Accidental Historian

Getting Carded, Part 5

There’s no place worse to be than The Friend Zone, amirite, guys?

We all know what The Friend Zone is, I hope.  It’s that terrible purgatory wherein you get to spend a whole bunch of time with that one member of the female gender who is, like, completely perfect for you in a making out and boobie-touching sort of way, but she just won’t let you touch her boobies and totally won’t make out with you.  It’s an awful thing to behold, truly.

And we all know how one gets put into The Friend Zone.  It’s when you, as the guy, say something like, “We should go on a date,” or, “You know we’re perfect for each other, right?” or you keep “accidentally” touching her boobies when you’re hanging out, and then suggest that maybe she should let you actually touch them in a non-accidental sort of way.  But no matter what you do she just plain doesn’t let you touch her boobies or make out with her because she just doesn’t want to ruin your friendship.

Of course that whole thing is bullshit.  She’s just trying to use you.  Or keep you as a backup.[1]  Or string you along out of some sort of crazy-ass sadism because women are evil, controlling bitches like that.

You know, when I put it in those terms, The Friend Zone doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.  I literally cannot figure out why anyone would want to stay involved in a relationship wherein one person has been put in The Friend Zone.  Obviously the woman doing the putting into The Friend Zone is some sort of using, controlling bitch, so why would her poor victim even want to touch her boobies?[2]  She’s obviously controlling him with her feminine wiles and the poor sap has been brainwashed by boobies.[3]  Boy, howdy, does it ever suck to be that guy.

Wait, no.  That still makes no goddamn sense.

Okay, let me try to figure this out in some way that does make sense.  Okay, what about this: let’s take a hypothetical approach wherein the female in question really does want to be friends and the male in question is a whiny little dipshit.  Then let’s see where this whole thing goes.  Conceptually, of course.  Theoretically, even.  Because we all know that this scenario is, like, totally impossible in reality.

Let’s say that the woman in question genuinely doesn’t want to date right now.  This could be a general thing and she’s totally off the dating scene.  It could also be a specific thing and she doesn’t want to date the guy in question but, like, if Orlando Bloom showed up and said, “Ya wanna go for coffee?” she’d be all, “Yes, Legolas, oh, god, yes.”  It’s not likely, but, hey, it could happen.

Let’s ask the question, “What could possibly going through a woman’s head when she puts some poor guy into The Friend Zone?”  This, of course, depends on any number of factors.  We must consider them.

There are the general environmental factors.  Has she recently experienced a big life changed, including a career change, a death in the family, a cross-country move, or something similar?  Is she currently engaged in some sort of long-term self-improvement project, including going back to school, trying to write the great American novel, putting more of her time into charitable giving, or finally learning how to make those awesome pastries she’s always wanted to learn to make?  Is something taking up a shitload of her time, such as finishing her Masters while working full-time, a huge project at work, an ailing family member, or a recently purchased house that needs a lot of work?   Has she recently gotten out of a long-term relationship?  Has she recently gotten out of a short but intense relationship?  Has she experienced a string of bad relationships with guys who suck?  Is she, for that matter, currently in a relationship?

Once we get through the general environmental factors we need to ask specific factors.  Does she tend to date dumb jock types while you happen to be a pointy-headed intellectual type?  Are you pretty much her only friend and confidant?  Does she happen to be best friends with your sister?

These are all valid, nay, important questions to consider.  This list is also far, far from exhaustive.  Chances are that these or similar questions are all part of the mental calculus a woman puts into a potential relationship.

Guys, on the other hand, pretty much only ask two questions:

1.  “Is she hot?”

2.  “Is she single?”[4]

If the answers are, “Yes,” and, “Yes,” respectively, then there shouldn’t be any roadblocks in the way.  Any woman who does put up a road block, then, is being some sort of scheming bitch who is trying to destroy the guy in question.  Because, really, what else does a relationship need?

The problem with this difference in approach is pretty simple: the guy signals that he doesn’t actually give a shit about the supposed object of his affection.  If it’s only worthwhile to be friends with someone if she’ll make out with you and let you touch her boobies, then that person has been reduced to tongue, lips, and boobies.  It’s really that simple.

As such, the guy who sits around and bitches about being relegated to The Friend Zone sends the message that he is not and never will be boyfriend material.  Because, really, why would anyone want to date someone who doesn’t actually give a shit about them?  I suppose that there are women out there who are like that, though.  So maybe Captain Friend Zone needs to go find one of them.  Chances are he’ll be doing the object of his attention a great service if he does.

For the record, I’m not saying any of these things as someone who hasn’t fucked this up.  I totally have.  I’ve simply made it a point to learn from my mistakes.

Amy and I dated for about three months, then spent the next year and a half or so in this kinda-sorta pseudo relationship thingy that was bad for everyone involved.  For whatever reason she decided it wasn’t going to work and then tried to Friend Zone me, with a certain level of success, most of which had to be qualified by me pointing out that I did the passive-aggressive douchebag thing for most of that time.  After we stopped talking I realized from time to time that I actually missed her.  It wasn’t that I missed sitting around thinking about how great it would be if she let me touch her boobies.  It was that I missed having her around as someone to talk to and as someone who I knew would know Thing X about Subject Y that I, personally, knew fuck all about or would want to talk about Subject Z that I knew most other people I know couldn't be arsed to discuss.  Ergo, I hadn’t broken up with someone, I’d lost a friend.  I missed that particular friend and there was no getting her back.

Meanwhile, at a later, non-disclosed point in time I met a woman I came to value as a friend.  She was in a relationship when I met her.  I eventually figured out that she was actually someone I would date in a heartbeat if the opportunity presented itself.

Eventually she broke up with the guy, which I considered a good move on her part.  It wasn’t because I knew I could then make my move, but because she wasn’t happy and I wanted her to be happy because she totally deserved to be happy.  The fact is that by the time that happened our friendship had progressed to the point where I didn’t want to potentially fuck it up by making a pass and finding out she totally wasn’t interested.

The fact of the matter is that I know the standard guy response to that situation is, “Ask her out.  Who cares about the consequences?”

I do, that’s who.  And I care because in the final analysis I ended up being more unhappy that I didn’t let Amy Friend Zone me than that she didn’t let me play with her boobies and make out with her and shit.

Turns out the dreaded Friend Zone isn’t necessarily such a bad place to be.

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[1]I originally wrote this as “Or keep you as a backpack,” which would be really, really weird.

[2]I mean, other than the obvious reason.  Boobies are fun to touch, after all.

[3]Brainwashed By Boobies is also the name of The Curb Tacos’ debut album.  Out June 12th.

[4]This question is, sadly, optional for some guys.

Getting Carded, Part 4

When we last left off I was calling bullshit.  Specifically, I was calling bullshit on this:

It's because, in males more so than females, the sex drive is completely detached from the rest of the personality. The part of the male brain that worries about job security or money or social reputation or legal consequences has almost no veto power over the sex drive. You've heard guys say they were "thinking with their dick" or "I was thinking with the little brain" or "I took an order from Captain Bonerhelmet." That's what they're referring to.  [Emphasis mine]

I have a huge problem with the line of thought in the bolded sentence.  My problem is that it’s in an article that’s ostensibly written as a defense of women against the predation of men, but that single sentence negates pretty much every good thing that the article could have said (which, sadly, were few and far between).  See, by offering an awful and convenient evo-devo explanation the author totally takes all responsibility for men’s behavior out of the hands of men.  Don’t believe me?

Science doesn't seem to totally understand why the "base urges" part of the brain reacts differently in men. Maybe it's just a matter of having 10 times as much testosterone in their system, or maybe society has trained us to be like this, or maybe we're all spoiled children. My theory is that evolution needs males who will stay horny even in times of crisis or distress, and thus cuts off the brain's ability to tamp down those urges. Whatever -- nailing down the cause isn't the point.  [Emphasis mine]

Um, yes, as a matter of fact, nailing down the cause should be the point.  It should be the entire goddamn point.  And just dismissing male tendencies in the horniness department as “men need to be horny during distress” is fuck stupid.  You know what happens to be a really good way of getting your dumb, horny ass killed?  Stopping to rub one out while being chased across the savannah by a hungry lion, that’s what.  You know what’s a really bad idea during one of those “times of distress” that might include things like “famine” and “drought” and “spending a year stuck in a city besieged by ravening hordes of Huns?”  Bringing more hungry mouths into the world, that’s what.

I, personally, would think that the more logical evolutionary developmental advantage within humanity would go to the one who can control his sexuality.  Yes, there’s the whole propagation of the species through survival of the fittest and wider dissemination of the genes is a total Darwinian concept that makes perfect sense.  But humanity has something that your average mayfly, cuttlefish, or prairie dog lacks: the actual intelligence necessary to engage in long-term thinking.  Actions, after all, have consequences.  My dog doesn’t necessarily have the capacity to understand that, but I sure as shit do.

That, for the record, is pretty much how society works.  We have laws and cultural mores for a reason.  Some of those laws might be stupid.  Some of those cultural mores might be outdated.  But the underlying concept of laws and mores is essential to the proper functioning of human society.  So if you take fifty-percent of humanity, throw your arms up, and say, “Fuck, I don’t know what to do, they’re evolutionarily incapable of understanding consequences,” then YOU.  ARE.  NOT.  HELPING.

It’s as simple as that.

That’s the problem with this entire exercise, though.  The article attempts to say that it’s somehow “society” or “evolution” that causes men to treat women like shit, then passively says, “Well, what’re ya gonna do, boys will be boys, after all.  We can’t be trusted around boobies.”

Step one is to say that, no, it’s not okay.  Step two is to hold that line.  Step three is to smack any whiny, over-privileged twit who tries to go over that line without consequences.  Step four is to smack anyone who lets him get away with it.

It’s really not that complicated.  This isn’t to say it’s particularly simple, as there’s a lot of inertia and unexamined privilege that must be overcome in order to create real, lasting, necessary change.  For the most part it should be an issue of changing mores.  Make it unacceptable to be a douchebag.  Make it clear that certain actions are sexual assault.  Then, when someone crosses that line, don’t let him say, “She was asking for it.”

This is usually when someone comes out with the ol’, “But what about those crazy bitches who accuse guys of rape because they’re, y’know, crazy-ass bitches?”  To be honest, this is problematic.  I have no doubt that there are women somewhere in this world who will run around all willy-nilly claiming that every single guy who’s ever looked at them is engaging in sexual assault.[1]  This, unfortunately, is a problem we have to deal with all the time in society.

What’s to stop my neighbor from accusing me of stealing his laptop?  What’s to stop someone walking down the street from calling the cops and claiming I tried to run her over with my car?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.  This is the risk of living within a society.

Accusations of crimes related to sex are also far, far more complicated and fraught with social peril than accusations of property theft.  In most cases it’s literally a case of the word of one against the word of another without any witnesses.  That’s truly problematic and does open well-meaning people up to spurious and false accusations that they cannot disprove.

The solution to this seemingly intractable problem, though, is not to simply allow one half of the population to get away with anything they want because, fuck, man, what’re you supposed to do?  That’s the world we live in right now.  Boys will be boys, after all.  They can’t be expected to consider the consequences.[2]  Besides, she should have known better than to put herself in a position where those uncontrolled and uncontrollable boys would see her and she sure as hell should have known better than to have a history of being sexually active.  Really, if a woman has had one penis inside of her then that means she wants to have every other penis inside of her at any given time, regardless of whether she knows the guy or likes him or wants to have sex at this particular moment.

That doesn’t sound fair to me.  And if it sounds fair to you, chances are you’re some sort of MRA and/or PUA douchebag and, quite frankly, the only solution to that is castration with a rusty X-Acto knife.  Sorry, bro, you know what they say, “Life’s a bitch, then you marry one.”  Har-har.

David Wong does try to avoid the exceedingly negative implications of his argument:

No, this doesn't excuse anything. Obviously, "She was asking for it!" is still a bullshit rape defense. All I'm saying is when you see guys actually get annoyed or angry at the sight of a girl showing too much skin, or if you see them eager to degrade or humiliate the girls at the strip club, this is why. It's probably why some Muslims make their women cover themselves head to toe.

While the disclaimer at the start is nice, the rest of the thing is pretty fucking stupid.  It makes sense if you genuinely believe that men are uncontrollable horndogs, I suppose.  But, again, all this does is say that it’s all the woman’s fault.  Humiliation, abuse, and strictly enforced dress codes are not an issue of men recognizing their limitations, either.  They are the artifacts of control, plain and simple.

And that is why we need to change up the cultural mores and stop saying that men can’t be expected to control themselves or consider the consequences of their actions.  It’s not some strange, amorphous “society” putting these limitations on women and allowing men to run about in a blissful fog, free of any consequences of their actions.  It’s men.  You know how I know that?  Because I happen to know that men are in society, men have most of the power in society, and the way society is formulated is strangely skewed to give men more power and privilege than women.

So, yeah, that’s all I have to say about that for the moment.  Stay tuned, though, since I’m going to veer off of the David Wong article and take all a y’alls into a place I’m sure you don’t want to go: The Friend Zone.

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[1]Seriously, I knew someone in college who was a social work major and one day, out of fucking nowhere, put this big, long diatribe out (on Facebook, if I recall) about how every man in the world was a rapist and not to be trusted.  Except her current boyfriend, of course.  She also accused me of being a tool of the Devil and attempting to undermine her once because she got it into her head that I had been pulling the strings on something that I had only a tangential connection to.  There is little doubt in my mind that, yes, she could end up accusing some dude of rape because he bumped into her on the sidewalk.

[2]Some people, of course, genuinely can’t think past the action to the consequences.  I do not think that this is or should be thought of as a normative male modality.  I think that your average male is completely and totally capable of controlling himself, but we as a society have not given enough incentive to do so.  I’ll also note that the primary drivers of the laws and law enforcement in our society are men.  Strange coincidence, that…

Getting Carded, Part 3

[I don’t do this very often, but this post needs a trigger warning, since it covers a topic that’s impossible to handle without discussing rape.]

I was having curb tacos across the street from the Double Door last Friday with a buddy.  Curb tacos, for the record, are regular tacos consumed while sitting on a curb.  They aren’t a venereal disease and there’s nothing sexual about the whole thing.[1]  It might be a bit soggy, but it’s not sordid.

The Double Door, for those who don’t know, is a Chicago music institution located at the intersection of Milwaukee, North, and Damen in the extremely gentrified Bucktown/Wicker Park area of Chicago.  The entire area is Asian fusion restaurants and trendy bars and Starbucks and various things that are magnets for childless people with disposable incomes in their late 20s and early 30s.  Last Friday was a bit misty, but it was warm enough that there was a lot of foot traffic and a whole lot of people who apparently thought it was the middle of goddamn summer and dressed accordingly.  The upshot of this means there was a veritable smorgasbord of two things: attractive women and short skirts.

So my buddy and I were having a conversation that should have cost me a man card or three, since it was me articulating my various feelings of inadequacy as a human being.[2]  He kept stopping to check out women who were walking across the street with their nice legs and shapely buttocks.  He also, in the time-honored tradition of men everywhere, made sure to point them out to me.

My answer was always some variation on, “So, what?”

At one point he got mad at me and said, “So why do you keep doing this?  Do you think you’re more mature than me or something?”

The answer to that question is “No,” which I tried to articulate, but probably didn’t do so well, since his question didn’t make any sense to me.  It would be like if I showed up with my new Mazda and my buddy was like, “That’s nice for you, I guess, but I prefer Hondas,” and I was all, “Why are you telling me my car sucks?  Is it because you don’t like gray cars?”  I couldn’t answer the question because it wasn’t applicable to the situation.  He thought I was judging him.  In truth I just didn’t want to be bothered.

Attractive women are nice to look at and all.  I’ll accept that premise because I wholeheartedly believe it.  For me, however – and this might be something that genuinely only applies to me, I don’t know – seeing an attractive woman isn’t that big of a deal.  I could see the most attractive woman in the world walk past me right now and by this time tomorrow I will have forgotten that it happened and gone on to something else.  For me it’s not a question of maturity or self-control or superiority so much as it’s a question of utility.  If I’m trying to have a conversation and maintain a train of thought someone stopping me to say, “Hey, look at that ass!” isn’t helping.

There’s also a functional point to be made:  I’ve made it a point to not think of women as a nice set of legs or a curvy ass or a sweet rack.  Does that mean that I can’t see and appreciate such physical features?  No, not at all.  What it does mean, though, is that I’ve basically deprogrammed my brain from being constantly and casually distracted by the presence of a nice set of legs or a shapely ass.  There’s pretty much zero chance I’ll end up striking up a long-term, meaningful relationship with a woman crossing the street half a block down, so I can safely not give a rat’s ass about her shapely ass.

Does that make me weird?  Probably.  Does it make me more mature than other men?  I’m going to say no, since I don’t think that maturity has anything to do with it.  That’s a completely different dimension of human attitude than a simple mature/immature continuum.

And yea, verily, do we reach the part of David Wong’s Cracked piece that pissed me the hell off and convinced me to finally pull a bunch of disjointed thoughts together and write about them: “#3. We Think You're Conspiring With Our Boners to Ruin Us.”  Um, yeah.

This is a fairly common idea.  Way back in the day Amy articulated it to me as, “Women know that if you can get a guy’s blood flowing to the little head he doesn’t have enough to think with the big one.”  It’s common knowledge, basically.  It’s not even like the idea is regarded as a moral failure or an issue of immaturity.  It’s just a value-neutral fact, like the wetness of water or blueness of sky or eastness of sunrise.  Give a dude a boner and he won’t be able to think anymore.  The goes with the attendant idea that all a woman has to do is flash a little thigh and said dude will get himself a boner.

Okay, so, this is conventional wisdom.  It’s generally accepted and considered part of the overall male-female interaction and everyone is just kind of okay with it.  Because that means that women get to control men through sex and boys get to be boys and we can all just live happily ever after.  Until it comes time to take someone to court on rape charges and everyone shakes their head and says, “Well she shouldn’t have been wearing that short skirt.  She was asking for it.”

Then it becomes a problem.  But only for those sluts who really should know better, anyway.  But that’s okay, too, because obviously they were going out in search of a guy to put his penis into them, so if they were planning on having a penis in them isn’t one penis as good as another, even if the one that happened to end up there belonged to a guy who grabbed her in a hallway and shoved her up against a wall?  I mean, seriously.  Why should she be picky, since she got exactly what she was after?

And, yeah, David Wong goes all the fuck over this territory, in spite of his protestations to the contrary.

First, you need to understand something about the unique love/hate relationship men have with their penises.

Do you remember that story about police having to free a guy who got his dick stuck while humping a pool filter? Or that other guy who got stuck humping a park bench, or the other guy who got stuck humping a picnic table? Or that judge who got caught jerking off while on the bench listening to testimony?

I, for one, do not have a love/hate relationship with my penis.  I neither love nor hate my penis.  And I can assure you that I have never gotten anywhere close to getting my dick stuck in a park bench or a public pool because I’m not a fucking dipshit who can’t control myself.  I would also be willing to bet that better than 95% of the male gender would completely and totally agree with me on that one.  There is as much of a gulf between “a guy who owns a penis” and “a guy who owns a penis and plays with it in public” as there is between “a guy who owns a knife” and “a guy who has stabbed a hobo to death.”

Simply having something that someone else has used in a way that’s frowned upon by society doesn’t mean you have to use it in that same way.  The story about the guy who gets penis stuck in vacuum attachment is going to get a hell of a lot more play than the million or so stories every day of guys who used a vacuum and managed to not stick their dicks in the various hose-based accessories.  It’s kind of the same thing as a story of kids getting kidnapped get a lot more play than the stories of kids who don’t get kidnapped.  Children are, at least according to the statistics I’ve seen, safer now than they were during the golden ages of years past when kids played in the streets all day and night and befriended magic hoboes who taught them important life lessons and told them where to find secret hobo treasure.  But all we hear about are the kids who get abducted, so people assume that there’s some creepy, candy-besotted stranger with a windowless Astro van around every corner.

I guess my point is this: I’ve never seen a dude fucking a picnic table or humping a pool filter.  I don’t think I’m alone in this.  Also it’s fun to talk about hoboes.

Either way, the Cracked piece actually gets worse, if that’s possible.

You see this type of story come up a lot -- check your local police blotter. And they all have something in common: They're all guys.

Seriously, do a Google search for "masturbating in public library." Notice something in common with all of those stories? They're all dudes. Obviously I'm not saying women don't pleasure themselves (every single study would prove me a liar); I'm saying that men are far, far more likely to engage in extremely high-risk masturbation in public. They're more likely to do it at work, and they're more likely to do it in situations where they could go to jail.

No, it's not some rare, weird exhibitionist fetish, either. It's that they can't even wait the couple of hours it'd take to do it safely at home.

I can’t believe that I have to be the one to explain this, but here goes: women are fully capable of masturbating in public.  Chances are that they do it, too.  Possibly as often as men.  Women, however, have a distinct technological advantage in the public masturbation arms race: they don't have penises.

I’m given to understand – and any women who happen to stop by can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, since god knows I have absolutely no business acting like I know anything whatsoever about the secret functioning of ladyparts – that it’s entirely possible for a woman to stimulate herself without drawing much attention to the act whatsoever.  If I’m correct in my understanding it requires a hell of a lot less work than whipping out a six-inch meat log and furiously stroking it for thirty seconds.  That’s kind of an attention-getter.  And it’s rather hard to disguise as some other, more innocent activity.

All that aside, especially if it turns out I’m wrong (although, really, what the hell else are kegel exercises for?  Again, I have ZERO expertise in the area of ladyparts.  And I’m pretty sure that that’s gonna cost me a man card.  Here, have a dozen.  They’re good for ten cents off a coffee at your local Caribou franchise as long as you get the daily trivia question right), what the fuck does, “Some dude decided to stick his dick in a picnic table,” have to do with, “Women try to control men through their penises?”  I don’t know if anyone else has ever noticed this, but while a woman can be many things, a picnic table isn’t one.[3]  Let’s go see what the reason is that these two totally unrelated things are absolutely related, shall we?

It's because, in males more so than females, the sex drive is completely detached from the rest of the personality. The part of the male brain that worries about job security or money or social reputation or legal consequences has almost no veto power over the sex drive. You've heard guys say they were "thinking with their dick" or "I was thinking with the little brain" or "I took an order from Captain Bonerhelmet." That's what they're referring to.

Bullshit.

Bull.  Shit.

Bull.  Fucking.  Shit.

That’s the old…

Wait, hold on, I don’t think you got the point yet.

Buuuuuuuuuuullllllll.  Sheeeeeeeeit.

There we go.  Anyway, back to the post.

That’s the old “boys will be boys” excuse.  Us poor men are led about by our penises and just can’t do a damn thing about it.  So, really, when you think about it, we should get a cookie and a pat on the head for every time we don’t beat off in public or rape a woman who’s just trying to get a $20 at the ATM.  Because men just can’t be expected to think about the consequences, like when we buy $3,000 TVs when we’ve got an upcoming down payment on a house to think about.

And, hey, lookit that.  I'm up to four pages and I’m not even warmed up yet.  Looks like this one’s about to become a two-parter.

Sorry.

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[1]That said, I now want to go to Fort Worth and sit on the sidewalk on Berry Street across from the TCU campus, since getting some Fuzzy’s curb tacos sounds totally dirty.

[2]I have several.  If you’d like to hear them it will cost you a curb taco.  And, yes, I’ve decided to make “curb taco” an integral part of my lexicon.

[3]Unless you’re at one of those crazy-ass sushi places that serves the food on a naked lady.  At that point a woman is pretty much a picnic table.

Getting Carded, Part 2

I’ve got a friend who will regularly stop in the middle of something he’s talking about and say, “I know I’ll have to turn in my man card if I say this, but…” or, “Well I guess I have to turn in my man card,” or something to that effect.  My response to that is always, “The man card thing is bullshit, what’s on your mind?”

That should always and forever be the response to anything involving the terms “man” and “card” placed next to each other.  The idea of “manhood” as espoused in the man card concept is annoying when it’s something that someone else tries to push.  It’s insidious when it becomes a form of self regulation.  This is something with which I am all too familiar.

For those who haven’t been around these here parts much, I grew up in the Evangelical Christian community.  Or whatever you call it.  Because I grew up in the Evangelical church I am incredibly familiar with self-regulating behavior modification.  If you tell someone enough that “you’re not a good Christian if you do/don’t do X,” then threaten them with punishment for breaking that rule you can eventually convince them to watch their own behavior.  This pretty much explains the weird obsession Christianity seems to have with masturbation and using swear words.[1]  The penalty for not watching your behavior in Christianity, of course, is that you’ll go to hell.  Because Baby Jesus is super interested in how often you jack off and say, “Fuck.”  In fact, he’s so interested that he watches you do it.  All the time.

Apparently Baby Jesus is a perv.

The penalty for not behaving in a manly manner, of course, is that you won’t get laid.  This is why you, as a man who, because you are a man and men want to get laid, must always and forever and consciously be a man.  And how does a man know he is being a man?  When he’s behaving in a manly manner, of course.  Behaving in a manly manner is mostly a matter of always holding tight to one’s man card.[2]

Of course being properly manly isn’t as easy to define as being properly Christian.  The Bible says that all you need to do to be a good Christian is to pray the “Sinner’s Prayer” and make sure you don’t swear, smoke, masturbate, vote for a Democrat, or approve of anyone who is gay or has abortions.[3]  There is no simple manual to tell us in short, declarative statements what it means to be a proper man, unfortunately.

This, of course, means that we must identify a “man” according to what a man should not be.  Since the world consists of two and only two types of people, namely “men” and “women,” we simply have to figure out what a woman is in order to figure out what a man should be.  Simple, right?  Let’s try it.

Women are emotional and like talking about their feelings.  That means that if you, as a man, talk about feelings, or even acknowledge that you have feeling, you are being a woman.  That is a man card violation.

Women never want sex for pleasure, only for control.  That means that if you, as a man, ever don’t want sex or exercise any control over your sexual impulses, you're being a woman.  That’s a man card.

Women like poetry and art and the opera and that sort of boring bullshit.  That means that if you, as a man, want to go to a museum or really like “The Marriage of Figaro," you are being a woman.  Man card.

See how easy that is?  All you have to do is ask yourself no matter what you’re doing, “Is this what a woman would do?”  If your answer is, “Yes,” then you know that you are, by extension, being a woman.  If you’re being a woman then that means you’re not being a man.  So you might as well just hand in that man card and slip on skirt over that lacy pair of panties you just put on, bitch.

These posts are, ostensibly, a response to the ideas David Wong put into this piece at Cracked.  More specifically, this post is my reaction to “#2: We Feel Like Manhood Was Stolen from Us at Some Point.”  He makes half a point, then makes a half-assed refutation of the argument he’s supposedly dealing with and then he just kind of…stops.  This is a huge problem.

See, every single male can remember the first time, when he was 5 or 6 years old, he showed his penis to a stranger and everybody started freaking the hell out. He can remember the first time he got in trouble for hitting somebody, for peeing in public, for trying to jump off some high object or set something on fire. All of the core male urges, all the suggestions whispered to us by Darth Penis, all of it gets us in trouble.

And, when we get nostalgic for the past, we always dress it up in some ridiculous fantasy like 300, where everybody is shirtless and screaming and hacking things with swords. We are fed this idea that at one time, this is how the world was -- all of these impulses that have been getting us grounded and sent to detention from kindergarten on used to be not only allowed, but celebrated.

I will admit that my reaction to this is mostly anecdote and only my anecdote.  I’ll further admit that if my experience is as reasonably universal as I think it is, the plural of anecdote is still not data.  But I have a really hard time with this entire line of argument.

The primary problem is that I have never in my life showed my penis to a stranger.  Hell, I’ve managed to avoid showing my penis to close confidants.  So there’s that.  And no one wants to see me running around shirtless and pretending to be King Leonidas, not even me.  Also, I got sent to detention exactly once that I can recall.  So perhaps I was simply better behaved than your average boy.[4]

I don’t think that’s the case, though.  I had a lot of friends who never did their best Calvin or Dennis the Menace impressions, at least not in my presence.  I can’t see any of my male friends trying to imitate the dudes on Jackass for any reason.  For that matter, I’m pretty sure that most of my friends think the guys on Jackass are complete and total idiots.

More than that, while I have hit someone and gotten in trouble for it, I didn’t take the “getting in trouble” part as a lesson that my manhood had been taken from me.  I took it as a lesson that actions have consequences.  Does that mean that I, as a fourth grader, was smarter and more mature than your average adult male?  Apparently yes, if the internet is to be believed.

I don’t think I was, though.  I think that we’re supposed to believe that all boys are trouble makers.  I think we’re supposed to believe that all men are simply boys who have grown hair in strange and fascinating places.  I think we’re supposed to believe, in short, that “boys will be boys” and, by extension, “men will be boys.”  If boys are boys and men are boys, then, who is the adult in the room?

Right, the woman.  Hence the next bit:

And then at some point, women took it all away.

A once-great world of heroes and strength and warriors and cigars and crude jokes has been replaced by this world of grumpy female supervisors looming over our cubicle to hand us a memo about sending off-color jokes via email. Yes, that entire narrative is a grossly skewed and self-serving version of how society actually evolved. It doesn't matter.

The result is a combination of frustration and humiliation and powerlessness that makes us want to get it back in the only way we know how: with petty, immature acts of meanness.

I’m insulted by this whole thing.  Sure, he makes the lame refutation that “that entire narrative is a grossly skewed and self-serving version of how society actually evolved,” but at no point does he explain how it’s skewed or why.    He just leaves it there.  “We blame women for making us be adults.  We shouldn’t, but we do, so we act like assholes.”  Well okay, then.  Let’s just wander away and see what’s going on over there, then.

Or, y’know, let’s not.  There’s something I don’t remember ever having or being involved in.  That something is “a once-great world of heroes and strength and warriors and cigars and crude jokes.”  Where is that world?  Who lives in that world?  And why, pray tell, is it so great in the first place?  And when and why and how did “grumpy female supervisors” take it away?  And what does sending off-color jokes via email have to do with any of this?  And is it possible for me to write more sentences that start with “And” and end with a question mark?

Apparently we don’t need to get rid of man cards as a concept.  We need to sit down with the male gender and have a long talk about the importance of personal responsibility.  It’s pretty self-evident, at least to me, that it’s a bad idea to take your penis out in public, to hit people, and to send off-color jokes via company email.  There’s probably a policy about that in the HR manual somewhere.  This realization that actions have consequences shouldn’t ever be a matter of saying, “Man, so-and-so is such a buzzkill.”  It should be a part of growing up.[5]

This is the important lesson I’ve learned: women don’t kill fun.  Life kills fun.  Actions have consequences and it does absolutely no good to say to women, “Waaaa, you’re trying to ruin my fun.”

The upshot here is that I am about to be 31 years old.  I’m also about to be buying a house.  I drive a 2010 Mazda 6.  I have a bunch of really fun toys.  My estimated monthly budget is a few hundred dollars lower than my monthly income and I’ve managed to do all of that partially by being fortunate, but also by not buying $3000 TVs just because I’ve got that kind of money lying around in my bank account.

I’ve managed to make these things happen because I do not give a flying shit about being a man.  I am far more concerned with being an adult.  My self-image as a man is a secondary concern.

That’s really what the whole man card thing is, too.  It’s an issue of crafting an image.  The crazy thing about it is that the enforcers of that image aren’t even women, either.  Watch one of those Miller Lite man card commercials.  Watch that episode of Scrubs where the man cards are a plot point.  Notice who issues or revokes the man cards.  I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the women.

It’s actually a neat trick when you think about it.  Men get to enforce orthodoxy and create a hierarchy, with the person who dictates who loses a man card placing himself as the alpha male.  And then they get to blame the whole thing on those mean, meddling women.

Meanwhile, I’ve never heard a woman demand a guy’s man card.  But I think I’ll have to deal with that in a different post.

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[1]True story: I went to see Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers at the fantastic Gruene Hall outside of New Braunfels, TX during June of 2010.  I had just gotten my iPhone and was using the standard notepad app to take notes.  The standard notepad app had a terrible habit I had discovered that very weekend of randomly erasing notes.  It was awesome.  I was trying to keep track of the setlist during the show and sometime around song 12 I popped the note app open and discovered that it had erased everything but the opening song.

This pissed me off, so I did what everyone does in this situation and complained on Facebook.  My status incorporated a couple of four-letter words.  Because, y’know, I was pissed.  And somewhat soused.  And I’ve been using four-letter words since the fifth grade.

The next morning I had a response from one of my former youth group leaders that started off with, “Nice swear words.”  He then followed up with the ever-so-useful advice to get a completely different phone on the Sprint network.  Because, shit, who doesn’t want to break their just-signed AT&T contract and trade in their month old iPhone 3GS for some random phone some dude suggested based on a problem with a single app?  So, basically, the entire response was massively useless.  I believe my response was a swift de-friending.  Also an eventual installation of Evernote, which works beautifully.

Incidentally, when I traded in my 3GS for my Motorola Atrix 2 last month I got the Android Evernote app, signed in, and all of my notes were right there.  But that’s neither here nor there.

But you don't want to hear about my app usage habits.  The point is that someone felt the need to police my speech based on his standards of what counts as correct language.  This is something Christians do a lot, especially in debate with non-Christians.  They think that it proves some sort of point and that they are more moral because they don’t say “shit.”

[2]Which is not to be confused with a penis.  This is not a veiled penis reference.

[3]The Modern American Christian translation of the Bible, of course.  This is the Bible that’s always cited by a Christian prefacing a statement with, “The Bible says…”

[4]I have taken to referring to my “tragically un-misspent youth.”

[5]I was at Fry’s two weeks ago looking for a TV as part of my “create a home office” thing.  When I lived in Texas my desk was in the back corner of my living room, which meant that if I wanted to watch TV while on my computer I just turned on my TV.  It suddenly occurred to me a few weeks ago that I wouldn’t be able to do that anymore, so I either needed to get a third TV or not have a TV in the bedroom.  Either idea was equally valid, but since the whole house buying process has dragged on forever and ever I had some extra cash so I decided to see what was available, especially since it’s the time of year with TV makers sell off last year’s models to make way for the new shit.  I was just looking for a 26” or 32” TV.  Nothing big.  But I found myself standing in front of a 70” Sharp Aquos thinking, “That’s awesome.  I could get it as my main TV, then move my 37” to the bedroom and my 32” to my office and BOOM.  The TV was, like, $3,000, which isn’t that big of a deal in comparison to my current available resources.  So, yes, I easily could have purchased a 70” TV that day.  But then I wouldn’t have had as much money for things I need, like new carpet or paint or if it turns out the furnace in the house is on its last legs or to simply have spare cash lying around in case I need it for something next year.  Hell, I know I’ll be buying a new stove sooner or later, probably sooner.  Is a 70” TV more fun than a stove?  Yes.  Is a working stove more necessary than a 70” TV?  Hell, yes.

And for those who care about such things: I ended up spending $380 for a 32” Samsung LED TV at HH Gregg.  That’s, like, $50 less than the really good deal I got on my 32” Samsung LCD TV in spring of 2010.  TVs is cheap these days.

Getting Carded, Part 1

If I ever meet the guy who invented the man card I plan on punching him in the face.  With my fist.  Actually, I probably won’t, since that would be assault and the man card fucker totally isn’t worth jail time.  You know what is worth jail time?  Pretty much nothing, that’s what.

Anyway, the man card.  It’s a stupid thing.  It’s mostly an annoying thing, especially in those stupid Miller Lite commercials where they take some dude’s man card for drinking a different kind of light beer.  Because nothing says, “I’m a masculine hunk of manhood,” like drinking shitty, mass-produced beer.  Beer should not be a masculine/feminine thing, anyway.[1]

The man card has become a sort of self-regulating thing amongst men.  It’s incredibly fucking annoying to have to deal with this and pretty much requires a certain level of abruptness in its handling.  Because all the “man card” does is enforce a specific idea of what a man actually is based on really dumb and transitory societal rules.[2]

A few weeks ago I was out with friends.  There was an extremely cute redhead there and I was talking to her.  At one point a Matt Nathanson song came on and I was all, “Hey, Matt Nathanson.”  She was all, “Oh my god, I love Matt Nathanson.”  And I was all, “Dude I was totally at the show he did at the Riviera last summer,” and she was all, “I was in the front row.”

We had what I like to call “a Matt Nathanson moment.”[3]  For those keeping track, I was having a conversation and connecting with an attractive redhead.  I’m a huge fan of redheads, even more the attractive ones.  It’s kind of a thing.

My buddy was sitting there and he said, “You listen to Matt Nathanson?  I’m taking your man card.”

I turned, looked at him, and said, “Shut up, dude.  The man card is bullshit.”

This, I think, is the only appropriate answer to the man card issue.  It’s just an attempt to enforce a certain set of behaviors or values that belong to the category of “men.”  So, for some reason, “men” aren’t supposed to like Matt Nathanson or the music of Matt Nathanson.[4]  That means that if I, Geds, like the music of Matt Nathanson then I am not a “man.”

Of course, there’s also the issue that while the attractive woman was talking to me about Matt Nathanson she was not talking to my friend about, y’know, acceptably manly things.  So I think there’s a certain level of competition in the whole thing.  Because if we’ve learned anything from reruns of Saved By the Bell, it’s that girls see relationships as the outcome of a round of combat, or a battle of wits, or an embarrassing '80s sweater/feathered hair off.  They will watch two men fight and then pick the winner because we all still live in caveman times.

And now here I find myself in a bit of a bind.  I’ve written one page of text and two pages of footnotes and haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of my original intentions in this post.  I’m also pretty sure that I’ve already gotten completely off-track, so I think I’ll go all multi-part series on your asses.

Sorry.

But, just to create an illusion of continuity, the thing that’s gotten me thinking about this is this piece by David Wong at Cracked.  It’s one of those things that starts really well and goes completely and totally off the rails by the end.  Basically, I read it and was in total agreement with items 5 and 4, then in total disagreement with 3 (but not for the reasons you might think) and partial disagreement with 2 and 1.  Part of the problem is that only points 5 and 4 are actually related to, and in support of, the title of the piece.  Ironically an article that's ostensibly about women becomes almost totally about men at the end.

Hence, post.  Erm, posts.

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[1]True story: I went out on a first date with someone last year to a brewpub.  I proceeded to order a wheat beer of some sort and a chicken wrap.  She ordered an IPA and a cheeseburger.  I pretty much pointed out that this was not how things are supposed to work according to standard relationship gender roles.  ‘Twas hilarious to everyone involved.

She was also the only person I’ve been on multiple dates with since, well, since Amy, pretty much.  So I guess that means that, at least for some people, such things as “demonstrations of manliness based on really fucking stupid criteria” are, well, really fucking stupid.  And, um, no.  No relationship developed.  Why?  Because any relationship requires two people.  When one of those two people is me that means that one of the people is actively attempting to cause the relationship to fail for no damn good reason.  But that’s a story for another day.  Maybe.  Probably not.

Actually, it is kind of an interesting thought experiment.  What it boiled down to was that she was more into me than I was into her.  The reasons for that, at least from my perspective, were entirely valid and based on a complete lack of emotional engagement (and, honestly, a sense that she wanted to immediately jump into something to which I wasn’t sure I wanted to jump.  On many levels that whole thing actually did reverse the traditional rom-com gender roles, which is kinda funny).  But, again, the party that wasn’t engaging was me, and I tend to think that's at least partially because that’s what I do in general.

I’ve realized in the last few weeks all my bullshit criteria and rules and whatnot of dating aren’t actually worth spit and there should be one and only one criteria worth paying attention to: is this person worth caring about?  But that’s part of a much, much larger discussion of how people interact and is wedded to a whole set of other thoughts I have that start from my realization that religious affiliation as a sorting hat for friendship is the worst possible mechanism.  Except possibly sports fandom.  Or what bands you follow.  Basically, it’s that you aren’t friends with or in a relationship with a checklist.  So someone who is a yes in every checkbox might be someone you can’t stand and someone who hates everything you like might be your absolute favorite person in the world.

That, then, gets back around to a critique of online dating as a thing, because creepy-ass eHarmony founder guy and his scientific surveys can’t really predict why people will like each other.  The sooner we stop thinking science can the better off we’ll be.  I think.

But that’s a whole ‘nother post.

[2]Unfortunately I think the man card, or at least its popularity, needs to be blamed on Scrubs.  There’s one episode where Dr. Cox hands JD three man cards and takes them away whenever he does non-manly things.  Much of the humor of that show was built around JD doing non-manly things according to Dr. Cox’s assessment and then Dr. Cox calling JD by girls’ names.  I love Scrubs and I think that it was set up in such a way as to make sure that Dr. Cox was seen as a broken man who should be emulated by no one, ever, at any point, but JD wasn’t exactly depicted as a hero, either.

[3]This is a moment that occurs when two people connect over the music of Matt Nathanson.  Also, note, too, that he plays a 12-string guitar.  That's not an instrument played by just any dipshit trying to impress girls in a coffee shop.

[4]Part of the problem is that he seemed to take the “get songs played over the closing credits of shitty WB chick shows” route to fame.  I’ve been listening to his music since some time in 2005-2006.  He suddenly busted out all over the place after Some Mad Hope blew up overnight in 2008 or 2009 because he was suddenly on TV soundtracks (at least, as best I can figure out).  Other than hearing one of his songs on an episode of Scrubs, though, the only time I’d hear him would be playing over the ending credits of primetime soaps marketed to teen girls.  There’s nothing wrong with this particular route to fame, since money is money and people making money for doing what they’re good at isn’t exactly something I begrudge.  But it immediately pigeonholes him as a guy who writes that kind of music for the teen girl audience.

So it doesn’t matter that I was listening to him before that happened.  It doesn’t matter that I’ve never in my life seen a single episode of Gossip Creek or Gilmore High (I did, however, once sit through a couple epsiodes of of Everwood for some reason.  Oh, wait, no, I remember now.  There were two reasons: Emily VanCamp and Sarah Lancaster.  Also, probably, boredom, which I'm assuming was exacerbated rather than assisted by watching Everwood, since I remember exactly nothing about it, save attractive women and the fact that I should probably be embarrassed by this whole parenthetical thought.  Sarah Lancaster, of course, went on fame in the role of Gift Shop Girl on Scrubs.  And she was on some different NBC show or other, too, but who really keeps track?  Emily VanCamp now stars in some show I've never watched and that I only know because someone bought ad space on Chicago bus shelters and I'd walk past an think, "Hey, that's that hot chick what was on Everwood.") or whatever he’s now associated with, someone who doesn’t know me hears me mention Matt Nathanson and he’s like, “Dude, what?”

Again, I do not begrudge Matt Nathanson his success, no matter the route.  I get the general impression that he’s one of those people who you can genuinely say deserves every good thing he gets.  But I dunno, maybe he goes home, takes off his public persona, and rapes kittens or something.

Once Again, Scalzi Proves He's a Mensch

He's given a doctor friend his platform for an anonymous guest post on one of the current big women's health issues.

Fellow physicians, once again we are being used as tools to screw people over. This time, it’s the politicians who want to use us to implement their morally reprehensible legislation. They want to use our ultrasound machines to invade women’s bodies, and they want our hands to be at the controls. Coerced and invaded women, you have a problem with that? Blame us evil doctors. We are such deliciously silent scapegoats.

Read it.  Pass it on.

No Girlz Allowed

Read this article.  Read it right now.  I’ll wait.

Done?  Awesome.  I know that it pained you to have to follow a link through the internets and all, but I made you do that because that particular article is important.  It’s an attempt to say something that has been sadly missing from the whole bullshit contraception kerfuffle and it does it very well.

As such, it’s a good jumping-off point.

The thing that struck me when I first got news of the whole Issa-Fluke catastrophe was the reason Issa gave for Fluke not being allowed to testify about women’s reproductive needs so that five old, sometimes celibate men could.  When Issa refused to allow women to testify his reasoning was that the hearing was not about women, but about religious freedom.

The implications of that line of thought are staggering.  They are also, sadly, mundane.

Claiming that the hearings were about religious freedom and not about anything having to do with women clearly states several things about religion and women in America.  First, and most obviously, it declares that woman have no place to speak in society.  Second, it somehow puts “women” and “religion” on opposite ends of some sort of spectrum and in a zero-sum argument against one another.  Third, it takes away the notion of “religious freedom” from the class of “women.”  To wit: women can have all the religious freedom they want as long as they choose to use the religious freedom dictated to them by old, sometimes celibate men.

Now, let’s bracket off the big question of utility here, as there was a place where an argument could be made and that was as an issue of cost.  Providing contraception, after all, is not going to be free.  It is, however, more cost-effective for insurance companies than paying for even the cheapest birth.  Contraception, then, can be considered a form of preventive health care.  And, of course, there are all the women who need it for non-sex reasons.  This also can’t be part of a larger personal responsibility crusade.  I could eat greasy cheeseburgers three meals a day and still end up with a subscription for Lipitor covered by my insurance without having anyone say, “We’re thinking of not giving you these drugs because gluttony is against our religion.”[1]

Moreover, all you have to do is run across this ABC News article entitled “Erections Get Insurance, Why Not the Pill?” to realize that Viagra – which has significantly lower non-directly-sex-related use in America – has been covered by insurance pretty much since it came on the market.  As such, any argument about not covering the Pill is officially a load of horseshit.  Also, as I’ve mentioned before, 28 states have had laws about covering the Pill on the books for years.  There hasn’t been a public outcry about this until now.

Then, of course, there’s this notion that religious institutions should be allowed to regulate what kind of medical care their employees can get.  This is, in a word, wrong.  Health coverage is a form of compensation in America.[2]  As such, it is no different from the dollars in my paycheck.

Judging by the number of pastors that get caught with hookers or blow or snorting blow off the asses of hookers, I’m pretty sure that religious institutions don’t meticulously track where their employees spend their paychecks.  Sure, they can say, “We’d prefer you not blow this money on hookers and blow,” but they can’t really pre-emptively stop it.  Moreover, no one is really talking about the scandal of churches allowing their employees the freedom to use their hard-earned dollars on hookers, or blow, or cigarettes, or alcohol, or pornographic videos, or to pay back their credit cards with those totally-not-usurious 21% interest rates.  I’m also pretty sure that churches aren’t demanding that their employees immediately turn their paychecks over to charity, even though Jesus did command the rich man to sell off all his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.

Take that all away, though.  What is the central point of the kerfuffle?  It’s that men get to talk and women get to be talked about.  Men get to make decisions and women get to be decided for.  This goes back to the whole idea that the conversation was about religious freedom and, as such, it was preposterous that anyone would even bother to think that a woman would have anything of value to say.  Take away the bit where it was about women and contraception.  Just take the reply at face value.  “The menfolk are having a conversation here,” Issa basically said, “Women have no place here.”

Conservative religious leaders don’t give a shit about women.

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This takes me to an interesting place: porn.

It’s an interesting place since I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of people who are less capable of speaking authoritatively than I am on the subject of sex are in grade school.[3]  But, hey, what are ya gonna do?

Ever since I created my Tumblr account I’ve realized that there are few things in this world more fun than just fucking around on Tumblr and seeing what all there is to see.  The other day I discovered that porn stars seem to put up Tumblrs.  It should come as no surprise that said Tumblr accounts are filled with pictures of naked or nearly naked people and that in some of those pictures the people are having sex with each other.

Now, as best I can tell, the purpose of this exercise is to titillate and, in doing so, sell further titillation to people like, well, like me.  At no point in this journey was I particularly titillated.  I certainly did not become aroused.[4]  I found the whole thing fascinating on an anthropological/sociological level.

See, I’ve never really understood porn.  I get it on an intellectual level.  Its purpose is pretty self-evident, really.  When I was growing up in the church I was also told it was one of the most dangerous things ever.  I’d hear about the dangers of porn.  I’d occasionally hear a testimony from someone who had discovered porn and subsequently became addicted.  So I avoided the stuff, which, really, wasn’t so hard in a world without Tumblr.  In fact, it’s still pretty easy now, even in a world with Tumblr.  The trick is to not really give a flying crap.  But that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, after I stopped worrying about making baby Jesus cry I eventually figured out, “Hey, it’s okay to watch porn.  I also realized that, holy shit, lots of people do it and most people aren’t exactly ashamed about it.  So I ended up tracking some down.  My response was pretty much, “Wait, this is it?”

I didn’t care.  I couldn’t figure out why, though.  Mostly I just had a sense that there was no real point to it or, if there was a point, it certainly wasn’t one I was noticing.  It didn’t help that even I, a guy who knows fuck-all about actual sex, managed to watch about five seconds of the stuff before I realized, “This is totally unrealistic.  How the hell could anything I’m seeing here possibly seem like a good idea?”[5]

So, yeah.  Porn.  I don’t get it.

I was on Tumblr, as I was saying, and ended up on a porn star’s Tumblr.  I do not know who it was.  I was too busy at first trying to figure out why this person was putting up lots of pictures of herself sitting naked in a bathtub and also why she didn’t eat a sandwich from time to time before I finally realized, “Oh, hey, porn star.  Now I understand.”  I mean, I still don’t get the obsession with bathtub-related self-photography, but I totally get why naked pictures would be a thing.

Tumblr, dude.  Tumblr.

Interspersed with said bathtub-related self-photography were pictures that would best be described as “on set” or possibly “promotional.”  Tumblr being what it is, pictures were also often accompanied by links to other Tumblr accounts maintained by other porn people.  I spent about 20 minutes wandering around because I was fascinated by the whole thing.  In doing so, I finally figured out one of the major reasons I’ve never understood porn and probably never will and also why I have no urge to do so.

Any picture I saw of a woman having sex in a porn pretty much came across as a picture of a woman having absolutely no fun.  I suppose this is probably the partially Lawrence Weschler-trained, self-taught art aficionado in me[6], but I found myself looking more at the composition of the scenes and the various similarities rather than, y’know, genitals.  I quickly realized that every woman in a picture with a man wherein sex was happening was on a lower plane, in what appeared to be a really uncomfortable position, looking up at the dude, and always wearing the exact same facial expression.[7]

The facial expression was not one of someone who was enjoying herself, either.  It also wasn’t the look of someone who wasn’t enjoying herself.  It was, instead, a look designed to communicate exactly one thing that I can really only describe as a combination of worship and appeasement.  It’s…it’s weird.  It’s hard to explain, but it’s basically the look that I imagine is on the face of any woman who’s telling a guy with whom she has just had extremely dissatisfying sex that, yes, he’s the best she’s ever had and trying to sell it really hard.

I can’t help but think that this facial expression kept repeating because, for some reason, people who buy porn want to see it on the women upon whom the sex is happening.  And that set composition of the man above, and the woman below and looking upwards with that, “Oh, god, yes, this is the best thing I’ve ever done, don’t you believe me…tiger?” can’t possibly be an accident.

It also occurred to me that in all the times I was warned about the evils of porn it never actually came up that porn was depicting an extremely unrealistic, reductionist view of sex.  The idea of objectification of women might have come up, but certainly the idea that having sex porn-style wouldn’t actually do much to help the woman enjoy herself didn’t enter any conversation I remember.  The idea that sex as depicted in porn is really just meat slapping together while no one actually seems to be enjoying themselves never entered the conversation.  And, believe you me, I heard from enough people who had watched enough porn that there should have been that body of knowledge available, even in my restricted Christian circles.

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So Rush Limbaugh spent three days calling Sandra Fluke a slut.  Some other jackass broke out the cost of contraceptives and decided that meant she spent an average of $3 on condoms a day for three straight years.  Darrell Issa didn’t allow a woman to provide testimony at a hearing about women’s reproductive rights because those rights are non-existent compared to old men discussing their religious freedom to deny reproductive health care to women.

I wonder how much time all those guys spend watching porn.

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[1]Quite frankly, I would only be able to accept the religious freedom for pharmacists bullshit if it also included an opt-out for pharmacists who don’t want to give out drugs for high cholesterol to obvious gluttons, don’t want to prescribe expensive, brand name drugs due to corporate greed, and don’t want to accept credit cards due to a religious injunction against usurious lending practices.  Until that happens, though, it’s all a game of slut shaming disguised with piety.

Come to think of it, that pretty much explains all of religion, which is odd, considering that whole bit in the Gospels where Jesus treated women as people and made it a point to not slut shame.  It’s almost like the buffoons who represent Christianity in this country are a bunch of small-minded, misogynistic dickheads who have co-opted Jesus and re-made him in their own image for cynical, self-serving gain.  But, really, who would do that?

[2]Which is yet another in the long line of arguments in favor of universal health coverage.  It’s this thing that’s supposedly a terrible idea because it will cost more in taxes.  The fact of the matter is that right now I pay hundreds of dollars a year and my employer pays thousands of dollars a year for my health coverage.  The fact that the money goes to Blue Cross Blue Shield apparently makes it good money to spend, whereas if it went to the government it would be bad use of money.

My argument is that I’m having money taken out of my paycheck either way and I’m pretty sure that I don’t have much of a voice with Blue Cross Blue Shield, so that sounds a lot like taxation without representation.  And they’re more likely to drop me because of some pre-existing condition than Medicare is to drop my 91 year-old grandmother.  Also, if I lose my job tomorrow I also lose my insurance coverage, while my grandmother will not be losing her Medicare any time soon.  So, really, what’s so fucking great about private health insurance again?

[3]The rest conveniently gathered together the other day for a group picture:




[4]This might sound like one of those, “The gentleman doth protest too much,” sort of things.  But, really, why the fuck would I lie about something like that?

[5]Also, the thing that porn people do with their tongues, where they, like, flap them around in each other’s general direction as if they have a hyperactive, meth-addled hummingbird trying to escape from their mouths sideways.  WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH THAT?  WHO DOES THAT?

Other than porn stars, obviously.

[6]Yeah.  I’m tossing Lawrence Weschler references in the middle of a discourse on porn.  Eat it.

[7]And those were pictures intending to promote the videos.  It’s not like it was a photo essay of reasons why porn is anti-woman on Feministe or something.  They were put up by the actual porn stars to say, “Hey, look at this awesome thing.  You know you want to buy it.”

In Which Charles P Pierce Says it All

I've recently added his Esquire blog to my feed.  Why?  Because he's freaking awesome.  At this point my list of non-fiction essayists/columnists who can regularly turn a delightful phrase such that I suddenly wish I was a half-competent writer myself stands at five:  Fred Clark, Lawrence Weschler, Ed Kilgore, Charles P. Pierce, and Lawrence Weschler again because, holy shit, can that guy put words together to form a sentence.  And sentences together to form paragraphs.  And paragraphs...well, you get the point.  Oh, and I guess if I had to add a sixth I'd go with John Scalzi.  He ain't bad, neither.

Anyway, Charles P. Pierce, ladies and gentlemen:

(And can I say for the record that there is no "fierce debate" around the country about contraception. There is what people do, and what they like to do, and there is an immensely unpopular position held by immensely unpopular people. This is not a debate, let alone a "fierce" one. This is an issue on which the country made up its damn mind long ago, regardless of how ginned up some politicians can get the rubes. It's also not a debate about "religion," unless, to borrow Garry Wills's felicitous phrase, one reduces the Gospels to "the mere smithying of chastity belts." There is only one reason to describe what's going on this way in your newspaper -- you don't want 55,089 phone calls and/or e-mails from faith-based nutbags. We continue.)

Or, to put it in other terms, those on the side of contraceptives for women are the New York Yankees.  The anti-contraception lobby is the Boston Red Sox.  The 2003 Boston Red Sox.  Pretty soon they'll be the Chicago Cubs.

Tossing My Two Pennies Down the Well

So, I've managed to almost entirely avoid weighing in on the manufactured birth control controversy.  Mostly because I'm, y'know, a dude.  And I'm, y'know, not exactly sexually active.  Also because I'm, y'know, not a fucking idiot who thinks the only proper place for women is barefoot and pregnant and makin' me a sammich.

Oh, and I'm totally aware of the economies of scale between birth control and pregnancy.  Also, I know that some women take birth control for health reasons and not just not-getting-pregnant reasons.  But, that's really beside the point.

Since I understand the concept of looking up things that happened before last week, I know that more than half the states in the union have had laws similar to the one that got the collective panties of the old, theoretically celibate, Catholic bishops in a bunch.  I also know that most of those laws have been on the books for nearly two decades.  And I know that Rick Warren happens to live in one of those states and isn't in convenient that that giant bag of douche suddenly realized that the purpose driving his life was to get rid of such laws during an election year.[1]  Oh, and, of course, that rich-ass motherfucker got to play the role of martyr for his faith in the process.  Because everyone's alway stepping on the faces of those poor, downtrodden Christians.  No one in the goddamn country is more persecuted than Rick goddamn Warren.

Wait, where was I?  Oh, yeah, birth control.

The narrative we get from jackasses like the celibate old men of the Church, television blowhards, or super wealthy, out of touch blowhards, all of whom are men, some of whom are known Viagra-popping philanderers, is that the only women who want birth control are slutty mcsluttersteins who constantly crave cock, day in and day out and day in and day out (ifyaknowwhadImean, wink wink, nudge nudge).

Let me just toss this thought out there:

I once dated a girl whose dad was a Baptist pastor from the GARB, which is one of those groups that makes the Southern Baptists look positively progressive.  She went to private schools wherein she learned creation science and, due to that, genuinely believed the world is only about 6000 years old.  She did a year and a half at Cedarville, which is one of those Christian colleges that makes Wheaton College look like a hotbed of free thought and free love.[2]

She was one of those no sex before marriage types, as were her friends from back home.  She told me one time how weird it was to deal with her friends who were going on the Pill in preparation for their soon-to-be post-marital status as sexually active women.  It wasn't because of the going on the Pill itself aspect of things.  It was because the inherent chemical and hormonal changes included mood swings and other such emotional changes.  She herself, if I remember correctly, pretty much took it as a given she'd be going on the Pill a few months before her wedding.

This, for any modern social conservative who happens to be reading, is how you define being on the wrong side of history.  Birth control is not a controversial topic in this country.  The only people who seem to think getting rid of birth control is a winning topic are the people who can't take it and need it least.

Angry, rich, old men might have the pockets to pull the strings for aspiring Presidents.  Angry, scared, easily led people might be enough of a voting bloc to make it seem like there is a deep hunger in this country for the likes of Rick Santorum.

But there's a bigger voting bloc out there than everyone else combined: women.  Just over 50% of people of voting age in this country are women.  Hell, given the statistics I've seen (and my own half-recalled observations), better than half of the people who attend church in this country and are active in ministries are women.

Sure, some of them can be tricked or lied to or browbeaten or diverted to the role of Uncle Tom.  But if you're starting with a voting bloc that's enough to carry an election all on its own, you probably shouldn't be doing your level-headed best to alienate them.  This is especially true when you consider that there are plenty of men out there who are willing to join with women.  It required the actions of men, after all, to bring women's suffrage to America.  Women couldn't vote or write laws, so men had to do it on their behalf.

The angry, scared, old men who tried to stop women back then were on the wrong side of history, too.

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[1]Moreover, this really takes to task one of the conservative canards in this country: that of "States' Rights."  The idea is that the state, rather than the federal government needs to have the most power because states, somehow, are more responsive and better at meeting the needs of their people.  But the state as a laboratory of democracy is, like so many other things, only the right way to do things when the states agree with what the conservatives want.

As such, they want DOMA as a federal law to protect against Massachusetts, Iowa, Washington state, California, and whoever else legalizing gay marriage.  But if the state is the best arbiter of democracy, is not a given state allowed to make something legal if that's what the state's citizens want?

Ergo, if 28 of 50 states have a law about providing birth control to women on the books, then are we not looking at more than half of those laboratories of democracy saying, "This is good for the citizens of this democracy?"  I mean, we're not quite to Constitutional Amendment percentages there, but the point stands.

Also, remind me to write up a post one of these days about why the federal system we have in America is ultimately a huge load of counterproductive horseshit and Ruth Bader Ginsberg was absolutely right.  That'll be fun.  Everyone loves hearing about the Nullification Crisis, right?

[2]Okay, it might not be that bad.  Cedarville is certainly no Pensacola Christian College.

Seeds in Search of Fertile Ground

I have a reflexive tendency to defend the institution of higher learning located smack-dab in the middle of my hometown.  It makes sense, I suppose, as the school has had a great deal of influence on my life.  That’s what schools do, even if you don’t actually attend them.

This reflexive defense might be surprising to anyone who knows the name of my hometown.  I grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, in the shadow of Wheaton College.  Yes, that Wheaton College, the school synonymous with Billy Graham, the Harvard of Christian colleges.[1]

My relationship, such as it is, with Wheaton College is complicated.  There was actually a time I thought I would attend the school.  While that never actually happened there was also a long stretch where most of my friends were Wheaton College students.  When I was in junior high and high school most of the adult leaders of my youth group were Wheaton College kids, as my church was just a couple blocks from the school.  As such, Wheaton College runs deep in my personal history.

I also remember driving through the edges of the Wheaton College campus in the summer months in my old 1979 Cadillac blasting Soundgarden’s “Ty Cobb” out of the car’s crappy speakers.  In my not-at-all-rebellious (or particularly creative, I suppose) high school mind I imagined the repetition of, “Hard headed fuck you all,” in front of the school’s renowned conservatory a scandalous act.  I don’t know if that says more about my opinion of scandal or my opinion of Wheaton College’s general tendency towards stuffiness and control, however.  Maybe it’s a little of both.

Right after I moved back from Texas the city of Wheaton held its first annual[2] Alefest, an actual, honest-to-god celebration of liquid heaven right on Front Street downtown.  I walked through the Wheaton College campus to get to Alefest.  I walked back past the front of the Billy Graham center a few hours later, still buzzed.  I ran in to some friends I used to go to church with and we discussed our surprise at the lack of visible protest from the stuffed-shirt establishment types.  They might not have been scandalized by Chris Cornell’s barely-discernible repetition of the f-word, but they most certainly were scandalized by the city’s decision to host a debauched celebration of alcohol.  But no one stopped me, coming or going.  No one told me I was hellbound for drinking the Devil’s drink, even on the Wheaton College campus itself.

I was amused enough at the juxtaposition to mention it on Facebook, but it didn’t seem an act of rebellion so much as a step of inevitability.

A decade ago – back in that twilight period after I graduated from high school but before I went off to Western Illinois – Wheaton College lifted its ban on dancing.  A few weeks before the official news broke a few of my friends had snuck off and gone dancing in a small act of rebellion.  It was serious rebellion, however, since they could have been kicked out of school for breaking faith with the Statement of Responsibilities if they’d been caught.  Under the new Community Covenant, however, they could have held a dance in the college President’s living room and slapped video up on YouTube without getting in trouble.  Y’know, if YouTube existed at the time.  And if they didn’t get slapped with trespassing charges.

At the same time the school lifted its ban on the use of alcohol and tobacco by the faculty and grad students.  That move was mostly because the state of Illinois had laws against pulling that sort of shit.  But while the latter changes were mandated by the state, the bit about dancing was a gratuitous addition to the freedom of the entire student body.[3]

One day a risk, the next day a right.

I used the word “gratuitous” up there for a reason.  I come from Wheaton, Illinois.  That means I come from a place that speaks the language of grace and acceptance.  Love and forgiveness are spoken of in the churches and the halls of the school of my hometown.  The words roll off tongues and pass through ears with an effortlessness that belies the fact that that discussion of love and grace and acceptance and forgiveness is, all too often, a lie.

My friends who went dancing risked getting caught for their transgressions and kicked out of school.  The risk, I suppose, was low, but it was a risk nonetheless.  For a school that supposedly follows the teaching of a man who preached forgiveness and grace, Wheaton College can be remarkably unforgiving and graceless.  I’ve always known that, though.  I’ve also always known that there were good people at Wheaton College who would buck the trends.

Of course, some things are bigger than dancing.  Some trends are harder to fight against and come with a much greater cost.

I kind of paid attention back in 2006 when a group called Soulforce went to Wheaton to try to force the school to talk about homosexuality.  At the time I was out at Western Illinois undergoing my own crisis of faith.  Basically, though, a collection of LGBTQ Christians and their allies showed up on campus and said, “Hey, what’s up?”  Wheaton College used the opportunity to set up a dialogue and then kind of let the whole thing pass, at least as far as I was aware.  Again, I was kinda busy with my own thing at the time.

Still, it was impressive that they were willing to talk.  But the thing about Soulforce is that it was an outside group.  Outside groups can be ignored.  Outside groups can be turned in to the Other if need be.  Outside groups can be accused of not being “the right kind of Christian.” They can, in short, be dismissed by those on the inside.

There was a new development almost exactly five years after Soulforce showed up on campus.  I totally missed it, since I was in Texas at the time.  I kind of wish I’d been paying attention at the time, though.

In April of last year a collection of former Wheaton College students circulated a letter in response to the college’s teaching on homosexuality.  They stood outside of chapel and handed the letter to the Wheaton College students as they were leaving.[4] In order to do so they had to out themselves, either as gay or an ally of gay people.

The group is called OneWheaton.  They have a website.  The people who have signed on have put their names and their graduating classes out on the internet for all to see.

This isn’t an insignificant move.  Doing that sort of thing as a Wheaton College alum carries a risk of future stigma.  Doing that sort of thing as a Wheaton College alum carries the risk of immediate stigma.

I found the list on Monday morning and skimmed it, hoping to see the names of people I knew.  My disappointment slowly grew as I scrolled farther down the list and didn’t find any names I recognized.  Then I realized something else and my disappointment eased.

Take a look at the list.  Start at the top and scroll down.  See if you notice the same thing I noticed.

It happens around 1995 on the list.  That’s “Wheaton College graduating class of 1995,” for the record.  Notice how around the mid-‘90s the frequency of names appearing in successive years picks up, then really takes off some time in the middle of the 2000s?

Those Wheaton College alums from the mid-‘90s were the age of the adult leaders that worked with me when I was a junior higher and high schooler.  Those Wheaton college alums from the early- to mid-2000s were the age of my friends, including my friends who snuck out to go dancing.  They are, in short, my colleagues, my cohort.  And there are a lot of them on that OneWheaton list.[5]

They also list their major.  A lot of those majors are theological in nature.  Some of the signatories are pastors.  That means there are Christians out there who are saying, “I studied theology at Wheaton College.  I am a pastor.  I am gay/I support gay people.”

Meanwhile, the last half-dozen people on that list are from the classes of 2012 and 2013.  That means they haven’t graduated yet.  That means they’re putting themselves in a position to be seen as violating this part of the Community Covenant:

By contrast, Scripture condemns the following:

[...]sexual immorality, such as the use of pornography (Matt. 5:27-28), pre-marital sex, adultery, homosexual behavior and all other sexual relations outside the bounds of marriage between a man and woman (Rom. 1:21-27; 1 Cor. 6:9-10; Gen. 2:24; Eph. 5:31).[6]

That might be a bit braver than going somewhere off campus and dancing.

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Meanwhile, I looked up some reactions to, y’know, stuff...

Here’s an account of the OneWheaton Homecoming from the Wheaton Patch, Wheaton’s local newspaper.  It’s remarkably humanizing.

Blog post from a Wheaton student.  This is what happens when humanity gets in front of dogma.

There’s this pre-OneWheaton, post-Soulforce post by an actual gay guy who actually attended Wheaton College.

These accounts matter, especially in the Evangelical tradition from which I have extricated myself.  As Fred pointed out last week, the personal testimony matters, so sometimes the best way to create change is to put stories outside of the standard Evangelical narrative in front of Evangelicals.  I have a bit of experience with that myself, and I can tell you that it won’t change things overnight.  There are some things it might not change at all.

Sometimes, however, the seed does not fall on the road or by the wayside, but instead lands on the fertile soil and delivers a bountiful harvest.  The brave folks who signed their names to the OneWheaton letter are preparing that soil.

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[1]Yes, I know this is something of a redundant statement, given Harvard’s history.  But Wheaton College is the Ivy League of specifically parochial institutions of higher learning in America.  That’s just how it works.

[2]Maybe.  It got good reviews, so, hey…

[3]There’s a major issue of community mores here, too.  My parents were (really super low level) competitive ice dancers in the years before I was born.  They’ve been ballroom dancing since forever.  My sister and I were not allowed to tell anyone at church that my parents danced.  My parents, who were married to each other.  They didn’t even fucking go to Wheaton College, just the church right down the street in the middle of Wheaton, Illinois and all of its crazy Evangelical-ness.

[4]This is also a thing that matters.  The anonymously circulated letter is a big deal in certain Wheaton circles.  It’s a cowardly action taken by people who are too weak to say what they mean and want, but still want to stir up trouble.  One such letter got the pastor at my church canned.  I was in junior high at the time and my mother told me about it.  She also told me that she’d refused to be involved, since if you’re going to say something you’d damn well better put your name to it.

I’ve always remembered that and followed that piece of advice…said the guy who writes an anonymous blog in the internet.  Um…erm…yeah.  Actually, I’m not particularly anonymous, since pretty much anyone who knows me knows how to find my blog and there are several people who originally knew me through my blog who know who I am.  I just maintain the Geds thing because I’d rather not make it easy for a quick Google search of my name to hit my blog.  It’s more of a “keeping my nose clean in case I need to do a job search”-type thing.

But, seriously, “Geds?”  Yeah, that’s a nickname I’ve had since junior high, when a couple friends gave it to me on a church missions trip…

[5]Relatively speaking.  The entire list is still significantly smaller than the upcoming graduating class.  But it’s growing and it’s out there in the open.  It’s not just one voice, but a chorus.  That’s significant.

[6]Of course, in order to get from the bit about Scripture condemning things to the paragraph that includes homosexuality, you have to get past this paragraph:

hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and legalism, understood as the imposition of extra-biblical standards of godliness by one person or group upon another (Acts 15:5-11; Matt. 16:6; 23:13-36);

I’d argue that by these standards the folks who wrote the Community Covenant and/or the people who enforce the document ought to be thrown off campus on their asses.  It’s basically impossible to write a document such as the Community Covenant without using it to impose extra-biblical standards of godliness on someone else, especially since Wheaton College undergrads are still banned from smoking or drinking, regardless of whether they’re of age.  Last I checked, that Jesus fellow drank a bit of wine.  Ergo, legalism and extra-biblical standards.  Oh, and I'm pretty sure that Jesus was also not big on treating people like subhuman pieces of shit...