America: As Slutty As Ever
A friend of mine lamented that marriages were breaking apart everywhere because we were “addicted to the orgasm.” What happened to the days of old, when men were staunch against the ever-impending threat of The Affair, and couples stayed together until death do they part? Where did our honor go?
Well, it never really left. We’ve always been slutty. We just haven’t aired that sluttiness in public.
See, in lusting after the “good old days,” you’re also forgetting the days when men were expected to get some on the side, and be discreet. In Victorian England, land of the staunchest, stiffest-upper-lips of all time, prostitute use ran rampant. Men were forever nipping off to fuck other women, often for money; you just didn’t bring that shit home. (Except in the form of copious venereal diseases, of course.) And there were multiple affairs among the nobility throughout history, which wives often endured, because men quote-unquote needed that sort of thing, and they looked the other way while their husbands plundered their way among younger, more attractive women.
(This is not to say the lower- and middle-classes weren’t also having affairs, but alas – just as People Magazine doesn’t chronicle the affairs of Edna and Herbert Menna, landlords of a nice tenancy in Queens, the history books don’t go into nearly as much detail on the lives of peasants.)
So people were fucking. Why didn’t we know? Well, for one reason, divorce back then was considered an absolute sin. You were castigated if you separated, particularly if you were a woman, but even the men were viewed with a sort of pitable sadness that they couldn’t keep their woman in line. These days, if someone is cheating you’re free to pack it up, but back in those days? That was a huge move. So you had tons of couples who had loveless lives, basically separate, keeping their own affairs, but never divorcing – thus giving the illusion of “’til death do we part.”
(What they didn’t mention is how eagerly many of those couples were looking forward to departing each other.)
And then there’s the issue of public decency. You didn’t air your personal lives back then; it was considered a great stigma for the press to blow that shit wide open. Did FDR have an affair? You bet your ass he did. Kennedy? Don’t make me laugh. Eisenhower? He actually asked for permission to divorce his wife, but was denied. By his general. Hell, even Thomas Jefferson had a few redheaded kids running amuck – though I guess you’d expect that of TJ, that rebel of the Founding Fathers.
The point is that affairs happened all the time, but the press didn’t think it was of interest, or thought it was tawdry, or both. So they didn’t cover it. J. Edgar Hoover had files on hundreds of extramarital affairs, but did he go to the press? No he did not. Because societal pressures kept all that under the carpet. It’s not that it didn’t happen, it’s that when it did happen, you didn’t know about it.
If General Petraeus had been caught with this affair in the 1930s, he would have just found some mysterious excuse to step down. It would be deeply embarrassing, to those in the immediate circle. Questions would be asked. But would “GENERAL DICK-DEEP IN BIOGRAPHER” make national headlines for days at a time? No. And so you’d think “Gee, people were so much better in those days.”
So are people breaking more oaths these days? My pal has a point in that marriage is no longer thought of as a lifelong commitment – but then again, given that marriage is no longer pretty much required for women to be functional, I’ll take that tradeoff. And I agree with him on the larger point, in that I do think that America has pretty much fallen away from the ideal of commitment to anything – Kennedy’s line of “Ask not what your country can do for you” seems quaint, as after Carter and Ford’s attempts to say, “Hey, could you guys do with less gas so we can get out of the Middle East?” got them voted out of office roundly. No, what we want is abundance, and I see both Democrats and Republicans milking that voter-cow.
But was there a golden age of fidelity? No. People have always fucked around. People will always fuck around. They may find different ways to do it, and different ways to cover it up, and different ways to react to it. But those orgasms? We’re hard-wired to be addicted. And that’s never gone away.
Two Snippets From A Weasel's Odd Life
Snippet #1:
I awoke this morning to go see Gini, who had risen several hours back, in our living room.
“Congratulations on getting up and working out early with Erin!” I said. “I’m glad it went well!”
“Thank you.”
“I had to tell you that I knew it happened, or you’d think I was ignoring your accomplishment,” I continued. “Even though I already read that it went well thanks to Facebook.”
“You could have just liked my status,” she replied. “Then I would have known.”
“It might have been hours before you saw my like. And until then, you’d think that I didn’t care about your accomplishment at all. I couldn’t risk that.” I paused. “Come to think of it, social media is causing me to have some a lot of redundant conversations lately.”
Snippet #2:
My sad triumph over Thanksgiving was this:
I was making the Bosworth stuffing and listening to AC/DC, because they’d finally caved to iTunes and so I filled in the gaps in my collection. And I was assembling the sausage and toast and all the other secret ingredients in a bowl in the kitchen, rocking out to “For Those About To Rock.” Full volume. I was doing a very metal stuffing, strutting as I went to get the eggs.
Then we got to the intense part, where Brian Johnson shouts “FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK!” and the band falls silent and then there is that empty pause where you know oh, shit, here comes the thunder… and then wham, he shouts “FIRE!” and a barrage of cannons go off and there, my friends, is the thunder.
And I thought, shit, I’m not going to do this, am I?
And as Brian screamed “FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK!” I hoisted the egg up in the air, in full-on Freddie Mercury rage pose.
And when he screamed “FIRE!” I slammed the egg down in one smooth motion on the edge of the bowl, hard as I could.
It went perfectly.
In that moment, I was the heavy metal god of stuffing, the iron maiden chef, the Ronnie James Dio of bird filling, and had angels descended to lift me up to heaven, I could not have possibly been more satisfied with the trajectory of my life in that moment, for it had led to this one moment of perfect, rebellious grace.
Then I made the rest of the stuffing. Even Rock Gods have to finish the meal, you know.
Kick Me In The Balls, And I'll Learn To Love It
When I was twenty-one, I spent half my time crafting awful nicknames for my closest friends. The goal was twofold:
1) Find a strange habit of a good buddy of mine did that nobody else had noticed;
2) Think up a “sticky” nickname, something clever and memorable, that would highlight this unnoticed character flaw in a way that others would immediately laugh at.
If I was successful, then suddenly we’d spend the next three weeks chortling about the way Matt swung his arm back and forth when he got excited about something. If my nickname was really successful, then others would start riffing on the gag, and Matt’s swinging arm would become a locally viral sensation, where we’d find a way to riff on Matt’s arm in every movie we watched. Hey, was Arnie on TV? He’s the Arm-inator! And we’d laugh ourselves hysterical about Matt, the contract killer, who slaughtered his victims by whirling his errant arm like a helicopter blade. We’d draw pictures. We’d imitate Matt with a Teutonic accent.
It was the pre-Internet version of a meme, where we’d endlessly permutate MTV videos to make them all, somehow, about Matt’s arm. All while Matt stood there, nodding stoically, acknowledging that ha ha, have your kicks if you need to.
This may seem cruel. It was. The only thing that made it okay was that Matt – and everyone else in my group – was trying to do the same thing to me… partially, because if they were successful at making me the kicking bag of choice for a few weeks, they got kicked less. But there were about fifteen of us, all out to viciously exterminate each other’s self-esteem through humor.
Thing is, we took pride in our ability to endure. The whole point was that we were brutally honest to each other, and we could take it. Sure, I was fat, and had buggly eyes, and couldn’t hold my pot, and… well, I could go on about my failings for days, because in my time with that group every single one of my sins was enumerated, expanded, and roundly mocked. There was literally nothing unusual about me that wasn’t held up to the light and blown up to Godzilla-sized proportions, to the point where it seemed like I was a walking tub of bug-eyed lard, because everyone was angling to tear me down.
But I didn’t have to be nice, which was another term for “dishonest.” Being nice meant that you pretended that Mike’s hair wasn’t weird, or that Jake’s habit of wearing a tie wasn’t pretentious and idiotic. Why should we have to tiptoe around these quirks? Why should we hide our annoyance?
Why should we deprive ourselves of laughter?
Sure, you had to occasionally take one for the team, but that gave you an honest crossroads for improvement: you could fix the problem, or learn to love it. Hey, was I fat? Could be thin. Hey, was Matt swinging his arm? Well, he could learn to take pride in that arm-swinging, go over the top of us, and make arm-swinging one of his signature traits, to the point where we’d actually respect him for it, because by God the man may swing his arm but he fucking owns it.
We’d still mock him, but now it was a more respectful mocking. Matt was a tough bastard. Stood up to us.
That’s the way things should be.
And maybe sometimes you wanted a break from all of this hi-lar-ious humor, sometimes you wished you could just go to a party and not have someone call you “Fat Willy Wonka” and fucking deal with it, but that wasn’t the kind of world you lived in. You learned to cope by shooting first; they couldn’t hurt you if you blitzed them, so you’d arrive at a party loaded up with bon mots and new nicknames and the right people to insult. Better to get your chucks in now.
And maybe sometimes, you showed up fully loaded for bear for that party, and everyone else’s bon mots were funnier than yours, and you wound up the goat. Which sucked. But you could get ’em again, tiger… and if you couldn’t, then maybe you could latch on to one of the funniest guys, laugh really loudly at all of his jokes so he’d be less inclined to pick on you (though he would sometimes just so he didn’t look soft). This eventually led to subfactions where you had people allying with each other, these groups of hyenas laughing loudly, and one guy who everyone was trying to please because he could turn the tide of opinion.
But we were honest.
Very, very honest.
You can see that kind of honesty all over a lot of traditionally male culture; Howard Stern is the key man for such an environs, and its stamp is also all over Jackass. 40 Year-Old Virgin deconstructs that culture from start to finish, showing its appeals and limitations, which is why I love that movie so. It’s a brutal, Darwinian environment where empathy is discouraged, and laughter is encouraged at any cost.
The reason I bring this up is because I heard this exchange the other day:
“That’s so gay.”
“Really? You realize how you’re damaging actual gay people by using their name as a pejorative. I see your name’s Harold; how’d you like it if we called everything terrible ‘Harold’?”
And I thought: If I was twenty years old, I would fucking grow to love it. I would take that bowl of metaphorical thumbtacks and gobble them down, because this crude attention meant they at least acknowledged me. And if I held up under it and never cracked, eventually I’d start referring to bad shit by using my own name, and eventually the guys would realize I was one of them, and I would be one of the hardest motherfuckers in the crew.
So those gays? Should toughen the fuck up.
That’s the thing. My old crew wasn’t honest. Nobody would have fucking noticed Matt’s swingy arm if we hadn’t been on patrol for it. If we were really honest, we would have said, “Hey, we’re all insecure, and desperate to do anything to deflect attention from our own flaws, and by laughing hysterically and bringing everyone down to our level, it makes us feel better.” But we didn’t, and we didn’t acknowledge how these supposed irritations we found were ones we were hunting for. We wanted to be vexed. We wanted to find something to mock. We wanted to feel like there was no grace or charm in life, just a cobbling of sad quirks and ugliness, because not all of us could have grace.
But when you deal with these folks – and there are a lot of them – you have to realize that empathy as a tactic will fail. For them, empathy is a weakness. If you can’t deal with their quote-unquote truth, then you caved to other people’s opinions. And what do those other people matter? They don’t. They totally don’t. That’s why you spend all of your time mocking other folks, to show them the wisdom of not caring. That’s why you’re out there, making people mad, trying to get them to act as you do, because if the whole world acted this way then you could justify it completely and have no nagging worries when you’re alone or just feel too battered to deal with this shit.
Do I know how to reach them? No. But asking, “How would you like it?” will never work. Because if you kicked them in the balls, they would grow to love it, because that meant they passed the test. They endured. And thus, the world should learn to be like them.
Sad. And true. Two words that go together a lot, if you’re truly honest.
Traditions Contained In Meat
The stuffing was a secret recipe, I was told, passed down only to Bosworths. This was an uncomfortable reminder that I had a stepfather. And that I was not really his son.
Thankfully, my stepdad’s stuffing was kick-ass. It wasn’t light or fluffy; it was made of meat, a heavy, florid piece of stuffing that weighed down the end of your fork. It was by far the best thing about Thanksgiving; the turkeys were sometimes dry, often we ran low on gravy, but no matter what happened, Bruce’s special stuffing kicked ten brands of ass.
Every year, Barry – Bruce’s brother – razzed him about the stuffing. Well, this looks pretty good, Barry would allow, but I think you did a better job two years ago. This looks to be a little dry this time around.
Does it, Bruce would say. He didn’t grin. He didn’t grin much anyway. He had one of the greatest straight faces in history.
Barry would taste it. I dunno, he’d say, after a thoughtful chewing. I mean, it’s passable. But the texture’s a little off. You remember back in 2003? He’d poke his wife with his elbow. Now that was a perfect stuffing. You got it right that once. This will do, I guess.
It took me years to realize that Barry didn’t actually have a running tally of annual stuffing reviews. He was just giving Bruce shit. But until I was well into my thirties, I thought that Barry was actually cataloguing and storing each year’s stuffing.
Truth was, Bruce did it well. He did everything well. He was not the most imaginative man, but what he set his hand to, he did with extreme (and often intimidating) competence. And the stuffing, which remained a mystery – he shooed me out of the kitchen while he made it – was done the old-fashioned way, with a cast iron meat grinder and time.
I didn’t cook. But Bruce wouldn’t share. This was a Bosworth tradition, he told me, and frankly I wasn’t much of a stepson to him. I’d never quite gotten over Bruce stepping into the space where my Dad used to be, and whereas Bruce was relentlessly pragmatic and dour, I was emotional and flighty in only the way a rich white kid could be. We fought a lot, because my mother spoiled me, and Bruce felt as though he needed to be a mediating factor, and things came close to blows a couple of times. We weren’t close.
That changed when I got my own stepkids.
It wasn’t that I was in Bruce’s shoes, so much as the fact that we weren’t under each other’s feet any more, and I could appreciate him from a distance. I told my kids, “Be warned, Bruce is hard to get along with,” and they steeled themselves for a jerky father figure… but when my Mother and Bruce had departed, Erin and Amy looked at me and asked, “What was wrong with him? He seemed like a great guy.”
Which he was. He’d mellowed, I’d grown more responsible. And I was able to appreciate him not for what he wasn’t – for no one could be my Dad – but for the way he quietly provided support to my Mom, always making sure she followed her dreams in the most realistic way possible, the quiet support I hadn’t noticed when he was too busy trying to kick my ass into shape. And while we’d never been flat-out enemies, we certainly hadn’t been friends.
It was time, I thought, to rectify that.
So when I went home next time, I looked at Bruce through new eyes – and Bruce, I don’t think, ever looked at me with new eyes, because he was the sort of person who never had to. He didn’t hold grudges. Now that I had a job and was paying the rent and living my own way, he was content. That’s what he’d wanted. And so Bruce and I began to piece together a friendship, talking on our own once in a while without the glue of my mother to hold us together.
Eventually, I sent him a Father’s Day card – well, a stepfather’s day card. But for the first time since my Mom had made me as a teenager, I acknowledged Bruce as a part of my family. He never sent me any card back, but then again he really couldn’t – every occasion that called for a card, my Mother would send and he’d co-sign obligingly.
But he did, one day, give me the recipe to the stuffing. He didn’t make a big deal out of it. He didn’t have to, and it wasn’t his way anyway. I knew what it meant.
To this day, as I do on every Thanksgiving, I made the Secret Stuffing, and I share the recipe with no one. This is a small ritual, which I’m sad to carry out mostly alone; my mother no longer makes it, as her local grandkids don’t like it. Adam, his lone biological son, also makes it. We eat it, and it’s delicious and dark and sagey, and feel the weight in the pit of our stomachs, and we raise a fork in tribute to Bruce.
I wasn’t the kid he wanted. I’m not the son he would have chosen, nor do I know if he ever would have called me son if he had not passed away of Lou Gehrig’s disease three years ago. But I am his Stuffing Heir.
That’ll do, Bruce. That’ll do.
Polyfuckery Vs. Polyamory
I hate myself for slowing down to watch the massive wrecks on the highways. You’re the reason there’s a traffic jam, I think angrily. If you just drove by at normal speeds, everyone would get to work on time.
But no. I have to cruise leisurely by to take in the crumpled doors, the people holding their heads as they wait for the ambulance, the sparkle of safety glass scattered across the asphalt. It makes me feel positively inhuman, wanting to stare at tragedy, until I remember that the reason we’re moving at a crawl is because all the other humans slowed down, too, and then I start to worry about humanity.
Still, I cruise by the “Polyamory” forums at FetLife to see posts like this from time to time:
“I caught my husband dick-deep in a strange woman, at which point he straightened, brushed the crumbs off his shirt, and informed me that we were now polyamorous. She moved in despite me changing the locks, and now I sleep in a closet while they lick caviar off of each other on the bed. I’ve told him I feel unattractive these days, possibly because they have barred my entrance to the bathroom, but he just tells me how I don’t understand polyamory. What am I doing wrong?”
…what are you doing wrong, sweetie? Sticking around, that’s what.
The problem with polyamory is that it’s got that uncomfortable word right in the center of it – amor. Love. And if there’s no love in your poly, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s not polyamory, it’s polyfuckery.
Look, dig that poly’s always a careful balance. You’re going to get your feelings bruised sometimes; if you want a love that never hurts, this biz isn’t for you. (Get a dog.) There will be misunderstandings, misfittings, and days where your partner’s gleefully in love and you feel like you’re on the Isle of Misfit Toys. But there’s a certain type of quote-unquote polyamory that involves one partner who’s decided s/he’s going to fuck everything s/he damn well pleases, and a pliant partner who is too confused – and often purposely too confused – to say “no.”
And while folks will get mad at my defining poly thusly – who am I to tell people they can’t be in the cool poly pool? – I’m gonna say that polyamory involves a genuine love for all your partners. Which is to say that it involves some real concern for their feelings. And there are a number of ways to show that concern, ranging from the perhaps-overly-ginger “I’ll never do anything if it makes you uncomfortable ever” to the hard-core “If you’re upset, I encourage you to find someone better suited for you.” But regardless of how that concern is showed, there’s a certain level of respect for the underlying hurt that shines through.
Which is why I can’t see a relationship that revolves around “guilting your partner into increasing isolation so they can get your rocks off” as anything approaching love.
Polyfuckery is the opposite of love. Polyfuckery involves people preying on your uncertainty to get their goal, making you feel awful for having quite reasonable needs. Polyfuckery is a way of keeping you around just in case they need you, even though they may not even really want you any more. It’s all about negating your feelings so they can do whatever they want. I don’t have a problem with someone standing up for what they need – not every poly must be a house of mushy compromise – but I do have a problem when that selfish desire is couched in terms of other people not being good enough.
So while there are no universal signs in poly, lemme steal a page from Jeff Foxworthy, and say:
If your partner has unilaterally proclaimed your poly status just as you’ve caught them in bed with someone else…. You might be dating a polyfucker.
If your partner has asked his lover to move in with you, and never asked your permission…. You might be dating a polyfucker.
If your partner’s usual response to your hurt is to sneer that you’re just not as enlightened as s/he is… You might be dating a polyfucker.
If your partner doesn’t give you any say in your relationship, and yet guilts you whenever you think of leaving… You might be dating a polyfucker.
If your partner lectures you to explain why you have to be understanding whenever his needs have to be met, and then gives the exact same lecture to explain why your needs aren’t being met… You might be dating a polyfucker.
I hate slowing down to read those sad posts. It’s a lot of people stuck in situations with manipulative partners, made to feel bad and unworthy when really, the problem is that their lover’s decided they want things their way and will do whatever it takes to have ALL THE THINGS.
As the Internet says, “Polyamory means being honest; therefore, if I’m honest about how little you mean to me, we are polyamorous.” How sad. How very sad.