All right. Enough sex and happiness, let’s get back to the angst and soul searching. That’s why you’re here, right?
Right? Guys . . . ?
I finished writing this post on Monday, it hung around in my drafts folder, and I figure I’ll toss it out while I’m on hiatus and let ya’ll yell at me a bit. I would like to make it clear that this has nothing to do with why I’m taking a bit of a break. I was serious about that break thing. But, y’know, I already wrote it.
Unfortunately, many good things have been overdone. Not least among them is Ayn Rand. (If you don’t know who Ayn Rand is, then I apologize in advance.) Especially when one comes up and says “Oh, I love Ayn Rand. She changed my life.”
Oh, I don’t like that I’m going to say it, but I’m saying it anyway. I love Ayn Rand. She changed my life.
I read her philosophies, badly disguised as novels, beginning when I was about 15. At the time, I felt like I’d been hit with a lightning bolt. Here was someone who was articulating a theory I’d been thinking my entire life, but couldn’t say out loud.
I’m not going to go into the nuances of the theory from an academic standpoint, because frankly that’s all crap when it comes to how ideas affect one’s life. What I came out of her books with (including a better ability to articulate my thoughts) was this; I am my own judge, jury, and executioner. I determine my worth. I determine the value of my ideas, my work. I set my own standards, and I meet my own goals. I decide how beautiful I am, how smart I am, how worthy I am.
And I had better work my fucking ass off, because I owe it to myself to have good standards. I am my harshest critic, and I do not often cut myself slack.
What people rarely say, after coming to this or similar conclusions, is that living with these ideas in mind is sometimes heart-wrenchingly hard. If, like Maymay now or like me 8 years ago, you live in a world that constantly batters, beats down, marginalizes, or ridicules a portion of you, it is overwhelmingly hard to accept or validate yourself.
Especially when you are 18 years old, 50 pounds overweight and feel like you can’t possibly wake up and be more ugly.
Especially when your every mistake and hesitation brings on ridicule.
Especially when your desires are considered taboo, your demands unholy, your tastes profane and your orientation sick.
Especially when you put yourself out and get nothing back.
From George Orwell’s 1984: Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
This is approximately how I would feel some nights, realizing that either I was the person I thought I was, or I was going insane.
And eventually I became confident, and spoke out, and felt sexy, and did good work, and had friends and relationships. But then, which came first, the relationships or the confidence?
What I realized eventually was that Rand’s theories are torn to bits within the context of relationships based on respect, or love. In reality, I determine my goals and standards. I am still my own judge and jury. But also in reality, I do like to be validated by those I respect, and love. That’s the proof I wasn’t going insane all those nights ago.
(Rand would yell and scream and say I don’t need that, but I think perhaps my arrogance is more tempered by reality than hers.)
Eileen, what the hell does any of this have to do with kink?
Elizabeth recently put out a meaningless profile on a dating site, and got back over 100 responses in the first few days. I once posted an ad on Craigslist giving my age, sex and orientation, and asking people to write poems for me. I got over 30 poems. At any point, at any time, any woman who wants to can sign onto a chatroom or a message board that fosters female supremacy and be complimented, engaged, or even worshipped.
These are examples of meaningless validation. This is exactly what I’m railing against when I say that you should respect, love, and know your partner. Validation given without respect grounded in reality is meaningless.
And a lot of people sit on the sidelines, watch these exchanges and simply marvel. They don’t understand why or how people can ever feel good about that kind of relationship.
Well, I am not one of those people who sits on the sidelines and marvels. I know exactly how good that kind of validation can feel. I know it because a little part of me, the part that is still aching from the years of hurt and doubt and doesn’t give a fuck how or why as long as the starvation stops, that part of me likes worthless validation.
All the men who want to argue about how we secretly all just love this superiority, blind adoration thing are hungrily leaning in and waiting for me to spill it. Shoo. I am not writing that post. I’m writing the post about how much I hate that a little part of me likes to be adored. Fuck the source, just give me the worship.
(Self awareness doesn’t just mean you analyze your thought processes, you dig into what makes you tick. It means you seek, find, and face down the parts of yourself that you just don’t like.
If you say there are no parts of you that you don’t like, I think you’re a liar.
If you say you have every one of your personality flaws strictly under control, I think you are either a liar, or you’re deluding yourself. I know I am.)
Put a row of people on their knees with their heads bent. You don’t see their faces, and they don’t see yours. The human race has proven time and time again that many of us are capable of worship without understanding. What we haven’t gotten around to admitting yet is that the same capacity may allow us to accept being worshiped without being understood, if we have the strength of self delusion to force our conscience to look the other way.
(Ever wonder why so many smart kinky people are atheists? Think it might be because we’ve got a firsthand knowledge of the dangers of blind faith?)
You will of course be reiterating that this kind of validation is utterly worthless. And that I should know better, and that I do know better. I know this. You don’t have to explain to me all the ways in which these relationships are false, or all the ways in which I do not do what I’m talking about. This is not a post about the hazards, insults and tears brought on by the culture of worthless validation. This is a confessional post. I am not on a soapbox. I am on my knees.
There is a part of me that will forever be convinced that I am dumb, ugly, and sick. This part is hateful, hurt, and has the rational capacities of a two-year-old. It is, I would like to think, firmly under control. But there’s no denying it exists.
And it loves empty flattery, and worthless validation, even while the rest of my mind recoils in horror.(If you say that empty flattery has never once made even a tiny, stupid, childlike part of you happy, I think you’re a liar.)
I don’t want what I could go out and take without conscious thought. But I understand the starvation mode in which any validation is better than none at all.
If within the space of this post I have falsely accused you of lying, my sincere apologies. Instead, I would like to congratulate you.
I congratulate you on living so solidly within a world of principles and rock-solid, confident conclusions. I congratulate you on actualizing good practice and self worth so completely. I congratulate you for doing what I do not.
If I get approached by someone who knows nothing about me beyond the fact that I have ovaries and red hair, and am dominant, and so wants to worship me, almost all of me is squicked beyond all recognition.
But the part of me that is stupid, young, desperate and hurt, and likes to be validated and doesn’t particularly care how or why, the tiny part of me that I don’t like, refuse to listen to, hate to admit to, and undeniably have . . .That part of me smiles.
13 Comments
The part of this conversation I remember most vividly is when I said, “It’s okay to want that. I do too. But I will never have it.” I am on my knees with you.
All right. Enough sex and happiness, let’s get back to the angst and soul searching. That’s why you’re here, right?
Oh, look – there’s pizza! Later, gang.
*ahem*
As someone who’s been in and out of the Rand camp over the years (I used to subscribe to “The Objectivist” in pre-internet days, for cryin’ out loud), I’m in agreement with you. In fact, you could have just written …
“Validation given without respect grounded in reality is meaningless.”
… and then come out for pizza. Instead, you wrote that great piece, but missed the pie.
that paragraph above, only with “almost 28 years old and 80 pounds overweight” is what i wake up feeling every day, and have for the past 20 years. if that helps to give you another little piece of what goes on in my head.
May -
At least you’re good company.
“Francisco” -
Sorry, I was unaware that pizza was a viable alternative to angst :).
Darkness -
Always glad to see more of what goes on in your head. Not like you let me in much ;).
I couldn’t abide being worshiped.
You do well to stand it when it happens.
Richard -
It doesn’t actually happen, or hasn’t in years. I think I yell loud enough to scare all potential worshippers away.
I can’t abide it either. It gets under my skin in ways that are crawly. That was a lot of what I was trying to get across.
Rand! Fuck, yeah! If you didn’t read my LJ post a few days ago, then this is just ironic as all hell.
Lindsay1984-
I did not read it. But now I will :).
Looks like she’s a popular lady.
Reminds me of a story, a piece of my life that has always bugged the shit out of me. Embarrasses me to no end that I let it happen.
I grew up geek girl and also poor, although the two had nothing to do with each other except in context of the embarrassing story. While I was always *reasonably* physically attractive, it was in that awkward, tall, geek girl kind of way that disconnected from any internal sexuality. IE, if I had wanted to trade on any piece of physicality, I wouldn’t have had a clue how to do it. They weren’t wired together.
The only thing I knew how to trade on was brains.
I fell into (vanilla context) a group of slightly older men with money in my mid 20’s. I’d never been around money before, and I’d never been around men before who couldn’t give a fuck, really, about my brains or me as a person (their thinly veiled attempts to pretend to care about either were laughable), but for some unfathomable reason, they fell into some kind of macho competition for *me*.
I *knew* at the time it had nothing to do with *me*…not the soft things or the hard things or the brain or the heart. Still, I let them pour on empty flattery, telling myself that I was using them as much as I felt I was being used, to go places I’d never been and drink $100 congac while they out-roostered each other to impress me (no, to impress each other).
Every word of “adoration” was completely false. I knew it at the time and I still sucked it in and let it become a drug, for a time. I think there was a point I began to believe my own press.
Predictably, there is no good end to a story like this and there wasn’t to mine. I was in pieces for several years later, wondering how I had turned into “that woman” and how the fuck I was going to get *myself* back.
Which of course I did, no harm no foul, but to say that was the darkest point of self identity for me is no lie.
I ramble to say that I think what one has to trade in oneself for the heady feeling of ungrounded adoration ain’t worth the heady feeling of ungrounded adoration.
*Grounded* adoration? I’ll take that with the $8 cognac, thank you.
:)
hugs, E
Can I make the last comment even longer? Why, yes I can!
In the context of D/s, (and the greater world, you see this in male/female dynamics all the time), ungrounded adoration leaves all of the power in the hands of the one doing the adoring. (These thoughts have been running around my brain for a post at some point.)
What they have the power to “give” capriciously, they have the complete power to take back capriciously, which means they never actually gave it in the first place. All illusion.
Good enough for some people for a sex game for an evening, and if that floats their boats, they should enjoy…..that it doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean it couldn’t be quite enjoyable for others.
There are women around us who are crushed and disillusioned, I read them, that interactions with submissive guys keep breaking them. There is this heady flood of “adoration” that is all of the sudden withdrawn when the guy bugs out, and the women are left going, but he told me I was in charge, I thought this was going to be different from the vanilla world.
God, women, buy a clue. It’s no different from the guy wearing too much gold who comes up to you in the bar and tells you that you are the most beautiful and amazing woman he’s ever met, as the initial pick up line. It’s just a different line! The chances of either one of them being around a week from now are a thousand to one.
*blush*
I really should get my own blog so I don’t write such long comments on other people’s …….
Elizabeth -
Nooo! I demand long comments and relevant anecdotes!
I have not ever been in a situation quite like the one you’ve described here, but I have seen examples of this kind of competition in my life. Rarely over me, but plenty of times over other people. I just don’t tend to put myself in situations quite like that one.
However, funny thing, the one place where situations like the one you describe come up the most involving me is at Renaissance faires. (I should write a post about how liking ren faires does not intrinsically make me a loser.) Because I’m in this big old fantasy space where men just love to fight over things in a way that I find rather hilarious, and is fortunately conscious and usually handled with humor.
What they have the power to “give” capriciously, they have the complete power to take back capriciously, which means they never actually gave it in the first place. All illusion.
YES.
I mean, ah, yes. Spot on. There’s this crazy imbalance of power that is simply fucked up. And when you’re being adored because you have breasts and red hair, what happens to your adoration the minute some girl with better breasts and redder hair walks in?
And when you’re being adored because you have breasts and red hair, what happens to your adoration the minute some girl with better breasts and redder hair walks in?
Or, to pound on the submissive man’s side of the coin so no one forgets it: the minute some guy with harder abs or a higher pain threshold or is more physically skilled walks in?
It’s not just women who face this problem, and it never was, even though it’s all most people ever seem to notice.
Maymay, I wish my experience included a gazillion eager male submissives, even if most of them were lousy. We have a very active scene here but one hardly gets mobbed. *sigh* (I’m sure it would suck to be mobbed, but it would be nice if one had a sense of there being more fish in the pond. Not that I don’t have a very excellent fish already.)
Maybe all the good male subs in Denver gave up already.
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