’s some perspective.

Oil is in everything. Oil is in every single thing you ever use, touch, or buy.

How does food get to the store or farmer’s market? In trucks that are running on gas. How do you carry your food home? In plastic bags. How do you store your leftovers? In plastic containers in plastic fridge interiors sitting on linoleum, laminate wood, or carpeted floors, all three of which are petroleum products.

Your prescription lenses are a petroleum product, your window blinds are a petroleum product, your brassiere is a petroleum product, and every board and nail your house was built with were made with and transported to your property on equipments burning petroleum products.

Your toothbrush is a petroleum product, the materials used to make your shoes and coats are petroleum products, and the plastic clothes hangars in your front coat closet are petroleum products. Nearly all your personal care items are in plastic containers or contain petroleum products.

2016-06-20

It’s easy to get mad about spills and pipelines and fracking, but we have to remember that “the fossil fuel industry” is us. If we’re sick of it, if we want it to change, then we have to change.

We have to demand wooden toothbrushes, woolen coats, fewer cars and more trains. We have to refuse to place every single piece of succulent produce we buy into a thin plastic bag we subsequently throw away. We have to be okay with things arriving at stores unwrapped and possibly in need of cleaning before we can utilize them. We have to bring our own containers for nearly everything, and we have to recycle the shit out of what’s left.

We have to demand less plastic in all packaging, from bed linen sets to hummus to children’s toys. We have to quit buying baggies and Tupperware and Saran wrap, and re-use the stuff we already have. We have to quit buying plastic plates and forks and Solo cups for BBQs and camping.

We have to quit buying disposable crap. We have to demand that our appliances be repairable, long-term investments, rather than engineered to fail in 18 months.

We have to buy fewer cell phones. We have to keep our computers longer. We have to walk more and drive less. We have to quit ordering take-out and eat in, on dishes, instead. We have to demand paper wrapping for our drive-thru foods.

We need to stop buying individual beverage servings; everything in those cold cases in gas stations has to stop. Buy fountain drinks only, in paper cups or a reusable container you brought with you, or STFU.

We absolutely must stop buying bottled water. There used to be drinking fountains all over the place. Bring them back.

We also have to be willing to accept things that aren’t quite as good. Wooden toothbrushes are porous and capable of harboring germs. Woolen coats aren’t waterproof and compared to modern synthetics are heavy and bulky. Paper bags fall apart in the rain. Leather shoes are cold and they leak. Real rubber degrades in sunlight. Shake shingles don’t last as long.

These massive oil spills are not just happening in a vacuum. The fossil fuel industry exists because we buy their wares, and we buy them all day long, every single day.

Americans consume petroleum products at a rate of three-and-a-half gallons of oil and more than 250 cubic feet of natural gas per day each.

Every latte lid, every drinking straw, every produce bag, every cell phone, every oscillating floor fan. Every quick little errand in the car, every elective surgery, every bottle of herbal supplements or tube of organic moisturizer.

Every plastic laundry basket, every pair of Fiskars, every casserole dish lid. Every bottle of liquid laundry or dish soap, every bottle of shampoo and conditioner, every shower shell, every vinyl floor tile, every set of speakers, every stick of deodorant. Every hand tool, every automobile, every plush toy, every microfiber throw, every Rubbermaid storage bin, every USB cable and extension cord and surge protector bar.

Even if you ride your bike to the greenhouse for a bouquet of fresh flowers, your bike was built with petroleum products and the greenhouse’s mulch and seeds were brought in on trucks.

Here is a picture of a long line of people standing on a beach protesting fossil fuels:

protest

Swimwear and flipflops? Petroleum products. Lotions, sunglasses, SPF cream? Petroleum products. Ice chests and parasols? Beach towels and plastic zippers? Nylon rope, surf boards? All petroleum products.

Everything in your medicine cabinet and under your kitchen sink: petroleum products. The kiddie pool, the lawn hose, the patio furniture: petroleum products.

It’s not that I don’t think massive spills aren’t a problem. I do. But we need to change the market if we want to change big oil; there’s no other way to reduce these risks or to reduce or stop fracking.

Oil is in everything. You use three gallons a day just sitting on your [synthetic and therefore petroleum product-containing] couch doing nothing but looking at your petroleum product-containing TV, the channels of which you change with your petroleum product-containing remote. When you get up to have some eggs, you cook them in your petroleum product-containing pan, and top them with cheese that came out of a petroleum product-containing package. When you go to wash your plate, you use a kitchen sponge made of petroleum products.

“The fossil fuel industry” is us. If we’re sick of it, if we want it to change, then we have to change.

OMFG you pussies are really beginning to piss me off now

Reading, Soapbox, Web, Whining, , ,

In which I’m ranting about “rape culture” yet again.

Rape culture doesn’t exist.

No matter how many articles you see about it, it still doesn’t exist. There was a national hysteria in the 80’s about an underground ring of satanic day care centers, where American children were being sodomized by the thousands. That didn’t exist either.

Back then the battle cry was, “We believe the children!” because only an asshole wouldn’t protect children. Now we “believe” the women, but the boogey man is equally unreal.

If you go look up the study that the 1-in-5 allegation was based on, you’ll find that even THE STUDY’S AUTHORS THEMSELVES say that it was never meant to be used this way. Not to mention that the methodology was ridiculous and biased, and basically all of the sexual contact reported was counted as rape or assault whether the respondant thought so herself or not.

Do you really think that all sexual contact is rape or assault? Really?

Seriously, gentlemen, just stop and THINK ABOUT IT for a minute. If 20% of women were getting raped, you wouldn’t be online right now. You’d be out with a baseball bat fighting men off of your mothers and sisters and daughters in the very streets. After all, it takes a long time to rape 31,400,000 women.

Rape culture was manufactured. Probably by college feminists for their own grant-generating agenda. Who knows. I don’t know, but I do know it’s a massive goddamned waste of time and attention.

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The snake analogy is utterly ridiculous and lacks intellectual rigor on every conceivable level. Snakes are animals, and they behave instinctively. Men are humans and have brains that are orders of magnitude more complicated than snakes’ brains. The snake analogy is straight-up sexism because if I can judge all men by their dicks, I can judge all blacks by their melanin, and all idiots by their IQs.

Men have become so soft now that they just accept brutal sexism — from one of their own! — without even a whimper. (There are few things more incorrect-seeming than the self-loathing modern male feminist.)

Feminism is now making men hate themselves for their masculinity. HOW IS THIS A BEAUTIFUL, RIGHTEOUS SOCIAL MOVEMENT?! It’s fucking not. It’s a disaster. It’s hateful, it’s ugly, it’s whiny, and it’s childish. There’s no academic rigor; it’s just a bunch of complaining about being rich and Western and how awful it is when you’re and public and men look at you. These women honestly believe that the world owes them perfect comfort and perfect safety, and that their feelings of discomfort are exactly like what Malala went through.

And the duh moment: the idea that men should police their own sex, particularly in the protection of women, has existed as long as men have existed! (See: nearly everything men have ever done, ever.)

Why are we letting idiots write articles? (Yeah, yeah, it’s HuffPo. They’ll let anybody post anything.)

As a woman, I think mens’ desire to help and protect women would be better served if it were based on facts and evidence rather than hysterical press. I also wish that they’d hold both themselves and women to a higher standard of truth.

This ‘rape culture’ hysteria distracts from real issues, like the fact that ISIL just burned a bunch of sex slaves to death in public. Let me say that again: they took a group of women and lit them on motherfucking fire and burned them until they were dead. THAT is a women’s issue. THAT is where our attention should be. THAT is what feminism should be working on, not making boys ashamed of their sex.

White chicks “feeling uncomfortable” when men look at them, or walk past them, or speak? IS FUCKING NONSENSE. White chicks are the safest, most educated, freest, and most privileged class IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. They — we — are not victims, and letting us tell you we are is a disservice to us all.

Rape culture is a lie. Kill it with fire.

A killer app

Events, Soapbox, Web, ,

In which I talk about the news.

Was told by WaPo via popup that I’d already viewed my allotment of free stories for the month, and was invited to give them a hundred bucks per year. Instead, I switched to another device and read the story anyway, and they got no money. (I sometimes subscribe for a month or two to a paper I read frequently, out of guilt, but there are so many I visit that it’s a hassle to subscribe and remember to unsubscribe and keep them all straight.)

Same with the NYT. And the local paper from the last town I lived in. It’s only the 10th of the month, so clearly I click on a lot of news links as I scroll down my Twitter and Facebook feeds. But ultimately, there’s no paper I want more than twenty articles, maximum, per month from.

Problem is, I feel bad about it. I want to support journalism. We need newspapers more than ever before, because they do things that nobody else does: they do long, involved, expensive research; they send reporters to sit through meetings at every level of government; they centralize and curate conversations.

And most of them, unlike entities that were never papers but have only ever existed online, still feel the ghosts of journalistic ethics. They went to school for this shit, and they took ethics classes. They care about impartiality, facts, and justice. We may not agree with their various slants, but they’re all we’ve got. And they’re dying. (See: tronc.) Imagine a world with no journalistic exposées: just imagine it. You think it’s bad now?

When real papers, with real traditions and real experience and real journalistic ethics die, what will fill the void?

And not just big papers. In most small towns, once the paper fails there will be nobody to sit in on the budget meetings and report the results to the citizenry. (And, as we know, unobserved people do things they’d never do otherwise. Enter the new age of rampant fucking fraud and embezzlement at the city and county level!) Nobody to cover the town hall meetings, or the police reports, or the local obits.

This stuff is important, and without it we’re at the mercy of… God knows what. No information, bad information, information made up by politicians, corporations, and whackjobs; important information that never sees the light of day because there’s nobody whose job it is to report on it.

I want to pay for the work of journalists and journalistic institutions because I believe it’s valuable.

However, I have no interest in annual subscriptions to a dozen different news entities, because there’s no paper I want to read thoroughly enough to justify the expense. (The last time I subscribed to the NYT, it guilted me that I wasn’t reading enough of the content to make sense of the subscription. Who has time to read the whole paper each day, let alone the Magazine every week?) This is no longer the age where we all subscribe to our local paper, expecting it to cover local events and to buy important national and international news off the wire. That day is done. Nobody wants a full subscription to a non-local paper, or even a local one. We get our news from everywhere.

What I want instead — and I’ve been thinking about this really hard — is the following:

  • A widget I can sign up for once, that follows me from paper to paper and lets me pay a dollar with a single click to view a story behind a paywall. (Or two dollars. Maybe five if it’s a massive research-based exposé.)

    • AND/OR

  • A way to buy an annual subscription that is allocated across all the news sites I visit. (For $99 you can access X number of articles across all member news entities for 12 months; if you go over, you can upgrade incrementally or revert to the per-story fee.)

Is it so much to ask? A little button that pops up and says, “You’ve read your free stories. This article is $1,” and which hits my card immediately and grants me access when I click on it, and which is secure and fair and works across all devices and platforms once I login? Why has no one invented this, when papers are starving for money? Maybe a bank could do it, or a credit card company. Bitcoin. Google. I don’t care, just make it happen.

I don’t want to subscribe to WaPo; I read the big stories but I’ll never read the whole paper every day because I don’t live there. Same for the NYT and the Star-Tribune and the L.A. Times and the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin (as well as magazines: Slate and Mother Jones and Wired and The New Yorker and The Rolling Stone).

Since most U.S. papers have shut down their international bureaus, I go to international papers for international news. I’d like to pay them, too. But I want it to be convenient and I want it to be fair.

I don’t buy print newspapers or magazines, and I don’t want online subscriptions, but I do want to pay for my news.

So, make it easy for me to do so. I beg you. I love you. We need you.

How is accusing someone of rape ten years after the fact ‘brave and courageous’?

Life, Soapbox, Web, ,

In which I go off on stuff that has nothing to do with me and about which I know nothing! Because it’s the internet!

A guy from Tor has recently been accused of rape. He had to resign. (I don’t know him, I’ve never chatted with him, but people who do and have say he’s a twat. So there’s that.) A woman who, ten years ago, had multiple sexual encounters with him over the span of a year, has now accused him of rape.

By her own admission, she slept with him repeatedly, in group settings, and while drunk. Apparently he violated her “safe word” in front of another man, who was allegedly appalled but failed to stop the alleged rape.

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One thing the sexual revolution told women was that they need sex as much as men do. This is not true. (I suspect this is why gay males will hang out in bathrooms and parks and malls and bars and concerts trying to get laid by strangers, but there really isn’t much, if any, of a lesbian corollary of the same behavior.)

Another thing the sexual revolution told women was that dangerous sexual activities are safe, and that women have an expectation of safety in unsafe situations. Which is obviously not true, if women are routinely upset for entire decades after engaging in such activities.

~+~+~
Women prefer less sex than men and they often prefer sex with committed partners.

Much if not most of the sex women have with non-committed partners is performed in an effort to convert the non-committed partner into a committed partner, rather than a male-like desire for the sex itself.

Women with truly high libidos are the exception, not the rule. There were always places in society for such women before the sexual revolution. The lower classes became dancers, hookers, escorts; the upper classes made secret assignations via servants, sometimes with servants (and often to the servants’ detriment). Men knew their expectations of such women could be different than the expectations they had for the rest of women.

For these types of women, the sexual revolution was awesome. For the majority of women, though, it’s been confusing. And damaging.

Before the sexual revolution, society kept females out of situations in which they could be emotionally damaged by the fundamental sexual differences between most males and most females.

It wasn’t oppression, it was protection. Withholding the vote was bullshit, of course, but telling us we need chaperones probably wasn’t. (“Boys will be boys” actually means something like, “you’re probably not going to like what he’d like to like, so let’s save you from that.”)

~+~+~
The sounds of a woman being happily fucked are virtually indistinguishable from the sounds of a woman being unhappily fucked. If you don’t move, turn, sit up and demand in clear language that the activities cease, well, there’s a lot of grey area. Especially if you’re not objecting to sex in general, but to a specific act.

Is it really that hard to understand that a muffled “um, no, stop” can sound — especially in a kinky setting — just like continued consent? Especially if you’ve already said the same thing earlier as part of the play?

Is it really hard to understand that an avoidant wiggle looks very much like a playful, fake-avoidant wiggle?

Is it really hard to understand when you’re in a hotel room with two or more men with whom you’ve agreed to have sex and with whom you’ve already discussed your safe word, that they might believe you’re up for pretty much anything sexual within a probably-not-completely-pre-discussed reasonable range?

Is it really hard to understand that when you’re in a hotel room with two or more men with whom you’ve agreed to have sex and something’s happening that he really enjoys and you suddenly safe word that he’s maybe going to have trouble getting on board with that?

Is your refusal to honor part of an implied social contract really rape? I mean, you agreed to be there, you agreed to sex, you agreed to take part. You agreed.

~+~+~
In before accusations of accusing the accuser!

I’m not accusing you. I’m telling you that your choices and behaviors have consequences. You’re not on a nice date with a nice boy; you’re drunk in a hotel room at a convention with a safe word and a couple of horny guys.

You have put yourself in what is clearly and plainly a dangerous situation: a purely sexual encounter with multiple partners, sexual play and/or role playing that requires a safe word, and intoxicants.

It is a situation in which someone is very likely to do something to you that, while not clinically harmful or physically dangerous, you don’t want or like.

And ten years later, this is rape? I’d say rather that it’s remorse, and that you need to take responsibility for not protecting your body or fine feelings adequately.

I’m not judging you. I’ve made equally bad decisions myself. I’m just saying it’s not legally actionable. (Destroying a man’s livelihood through public accusations is legally actionable. Again, I don’t know anybody involved, but still.)

~+~+~
If you’re super horny and a woman and on contraception, sex with random people is great and fun. Yay sexual revolution!

But if you’re a regular female with a typical libido, you’re doing it because everybody else does and because you’re human and enjoy human contact. But you’re not doing it like males do it, because you rarely want it like males do. (That you believe otherwise is part of the great feminist whitewashing, which has denied you many kinds of happiness and exposed you to many kinds of emptiness.)

When you get older and look back over your sexual career, you may find that most of your sexual encounters were not sexual as much as societal. If sexual intercourse weren’t now so normalized, if you’d had to go out and seek it rather than having it more or less just happen, you’d probably have had a lot less sex. And if you hadn’t had access to media that taught you about kink, if you’d had to invent it yourself, you probably wouldn’t have. You probably wouldn’t identify as submissive or sadistic or whatever you identify as; you probably wouldn’t have invented the safe word.

It probably never would have occurred to you, if it weren’t societally normalized, that you’d feel powerful getting drunk and naked in a hotel room with one or more men, being the willing object of a specific and certain kind of male regard. A kind of regard that is entirely physical and sexual, and which does not, in fact, encompass the whole of who you are.

If you weren’t both promiscuous and naive, you’d know that getting drunk and naked in a hotel room with one or more men is very, very likely to get you fucked up the ass, or spanked, or gagged, or pissed on, or used in some manner that, while not technically dangerous, you would prefer not to be used.

Because while this particular type of power over men can feel good, you can’t help but note that: you’re not a beloved female, known and cherished and cared for, you’re an imaginary sexual archetype. You’re a fantasy. You’re a dirty girl.

You’re a whore.

Because you’re drunk. And naked. In a hotel room. With one or more men. Who believe they have your permission, because you’re there. Freely, and of your own volition. They think you’re one of those women who like sex the way they do. But mostly what you want is attention and contact and to feel valued and powerful.

This is generally not the ideal way to experience those feelings.

~+~+~
And the other guy in the room, the one with whom you say you did have a closer relationship? Why didn’t he protect you? If he did, you weren’t raped. If he didn’t, why aren’t you accusing him, too, as an accomplice?

And why did you have sex with your so-called rapist again, afterward, at a later date? How does his charisma relieve you of responsibility for your own actions, your own choices, your own decisions? I mean, c’mon. He’s a fucking nerd. Literally.

While wanting to feel powerful and desired is quite normal, it doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility of the results of your decisions. Because you’re an autonomous grown adult, not a child.

~+~+~
Accusations of rape can ruin men’s lives. And society listens to women who accuse men of rape, because women are — in spite of all our efforts to prove the contrary — still considered valuable and precious, simply because we’re women.

~+~+~
“The crime of rape generally refers to non-consensual sexual intercourse that is committed by physical force, threat of injury, or other duress. Common law defined rape as unlawful intercourse by a man against a woman who is not his wife by force or threat and against her will.”

If you’ve already consented and are in flagrante delicto, and [one of] your partner[s] tries to do something you don’t like, where’s the duress? Men are generally bigger and stronger, of course, but if you weren’t already tied up and spanked and drunk or whatever, you’d be able to let your caring partner[s] know you’re not into that and that he should stop. And he would.

Could it possibly be that your decision to make yourself available in such a way to men who are not deeply invested in you emotionally was a dumb idea?

And simply not preferring one act to another, is that rape? Is an expectation that you should like and enjoy every single aspect of a sexual encounter truly realistic? Do you like and enjoy every aspect of your job, of your family holiday get-togethers, of your Tuesday night bowling league? Why do you believe you have the right to like and enjoy every single aspect of a sexual encounter, that only your own pleasure should be considered? Is that at all mature?

These men, after all, are not your husbands or committed partners. They have not made any formal commitment to protecting you or providing you with happiness, have they?

No. You’re just a fuck. You are owed only what fucks are owed, which is fucking. You cannot possibly argue that long-term partners and fucks get the same considerations.

~+~+~
I could safely consent to being spanked and tied up and gagged by my current committed long-term partner. Because he’s my committed long-term partner, he’s invested in me emotionally, and we have history and we have context. My pleasure and happiness are his concern.

I doubt he’d be equally as invested in some random convention chick in a hotel room, even if he’d known her a few years, through work. Context.

Context is a real consideration, and one that must be considered both morally and legally. And your having repeatedly consented to this sort of play with this man is willing and repeated consent, without force or duress.

The person who owes you an apology is you. The person who endangered you and let you down is you. The person who treated you like an unpaid whore… is you. The men you did this to yourself with were merely set dressing.

~+~+~
I might also posit that a post-birth control feminist society, which has repeatedly told you that you want and enjoy and deserve sex as much as men, might also be at fault. It repeatedly tells you that you can and should have a realistic expectation of safety in unsafe conditions. It tells you that nothing that ever happens to you is your own fault.

It tells you that you cannot and should not be held responsible for your own choices and actions.

It tells you that you can be drunk and naked with a safe word in a hotel with two men and not suffer any discomfort. Which is total bullshit.

Yeah, that might be at fault.

~+~+~
I know, I know.

People will say I’m not “sex positive,” like it’s some sort of an insult.

Telling women they’re frigid is an insult these days, too, because women are as horny as men. Right? It’s not like we exit these situations with experiences that bother us for years or anything, while the males very seldom do.

I won’t even bother to trot out my own sex life, because it’s lovely and it’s nobody’s business.

Instead, I’ll say that the majority of the hurts and fears of my past were due to the idea that I wanted and needed and enjoyed sex for its own sake just like men do. Furthermore, I would say that the majority of the hurts and fears of most women, their pain and rage and anger, their conviction that there are “no good men,” are due to the same myth. (See: all episodes of Sex and the City, ever.)

Women are not men. Left to our own devices, we don’t act like men, especially not sexually. Our society has told us that we like meaningless sex, but what we really like is attention and power and to be desired. And because of this, we put ourselves into situations that are quite plainly not safe.

The idea that you can go anywhere and do anything is false. We cannot. There are neighborhoods it’s best not to drive through, but if we must, we lock our doors and roll up our windows, don’t we? This expectation we have, that we can go anywhere and do anything, is both privileged and false. If we willingly go unsafe places and do unsafe things, the results of those choices are our own. We are credited with discrimination and, ladies, we must strive to deserve it.

If a male hangs out with drug dealers, uses drugs, engages in unsafe behavior, and ends up in jail or shot, whose fault is it? Well, we can, like I’m doing here, partially blame society, but ultimately his decisions — and their results — are his own. Is that blaming the victim?

When a person gets shot, it’s the shooter’s fault. When a person gets raped, it’s the rapist’s fault. Of course. But we have a definition of rape, and it does not include not liking a particular sex act while engaged in otherwise consensual sex.

Recognizing our own agency in our hurts is not blaming the victim. It’s responsibility.

Until women stop playing the blame game and start owning their choices, we’ll continue to be mocked and made fun of. Which is why I think it’s ridiculous that this entire thing, and all the other things like it, is playing out online.

—
This is what his detractors are doing:

‘The site was made by a small group of people of different genders, who are tired of Jake victimizing and harassing our friends in the infosec and internet freedom communities. Some of us have personal stories of being abused by Jake and some don’t. We have heard lots of complaints about his behavior over the years, and have experienced it first hand. We want it to stop.’

Maybe he’s a rapist. Maybe it’s a bunch of hearsay. I read the site, and he does sound like a manipulative, aggressive jerk!

This right here.

Soapbox, Social, Web

In which I bitch about things I see on Twitter! (You kids get off my lawn!)

A snowflake narrative is being claimed by nearly everybody these days, from African Americans to feminists to white males to the parents of autistic children, and they’re all saying the same thing: our suffering is so unique that no person or group can ever possibly understand it or us. Ever.

Here’s a prime example:

Capture (2)

Complex! Contextual! Nobody can speak to it!

Bullshit. What are you, twelve? Have you not yet learned that other human beings can model your experiences if you explain them?

Listen, you’re human. So are the rest of us. We can and do understand you. You’re not that unique. Or rather, you’re just as unique as everybody else.

The article itself well-written and interesting and is worth a read, even though the author gets himself turned around and eventually says that blackness is cultural, thereby negating his own point about racism and the so-called “black experience.” (He actually means the black American experience, which doesn’t apply to blacks in Europe, for example, or Somalian refugees, who can walk around being black all day long without getting shot by police.)

I’ve basically had it with this complaint. The concept that there are human experiences that nobody can understand unless they belong to a certain group is untrue and contributes directly to racism. Nay, it actually is racism, because it claims that human beings of various different skin tones are fundamentally unknowable to one another.

Which is stupid. Race is a social construct. We’re far more alike than we are different. Race is cultural, and cultures can be understood because everybody belongs to one or more.

Fear is universal. Fatigue is universal. Anger is universal. These are all human experiences, not black experiences, not female experiences, not disabled experiences. Blacks as a group and females as a group may feel fear in response to different triggers (cops for one, and strange men for the other), but fear is fear. We can model each other’s experiences, and we must if we wish to actually achieve the goals of these various social movements. If you’re a white member of Black Lives Matter and you parrot the idea that you are incapable of understanding the black experience, you’re perpetuating racism.

The article is really about finding out you’re not what they said you were, which is not a black experience, nor an American experience. It’s a human experience, and cloaking it as “racism” is disingenuous.

If you want to be understood, tell your story. But every time you claim nobody can possibly understand you but your own group, you’re basically claiming victimhood as your identity. Which isn’t exactly a healthy psychological state.

On the cult of printed books.

Memes, Reading, Reference, Soapbox, Whining

In which I’m kind of a dick about people trying to wean themselves off of their identification with their belongings (which is a very important stage of development, of course, but seriously, this has to be the hundredth blog post I’ve read about how deeply attached bitches are to their Harry Potter books, and I’m like, You were literally raised in the cheap portable personal electronics age, and your attachment to books, to actual paper printed books, is, compared to those who went before you and truly used books in a way you never needed to, tenuous at best, and yet here you are talking like you were a monk illuminator who just watched his whole life’s work burn to the very ground).

I love to read, but this maudlin affectation about book collecting currently infecting our group consciousness is getting silly. “I really love books!” is turning into some sort of off-kilter, past-worshiping, item-hoarding cult. We get it: you love the smell of books and the feel of a favorite volume in your hand. So does everybody else. Shut up already.

The vast majority of books you read aren’t that good, and won’t need to be read again. And reference is all online now, you don’t need encyclopedias or dictionaries or histories. You can put a thousand years of human knowledge on a single eReader, but you’ll still probably read throw-away pop fiction. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

The old fashioned library is dying, and in many ways, yes, it sucks, but let it go. Jesus. The TERRIBLE STRUGGLE you go through trying to pare down your embarrassment of stuff, to minimalize, to quit decorating with books you’ve never even read, truly verges on the absurd. You’re having crazy romantical identity feelings about a particular style of inanimate object. If you talked like this about rolls of aluminum foil, we’d tell you to see a specialist.

(I realize the analogy breaks down, because while aluminum foil is incredibly useful, it’s not potentially filled with knowledge in the same way a book is, but books aren’t dying: the format is changing. As are our lifestyles: we don’t have family seats where libraries can live for generations; we move every few years. The energy expended in moving a library of paper books that you could store on a six ounce device just for false nostalgia is wasteful. Period. And there are more books being published every day than used to be published in entire years.)

I get that it’s hard the first time, when you’re ten or eleven or so, and, because you spent all Saturday fucking off and not cleaning your room, your dad stuffs “everything that isn’t schoolwork or clothing,” meaning all your books and toys, into trash bags and throws it all out: yeah, you’re a kid, and you cry because you just lost your purple teddy bear for disobeying, and losing your beloved things is hard.

But if you’re old enough to have a book collection, you’re old enough to know that you are not your stuff, and that reading itself, that magical alchemy in which somehow an entire world fits inside you and lives there, isn’t going away, and everything in your books and papers can be digitized and stored in a smaller, lighter, more easily searchable format, and your maudlin attachment to a data format is too forced and common to really seem genuine.

books

I recently started learning how to make bread. It turns out that holding a ball of soft, living bread dough in your hand feels an awful lot like holding a book: it’s an act that belongs to everyone of us, it reaches backwards and forwards through time, it contains potential, it nourishes, and, honestly, you really have only a vague idea of how it’s going to turn out.

All of which is to say, hey, if getting rid of some treeware is truly heartbreakingly difficult for you, then you’re basically a Disney princess in terms of level of real world difficulty. Lucky you!

I’m an aging domestic! I’m so boring! Come read about cooking and plants!

Domestic Goddess, Life, Love & Marriage, Weather

In which my life is so completely the opposite of rock star. I’m not entirely sure how I’m supposed to feel about it.

Both of the houseplants, the kalanchoe a co-worker gave me last year and the avocado pit I started in 2014, were totally root-bound and desperately needed to be repotted.

Pastels

On Saturday we went to the ghetto K-mart for pots and toilet paper. It was the first time I’d gone anywhere in the car in months! The weather was gorgeous but everything was still grey and brown; it took today’s endless hours of rain to start any greening.

I also got a little gardening tool — I have half a plan to dig up the overgrown bed in front of the building and grow tomatoes and parsley instead of weeds and grass — and some tomato seeds.

Tomatoes

On the other hand, the rabbits would probably eat any seedlings, the site gets brutal direct sun all summer, weeding sucks, and I could just grow tomatoes in pots in front of a window and eliminate pretty much all the bother altogether.

I recently bought myself an apron. AN APRON. So when I cook and clean and do dishes, I wear my little housewifery uniform. I’m pushing 50 and I wear an apron because it keeps me from wiping my hands on my clothes and that seems like a good idea.

Apron

I still haven’t bothered to go out and make friends; I’m perfectly content hanging out with my weird and wonderful boyfriend and never going anywhere. (Plus, as far as I’m concerned, “going anywhere” weather lasts about four months a year in this part of the country. I miss Walla Walla weather so fucking much.)

I keep thinking I need to join a stitch & bitch or drag my carcass to an open mic, but then I don’t, which makes me think I don’t really want to. I’m generally pretty hard to stop when I set my mind to going out and doing things.

I cook dinner every night, I do dishes. I sleep in. I make the bed, I tidy up, I fuck around online, I read a few hundred books per year, I play with miniature sewing machines.

Miniature sewing

I don’t knit for shit anymore.

I also don’t sit on the floor anymore, which is beginning to get on my nerves. There may be a rug in my life soon, so I can sit on the floor. Chairs are stupid. I also think they might be bad for your legs, or at least your circulation, and your lower back.

Here’s a zucchini lasagna I made. I even made the marinara from scratch, since all the store-bought sauces these days have added sugar.

Lasagna

I do laundry, I sweep floors, I maintain seasonally appropriate decorations. Basically the only people I ever talk to are Scott and the guy at the gas station. Once in a huge great while I walk over to the taco bar for a drink or three, but I’m so cheap these days I feel like that’s only for treat, not for regular, even though I always used to blow my cash at bars. I mean, you can get twice as much booze for the same price at a liquor store than at the bar!

Bloody Mary

I actually like my job. I close the bedroom door, login to the other account on my computer, and take calls for Comcast. (You’d think taking calls for Comcast would be awful, but I support the security system rather than cable or internet, so we have totally different metrics and it isn’t.) After four hours, I log off and walk into my living room. I never have to wear a bra, or even brush my hair for that matter.

I routinely get perfect VOC (“voice of the customer” survey) scores, and about once a week somebody will ask to be transferred to my supervisor to report how much they liked my service. I don’t even have to wear shoes. When it’s slow, I read books between calls, or surf on my tablet. When it’s busy, the 4-hour shift goes by quickly. I have an incredibly comfy, cushy job and after the shock and awe of that year in retail I’m terribly grateful for it.

Comcast-bashing mail

I didn’t have to leave the building once during blizzard season. I worked from home and had groceries delivered! It was awesome!

I am basically the most coddled, most spoiled person on earth. Seriously. I don’t even get out of bed some days until two in the afternoon. The place is so small I can scrub the bathroom or clean the kitchen in half an hour. It takes minutes to sweep.

And the relationship is awesome. I love the shit out of him, and he loves me right back. We’re nice to each other and we help each other. There’s total affection and total parity, plus he regularly makes me laugh (even though he watches vintage pro wrestling way more than anybody should). If I get up to do some chore or another, he’ll jump up too and take out the trash, or run the broom, or pop off to the store with the grocery list (he does most of the household errands).

His only real bad habit is his regular failure to close cabinets. I close the medicine cabinet every single day, and kitchen cabinets frequently. But that’s it. Otherwise — well, beyond his propensity for puns and other forms of very unfunny, low humor — I couldn’t find anything to bitch about unless I made it up.

Sure, I do the bulk of the chores, but unlike all the other losers I’ve dated, this one actually pays the rent and the bills, so I’m happy to. And, unlike all the other losers I’ve lived with, he doesn’t treat our home like a hotel his mother works at. It’s fucking glorious.

Here’s the photo they’ll run if we ever get accused of some sort of heinous crime. (We won’t have committed it, though, because that would require us to go out and do something.)

First pic with new phone's front-facing cam

The neighborhood is host to tons of heavy traffic. I’ve never lived on a busier street, and I once lived on Powell boulevard in Portland. There’s traffic past our building 24/7, and a lot of it is emergency vehicles with sirens on. Tons of foot traffic, too, all year, although a lot more when it’s a decent temperature, of course. In the summer, there’s the pedal pubs too. Somehow it gives the impression that you’re doing something, all that activity just out your window, even though you’re probably just sitting around looking at Pinterest or something. Maybe that’s part of why I don’t seem to feel compelled to get out there and meet people.

I’ve lost a lot of of the weight I’d gained in the past few years, and intend to lose still more. But even though in some places my dimensions are what they were, say, five or ten years ago, that middle age thickening thing is clearly taking over. It’s something about where the fat lingers, and the elasticity — or lack there of — of the skin, somehow. I can look at myself in the mirror and know that this measurement and that measurement is what it was awhile ago, but now I look like an old lady. The body changes. It’s vaguely disconcerting.

My eyelid continues to indulge in its slow decline and now my eyes are entirely asymmetrical. I do wonder what causes one’s eyelid to droop. I think it’d freak me out more but Scott doesn’t give a shit, somehow that helps. I guess you can relax about the issue of your beauty or lack there of when you’ve already got a mate.

KINDLE_CAMERA_14386

Getting into other middle aged pursuits: old movies. Movies from the 30’s and 40’s. Movies I used to find uncomfortably dull are now enjoyable. I find myself thinking about how when the weather gets nice, I should persuade Scott to go for brief postprandial walks around the neighborhood with me, for our health.

I think about holidays and tea pots, whether I should buy a spiralizer, I read tons of recipes; I don’t think about bars, gigs, and parties. I put on makeup about every six months for no reason and then generally wipe it right back off. I consider appropriateness when choosing clothing. (Well, secondarily. First it’s comfort, then it’s “does this hide or emphasize the fact these old tits aren’t in a bra?”)

Becoming amused by my invisibility; when I walk around or hang out in front of the building veritable packs of “young people” walk by and they register me exactly the way twenty-somethings register people old enough to be grandmothers. It’s weird. I used to be them, now I think of them as idiot kids and they think of me as old. Conversations that were once painfully new and riveting are now painfully derivative.

(I do know the “cure” for these feelings of aging into obsolete unhip decrepitude is to go hang out with a slightly older crowd. Then you quit being an old lady and you start being the hot young thing; but again, I just can’t be arsed.)

It makes me invisible in a way, being older than the neighborhood, and it’s such an interesting dynamic, since most of it occurs internally. The kids in the building usually say hi on the rare occasions I see them, and certain personality types will nod as they walk past on the sidewalk, but in general most of the population’s eyes just slide off me like I’m not there. I’d probably be super bugged by it if I didn’t live with someone who smooches me frequently and somehow manages to grab my butt every single day of the year.

Aired up my bike tires! Told Scott to buy me some bike baskets. Getting ready to ride for groceries! Having them delivered is awesome, of course, but hardly necessary when it’s over 50F (and under 80F). Had considered going for a ride today, but it decided to rain non-stop. At least the grass has started to become green.

Maybe I’ll go ride my bike around tomorrow!