A Little Compassion For The Dudebros, Please

“Is this an Onion piece?” a Twitter friend of mine asked.  “Are we expected to feel sorry for men, that they’re scared of perpetrating sexual assault?”
And indeed, the article on Salon was about the terror of college-aged dudebros who were terrified of looking like a predator while trying to hook up.  (Alas, the Bloomberg article it’s referencing seems to have been taken down, so I can’t comment on that.  I suspect it was significantly more insipid.)  But basically, after years of being educated that women’s enthusiastic consent is a necessary component of hooking up, some subset of guys are not sure how to approach that line, and as a result wind up walking away.  As chronicled in such anecdata as:

Malik Gill, the former social chair of the Sigma Chi fraternity at Harvard University, told Bloomberg he has witnessed something similar happening among his friends. He recounted an anecdote in which he gave one of his guy friends a woman’s number after she had expressed interest. Gill’s friend never called her. “Even though she was interested, he didn’t want to pressure her,” he explained. “He was worried about making her feel uncomfortable.”
Earlier in the piece, Gill said he no longer offered female classmates beer at parties because he doesn’t want to “look like a predator … it’s a little bit of a blurred line.”

So what you have are scared dudes who don’t want to violate a woman’s boundaries walking away from potentially fulfilling sexual encounters because they don’t know how to navigate some ambiguous waters.  And please do not do the sexist thing of going, “Well, good!  Those guys were pushing sex on women who didn’t want it!” and assuming that none of the women involved wanted to have fulfilling sex back because, you know, men are the only humans with a sex drive.
If what we’re told is true – and I’ve seen some evidence of this new-found hesitation in polyamory and kink communities as well – then you have a situation where guys are scared of looking like assholes and freezing in situations where they may have had willing partners.
And yeah.  I do think you should have sympathy for them.
Now, to be clear: yes, being raped is way worse than any social awkwardness on any front, and my goal is that no person gets raped or touched against their consent.  This is why I am glad this awkwardness is here.  Given the tradeoff, I would by far rather have a bunch of timid college kids refraining from handing a consenting woman a beer rather than having some overconfident oaf deciding without evidence that a girl he liked needed to be kissed.  What this is is a necessary redistribution of anxiety, in that for a long time women have been afraid of being harassed in public spaces by dudebros, and now the culture is swinging around to put the weight on men.  Where a lot of that weight, properly, belongs.
So on many levels, this newfound terror as guys acclimate to a new environment is a wonderful fucking change.  Do not take me to be saying otherwise.
But in real life, I prefer not to play the “The bigger terror supercedes the lesser terror” game.  Yes, there are people who have PTSD from combat runs in Afghanistan; that doesn’t mean that I need have no sympathy for those with social anxiety.  Likewise, yes, women’s fear of being violated is the greater terror, one that we should prioritize…
…but that does not mean that we should leave these dudebros to hang.
The Salon article gets it right in that yes, we need to educate men on how to operate in a consent culture, because as a sex-positive person I believe that men should be able to find fulfilling, consensual sex.  Particularly since these guys are your potential allies in this particular struggle, albeit potentially unwilling ones – but they are at least responsive to social pressure, and some subset of them actually probably care about the women involved, too.
And I think too much of feminist thought handwaves the difficulty of men’s struggles in dating.  People of all stripes sneer, “Oh, dating and consent, that’s easy!  Just do it!”  And they forget that actually, when you’re the one actively trying to seek pleasure with strangers – and most relationships start out with someone who was, at some point, a stranger – determining all those tetchy elements of attraction and consent and how to negotiate what you want is actually one of the most complicated things we do in this society.
A lot of women forget that one of the things the patriarchy quietly does is to put most of the instigation of relationships upon the dudes.  As a guy, you’re expected to make the first move – and you’re seen as a wimp if you can’t.  (Another way in which men are subconsciously trained to be alike; even if you’re more a passive type of guy, you’re unlikely to get dates if you’re waiting for women to come to you, and if you can’t step up to actively seeking, well, society thinks you deserve a lifetime of loneliness.)
That act of breaking the ice can be terrifying, especially for people who have no experience, and especially for people who want to keep the people they’re trying to connect with comfortable.  Hell, I’m forty-five years old, and I’ve dated well over a hundred women, and I still have those moments of spine-chilling terror where after a merry half-an-hour conversation with someone I like I touch her on her arm and then go, Shit, should I have done that?  Did I just cross a line?  Check her reaction, did you fuck up, did you fuck up? 
That reading of reactions is necessary.  I’ll never say it’s not.  But even for the experienced, trying to ascertain what each person’s level of flirt-acceptability is can occupy a lot of brainpower.
And it is, I should add, “each person.”  A lot of discussions of dating and consent make it seem like everyone is the same – but god damn, when you’re out there dating, one person wants to be approached this way, and another person wants this entirely other way, and you’re constantly reading very subtle (and in some cases intentionally buried) signs to try to determine what’s actually going on here…
…and adding another layer of complexity to that already riotously overcomplex thing is a lot to ask.
And of course we should ask it!  Getting men to seek active and enthusiastic consent should be our goddamned goal, especially if we’re going to keep subconsciously perpetuating the idea that guys should be the ones making the first move!
But let us also have sympathy for their struggle.
Because if you don’t have sympathy – if you go, “Awww, poor widdle men, who the fuck cares about your terror when I could be assaulted?” – then what you say to men is, effectively, “Fuck your concerns so long as I get what I want.”  And when you tell guys that, it puts us right back into that idea that dating is a war between men and women, a zero-sum game where only one gender can truly win.
What I want is a middle ground where women deserve the right to not be assaulted but men also deserve the right to be appreciated for navigating a tricky minefield in order to try to enforce safe spaces.  I think all people should work to provide a sex-positive space where both sexes can meet, decide they’re interested, and hook up on every level they damn well desire without having those desires short-circuited by missed signals.
In short:

• Don’t think dating isn’t complicated.  It is.
• Anything that makes dating more complicated may be necessary, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t have some sympathy (and, more importantly, education) for the people who are trying to get it right for whatever reasons.
• Nobody should be assaulted, ever.

And that’s pretty much it for today.

A Word Of Wisdom On Crushes, And The Revealing Therein

I am, if you will recall, a fan of the no-obligation crush.  Which is to say that in the unlikely scenario that I have a crush upon your totes adorbs self, you are in no way obliged to return it.
My crush is my own.  It’s nice if we share a mutual attraction, but even if you show no interest in my pudding-like physical form, I will still hang out with you.  This isn’t a contract where I will only do nice things for you unless you promise to smooch the hell out of me; no, we are friends, and while my friendship may be laced with a bit of intoxication over the idea of smooching you, I value your actual presence over my daydreams.
Tl;dr: I’d rather have you in my life as a buddy than reject you for the crime of not crushing back.
And I often do reveal crushes, just to get that out of the way.  “Hey, I crush on you, this is a factor to be considered in our relationship, like the weather or traffic jams.”  I do it not because I intend to arm-wrestle love out of them, but because they should probably know that if they choose to, say, complain to me extensively that there aren’t any good men out there who like them, I may get a bit huffy for reasons that might seem mysterious in the absence of this crush-visibility zone.
Yet if I do crush on someone, there are five words that are fatal to any good crush-revelation:
“So…. do you like me?”
Trust me on this one: if you tell someone you’re crushing on them, and they like you back, they’re gonna tell you.
And if they don’t, pressuring them into a revelation of mutual crushitude transforms this from the “no-obligation crush” and into the “you’re gonna hurt my feelings if you don’t reciprocate” territory.  And that’s a pretty terrible place to be, on both ends.
Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with revealing a crush in the hopes of unearthing a mutual attraction.  But there is something wrong with pretending to be all “Oh, this crush doesn’t matter, I’ll like you either way” and then immediately follow that up with a subtle pressure of “LIKE ME BACK, DAMN YOUR EYES, I WANT TO KNOW WHERE THIS IS GOING.”
If you truly have the obligation-free crush, this isn’t going anywhere.  Even the revelation of a mutual attraction may not necessarily lead to hot bedside smoochenatings, as all mature adults understand that “Attraction does not equal automatic coupling.”  I’m attracted to any number of people who, in a vacuum, would probably warm my nethers… but they’re not in a good place to fulfill those needs and neither am I, so we just keep a good friendship and occasionally flirt with a sharper edge than normal.
You can like like someone and have it not turn into anything deeper.  They can like like you back and have it not change much.  Not every makeout session must be brought to fullness, and I think your life gets a lot better once you realize that.
Especially when you’re a flighty crusher like me.
(Originally written on FetLife, cross-posted here.)

Meet A Ferrett This Sunday: Sheffields, In Chicago, At 1:00!

Thanks to the help of my friend Jeremiah, we have a place to meet a weasel (and a weaselwife) this Sunday:
Sheffield’s
3258 N Sheffield Ave
Chicago, IL60657
Yelp seems to like it, with four stars, and that’s good enough for me.  So!  If you’d like to come by and hang out for a few hours, I’m told the drinks are good, and we will do some level of compatriating.
The inevitable question I get asked is, “I don’t know you, but…”  Stop.  There is no but.  I know people in Chicago, and am trying to meet up with them.  This is where I meet people I don’t know (or for who I do know, but can’t seem to schedule a happytime with).  It’ll be nicer if you tell me you’re coming, so I know who to expect, but if you’ve had the urge to say hello to me, here is where you do it.
And no, I have no idea how many people will be here or not.  I’ve only done this once before.  But please!  I welcome your company.

How Ferguson Proves The World Is Getting Better

“It seems so hopeless,” my wife said.  “The world is just getting worse all the time.”
“Nope,” I said.  “It’s getting better.”
The thing about watching the abysmal police violence in Ferguson is that this is not unusual.  The cops have been mistreating black kids for years.  When I was young, I had a black friend who I used to play with.  Years later, I discovered that he got himself shot by the cops.  He was handcuffed at the time, and on the ground, but whoops apparently he was a threat.
There’s been excessive brutality to blacks all along.  You just didn’t have to pay attention to it.
But thanks to cell phone cameras and Twitter, we now have a situation where it is literally much harder to hide a body.  What’s happening in Ferguson is not the sign that oh my God, it’s hopeless – the fact that this has made front-page headlines despite the fact that CNN and Fox were initially ignoring it like all the other cop shootings is proof that we’re making progress.  Slow progress, and redundant progress – yes, similar things have happened before, and will happen again in the future…
…but don’t confuse the exposure of a problem with the intensity of the problem.  Blacks have gotten the raw end of the deal from cops for over a century now.
But thank God we’re looking it in the face.
And it’s like Occupy Wall Street, which I’ve come around on.  Initially, I thought, “Well, they’re not activists, they’re just raising a question.”  And I’ve come to realize that even in the absence of a focused agenda, raising the question can do a lot of good.  No, Wall Street hasn’t been torn down brick by brick yet, but I’ve seen a lot more debates in mainstream media about whether greed is good, and it’s been a lot harder to smother questions about “Why should these dudes have all the money?” with the usual conservative grumblings of “Class warfare, harrumph” because, well, we’ve opened up a debate.
Ferguson probably won’t end well for Ferguson.  I suspect the status quo will reign there after the media leaves.  But we’ll have tossed another question into the mainstream media to debate, which is “How many people do cops kill in the course of their duty?” – and guess what?  Not surprisingly, the government isn’t collecting that data.  Now, thanks to Ferguson, we’ve got people assembling that data, and now we’ve got people asking, “So really, how comfortable are we with these numbers?”
It’s a slow change.  It’s not happening on Twitter time.  Political shifts take years.  But I think Ferguson will be a high-water mark in terms of getting people to understand that yeah, you can have a city that’s 67% black with a police force that’s 94% white.  People will start wondering if that’s fair.  And some people, God bless you activists, will decide that it’s not and start trying to fix that.
It may take decades for this to work.  The Stonewall Riots were all the way back in 1969.  And forty-five years later, gay activists are finally seeing the payoff for that.
Visibility doesn’t equal immediate action.  Or victory.  Nothing guarantees victory.
But you can’t have anything else without visibility.  And man, this is like a needle to the eye.

Okay, I'm Holding A Meetup In Chicago This Sunday. Where Shall It Be?

Because the New York meetup went so well, I’m gonna say that at 1:00 this Sunday, I will show up at a public bar somewhere.  Anyone who wants to hang out with me for a bit can totally say hi.  Even if we have never ever met before.  (Seriously.  I like people.)
The question is, where should we meet?
I don’t know Chicago all that well, so I’m going to ask y’all to help me out.  If you’re planning on coming to this Meet-a-Weasel Extravaganza, leave a comment with a good place that allows for varying numbers of people to show up randomly and hang out.  (Preferably a space that doesn’t rely on tables, because I tend to circulate.)
I’m told Chicago is large, so somewhere easily gettable-to would be preferable.  And time is of the essence, as I’ll be needing to announce the location, like, tomorrow.
So.  Sunday.  In Chicago.  1:00 p.m.  Any help beyond that would be appreciated.