Why Twerking Does Not Taste Like Bits of Carob

It was my hippie aunt who, inadvertently, taught me the power of the right word.  And she did it in nine words:
“Try it, Billy! This carob tastes just like chocolate!”
See, at the age of nine, I trusted my aunt.  She was my favorite relative ever.  She brought me up in the summers to stay at her house way out in the sticks, where I got to play on the neighbors’ farms.  And she was all crunchy-granola organic, and trying to get me off of my junk food fix, and so she said the fatal words.
I bit into the carob eagerly.  Here was something just like chocolate, but healthy!  And I –
– wait.
This isn’t like chocolate at all.
To this day, “betrayal” tastes like carob to me. For this carob wasn’t sweet, the way chocolate was, but sort of carroty-sweet, and the texture was different.  I could see the similarities between carob and chocolate, and maybe if it had been presented to me as something yummy in its own right, but it was by no means just like.
And this is how I feel about words.  Each word is a very specific taste to me, filling a slot as precise as chocolate.  And when someone wants to remove or change a word, there’s often no good replacement.  The thesaurus would have you believe that “quick” is the same as “fast,” or “swift,” or “rapid,” or even “break-neck”; to me, each of those words have their own unique flavor, and I could not use them interchangeably.  To me, swift is the surge of whitewater, pounding majestically down the steep slope of a waterfall; quick is an animalistic word, red-furred as the fox, jumping in nimble arcs over a series of obstacles.
I don’t claim that these are universal definitions, mind you.  But to me, saying, “Quick is the same as fast” is like telling me olive oil is the same as canola oil.  I guess you could make popcorn from olive oil if you tried, but the flavor wouldn’t be what you expected.
And so when a word slides in meaning so much that there’s no handy word to replace it, as it did with the term literally, I get vexed.  (Not irritated, or upset, or disgruntled: exactly vexed.)  And when it becomes clear that a word like “retarded” is hurtful to people and I shouldn’t use it, I do drop the usage – but I also lament a little, because that word filled an exact space in my personal lexicon that no other word can quite fill, and saying, “That’s ridiculous” doesn’t carry all the weight and implications of a bunch of fifth-graders expressing indigant disgust at discovering that the world is often not just unfair, but often completely insane.
(Which is not to say that it’s correct to use that word, I hasten to say – for the very good reason that, as mentioned, these definitions aren’t universal, and those who actually are retarded or have loved ones who are hear that very differently.  Part of being a grownup is coming to realize that while you may mean “gay” in no way to refer to actual gay people, it’s actually quite rude of you to expect gay people to make that distinction.  So it’s something I’ve stopped doing.  But, like a quit bad habit, I may have stopped smoking cigarettes for very good reasons, but these lollipops I’ve substituted don’t quite make up the difference.)
So when I got tagged in a Facebook status by Riv Swanson, I was surprised to see this Conan O’Brien quote presented as though I’d agree with it:

The Oxford dictionary has named “selfie” the word of the year, narrowly beating out “twerk.”  In a related story, the funeral for the English language is Saturday.

Why would I be upset by that?
These are specific words that describe very specific situations!  You know what would upset me more?  If we had no specific word to cover twerking, and instead had to refer to it awkwardly as “that gluteal dance people do.”  Selfies are a phenomenon that can only exist in the age of cheap cameraphones and social media, and I exult in the fact that we’ve had to devise delightful new words to cover all the magnificent ways that human beings act!
I suppose I should be enraged that newness makes its way into the OED, but no.  I love slang of all sorts.  I love the creative ways that human beings keep finding bizarre things to do that no word in the long history of the language can quite describe, and that we’ve had to patch together some new term to describe a behavior.
I adore that we can have a dictionary of twenty thick volumes, printed in microscopic type, and still that’s not enough words to define everything people can do.  All the shades of meaning.  All the dances, all the emotions, all the inventions.  We keep having to make that thicker, and the truth is that it’ll never be big enough because we, as people, are going to keep doing these grand shining-new things that are so vibrant we’ll need to hammer some letters together in order to describe it in a single word.
So no.  Twerking is wonderful.  It’s another thing to add to that colorful list of dancing, mamboing, cha-chaing, foxtrotting, rumbaing – another distinct shade for my palette.  I’m glad it’s here.  And welcome aboard, little butt-dance; I don’t think you’ll last, but I’m pretty sure you’ll delight someone eighty years from now looking up the crazy trends that seized us in the early 2010s, and discovering that this was A Thing.

Choose Carefully Who You're Kind To

On FetLife, there is the Spammy MicroDom – the 21 year-old “master” who gets an account, finds every woman within 20 miles of him, and emails cut-and-pasted orders for her to kneel at his feet.  This kind of behavior is widely mocked, and rightfully so; at least three times a week, you’ll see vicious parodies of the MicroDom hitting the “Most Popular” boards.  Women have contests to create the most insulting reply, and there are whole boards dedicated to shredding these pathetic attempts of domination.
Believe it or not, I have some sympathy for these guys.  Not a lot; just a glimmer.
I say this because I got an email from someone asking me to look over one of his posts, where he argued – and correctly – that a lot of this idiotic behavior comes because the media presents an impression to men that this is how they’re supposed to act in BDSM situations.  These guys have heard through various badly-presented filters that this is what “submissive” women want, and so they arrive on Fet and treat women in the way they’ve been told that women “in the scene” want to be treated.
Now, the reason I lack most sympathy for these guys is because they’re from-the-hip idiots.  A single Google search would tell you that this isn’t how things work in reality, and any understanding of how human beings actually work when they’re not your masturbatory fantasies would tell you “Hey, women usually don’t want random strangers splurting their sexual desires all over them.  Women, in fact, are drowning in dumb generic offers like yours.”  (I mean, this isn’t unique to FetLife; I’ve heard many similar horror stories from women on OKCupid, where the sexual innuendo actually seems to be more prevalent.)  And they’re often emailing women who self-identify as Dommes, presumably on the basis that “these women are pretty” and “I want to sex them” means “So they must be submissive.”
So these guys are misled, but only because they’re short-sighted and lazy.  Fail.
However, the guy writing the post essentially said (paraphrased by moi), “Why aren’t we more compassionate to these guys?  They’re stupid and ill-informed, yes, but instead of responding with mockery to drive them away, why don’t we as a community concentrate on educating them?  Guys who look at the Kinky and Popular board will see nothing but parodies of them.  I feel like all we’re accomplishing is creating this negative atmosphere for new male doms.”
To which I replied, “This mockery accomplishes something more vital, in a way: creating a more positive space for women, both dominant and submissive, who are less likely to have to deal with this shit – and more likely to stay. And who would you rather privilege – newbie male doms who are acting reflexively like assholes, or all the women on FetLife?”
“Think carefully,” I concluded.  “There’s some very encoded and subtle sexism built into your thought patterns here.”
Don’t get me wrong; I am all about the teachable moment.  I think you’ve got to allow for them, and someone has to stand up and be nice and take someone’s hand to walk them through all the dumb mistakes.  But every time you “open up” a community to make it more welcome to those expressing dumb and insulting behaviors, you alienate those who are insulted.
And you have to choose.  There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be compassionate.  But if you create a place where people are very tolerant of the MicroDom’s mistakes, then more MicroDoms are likely to thrive there.  Which means that the women get more dumb emails.  Which means that the women are more to leave rather than being harassed.
Classic liberal thinking has “the big tent,” where everyone can stand underneath it.  I’m here to say that the best reality can do is a largeish tent, where you can either choose to evict a rowdy subset, or have them drive off some portion of people who don’t want to deal with them.  In either case, not everyone will be in that tent, and whoever’s not in the tent will feel alienated from you, whether you intended it to be or not.
I’d argue that it’s far better to intend it.  Yes, it’s a wonderful goal to have everyone able to act however they please, and all of us being tolerant of their quirks.  But what happens is that some people’s quirks are so unpleasant that nobody wants to be around them – and if you don’t choose to eject them, you unconsciously choose to be okay with certain groups of people leaving.
I feel a little bad for the MicroDom.  He’s uneducated, stupid, naive, and maybe could become someone worthwhile with a little guidance.  However, I feel way worse for the forty women he emailed, who routinely wake up with an inbox clogged with mails not just from him but from everyone like him… and I’d far prefer they stick around.  They’re more likely to have something interesting to say.
And maybe we could apply pressure in a way that includes less mocking.  I agree that it’d be nice if we were all a little less hateful.  But on the other hand, if we’re asking people to change their behavior, I’d probably prioritize the people who decided that random strangers were worth harassing, you know?

How Can You Be So Ugly?

One of the things that always amazed me about the Baby Boomers is what they did to marijuana.
They smoked it, almost all of them, during those crazy hippy days.  They knew it didn’t drive you frothing mad, or strangle your soul; it just made you hungry, and maybe a little unmotivated.  So when I was young, I figured that by the time I was twenty, pot would be just this other thing like alcohol and cigarettes.
And the Baby Boomers treated marijuana like it was the Antichrist.  They were terrified of anyone touching it, ever.  And the jail sentences went up, and the laws clanged down, and by the time I was twenty you could get your whole house confiscated for selling a dime bag.
I never got that.  I thought that people who’d been through that would understand.  But as it turns out, there’s this sort of violent reaction that people have to stupid things they did in their youth, where they get to the Age Of Lawmaking And Morality and thunder, “Well, we did that, but nobody else should ever!” and act as though anyone who would do such a thing is the scum of the earth.
And I think of this Facebook generation, where you see teenagers posting the dumbest goddamned statuses everywhere, embarrassing photos and insulting jokes and ill-thought-out political statuses.  And I’d like to think that by the time these kids are all fifty and pretty much every Congressman has a picture of themselves doing a beer bong hit, society would say, “All right, we all sent a naughty picture to a lover, we all have a photo of ourselves embarrassingly drunk, we all held opinions in our twenties that we regret now” and accept that a) saying and doing stupid things when you’re young is a fact of life – I mean, when else are you going to be at your most stupid except when you’re least experienced? and b) a person’s politics at age eighteen are often as transient as her love of Justin Bieber, and we should acknowledge that as human beings, we evolve.
Yet what I see happening is like the marijuana situation, where people assume that one stupid post is the whole of who someone is.  The moment someone says something dumb, society freezes to a halt and that’s who they are – that dumbass who said that thing.  They said that five years ago!  What scum!
Can people ever learn?
And I see this increasing hostility towards people even having to defend their positions on the Internet.  “Hey, I’m on the side of righteousness and good!” they seem to cry.  “And can you believe this jerk is asking me questions?”  And yeah, I get that it’s exhausting to be the teachable moment all the time, and I’m not saying that anyone should be forced to serve as a continual FAQ – but god damn, people, the teachable moment is how we take people who don’t understand why this is a big deal and show them.  It’s the moment of potential enlightenment.  It’s the moment where you were ignorant, but you got it.
Yet I feel a constant pressure of “Man, what a kneebiter, he didn’t agree with me the instant I showed him the true path!”  And that, I feel, is part of this sociopathic Internet sense that you either get it or you don’t, and if you sinned once – or even had to be convinced of the correctness of someone’s argument – then you’re not really worthy.
I’ve sinned a lot of times, man.
You can still read them all.
I had someone ask me a question, upon reading one of my older essays, that was, essentially, “Your classic essays are so horrible, full of casual misogyny and ugly humor and fratboy antics?  When did you have your moment of conversion?”
And I’ve thought about that comment for almost a year now, and the answer is simple: there wasn’t one.
I had no sizzling flare of comprehension, no singular moment.  I merely evolved, one interaction at a time, over the course of two decades.  The guy who had all of these disastrous love affairs and tried a hooker and hid in a bathroom closet to stop a pervert has a lot in common with today-Ferrett, but god damn if I don’t look back and wince at what a clumsy, hurtful oaf I was.  I just had a thousand interactions where I recognized my own insufficiency, usually by hurting someone, and said, I can be better.
And so, slowly, I became better.
And it would be a lot better for me, in many ways, if I quietly deleted those essays, as they don’t reflect who I am.  People who read them risk thinking, “Well, that’s who Ferrett is, what a kneebiter,” and walking on.
Yet I keep them up.  Because yes, there are people who are going to freeze me (or anyone else) in amber. But I leave all of my ugly bits out in the open as a form of protest – yes, I was stupid when I was 22 years old.  Weren’t you?
And I refuse to bow to the folks who seem to think that “who you are now” has an exact correlation to “who you were then.”  We learn from doing stupid things.  Often, we learn because we did stupid things.  And it’s not right that we say hurtful or thoughtless things, but the people who confront us are doing us a great service by revealing their pain, and risking being callously written off because it might change how we act in the future.
All you people who I slighted, erased, or slandered: I leave my stupidity up as proof of how much work you did.  I am not monolithic.  I am evolving, continually striving to make myself better, and I am here to battle the concept of innate perfection.  I am here to battle the idea that one bad day can swallow every other achievement in your life.  I am here to battle the idea that one thoughtless moment means you can have all of your self-worth stripped away by people who want to feel superior.
You’re going to make mistakes.  That’s okay.
Just make up for them.

Is "Desolation Of Smaug" A Bad Movie?

No.
I wrote a very long essay on why “Desolation of Smaug” was disappointing, but The Hobbit 2 is still a hit.  A CinemaScore grade of A-, decent reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and down 12% from The Hobbit 1 but still pretty respectable at the box office.
And Desolation is still worth watching.  The scenes with Smaug are amazing, and the visuals are gorgeous.  (I saw in 48 FPS, and you can count me a fan.)  It’s amazing eye-candy with some fun action scenes that defy all known physics, and I don’t regret spending my cash to see it.  I may even see it again.
I just don’t think it’s a great movie.
Let’s be honest; there are a ton of box office smashes that come, make their mark, and leave without a trace.  If we look at 2001, Rush Hour 2 was a gigantic smash, as was Jurassic Park III and the Planet of the Apes remake.  All of them were okay, and fun to watch, but in the end they entered your eyeballs in a flare of action and slithered out without a trace.
There’s a lot of movies like that.  Fun while they lasted.  But not great movies.
Lord of the Rings, I think, are great films that people will be watching in twenty years’ time, maybe even thirty.  They’re brilliant, and deep, and moving.  And The Hobbit, I think, will be the Phantom Menace; watched, perhaps, out of curiosity, maybe even loved by some, but interesting as a portion of a greater film.
There’s a distinction between “That was fun!” and “That was magnificent” that, perhaps, as a writer – who has to shoot for magnificent every time – is lost on people.  But I’m not saying The Hobbit is terrible, but rather a disappointment compared to Lord of the Rings.  It’s eye candy.  It’ll be fun.  But it won’t really last the test of time, if you’re to ask me.
And a lot of very silly people said, “Well, you said the Hobbit should be about friendship!  The books aren’t about friendship!” Which I did not.  What I said was this:
“I don’t envy Peter Jackson’s challenge here, because the Hobbit is a hell of a story to try to tell.  You can’t make it about friendship and the dwarves bonding with the burglar, because of how bitterly the Hobbit ends….We might be able to get around all of this thematic whiplash if – if! – the story was about friendship.  But it is not.”
People have made the point that The Hobbit is fractious, but then you need to figure out what it is about.  And thematically, The Hobbit is a mess.  Is it about Bilbo learning to be A Hero?  The Dwarves, longing Palestinian-style for their homeland?  Gandalf, fending off Baby Sauron?  Well, it’s about all of those, and when it’s about all of those, I’d argue strongly that it’s about none of those, because the characters are at odds with each other and yet the film strongly keeps trying to hammer home the resonance of Lord of the Rings.  Which was about friendship, and facing a shared challenge.
What The Hobbit is, is nothing.  It’s a lot of fun, if you don’t think too hard.  It’s three hours watching crazy action sequences.  But it’s not the heart of the Fellowship – and that’s not to say that it needs to be the heart of the Fellowship, but rather twisting the Hobbit a bit to make it about friendship was but one way to save it.  Maybe you make it thematically about lost homes, and how that eats into your soul – the tools are there, but it’s not explored in the film.  Maybe you make it about how greed drives apart friendship.
But what’s the Hobbit about?  About three hours long.  It’s fun.  But it won’t stick, because man, it just doesn’t know what message it’s trying to tell aside from “Dragons are pretty awesome, aren’t they?”

Failure Patterns In Poly: The Ping-Pong Partner

Talk it out.  Talk it out.  Talk it out.
That’s what’s often presented as the miracle cure for polyamory.  Got a conflict?  Discuss.  Got a partner who wants to fuck a llama?  Negotiate.  Got a lover who’s  just embezzled your paycheck and used your minimum wage to fund terrorist bioweapons?  Hablar, mi amigo!
Problem is, that talking is not the ultimate cure for what ails ya.
It’s the decision.
Now, the talking is the way of coming to a good decision.  So that’s worthwhile.  But one of the core polyamory skills is listening to all sides, concluding what you think is fair, and then sticking to that decision.
‘Cause otherwise?  You become Ping-Pong Poly.
Wishy-washy people don’t do well in polyamory, because if you’re dating then your partners will come into conflict.  This conflict isn’t always the “battle to death in a ring of fire” style of dispute, but you’re inevitably balancing time and intimacy: Partner A wants a twice-a-week date with you, Partner B feels that you’re ignoring her as it is.  Partner B wants to start moving towards a Master/Slave relationship, Partner A is not comfortable with that dynamic.
It is your job to listen to both partner’s needs, figure out what you’re comfortable with, and finalize a decision.
But if you’re Ping-Pong Poly, then you’re swayed by whoever you’ve just talked to.  Mr. Ping-Pong goes to Partner A, who says that two dates a week isn’t all that much when Mr. Ping-Pong spends the remaining 160 hours with Partner B, and Partner A is lonely and has no other lovers.  So he leaves her house convinced of Partner A’s truth…
…until he gets home and Partner B points out that Partner A gets all the fun evening times after work, and Mr. Ping-Pong’s sex life with Partner B has gone down because he’s coming in at 2 in the morning after a big whoopty-whoop date with A, and is too tired for sex.
So what does Ping-Pong Poly do?  Punts.  He makes firm agreements with Partner B that he will only have once-a-week dates, which lasts until Partner A wants to see a movie.  And he goes, “Okay!”
That movie date lasts with Partner A until Partner B finds out and hits the roof, and then he cancels with Partner A, and…
…and it’s not good for anyone, because this nebbish can’t make up his goddamned mind.  And he (or she) usually winds up sneaking around both partners, quietly breaking agreements until the other finds out.  And that throws up these great clouds of psychodrama as he remains *utterly convinced* by one side… as long as he’s in their presence.
Here’s the fundamental truth of polyamory: you have to make a decision, because there’s no right answer.  Does Partner A need more time?  Is Partner B actually neglected?  People will doubtlessly debate which side is “correct” in this example, but the truth is that there’s no objective truth to be found here.  Maybe Partner A is too needy, or maybe Partner B is trying to strangle Mr. Ping-Pong with household chores.
Is two dates a week too much?  It depends on the people involved, man.  And I’ve not told you enough about either side to say for sure.  The point I’m making is that it could go either way – and since you’re the one who’s in the middle, you’ve got to make a decision or it’s not fair to either of your partners.
It’s about what you think.  You’re not a weathervane.  And it may be uncomfortable to look your partner in the eye and say, “I know you want this, but I am unwilling to give it to you” – but hey!  You decided to date two people!  Those people will have conflicting needs!
You owe it to them to settle the matter definitively.
Because let’s be honest: it’s absolutely shitty to tell your partner that they’re absolutely right, and then about-face when you talk to someone else.  It makes you unreliable, and if there’s a greater sin in a relationship than “I can’t trust them” then I don’t know what is.
And I know why you don’t want to make a decision: because one of your partners might leave!  If you tell Partner A “No, once a week is all I can do,” or tell Partner B, “I think twice a week is perfectly fair,” then A or B might pack their shit and go.  And that’s rough.
But you’re not avoiding them leaving by continually passing the buck: you’re just dragging it out with a lot of pain and angst.  Eventually, one of them will figure out what it is you *really* want to do because you’ll have broken your word to take up with Partner A more often than not, and they’ll go *anyway*.  Usually with a lot more anger and psychodrama than they would if you’d just bitten the bullet and told them what you were actually willing to do.
Being a good partner involves being honest about your limitations.  Even if those limitations are “won’t” instead of “can’t.”
I’ve lost people I loved because I told them I thought they were being unreasonable in their needs.  And even though we’re exes now, I think that made me a good partner for them: I didn’t lie to them about what I was willing to do.  I told them flat-out what they could expect from me, and gave them the information they needed to decide whether they should stay.
Many of them were disgruntled, but stuck around.  Because I was good to them in other ways, and they decided that hey, maybe the once-a-week date wasn’t a dealbreaker.  And that argument healed over and things got better.
Others chose to leave.  And those fractures were painful, I won’t deny.  But it was also quick, and respectful, and left me with strong remaining relationships.  I’m friends with a lot of my ex-girlfriends.
The alternative was spending years making two or more partners very unhappy and disrespected as I dithered between them, never making either feel truly loved, making both feel as though my sympathy was something that could be yanked away from them at any moment.
No.  Better to make the call, and stick with it. Don’t Ping-Pong Poly it.
Decide.