IdioPrag

If the last two posts are any indication, I would like to start writing again. I work a lot anymore, and I highly doubt things will show up everyday. I want to write though. I think about writing a lot then get defeated and hopeless, and I never get it done. That is kind of what throwing yesterday’s post up was about. I figure that if the world if too much for me to critique for awhile, I will focus on writing something a bit more exciting. Maybe I won’t burn out. Maybe my readers won’t either. Anyways is good to be back and I hope to get lots of feedback on the smut pieces. I would love to turn them into stories one day.

I am putting this after a jump so readers can skip if they prefer

Continue reading “Quiet: a smut scene” »

When my daughter was right around a year old I entered her into her first baby pageant. I think I took her more than anything to show her off. Little W is/was adorable after all.  I was kind of grateful that she didn’t win. I didn’t want an excuse to come back. Even then, I dreaded the decision then as much as I regret the decision today. I want to talk about why.

1) Equality. I didn’t enter my son to a similar pageant when he was a baby. All my talk about sexism, equality, and gender roles, at the end of the day I never thought once about entering my equally adorable son.*

2) Makeup. I hate it. Somewhere in my teen years I noticed the ritualized obsession my friends and parents would apply a coating to their face. Makeup wasn’t a hobby. It was an obligation. I saw the obligation starting in babies and I was horrified.

3) Disappointment. As a rule, babies don’t feel disappointment when they lose a competition. They don’t even know they are competing, so there is no doubt that the disappointment I saw in parents was not mirrored child tears. These parents were actually sad their sons and daughters did not win an arbitrary contest of beauty that at least fifty babies (all adorable) competed in.

4) Obsession. Now this one is not limited to pageants. Parents obsess over making their kids winners in all sorts of ways that are otherwise healthy competitions. The pageant circuit though has obsession in droves. To the effect that body modifications, extreme diets, and costly dresses (often worn once) are the norm rather than the exception.

Pageants do little more than reinforce the idea that children have to be something they are not naturally to be seen as beautiful. While I am less bitter about adult pageants, I actually abhor forcing this on children. It is cruel at its worst, and sexist at its best. Childhood beauty pageants aren’t healthy competition.

They are gender policing, normative conditioning monsters

Which is why I never took my daughter back.

*A decision I don’t think I would make today. People change. Even their own sexist behaviors.

When I was discovering this poly side of myself. Jarreg directed me to poly forums. Sometimes the best and the worst thing you can do is to find people experiencing the same thing as you. The stories, successes sprinkled among failures (cause let me tell you much “new poly” fails) become tiny rays of sunshine in a tragic world. Sometimes you are doomed. Sometimes this can work. Absolute roller coaster.

The worst part is that you try, and try, and try to find someone Just Like You.

It is a snipe hunt. Sisyphean. Relentless, in that the fruit of similarities are always dangled just outside your grasp.

“This couple has been together ten years just like us. Oh but he said he wanted more partners. I just want one.”

“This guy is mono like my husband. Oh but she just wants a tertiary. I want two primaries.”

“This person fits. Falls in love with someone else while in a long term relationship. Wants two primaries. Husband struggling but managing. Girlfriend is patient as well….Damn. That one’s not me either. They don’t want to live together.”

And the giant stone you”ve been laboring up inches at a time rolls back down the hill just before you hit the peak.

I say this not to dismiss the role or forums and support groups and thematic social circles. They have a role, and truthfully, poly forums did help me. I learned a lot of new terms. I learned some of the science behind attraction. i learned to recognize more and more of the woo behind attraction. I learned some communication skills.

I didn’t learn how to be poly.

It was what I was searching for. I wanted a Guidebook for Poly in the Lives of Willo, Jarreg, and Nissa. I wanted to know that the end of the book was going to be successful. I wanted certainty and I found none. I only found people with similar struggles, similar fears, and similar hopes.

Instead, I learned there is no right, one, or true way to be poly. Funny enough, you hear that mantra every few seconds in the forums. Veterans, for the most part, know it well. Like good-parents they advise with caveats certain only in their lack of certainty. Somehow, their warning gets ignored every.single.time.

Probably because most new poly folk like myself are looking for the same thing. They are looking for more than hope they aren’t freaks (that is easy enough to find). They are looking for more than how to organize dates with multiple people. They are looking for more than how to tell their kids about the girlfriend.

They, we, are hoping that our vision. Our image. The way we see our future is a possibility. We are looking for a ray of sunshine that tells us that poly isn’t a death sentence. That love, true and absolute love, is a possibility.

And no amount of poly stories will give us that. It is something we have to discover on our own.

I think about potential often. Probably most people do, which is why Scrödinger’s Cat is so fascinating a subject. The idea that until potential is realized, something, anything, everything is two mutually exclusive possibilities. Fascinating subject overall.

In that respect, I think about other Schrödinger’s as well. Other potentials. I think about another famous exercise in potentiality: Schrödinger’s Rapist, a post by Phaedra Starling that anyone reading this blog has probably already read before. If you haven’t, go read it now. I will wait.

I also think about my own personal Schrödinger’s ______. Well maybe not strictly my own, but one that affects everyone who does the same job as me. I established in my last post that I deliver things to people homes. I actually work for a national chain who delivers stuff to people’s homes. I know this business of delivering well. I have done it for years and have colleagues in local business as well as in competing national businesses.

Something we all have in common is Schrödinger’s Customer. None of us call it that. Truthfully, most of us don’t think about it until a collusion of events occurs, mostly because we are pretty numb to the process. Only when a collusion of eventuals appears to be leading us to possible potentials, does the average driver seriously consider, “what if.”

But our national chain considers the potentials. In fact, every competing national chain considers the potentials as well. You might think you are a good customer.  You might think there is no reason to fear you. You might even ask me inside to set your delivery on the table, or get out of the rain, or wait for you to get your money.

But you have potential.

You actually have a plethora of potentials, but like Schrodinger’s Cat my company only has (or cares about) two. Will you harm a driver or not harm a driver? It’s no wonder that you see yourself in the camp of not hurting a driver. I see myself the same way.

But you are both. I am both. If the cat teaches us anything, it is that the potentials are both true until the lid is opened. My national company knows this. I am not allowed in any home, hotel room, or condo by company policy, a rule I only break on special circumstances. A rule I shouldn’t break for even those circumstances, and I slightly panic inside every time I do.

But you have asked me in. I refused. I was polite, and you gather your money while I act as a barrier to your escape-artist child or pet. Were you angry that I refused your potential politeness? That I preferred to stand in the snow while you searched for your wallet? No. you might be perplexed in your certainty that you are “the good person who doesn’t harm drivers.” You aren’t angry at me though. Nor are you angry at the company policy that tells me to wait outside. You go about your business as customer, and I go about mine as driver.

We both continue to remain potentials.

Lately I have been thinking about both Schrödinger’s Rapist and Schrödinger’s Customer. I remember back around a certain elevator incident and I first read Schrödinger’s Rapist. I remember the cries of misandry. The shock. The horror that “so-called feminists” were engaged in the assumption of potentiality as it applies to men and whether they could (or might) rape them. I remember the indignation. The special pleading. The backlash.

And then there the fact that few people ever even question my refusal to enter their home. Few people would ever wonder if national chain is engaging in anti-customer hate by having such a policy. That there are no cries of “I’m a good customer.” There is no movement to start delivery companies who walk in your home just to show they really care about their customers.

Despite the fact that the probability of a customer harming a driver is extremely low. Despite the fact that I have never been harmed by a customer. I don’t go into customer homes.

I am confused. Surely I am missing something here. Surely you will tell me how an one exercise in potentiality is more anti-men than the other is anti-customer. Or is it pretty much the same? Aren’t we all just pushing/preventing potentials when we ask for a date or refuse an advance?

When we think about you as a Schrödinger’s Cat/Customer/Rapist, you are all possibilities at once. You are the good person you imagine you are. You are the guy who is trying to get famous starting a new Creepshots Reddit. You are a rapist. You are a someone with a simple question. You will make me laugh.

You are potential. And sometimes, even often, we refuse to open the lid, leaving all those wonderful potentials unrealized on the off chance one might be harmful.

Dismissals of certain potentials may end up being a loss for us. You may have ended up “the best thing ever to enter my life.” Then again, I may have ended up being the “worst thing ever to enter your life” if I accepted your potential. Either way,  not opening the lid in this type of situation shouldn’t be considered wrong or right. Overall it is just good business for us to be picky about which lids we open and close.

I deliver stuff to people’s homes, sometimes their hotels and condos. I am not unattractive but neither am I expressly attractive. The only thing I really have going for me is tits and ass for days, so it’s not surprising I get what customer’s view as “compliments” from time to time.

“Nice legs.”

“Nice ass.”

“Want to come back later?”

“Want to have a beer, play a game of poker, hangout, etc?”

“You look dirty. Are you dirty?”

“Want to go out on a date sometime?”

“Here have a drink.”

“We will be here all night. You can come back when you get off.”

“Are you married?”

“Shake that ass.”

“Want to sit on my lap? Are you sure you don’t want to sit on my lap?”

It’s a sampling of my everyday, and thankfully, it hasn’t gotten worse than that. However, there are times where I can’t wait to get away from a house. It isn’t the words. It is how they are said. The dirty comment made me feel sick and cry and I vowed to never go back. It is scarier when there are lots of people. When they laugh at your embarrassment. When they join in. When they don’t stop at my polite refusal.

The worst though is that I can’t say what I think. Like ever. I can refuse to go back, but in the moment that they violate me, I represent my company. I cannot, as much as I would like to, school them on how fucking rude their behavior is.

I want to though. So do me a favor. If your friend, lover, asshole neighbor says this shit to their delivery person, shut them down for me. My polite dismissal doesn’t mean I like what it happening. It means I am tolerating it. Don’t ignore it. Don’t laugh it off. Don’t join in.

FemMe

The eyes critique me for some semblance of a smile
A hip sway
A flirt
To justify their existence, but I am not their god
Not present to appease their fears
The realization, sudden in them, cliche in me, sets off a fury
Words hurl like icicles
“Who did you think you were anyway, Cunt?”
As if the mistake in my identity was my own.
My reply, lost in the pale sickliness of complete silence:
“I thought I was just me” rattled like an exhausted echo
As the ghost of their prayers were killed not by my words
But rather the swift beat of heels on pavement
And their raucous derision
As I walk away

……

So I wrote that in October with the full intention of posting then. I rarely write poetry anymore and never write political poetry. I mostly try to write strange takes on the sonnet forms. This one obviously wasn’t in a form just had the theme and lines in my head and wrote them down. It’s nice if you like it, and not a big deal if you don’t. Let me know your thoughts good or bad. I am really interested to hear honest responses.

The question itself was foreplay. His hesitation. Her breaths of anticipation. Their mutual curiosity. How would it happen? Would he ask first, as was tradition? Fuck tradition, said Carla. She leaned in and asked. Breath warm, Henry’s blood rushed as well as his answer. “Yes.”

And then the kiss. They were eager and still their lips touched lightly, exploring the newness of their partner. He wondered if she would ask for more tonight. She doesn’t, but her casual breathlessness opens his courage. “Can I touch you more.” he whispered amidst the kisses. A soft refusal left her lips and he was almost certain she wanted to say yes but for some reason was not ready too. “One more kiss then?” and she answers with gusto.

___________

I have been considering that scene for some weeks now, wondering what consent culture would look like in a movie and lamenting how pervasive rape culture (or non consent culture) actually is. Would asking really not just ruin the moment? Could the question itself act as the catalyst? Would consent culture work in movies/books/music?

Simply, I believe the answer is yes. Just as happens in cultures that require extensive moderation of bodies in public where people develop attraction to ankles and what bits of flesh become exposed, the same can happen with consent. We have to make it that way though. That takes changing minds and creating stories where consent is part of the discovery just as much as the first kiss.