Pleasing By Delicacy Or Grace

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

This post is for the pretty men.

Now, when I say pretty, I don’t mean broad shoulders, rippling muscles, carrying power tools and towering over me. I don’t mean that genre of men, though god knows I’m a fan. I am a happy member of the cheering section.

I mean the men with soft skin, full lips, femme clothing. Men with skinny limbs and long hair. Men who like to wear satin and velvet. Men who like to feel pretty.

Pretty (adjective): pleasing by delicacy or grace.

You know who you are. This one’s for you.

There is some serious fuckupery concerning how body image issues are presented. Take a minute and think about who talks about body image. Think about the last time you had a discussion about body image. Think about the language you used.

Nine times out of ten, I’d bet that language was gendered. I’d bet you were talking to a woman. Woman’s issues. Woman’s weight. Women’s bodies. We’re teaching women how to accept cultural stereotypes, and how to fight them. Women’s body issues are vocalized.

Does it not seem a little fucked up that men’s body issues are not? When body image is considered a women’s only issue, we continue to strengthen the idea that only women are judged by their bodies. In a twisted kind of way, we continue to objectify ourselves while we fight not to be objectified. Following from this, we pigeonhole men into the role of the objectifier while simultaneously ignoring them as possible victims of cultural stereotypes.

Men are praised for their attractiveness in totally different ways. They are held to totally different, strictly gendered, strictly masculine standards. These standards, by the way, are almost never standards of beauty. They’re standards of wealth, of skill, of strength, of ownership and possession. May’s attraction is judged by how hot his girlfriend is. Most people look at me. Only rarely do they look at him.

Even the uprise of the metrosexual fashion movement in urban areas perpetuates the dichotomy separating modes of attraction. Metrosexual men can be in touch with their feminine side, can “reject macho stereotypes”, can use expensive hair care products and wear aesthetically pleasing clothes. But god help them if they decide to wear a satin nightie to bed.

This blindness leaves a vast, gaping hole that pretty men keep falling down.

Men aren’t the attracting partner. Men don’t get pursued. Men aren’t androgynous. Men aren’t bisexual. Men don’t want to be pretty. Men don’t want what women have. The most damaging of all? Shut up and take it. Be a man.

Ladies, hate to break it to you. Our bodies are pushed and shoved and stereotyped to within an inch of our lives. And yet, the freedom we’re allowed in breaking gendered stereotypes of attraction is epic, compared with our fellow men.

Why are we so much more okay with women in men’s clothing than we are with men in women’s clothing? I wear boy-cut jeans and a ratty button-down, and I don’t get a second glance, and I’m not necessarily a lesbian. But May wears girl-cut jeans and a ringer tee that I gave him, and he gets looks on the street, and he must be gay. Never mind he’s holding hands with a chick.

We bitch and yell when men want to dress up as women to be humiliated. (I bitch and yell with the best of them.) What about the men who’ve been told, over and over, that a man who wants to be a woman is supposed to feel humiliated?

What about men who just want to be pretty in the only way they’ve been taught is possible: by being more like women?

There is no middle space where “real men” can feel pretty. If you’re a man who wears women’s clothing or makeup, either you’re gay, you’re just getting off on being humiliated like a weak woman, or you’re three steps away from a gender transition and you just haven’t gotten there yet. And it’s such bullshit.

There needs to be some gender fluidity, and it needs to flow both ways.

If a woman opens up and says she’s feeling unattractive in comparison with cultural standards, the common mode is to support her in a sensitive, relatively ungendered way. We’ll talk about her mind, or her ideas. But if a man opens up and says he feels unattractive in comparison with cultural standards, we tell him he’s strong. Bad logic, damnit, bad logic!

But never mind. A real man would never say that in the first place.

Labels: Filed in Bad Logic, Beauty, Body, Fashion, Men, Sexism | Comments (12)

Posterius Maymayeus

Friday, August 17, 2007

“I shall write an ode to your bum!” I proclaimed one night. (I was drinking hot toddies; it came out a bit like “Ishil ritanode toyer BUM!”)

May looked at me, an adorable mixture of bemusement and self consciousness. “Uh huh, sweetie. That would be weird, but you write whatever you want. Maybe you should sit down?”

What is there to say about May’s bum?

I call it a bum quite consciously. It has none of the adolescent sniggering of a butt; only a smattering of the gritty sex appeal of an ass. It is rounded, very soft, and exceedingly cute. It is a bum if ever I saw one.

When I first met him, May did not have a bum at all. I remember one of the first nights he spent in my bed. I lifted his bum in the air with two fingers hooked into his pubic bone on either side, and as his legs spread wantonly open I remember his perineum bulging outward, prominently displayed against the flatness of his inner thighs. He was achingly skinny, achingly aroused.

I didn’t think about his bum, then. I had never had a partner with a particularly pert ass, and had yet to understand the appeal.

Of course, as the relationship progressed I began fattening him up. All very subtle, of course. When I met him you could count his ribs with his hands at his sides, and his jawbone was etched in stone. Once his mother, his incredibly Jewish mother, commented on this. I agreed, thusly: “Yes, the boy looks like a Ho- . . . like a famine victim.” Behind her back May and his brother choked on their orange juice to keep from laughing. Hello, my name is Awkward, could I stay a while?

My campaign to put meat on his bones rests mostly with the siren call of the Milky Way bar. Maymay cannot resist this combination of chocolaty, nougaty goodness. He’s very particular; regular Milky Way bars are ideal for munching. Popable Milky Way candies are summarily rejected (wrong chocolate to nougat ratio) while dark chocolate Milky Ways are reserved for special occasions. And king sized? Look out, world.

I hid them in my purse. I slipped them in my pockets and sent him hunting for them. I would ask him in drugstores, “Do you want a Milky Way?” He’d say “Noooo, they’re so bad for me!” and I’d smile, and buy it anyway.

And then one day he slipped on his first pair of tight-fitting jeans, turned in a pert little circle, and there it was. The bum.

May’s body is for the most part skinny, with muscular limbs and a triangular torso. His bum is round, soft, and just a bit on the squishy side. When he lays on his stomach it protrudes like a pillow. I carry my fat in my hips and my thighs; May carries his entirely in his posterior. I am shaped like a pear. He’s shaped like a porn star. Adorable little bastard.

From pictures you may or may not have seen, you might know that May’s skin is about the color of a polar bear in a blizzard. He’s covered in the posterior regions with a fine little coat of very small, very blond hairs. Slap a hand to his ass, fingers spread, and the handprint lingers on. If you do it hard enough, it can stay for hours.

Maymay is also (just a little bit, slightly all the time) anal retentive about personal cleanliness. We won’t talk bathroom habits in this particular entry, but suffice it to say I have never met such a well-soaped anus in my life. It even smells lovely. Skin and Old Spice and vanilla ice cream; this is the smell of May’s bum on warm evenings in bed. I like to bite his flesh, tongue it, roll it around in my mouth. It makes him pout when I bite his bum. Oh, I just can’t get enough.

And because I am on a calculated, tactical campaign to impress May with the reality of his sexual attraction; I pay a lot of attention to this part of him. A day does not go by when I do not grab his bum in some public setting or caress it in privacy. When I met him Maymay could not stand to be hit in that region of his body; spanking would drive him into a blind rage. I systematically destroyed this response. In this more than any other place, his attitude to spanking, I admit a deliberate, manipulative hand.

And then, there came the wiggle.

One day, pressed close against each other in bed, he made a little animal noise, combined with a tiny movement of his rear. It was not quite a shiver, not quite a wriggle. It was a wiggle. I was almost incapacitated by the cuteness of this gesture.

He kept doing it. Soon he was doing it at parties, on the subway, everywhere. It became how he said hello, how he said goodbye, how he said I love you. All of this contained in the wiggling of his bum. It got a soundtrack, an accompanying “wiggelzeebums” type of word. We joked that if he were ever made into a Super Mario Smash Brothers character, the bum wiggle would be his attack move.

His bum has become a character in our relationship. It has its own language, its own habits. It is a plump little inside joke.

Sometimes when May is tripping about the apartment, wagging that naked bum of his at the neighbors and dragging his long boned feet, I stop, and sit back, and watch him. This makes him self-conscious; he will stand pigeon-toed and wave at me. Sometimes I will stop him in the kitchen while I’m sitting at the table, pull him close and plant lines of kisses down his protruding hipbone, take little nips out of his skin and cup my hands around him.

He’ll stand for this for a minute or two, usually. Sometimes we get into little tug-of-wars. He’ll want to go back to fixing dinner, and I’ll be rapidly forgetting food in the luxurious, distracting swell of his skin.

Labels: Filed in Beauty, Body, Humor, I Like, Maymay, Romance, Tenderness | Comments (16)

Until They Become Conscious They Will Never Rebel

Thursday, August 9, 2007

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.

Labels: Filed in Beauty, Choice, Fear, Past, Self-Awareness, Stupidity, Vulnerability | Comments (13)

Cloudless Climes and Starry Skies

Monday, July 23, 2007

Kink journal? What, what?

People are talking about beauty. That’s got me thinking. What a surprise, really, that something would get me thinking. Here’s where my consciousness went wandering.

I have this friend. She’s kind of a new friend, because not only am I (as previously mentioned) practically crippled at getting to know people, she is also exceedingly pretty, and exceedingly pretty people are a titchy bit tough for me. I am by far my harshest critic and can easily convince myself that such and such a person is simply too cool for me. I did this with Blaise when we first met. We laugh about it now; such a ridiculous concept, that we wouldn’t like each other.

But I’m glad I know her, because she is charming, and also kind of wonderfully smart.

She and I and a few others had a interesting conversation a bit ago, in which she mentioned that she sometimes feels uncomfortable in scene spaces because of her beauty. Other people will sometimes react negatively to her body, as though her presence is a critique upon themselves.

There’s that insidious, damaging us-versus-them mentality creeping up again. In the issue of physical beauty more than anything else, people seem to be incapable of assessing themselves on a non-comparative basis. Obviously this is because we feel that we have to be judged against some kind of standard, which is only moderately less fucked up than declaring we must be judged at all. But it’s very, very different to judge oneself against an idealist idiom with no physical manifestation and to judge oneself against a real live person, standing in front of you. You’ve drawn the other person unwittingly and unfairly into your process of judgement.

And although I found that to be rather horrendous, even I am guilty of the smaller sin of dismissing the body issues of other people. I sometimes brush off the concerns of my friends. I think I’m a bit plump ’round the edges. I lost a bunch of weight, then gained some of it back, and now bounce around from day to day. I have bad-ish skin and ugly feet. For the longest time I was convinced something was wrong with my face, with my features too small for my flesh. But I self-deprecate and other people react with incredulity, and sometimes bitterness as well. Like hell you’re fat, you’re skinnier than me! You’re not ugly, you’re beautiful, I’m the one who’s ugly. How dare you have body image issues? How dare you?

Us versus them. Me versus you. I get that the instinct to rank people according to appearance is partially biological, but we’re in the 21st century and I’d like to believe we’ve grown beyond the grunting of our lizard brains. I get that it’s deeply cultural, but I’d like to think we’re aware enough to use culture as a common language rather than a common standard.

Many people believe that confidence is directly linked to physical appearence. It seems logical that if we’d feel better if we wore a size four, then the people who already wear a size four must feel fan-fucking-tastic all the time. We make no allowances for genetics. We cut ourselves no slack.

Why don’t we have an us versus them mentality on intelligence, I wonder? People are much less likely to look at some briliant philosopher and say to themselves, “Damn, I’m so not as smart as that guy. I suck.” But young girls look at models all the time and think their lives will be over if they don’t make themelves that skinny. This is the crisis of body image. Anorexia, bulimia, plain old every day angst, the desparate need to become prettier. There are no damaging psychological or physical diseases based upon the desperate need to become smarter.

When did it come about that our culture contentedly accepts intelligence as a natural, innate gift of genetics, yet deprecates and criminalizes physical appearance as completely under a person’s control? Unfortunate if you’re stupid, lucky if you’re smart. Valuable if you’re skinny, worthless if you’re not.

Has no one caught on to the idea that you can make yourself smarter? That intelligence demands to be worked at, that it is far more insistent and just as hard and just as worth doing?

And has no one caught on that there will always be someone prettier, smarter, better on the sliding judgment scale? And that sometimes a game in which you cannot win is not a game worth playing?

I’ve no intention of writing a philosophical treatise on the advantages of Objectivism in this blog. But it has been to my advantage to allow myself the luxury of isolated judgment. To deliberately, consciously set my own standards and determine my own value. I am no less driven for trying to step outside a competitive mentality, and in fact hold myself to standards that are upon occasion ridiculous. But they’re my own. And of course I fail sometimes, and of course I judge sometimes and get occasionally bitter, but I’m always swinging back to my own definitions.

It should be noted, however, that attempting to take oneself outside of a competitive mode when dealing with one’s own value does not prevent one from evaluating others. We can’t help evaluating people; we do it unconsciously. It makes the difference between choosing our partners based on our personal inclinations and choosing them at random.

I have zero intention of claiming that I don’t hold my partners to standards. Of course I hold my partners to standards; the people I chose to involve myself with both affect and reflect my life. I won’t invite just anyone into my home or my bed.

And although it might just be politically incorrect to say so, some of my standards are mental, and some are physical. It is a very common (and I think more positive than the alternative) attitude to become frustrated with strictly physical expectations, and to as a result adhere to a strictly mental system of standards, wherein partners are judged only by their personalities, characters, and intelligence. (With the thing where bad logic is reversed again. We just love doing that, don’t we?)

In the case of my friends, mental standards are the only standards I believe are appropriate. (An advantage of the blogosphere.) I may worry that my friend Paul is rapidly pushing 350 lbs and is giving himself health problems, but he’s a genuinely terrific man whom I’m glad to have as a friend.

But when it comes to the people I sleep with, the people I play with, physical appearance is a factor. May is playful, clever, funny and devilishly smart. He is also attractive, and smells good. Would I still sleep with him if he wasn’t attractive and smelled bad? Probably; he’s pretty damned brilliant and the physical doesn’t make or break my decisions. But it helps. Of course it helps.

When it comes to physical appearance, all I really expect is an attempt at health, by whatever definition works for that person. A bit of consciousness, an acknowledgment that neither of us is contained entirely within a mental realm and our bodies don’t exist just to lug around the hardware. I don’t mind what age you are, I don’t mind how your genes arranged your facial structure. Will it help if you happen to have a body that’s artistically interesting, aesthetically balanced? Will it help if I think you’re hot as hell? Sure. Of course it will. But I like playing with people, not inflatable skins.

Because I hold myself to physical as well as mental standards, I expect a certain awareness in both aspects from my partners. I expect them to deserve me.

Watch it now. Think about what that means; no writing it off as standard femdom propaganda. I am smart, self aware, sometimes funny, mentally engaged, personally demanding, have very high goals, and am aware of my body. I’m also arrogant, neurotic, guilt-ridden, awkward, eat like crap, don’t exercise enough and am more than a little fucked up and strange. I expect my partners to deserve me.

Labels: Filed in Bad Logic, Beauty, Body, Friends, Self-Awareness, Sex, Us Versus Them | Comments (12)