How The Ferrett Fucks

A friend of mine hooked up with a crush of mine last weekend.  When I pressed for the inevitable details, I was told that she “fucks like a beast.”
I tried to think of how past lovers would describe me, if pressed.  I don’t think “beast” would be the term that came to mind. So I conjectured several potential descriptions:

• “Ferrett fucks like a cold shrimp.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a mattress sale.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a Denny’s restaurant at three-thirty in the morning, right after the bars have let out.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a borscht belt comedian working a hostile room after one too many glasses of Manischewitz.”
• “Ferrett fucks like… well, you know that pair of shoes that’s always hanging from the telephone line from the laces, the ones you always wonder how they got up there?  Ferrett fucks like they got up there.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a carnival, but not Ringling Brothers, like that little carnival with the beat-up ponies who comes along and sells you elephant ears with too much sugar on them.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a Ferrett.”

Suggestions welcome.

The View From A Thousand Different Points

Here is a flowchart, telling you how to pick up a woman.  It’s long, and visual, and probably pretty effective.
I can’t stop reading the fucking thing.
See, viewed from one perspective, the whole Pick-Up Artist thing is an eminently rational response to a common conundrum: I’d like to have sex with someone I find attractive.  How do I do that?  Well, let’s use science!  And so the breaking down of the stages of flirtation into small, easily-digestible chunks and methodologies is something that really is quite helpful for guys looking to know how to charm a girl – or at least a certain type of girl.
Viewed from another perspective, it’s absolutely goddamned creepy.  It’s mind-manipulation at its crudest, using hooks to push the animal centers of a certain type of woman to goad them into having sex with you.
Yet viewed from another perspective, I mean, shit, isn’t that kind of crude hooks what corporate America does all the goddamned time?  We’re flooded with advertising and political campaigns designed to do exactly what the Pick-Up Artists do – hell, Yahoo! has at least an article a week on “How Supermarkets Manipulate You.”  We’re in an age where scientists are paid to find our weakest points – they’re like a psychological karate-master, knowing that if they hit us in the back of the knees, we go down like this every time.
The reason we don’t find that every bit as creepy as the Pick-Up Artists are a) we rarely get a raw look inside the mind-process of a corporation in the same way that we get a look inside the brains of Mystery and company, b) “men wanting to have sex” is often seen as inherently a creepy thing for men to do, and “women consenting to have sex with men” is something that OMG WOMEN DON’T WANT ICKY SEXX THEY MUST BE MEZ-MO-RIZED, and c) the corporations that create that sort of mind-scanning really don’t want you to look too closely at it, so they tamp down that particular animal terror.
But somewhere inside the corporation are a bunch of modified Pick-Up Artists, looking at your buying and voting habits with just this kind of creeptastic eye, looking at you as though you were a Skinner box with buttons to punched.  Their goal: find those buttons.
Yet viewed from another perspective, is learning manipulation explicitly really bad?  I mean, shit, speaking as a guy who had to learn whatever charm he possesses naturally, I can tell you that when you have zero skills in the “get people to like you” department, the folks at the top of the high school social pyramid did things that seemed like magic.  I had to watch them and learn things that seemed elementary to you, like “Don’t wear a shirt full of chocolate milk stains” and “Don’t interrupt people to tell them how they’re wrong.”
Some people have the charm naturally.  But that charm is still a form of manipulation, whether they consciously honed it or not.  They may not overtly mean to charm you when they touch your shoulder, but somewhere deep within they’ve learned that the shoulder-touch gets better results, and they do it.  So why is it creepy when one person is naturally talented enough to do something by a set of naturalized instincts, and the other learns it through hard work?
Isn’t that just punishing the socially inept, telling them that if they don’t have it, they never should?  Shouldn’t we encourage the kind of charm that sways us, no matter where it comes from? Why is it kind of a creepster thing to say, “I totally live by Dale Carnegie’s ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People’?”
To me, it feels like a way of saying, “We had all this talent naturally, and you shouldn’t be able to get it if you didn’t acquire it.”  That barrier to entry is creepier, in its own way.
Yet then I go back to the flowchart, and I see some pretty creeptastic shit buried in there: “It’s on, bitches!” and “No matter what she says here [at this stage], you’ll have to accept her” and “If all three answers are sexual, she’s a tease… you’ll have to build a lot of rapport to get through her barriers.”  GUH.
And I realize that for all of my rationale that this could be a thing that could help the innocent asocial nerd become a person who can get by in “normal” society, this is also the kind of Lex Luthor shit that can turn a nerd into a guy who views other people as safes to be cracked.  You wind up with a bunch of super-nerds, charming on the outside, shitty on the inside – not pick-up artists but con artists.
Then I loop back to the corporations doing the same shit to us, and I know for a fact they don’t give a rat’s ass about me aside from the contents of my wallet.  Shouldn’t I be more concerned about their manipulations, which are constant and effective?  What about the lonely nerds who could benefit from this?  What about the creepy way that a lot of the negative reaction to all of this assumes, on one level, that women are so hostile to sex that any normal guy who gets a “hot” woman to sleep with them must be an evil mastermind?
It’s creepy.  It’s useful.  It’s institutionalized.   And so I keep looking at this goddamned flowchart over and over again, trying to fit all the pieces together, and they don’t quite mesh.

A Brief Note On Pool

I have a love of terrible dialogue, delivered convincingly.  This was something they used to do back in the 1950s and 1960s – take these long, comic-book speeches, florid with metaphor and full of emotions that nobody would actually say, and the actors would somehow sell it.
It’s a tricky thing to pull off.  You need both commitment and talent.  If you don’t speak these lines like your next breath depended on them, the phoniness of it bleeds through.  If you don’t have the talent to act it with the proper heart, well, you look callow and stupid.
But when you manage it, well… you get Obi-Wan Kenobi telling Luke that this is a hive of scum and villainy.  You get Charlton Heston screaming at apes. You get Kirk and Khan, uttering lines through the bits of scenery still wedged in their teeth.  You get Jack and Rose on the deck of the Titanic, and yes that movie is better than you give it credit for.
But really, I’m watching two masters work some of the turdiest dialogue ever written: Rod Serling, you did us all a favor with the Twilight Zone, but holy crap your speeches were wooden. The only reason you could get people to believe this stuff is that you realized that you needed good actors… and when you got them they managed to bring your leaden speeches to life.
I’m watching two masters of the craft, Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters, exchange rapid-fire dialogue in one of the best TZ episodes, “A Game Of Pool.”  And I’m thinking, nobody talks like this.  Then I’m thinking, but people should.

As You Wish, Crom

SCENE: I’m showing the original Conan the Barbarian to Gini for the first time.  Conan, about to face the fight of his life, puts his back to a rock and says:
CONAN: Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That’s what’s important! Valor pleases you, Crom… so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen – then to hell with you!
The soldiers charge in.  I pause the movie. 
ME: He doesn’t get killed by the soldiers at this time.
GINI: What?
ME: The soldiers don’t get him. I’m explaining to you because you look nervous.
GINI: What?  I’m not nervous. This is a terrible goddamn film.
ME: As you wish.
I unpause the film.  Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, and miracles ensue.

You May Have Noticed I'm Not Used To Being Quiet

Usually, I go in guns blazing.  That’s because I don’t have the time to be stealthy.
“Stealthy” in videogames means “you creep everywhere at half-pace, waiting for guards to walk by, hoping their broken goddamned AI doesn’t spot you out of the corner of one visual cone and call every guard in the world in upon you.” Plus, I have a goldfish’s sense of direction, so no matter how many maps you throw at me, I get lost.  So what inevitably happens is that I wind up getting lost, then trying to find my way back in slow-motion, hoping no guards see me or the trail of bodies I’ve left behind.
Or I could just kill the guards, then kill any other guards who come at me, and never have to worry about them again.  This seems like a better option.  Break out the bullets.
(Plus, for some reason, designers have decided that “crouch” means “stealth.”  I’ve seen sneaky people.  They walk a lot whenever possible, and usually the guy hunch-lumping his way along the sidewalk draws more attention.  Plus, I keep getting cramps in my thighs imagining crouch-walking for, like, an entire day, as videogame characters seem to do.)
Except for Deus Ex, I started stealthy and have stayed stealthy, and for no apparent reason am very much enjoying it this time.  I don’t know why.  I’ve learned that there are a lot more ways that “stealth” can go wrong, because one impatient move sets off the whole damn alarm system.  You have to check every corner, monitor every footstep, hack every terminal.  Which means a lot more reloads, because I walked across a hallway and OH FUCK HE NOTICED, HERE’S SEVEN GUARDS, MISE WELL RELOAD.
I am like five levels in on Deus Ex, and with a straight-up shooty approach I’m pretty sure I’d be halfway to winning the game.  Instead, I’m repeatedly trying to get the near-perfect level.
Still, I think I am at least getting the thrill of the stealth player, which is that I am a different kind of God.  With the guns-out method, I am the Avatar of Arnie – they turn into blood fountains the moment I lay my eyes upon them.  But there is no fear; hell, there’s no time for fear.  In fact, they all charge at me, so confident that they can destroy me, that their brains are rapidly-expanding chunks of desegregated neurons before the Is this really a wise idea? thought begins to trickle through their neural networks.
With the stealth, it’s a trick; they never know I’m here, but their world is falling apart around them.  The only time they see me is when they stumble across a body, or notice that the turrets are now working for me – and then there’s that delightful moment of them going, “Hey!  What’s happening?” and I feast on their panic before hello, boys, did you miss me?  I’m the early-Rambo mode, the man who hides in bizarre places and drops down, the Batman.
Of course, I’m still notably terrible at stealth because I treat the guards like Pokemon.  I’m supposed to avoid the ones who aren’t bothering me, but I hunt every one down and knock them out.  I can’t leave if there’s a man standing; they all have to be heaped in the corner, made senseless puppets.  In this sense, I become John Wayne Cleaver’s wet dream.
Still, it’s fascinating.  And has the benefit of making the videogame take a lot longer to finish. So I may have to try this approach again in the future.

The Dreary Dom

Whenever I deal with BDSM communities, I know I will encounter the Dreary Dom.
He doesn’t want to talk to me, of course, but has the bare minimum of socialization to know that he must hold some kind of conversation with me in order to avoid being seen as rude.  But our conversation is low on eye contact; he’s continually looking over my shoulder in an attempt to find women he could be talking to, and only perks up when I’m a) discussing his talents, or b) providing a possible angle to meet newer and younger women.
He’s in his mid-thirties, with a bit of a gut, and was never conventionally attractive to begin with – but strangely, everyone he dates is in their early twenties, the younger the better.  He rhapsodizes over every one of them, telling them all how they’re beautiful stars, praising them endlessly for their strange emotional depth. No, you don’t expect a woman so young to act so mature, but you, my darling – you have a wisdom that really resonates.
Not one of these women has the wisdom to ask why he never dates anyone over thirty, except maybe for a wife propped casually on the sidelines, but hey.  It’s not that they’re young and attractive.  It’s all their personality, nothing more. Oh, hey, did I mention that I have this case of wine over here? It’s very expensive.  At least to someone on your just-out-of-college budget.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the Dreary Dom will go through a number of submissive women between each of our sporadic meeting.  He doesn’t seem to pick them up on positive reviews, either; he seems to find women in isolation to impress and coddle, and they stay for a time before moving on to other partners.  In this sense, sometimes I wonder whether the Dreary Dom is a rite of passage in the BDSM community for young women, some first spark of romance and interest before they find he’s really not all that interesting. I wonder what need the Dreary Dom fulfills.
The Dreary Dom isn’t actively evil or anything.  Just sort of tedious.  I’ve met him a hundred times, all under different faces, none of those faces quite willing to make eye contact with me because somewhere, there’s a cute young girl and he’d much rather be with her than killing time with me.
 

Why The Fact That I'm Right On Gay Marriage Doesn't Mean I'm Right On Gay Marriage

In Alaska, if you were new to the area, getting a car with four-wheel drive was a really dumb move.
It seemed smart; why wouldn’t you want a car with more traction?  Ah, but all that power meant was that you’d travel that much further out into the wilderness before you’d get stuck.  And there you’d be, far from any cell phone tower or passing motorist, stuck next to an angry moose and a cloud of hungry mosquitoes, wishing you’d been a little wiser in choosing your paths.
In the real world, if you’re really smart, winning arguments can be a really dumb move.
I say this because I recently schooled a guy on gay marriage.  I mean, I crushed him: I explained how his arguments about society falling were the exact same arguments people had used to block interracial marriages in the 1960s, shot down his idea that “people don’t want gay marriage, so we shouldn’t have it” by pointing out that people don’t want women to drive in Saudi Arabia and surely he doesn’t think that argument is a good one, then landed the body blow by dissecting his overblown opinion that “gay marriage would lead to the end of morality” by pointing out that honestly, if gays get married I’m pretty sure we’ll still be against theft, rape, and murder.
When I was done, he said, “Well done you once again have proved that your a good writer. That doesn’t however mean that what your saying is correct.”
The thing is, I absolutely agree with him.
Not about gay marriage – he’s still full of shit – but as a smart guy who works with words, over the years I’ve gotten really good at arguing.  It’s like a videogame, where I’ve been playing it for so long that for me, the weak point in the boss monster’s arguments light up in glowing red circles.  I will burn your straw men, Troncycle-cut off your attempts to change the topic, spread sawdust on that slippery slope. If you’re not as skilled in this PVP arena, I will shred your argument as a voice booms, “FLAWLESS VICTORY.” But here’s the thing that people forget:
Being good at arguing is an entirely separate skill from being correct.
When I was in the middle of the dot-com boom, I said, “All these Internet stocks seem ridiculously overinflated.  Take this online toothbrush-selling store; wouldn’t these guys have to sell like three times as many toothbrushes as the brick-and-mortar equivalents in order to be worth this much?  Doesn’t this stock price then hinge on the idea that all of America is suddenly going to buy three times as many toothbrushes?”
And Very Smart Stockbrokers told me that this was all very complicated, and clearly I didn’t understand, brought in a thousand reasons to show me why I didn’t quite understand the stock market.  They crushed me.  They had all these facts and responses and high-level studies at their disposal.  Hell, “being right about stocks” was what they did for a living, so how could I really respond?
As it turns out they were wrong and the toothbrush industry has remained woefully analog, but what the hell.
Likewise, if you’ve ever really had a discussion with a die-hard Creationist, he’s got a thousand responses to every Evolution 101 retort you throw at him.  I’ve been out-argued by Creationists, with my every point seemingly dismissed summarily, and it was only until I later went to some anti-Creationist sites and found that the scientific surveys he was citing were, in fact, flawed.  Then I went back, and he explained how the site I’d found – oh, yes, he was familiar with it – was very flawed itself.
Thing is, he was so good at dismissing my every retort that the only reason I believe in evolution is – much like the great toothbrush-selling scandal – because I stubbornly said, “No, this smells wrong to me.”
In other words, I lost the argument but retained my original opinion – and I’m still sure I’m correct.  Him winning doesn’t mean that he’s right, it means he’s just really awesome at debating this particular question.
And let us not tar just creationists and now-penniless stockbrokers with the same brush; let’s talk about my shattered personal life, shall we?
I spent the better part of a decade shuttling from broken relationship to broken relationship.  I had about, oh, forty women I dated in the 1990s, and all of them ended poorly.
Years of therapy had shaped me to become the Mike Tyson of personal arguments.  They’d try to stick me with the blame?  I’d dance out of the way and show them how my reactions were their fault!  I had a problem?  Yes, admittedly, but here’s why your problem is more critical to this relationship. By the time I was done, they were weeping with shame, because everything they were miserable about was something they could change, but they hadn’t because they had a weak character, but thankfully I loved them despite these awful flaws.  I’d hug them, proclaiming my love, knowing that I was the better person because they had come to me so angry and yet I’d calmly managed to show them the error of their ways.
You may note they still left.
Everything I said was, actually, true – it just wasn’t that relevant.  Certainly, they had their foibles – but for me, an argument was not an opportunity to fix the relationship, but rather to make sure that I didn’t get stuck with any of the blame.  (Not that I would have admitted, or even really understood this, at the time.)  I had flaws, deep ones.  I was wrong.
And where I was most wrong was in assuming that “convincing someone that I was correct” equalled “I was actually correct.”  When actually, what it just meant was that I was pretty damned awesome at arguing my point.
I won the argument, and lost some pretty spectacular girlfriends.  This was not actually victory.
Arguing is a talent that can be honed.  Put a flawed argument in a brilliant woman’s mouth, and it will sound like sweet music. Even more so if she actually believes it.  There’s a reason America is locked on issues like global warming and evolution, and that’s because frankly, you have two eloquent sides marshalling their titanic powers of rhetoric – and to someone who doesn’t know much about the issue, either side sounds absolutely convincing for as long as they have the mike.
The danger is when you, Mister Smarty-Pants Mass Debater, come to think that your untrammeled string of victories stems from the rightness of your cause and not your golden tongue.  “I won the argument,” goes the thinking.  “That means I’m right.”  And there you are with that four-wheel drive thrumming underneath you, your car carrying you deeper into the woods, not realizing you have an appointment with an angry moose.
But I’m still right about gay marriage, dammit.