All Women And Never Men: A Rant On A Polyamory I Dislike
“Baby, we’re poly; you can date all the women you want. But no guys.”
That’s the kind of polyamory that drives me crazy.
Look, if your guy is such a brobdignagian studmuffin that after shuddering in the shadow of His tremendous cock you need no others, then great! As the woman, you’ve made the choice not to seek other menstuffs. I support that. What I do not support is the polyamory model where the guy, majestically, allows his woman to date all the chicks she wants, but never men.
And it’s fucking everywhere. As a blogger with a reasonably sizable audience, I usually enstate a cooldown time between “a friend of mine does something that vexes me” and “the day I blog about it,” just so they don’t feel like I’m picking on them. But it never stops. Every other fucking week, I have a good pal who meets a guy who’s wonderfully encouraging, because he wants her to have all the loving relationships she can handle – as long as they have boobs! And no penis. That penis is scary, y’all.
It’s so everywhere, and I just fucking hate it.
Now, not every poly relationship is the same, and I’m sure that YOUR poon-but-no-peen relationship is based on factual evidence that men are the crushers of dreams. But what I usually see, when I look at these restrictive gardens, is a monstrous selfishness: Oh, you can have all of the sex you want, so long as it turns me on. I think lesbian sex is the spice, and maybe if I’m lucky I’ll end up as the filling in your slut sandwich, so go on and have your fun. Besides, we all know that women’s relationships aren’t nearly as deep or threatening as guy relationships, so it’s fun to indulge you – it’s like watching two kittens play! You girls are so cute.
The reason I hate it is because that’s a form of polyamory, but more often than not it’s one that’s selfish, misogynistic, and dysfunctional. It’s often a way of saying, “Everything in this relationship needs to serve my needs.” Because I’ve talked to a lot of those women while their man is out on a date with a new girlfriend, and it’s not like they don’t get the usual poly-quivers of jealousy and terror (as these dude-types are invariably a) arrow-straight and b) always willing to find just one more woman to fuck, as long as she’s cute). The women sit at home, not at all turned on by this new potential threat to their relationship, trying bravely to be fair because, “Well, this is an open relationship, this balancing of affections is just part of how it works.”
Except it doesn’t. Does he ever sit at home, worried about her on a date with a guy? No. It’s a one-way street because when she’s flirting with a hottie male at the club he gets all OMG HIS COCK WILL SUPPLANT MINE, and that shit is just too terrible for any man to deal with – so no, just fool around with harmless little women. (If you’ve read some of my previous rants on how dumb guys approach penises, you’ll know what I think of the whole ubercock routine.)
Look, my wife dates other men. Is it always easy on my ego? No. But even the best polyamory involves a few inadvertent shots to the self-esteem. There are people who will tell you that good polyamory involves never being jealous or insecure, and I’ll say fuck those inhuman robots right in their crankcase. Poly has a lot of benefits when it works – but even the best of relationships will occasionally have these monkeybrain down times of, “If she’s having a really good time with someone else, can she really love me?”
Yes. Yes, she can. But walling off a whole fucking sex just so you don’t have to have your dark night of the soul is selfish. Just go fucking monogamous, dude – there’s nothing wrong with that. But no, you want your hot threesomes, and you want to sex up as many chicks as you can, and she’s conveniently bisexual so you can just let her have her explorations as long as it’s not threatening to you.
I shall repeat: If you’re the woman, and you really don’t want any men, then I say that’s great. (As witness this excellent essay a friend of mine wrote on her trouble with “The ‘H’ Word” over on FetLife, which should be required reading.) But if the reason you don’t want any men is because he’d melt down in jealousy, then that’s a marker of potential problem – and one where, in my experience, the woman will jump through hoops to avoid bruising his ego, but when he eventually finds someone who threatens her, suddenly he’s all “Baby, you’ve got to learn to be more open-minded!”
Generally, that means, “You have to be more open-minded about doing only things that make me happy.” And “All the sacrifices in this poly are going to be yours.” And “Women can’t really get attached to other women in a meaningful way.” And I hate that. Hate all of it. Hate it, hate it, hate it.
If You're Not On LiveJournal, Then Where Are You?
Monte Cook leaving was the final straw.
See, right now I’m running my old Planescape campaign, and Monte (who designed Planescape) has been writing increasingly interesting thoughts on game design. Which he’s posted, mostly, here. And yesterday, he said, “I’m not posting on LiveJournal any more, this is why I have a blog. See you there.”
As have many others. And LiveJournal’s RSS aggregation is kind of crappy, so what I need to do is now go out and find all the good blogs and enter them into Google Reader so that I can catch up.
Which brings the big question: What non-LiveJournal blogs should I be reading? Short lists, please, as if you give me more than three blogs my eyes will glaze over. But if you’ve gone off-site and think I should be reading you, speak up! If you love a blogger, let me know! I’m looking for interesting reading here, so let me know!
(And when I say “blogger,” I mean “People who blog.” Aggregate collection sites like PostSecret and FailBlog are fascinating in their own way, but I’m looking for people actually writing on their own topics about their own lives.)
Why I'm Sad About Not Seeing Breaking Dawn Part 2
“The good news is, my husband said you can see me for the weekend,” she told me. “We can rent a hotel, have wild sex, cuddle, anything you like. But there’s one condition.”
“Which is?”
“You have to see the new Twilight movie with me.”
(Cue Darth Vader-style NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO)
The running gag was that seeing Breaking Dawn, Part 1 with her was proof of my devotion. Certainly I’m no Twilight fan. So we got good and drunk beforehand – I felt like a teenager, smuggling in little airplane bottles of vodka to covertly dump into my Sprite – and held hands, and watched the merriment of big dumb sparklepires.
And I liked it.
Not the movie – which, like most things society holds in poor esteem, wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone’s scorn but certainly wasn’t good either – but rather, her excitement. Watching her bounce in her seat before the movie, the way she squeezed my hand when things got exciting, the way she kept leaning over to explain who this werewolf was and why he was important.
And I realize: I get off on other people’s enthusiasm.
I’ve listened for hours to folks going on and on about hobbies that I have zero interest in. Manga, football, accounting, Battlestar Galactica, Ru Paul’s Drag Race, BBS communities I’ll never log into, you name it. But if they’re willing to share that enthusiasm with me, then I’ll match it, because what I like is seeing people’s faces light up as they share their world with me.
Now, there’s a fine difference, because there are a lot of people who aren’t there to share their world with me. There’s any number of yammerers who are there to show me how very smart they are, bombarding me with facts on bocci ball to demonstrate their mastery of the subject. And there’s the stereotypically breathless fan who, annoyingly, cannot even fathom that the world does not share her love of Yaoi, and so keeps quietly assuming that I’m intensely familiar with the fine differences between yaoi and gei comi.
Yet I love that moment of connection, where someone takes me by the hand and escorts me into their world and says, “This may be silly, but this is something I adore and I want to show you every bit of it.” Because it is an act of trust, and a form of love, and a whole bunch of new things to learn about. And so in those three hours, and over the rest of the weekend, I learned of the Twilight mythology, and how vampires breed in Stephenie Meyers’ world, and what scenes they left out of the movie – and maybe it wasn’t high literature or high cinema, but it was full of things I didn’t know that were critical to her.
We’re no longer dating, and I wouldn’t go see Breaking Dawn, Part 2 on my own. Oh, I could go with Gini, who’s read the books… but that’s a very different thing than going on opening day with a dear friend who’s trembling with excitement, burning to know how they adapted the rather boring second and not particularly satisfying last half of the book, so enthused to be there that they’re radiating a glow that suffuses me.
She’s gone. So’s that world. And there are other people with their new hobbies – there always are – but that doesn’t mean that when the new Twilight comes out I won’t be a little sad that no, that particular happiness is something I’m no longer connected with.
A strange thing, missing a movie I didn’t particularly enjoy, in a series I barely know. But as with most things, it’s all about the people you’re with.
Who Do You Believe?
Early yesterday, I read a horrifying link someone posted on Twitter about Daniel Tosh making a rather horrible rape joke. I read the incident, which boiled down to “This woman who I don’t know at all said that Daniel Tosh did something truly horrible.” And I went, “Well, Daniel Tosh is a douche, and this certainly sounds like something he might do… but in the end, I have zero idea who this woman is and I’m not entirely sure I want to spread this around as though it were factually reported.”
So I didn’t Tweet it. I would have if I’d known this person, or someone I trusted knew her… but I didn’t feel comfortable disseminating information to thousands of people without more than “one woman was really upset.”
Yet thousands of people did feel comfortable passing that along. And so it blew up into a huge PR fiasco for Mr. Tosh, who half-heartedly apologized in that haphazard way that comedians do (“I’m sorry if I offended you, but I’m here to talk about uncomfortable things!”).
But I still don’t know what happened.
There’s no video, like the Michael Richards stupidity of a few years ago – just this one person who is very, very upset. And the club owner, who was also there, claims that things happened differently. And okay, the club owner sounds a tad douchey himself (“If you’re offended, why would you take a couple tickets to come back to the club again?” – well, probably because you weren’t willing to offer cash refunds, dude, and they felt you giving them something in recompense is better than nothing).
But as far as the actual joke itself, I have yet to see hard facts on the ground about what exactly what was said. No video, just two people batting interpretations back and forth. And that’s troubling to me.
On the one hand, this issue raises some very valid conversations about rape and comedy: is someone objecting to objectionable material a dumb heckler, or a woman taking a bold and necessary stand? How do rape jokes make it easier for rapists to justify their actions? (Because, y’know, they kinda do.) What sorts of subjects are okay to make fun of? When does responding to a heckler become an act of oppression?
All good questions. I’m glad to see them raised. These furor-storms are useful for raising awareness of tricky issues.
But perhaps I’m unusual in that I also want to know that the incident that triggered it was reported accurately.
Sure, it sounds like something Tosh would have said, because based on past actions, Tosh is a creep. I have zero doubt he made a rape joke that wasn’t funny at all. But was he actually encouraging the rape of the woman in the audience by saying it’d be high-sterical if five audience members gang-raped her right now?
I dunno. Conservatives I know pass on links about things that sound good to them, and they don’t fact-check either, and they phrase them as though this totally happened. And then, when it turns out things didn’t quite happen in that way, they shrug and say, “Well, this is the sort of thing that does happen all the time, so the truth doesn’t matter.” And I think it does. I think when someone who isn’t on your side finds out that you’re just sort of hand-waving the facts at the center of things, it calls all the rest of your argument into doubt. It makes it easier for those who don’t want to think about ugly truths to go, “Well, that never happened, so nothing like it ever happened.”
And had the majority of Tweets started with, “This is what someone claims,” then I’d be cool. But most of it is, “This one stranger’s word is enough to build a whole case on!” And I’m cynical that even if I hear something that totally sounds like something someone I absolutely despise would do, I wait for at least a secondary confirmation.
(And maybe her version of events was confirmed – I’m not following all the links. But if so, the confirmation certainly hasn’t circulated to the extent that the original version has. At this point, given the two data points, I’m far more willing to take her word over the comedy club owner, who goes the old route of “Hey, if 300 people are applauding, can it be bad?” and then I bite my tongue to avoid invoking Godwin’s Law.)
Maybe that lack of verifiability is a good thing. Because hell, if the only time a link got circulated was if the Tweeter knew the originator (or knew someone who knew someone who did), then most outrageous stories would get zero traction at all. And as I will stress, again, it’s good to have these kinds of difficult conversations. If someone’s acted like a douche on the level that Tosh supposedly has, then he should be called out, and should have to deal with some debate as to his actions. As should any public figure.
Yet I kind of wish we also took a second to put some disclaimer in. Not “This is what happened,” but “If true, this is terrible.” Though I suppose that distinction’s a little too long for a Tweet.
A True Escape
Without getting into details, last night my older daughter got some very bad news – the kind of news where you stay up all night, staring at the ceiling, wondering about an uncertain future. She sat on our couch, numbly, while we tried to comfort her.
“Do you want to see a movie?”
“…no, I don’t think that would help.”
“Do you want to walk down by the docks?”
“No.”
“Do you want to go hang with some of our friends, who are wise and may provide comfort?”
“No.”
“You wanna hack up some orcs?”
Now, it must be said that I am not a naturally improvisational DM. Oh, I’ll roll with the punches once the game starts flying – but when it comes to roleplaying adventures, I can’t just do “So you meet at the inn” and then make up stuff on the fly. So I ran downstairs and searched through my collection of RPGs to see what I had in terms of canned adventures that I could run my daughter through.
Mostly Call of Cthulhu. Hrm. Not the sort of one-shot you want to give to someone who’s down on life right now.
All right, said I, this will have to be in a world I’m familiar with. So I flipped through the Planescape Monster Manuals until I found an appropriate monster to hunt (a Sword Spirit), then called my kid and my wife downstairs to take them back to the campaign I ran for five years: Sigil, heart of the multiverse, the Casablanca of the planes.
I handed her a character sheet for a character she’d played twice, tentatively, back when she was seventeen, a Harmonium officer/ninja called “Officer Sunshine.” Gini stepped back into her role of Ardenal, rock-demon ninja. And so began an elaborate campaign that involved the usual Sigilian assortment of phoenix egg-juggling thieves, baatezu weaponsmiths, the best book shop in the planes and a rain of illusionary halibut, a trip through the dregs of the Hive and a chance to save some impoverished souls from certain death from an exploding weapons cache, culminating in a climactic battle against a whirling tornado of magical weapons.
They defeated the Cuisinart using teamwork, Ardenal distracting it while Officer Sunshine made a called shot to the spirit in the center that powered it. And two and a half hours later, it was done.
My daughter hugged me, smiling for the first time since she’d gotten the news. And I thought: this is why roleplaying has endured. I remember getting kicked around in middle school, the constant slaps and stings of bullies, failing my classes, feeling like a loser. Yet when Bryan set up that DM screen and I became Delvin Goodheart, with my improbable loot in the form of a +5 vorpal sword and my Invulnerable Coat of Arnd, for a while I could wander around in someone else’s world and be a hero.
Last night, I managed that for someone who needed it. And I all I could think was, “Play it forward, man, play it forward.”