Welcome all visitors and newcomers to the Journal of the InnKeeper.  I thought I'd preface this with a little explanation of what this journal is, what the purpose is, and who I am.

I am Joreth, The InnKeeper, of The InnBetween.  As you can see on the left sidebar, I am an Atheist, I am Polyamorous, I work in the entertainment industry as a Camera Operator, a Stagehand, a Video and Lighting Technician, a Forklift Operator, a Boom Lift Operator, and a Spotlight Operator, and I am sex-positive.  I am opinionated and aggressive and passionate and I care deeply about humanity and my fellow companions on this planet.

This journal started out because I started dating tacit, who began referring to me in his journal.  So I created a profile here so that he could reference me with a link, instead of just S (the first initial of my real name).  I didn't figure I'd use this for anything since I have my own website where I can post whatever I want.  Mostly, what I wanted to post were pictures, and my website is much better for that purpose.

But then I discovered that my journal was a great way to post those stupid email forwards that everyone wants to send, filled with cute pictures and kitchy sayings or jokes, because I was pretty sure that, here, only people who cared what I had to say would see them.  I wouldn't be sending on unwanted junk email, because if people didn't want to read what I had to say, people wouldn't friend me.  Plus, I could put stuff behind cuts and then visitors would have to do double duty and actually CLICK on the stuff they wanted to see.  So nothing I posted was unsolicited.

But then I discovered the internet's second true purpose (porn being the first one) ... RANTING!

Keeping with my concern of bothering friends and family with unwanted email, I found I could blow off steam and rant here in my journal too, and just like with the email glurge, only people who wanted to read it, would.

Well, over time, it turned out that the things that most frustrated me, the things I ranted about most of all, were things that I (and my followers) felt would be a benefit to society to be heard.  I have always been an educator and a mentor.  I'm not particularly smart, but I do grasp concepts quickly and I can often (not always) find ways to phrase things so that people understand when they might have had trouble before.  At work, bosses routinely tell new guys to just follow me around in order to quickly learn the basics of the business.  I was a mentor, a math tutor, a lighting lab instructor, and a guidance "counselor" at various times.

I have also always been an activist at heart.  A passionate personality and an interest in education tends to pair up to become activist leanings, for whatever causes strike's the activist's heart.  The topics I was most passionate about tended to be the topics that frustrated me the most and ended up as a rant here in my journal.  So my journal took on an educational bent, for some definition of "educational".

I tackle topics that interest me the most, or that I have the most stake in the outcome of changing society.  I cover the most current news in STDs and sexual health, I cover gender issues, I cover netiquette, I cover polyamory, I cover atheism and science and skepticism.  These are topics I feel that people need to be educated about, and I do my best to provide one source of education, to those for whom my style of teaching works.

But, as I've repeatedly said, the topics that tend to get written about HERE, in my LiveJournal, are those that I feel most passionate about, which tends to lead me to feel most frustrated when they're not going the direction I think they should, which leads to most of my entries being rants.

And, to that end, Dear Reader, please understand that, although many of my posts are, in my opinion, educational in nature, they are also written from the perspective of a passionate, frustrated, human, who takes the term "journal" to heart, and treats this like a journal, not a "blog", or a news column, or a classroom.  I hope that people get something of value from my journal, that I can report interesting or relevant news items, and that I can teach people something, and I do offer more classic or traditional styles of education, such as lectures & workshops, but I also come here, specifically, to rant.

Journals are typically places where people can write their private or personal thoughts.  They were traditionally considered safe places to reveal one's innermost thoughts, perhaps even those ideas that could not be spoken aloud.  Well, we have discovered just how valuable revealing certain journals can be to society, usually after that person's death.  And the advent of the internet has created a whole new society whose private thoughts are more public than truly private.  We use the internet to share those personal, innermost thoughts, to reach out to people, to connect with others, when once we might have suffered in silence, in isolation, with our private, paper journals as the sole, compassionate listener to our most intimate selves.

So, here, on the internet, utilizing LiveJournal as a personal journal where I can write my innermost thoughts, perhaps the kinds of things I cannot verbally say in polite society or as a way to organize my thoughts for a more appropriate-for-public version later, you, my Dear Reader, can get a glimpse into the mind of the InnKeeper.

But note that this journal, like any other journal, is only a small slice of who I am.  I use this journal to vent, to rant, to let off steam, and these rantings have shown to have some value to those who follow it.  But this is not the whole of who I am.  This is Ranty Joreth; this is the Joreth who needs to vent; this is the Joreth who needs to blow off steam; this is the Joreth who says anything and everything that may not be allowed to be spoken aloud, in public, or to the intended recipient.

Joreth is ranty and frustrated and passionate.  But Joreth is also compassionate and caring and occasionally a little silly.  Joreth melts at the mere sight of her fluffy kitty and is often late to work because she can't bear the thought of disturbing her cat to remove her hand out from under the cat's head.  Joreth needs hugs and cuddles.  Joreth cries at sappy movies and whenever anyone around her tears up.  Joreth sometimes lets her emotions carry her away.  Joreth gets deeply hurt.  Joreth isn't happy with her physical appearance but is mostly content and accustomed to it.  Joreth secretly craves attention and adoration.  Joreth likes to sing, especially bluesy-country songs and showtunes, but is terrified to have people hear her sing, in spite of being a mezzo-soprano in a choir for 5 years.  Joreth is touched by tears glistening in her father's eyes when he's proud of her.  Joreth has a sweet tooth and can almost always be tempted by sugary desserts.  Joreth is a lot of things, just as everyone else is.  This journal, and the other online aspects of Joreth are not the totality of who Joreth is.  

You get to see a portion of me, and it is truly me, here in this journal, but it is, by far, not the only portion of who I am.  Do not mistake reading a journal, whose very purpose is to be an outlet for a very specific part of my personality, for knowing who I am or anticipating how I will behave or react.  Just as I show only a certain portion of myself at work, and I show only a certain portion of myself with biological family, I show only a certain portion of who I am here.  All versions of me are still me, and there is some cross-over, but they are not complete models of me by themselves.  Just like anyone else, I am a three-dimensional, multi-faceted, complex and dynamic person.  I care, I love, I laugh, I hate, I hurt, I crave, I desire.  Just like everyone else.

Let's get a few things straight about "orientation" vs. "choice", specifically from a poly standpoint.

First:

A person is polyamorous if they have OR WANT multiple, loving relationships, regardless of their current relationship configuration or experience. This is "orientation".

A relationship is polyamorous if the relationship agreements allow for multiple, loving relationships, regardless of how many people are currently involved or have ever been involved. This is "choice".

A person can have or want multiple, loving relationships without ever calling himself "polyamorous".

A relationship can be open to multiple, loving partners without the participants using the word "polyamory".


What all this means is that people can both BE polyamorous and can be IN polyamorous relationships. It is both an orientation, when we are talking about what people feel, and a choice, when we are talking about people's behaviour. Some people may have only one or the other and not both, where a person might feel polyamorous but not actively engage in polyamorous relationships (or may even deliberately refuse polyamorous relationships), or where a person might participate in a polyamorous relationship but not have the feelings or desires for polyamory.

We can talk about nature vs. nurture 'til the cows come home, but in the end, EVERYTHING we do is a product of our environment, which happens to be "nature". Whether it's because our genes code for it, or the mix of hormones in our mothers' wombs directed it, or we were programmed by society, in the end, we are all a product of our biology, and our biology is influenced by the world around us. We know that doing certain activities can actually change the pattern of our brains. We know that being told something often enough can take advantage of something that's pre-wired into our brains so that the belief takes such a strong hold that it cannot be undone.

While many people can consciously choose to change things, such as unlearning social rules and picking up new skills, it is a false dichotomy to argue "nature vs. nurture". I do not believe it is even possible to disintangle "pure" biology from social programming completely in any given individual (although it *is* possible to identify which put the most pressure on a group of people because we can compare different groups with different influences and see how they're similar and how they're not). There is no way to know if I would be this much of a ball-buster if I grew up in a less sexist society. There's no way to know if I would be more or less confident and aggressive if my mother ate more fruit while she was pregnant with me. Maybe someday we'll have all this sorted out, but not today, and most likely not within my lifetime.

And, in my opinion, it's irrelevant anyway, except as a curiosity. At least when the debate takes place in societies that value freedom, independence, and democracy. Sure, we can argue that our country only pays lip service to those concepts, but that's not the point either. If we say that freedom, independence, and democracy are important, then whether or not someone does something because it's his "orientation" or his "choice" should be nothing more than categorization; certainly not anything to base policy on!

And this doesn't even have to go all the way up to lawmakers. Certain poly groups and poly people like to claim that it's not poly if you're not actively engaged in polyamory for some arbitrary amount of time. They make up a minimum number of people you have to be in a relationship with, they make up a minimum amount of time you have to be with them, and they make up a specific structure that you have to be in, such as live-in relationships only. And these groups, and these people, like to pass rules that say you can't play in our clubhouse unless you show proof that you are "poly".

Bullshit.

I argue semantics all the time, so I understand the value of having clear definitions so that we can see when something definitely IS and when something definitely ISN'T. I know it's all PC to say "there's no One True Way of polyamory" but I stick by my assertion that there ARE "wrong ways" to do poly. And declaring that you're only poly if you have participated in a poly relationship for a minimum time limit is a WRONG WAY.

By that logic, no one can call themselves straight or monogamous either, unless they have been in a heterosexual monogamous relationship for a certain time limit too. And how do you know it was heterosexual? Are you watching to make sure they're both having and enjoying sex? How do you know one of them isn't "faking it" or making excuses to avoid sex or cheating?

I am polyamorous whether I have 5 boyfriends, 1 boyfriend, or no boyfriends. That is my orientation. Simultaneously, I am in polyamorous relationships, whether there are 2 of us or 20 of us. That is my choice. Just as I am straight whether I have any male sexual partners at any given time or not. Just as I am female whether I am shopping at the mall and wearing dresses or incubating babies, or not.  Just as I am a stagehand even when I'm not currently at work, or even when I'm out of work.  Just as I am a LOT of things, whether I am actively engaged in whatever activity people associate with those things, or not.

People are what they are and people do what they do, and sometimes these things line up, but sometimes they do not. Now, if you want to run a group that has a specific purpose, such as "Poly Support Group For People In Poly Relationships", that's one thing. I get the need to have specific niche groups with specific missions and goals. Not everyone has to have a clubhouse that allows everyone.  Our local group, orlandopoly, does not allow people who want to bash polyamory, for instance.  But there is a difference between "This Club Is For People Who Do X" and "This Is Club X - but you're not really X unless you do it this way so you can't come and play with us". In other words, a poly club for people who are actively in poly relationships is fine. A club (or a person) that says you're not poly unless you are actively in a poly relationship is not fine. Ur doin it rong.

http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Butch_Cassidy_and_the_Sundance_Kid/26308213?trkid=2361637 - Netflix
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064115/ - IMDB
http://www.amazon.com/Butch-Cassidy-Sundance-Two-Disc-Collectors/dp/B000EXDS5M/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1310417985&sr=1-1 - Amazon

This is a difficult movie for me to categorize. First of all, it's a western all about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But it's not a typical Western either. Not being very familiar with the actual history (or legends) about them, I couldn't tell you how historically "accurate" the movie is, but it was an enjoyable movie in this regard. The characters are gruff old Western bank robbers. They're bad guys but they're likeable bad guys. The difficulty I have is the poly content.  Now, keep in mind that this movie is first and foremost, a western.  The poly storyline is not the main focus of the story, although it takes place for more or less half the movie, so if you watch it, go into it with that perspective. 

First, we see Butch and Sundance hanging out at a brothel, and there was no jealousy or weirdness about sharing women. So I thought "a movie about not getting jealous over hookers is NOT about polyamory". But that wasn't where the poly story was. Next, we discover that Sundance has actually hooked up with a schoolmarm in his version of a long-term relationship. He shows up when he shows up, but they obviously have real feelings for each other and it's not just a sexual release. Sundance admires and likes Etta as a person, and Etta clearly is strongly attached to Sundance.

The poly part comes because of her feelings for Butch. But that's also where the question comes in.

In the second main scene with Etta, after she has spent a night with Sundance, Butch comes riding up on a new bicycle and tempts her outside for a romantic and touching bike ride. At the end, she asks him if Butch ever thought that maybe, if Etta hadn't met Sundance first, if Etta and Butch would be the ones to be in a relationship. Butch flippantly replies that they ARE in a relationship. Etta looks at him questioningly, and he says something like "in some countries, riding on my bicycle is the same as being engaged."

So clearly, there are also very strong romantic feelings between Etta and Butch. But Etta does not consider it to be a "relationship" and they do not have a sexual relationship at all.

Just after this conversation, Sundance wakes up and comes outside, demanding to know what's going on. Butch says "I'm stealing your woman." Sundance says "take her!" and stumbles back to bed.

So this is one of those relationships that lives on the very fuzzy borders of the definition of polyamory. On the one hand, Etta establishes that her relationship with Sundance is a clear-cut case of a romantic relationship, between their feelings for each other and their sexual activity. She appears to have similar feelings for Butch, but she does not acknowledge a romantic relationship with him, possibly because of the lack of sexual activity.

But as I said in my review of Carrington, many polys acknowledge the existence of NSSO or Non Sexual Significant Other relationships. The three of them take off together across the country and into South America where they live as a more or less happy threesome, just without any sex between Etta and Butch. Is it poly if Butch always sleeps alone but is part of the same household?

Since I have titled my list "Poly-ISH Movies", I think I'll include this movie on the list, but I have mixed feelings about it. I think it differs from Carrington in that the non-sexual partners in Carrington acknowledged a family and even a romantic bond with each other, but that bond is not acknowledged by all in this movie. I think that's what makes the difference to me, so I don't know that I would classify this as a poly movie. But it has so many other elements of a poly family, that I don't think I can really criticize someone who disagrees with me and thinks that it IS a poly movie.

So, in a rare move for me, I think I'll add it to the list so that people can see it, but I'm going to leave it up to you all to decide for yourselves if this is a poly movie or not without me giving a declaritive statement about whether it is or is not a poly movie. I do, however, think it's a terrific example of how messy relationships are and why, although we can have clear-cut definitions that say X definitely IS but Z definitely ISN'T, when it comes to taxonomy, either in biology or sociology, X and Z may be clear, but Y might be something in between. And that's OK.

Question:
Why aren't there more women involved in atheism & skepticism, and in particular, why don't they come to the conferences?

Answer:
Well, besides daycare and expense issues, many of us don't come because we feel we are often dismissed, judged for our looks first and brains second (if at all), ignored, talked over, condescended to, hit on, and there is an underlying attitude of sexism and misogyny, not to mention being outnumbered by so many men, even if they are being nice.  Sometimes, I even feel afraid for my own safety because my concerns are not taken seriously and my wishes to not be hit on are ignored.

Responses:

• "Smart women are hot."
• "Oh lighten up, you should be flattered that men want to hit on you!"
• "Consider yourself lucky that men hit on you! I wouldn't be upset if more women hit on me!"
• "Please, you're not pretty enough for anyone to hit on you or rape you, so relax."
• "You think you have problems? There are women in other countries who are being beaten and mutilated! You have no room to complain because of how good you have it here!"
• "Let's get some perspective on this. Men have problems too, y'know. We have to deal with you being afraid of us, and every so often, a man gets raped too."
• "The problem with women is that you're just too emotional. I understand that this is an emotional topic, but you're not discussing this in a rational manner. There's no evidence that any of this happens or that it's the reason why so many women stay away; you're just a single data point."
• "You used some words that I mistakenly attribute to man-hating feminazis because someone else told me that use of these words is anti-men. So I'm not even going to listen to your actual point because I don't like the words you used. Instead, I'm going to throw my own loaded terminology at you like 'feminist propaganda' and 'agenda' and 'reverse sexism' and then unironically complain about not getting your point across because I have a problem with the words you use."
• "You fucking bitch, I hope you get raped."
• "You're just an attention-whore."
• "*cough*dramaqueen*cough*"
• "Does getting all this attention from men get you wet? Because you seem like the kind of woman that does."
• "I'm totally going to cop a feel when I see you at the next convention.  What? It was just a joke!"
• "I'm going to drug you and rape you."

Several of these comments are direct quotes.  In fact, the most offensive ones are the direct quotes. So please do not tell me that I'm building straw men or overreacting. I have a right to be both afraid and angry at the way women are treated in this culture even though men can have bad things happen to them too and even though women in other countries have it worse.

I spend most of my energy on the STI tag on HPV, since that's the one I know the most about and the one that had the least amount of information when I started this tag. But I found some information on HSV that I thought I ought to share. The part between the horizontal bars below was not written by me, but I did obtain permission to post it.

First of all, some background:

HSV-1 is a strain of herpes that prefers the oral region, but it can reside in either the oral OR the genital region. It's just more commonly found orally.

HSV-2 is a strain of herpes that prefers the genital region, but it can reside in either the oral OR the genital region. It's just more commonaly found genitally.

When we say "prefers", it means that, if a virus comes in contact with the human body, there are some areas that the virus is more likely to attach itself to and some areas that it is not likely to attach itself to.  HSV does not like, for example, the backs of your knees.   You just don't get HSV on the backs of your knees, even if the backs of your knees are exposed to HSV.  So, if HSV-1 comes in contact with your mouth, you have a pretty good chance of it attaching itself there and taking root.  If HSV-1 comes in contact with your genitals, it can attach itself to you, but it can also not attach itself to you, to put it simply.  The opposite is HSV-2 - it will probably attach itself to your genital region, but there's a good chance it won't attach itself to your oral regions even if it comes in contact - although it can.

You can consider them, for all practical purposes, the same thing, just with different preferences.   Both are transmitted through "shedding", which means that they reside in tissue cells that can be transferred by contact and do not require any fluids.   So condoms are effective if the area that is shedding the virus is covered by a condom, but not if the area is outside the condom coverage or if affected cells get moved to outside the condom coverage, and condoms are pretty useless to prevent oral-to-oral transmission.

HSV is often passed from older family members to children just by giving them goodnight kisses.   As far as I'm concerned, any virus you can catch from your grandma is not an STD.   But the reason it can be passed, besides a parent just being careless, is because this virus can be passed through simple touching even when there are no symptoms.  It's called asymptomatic shedding.

Touching a person with HSV, even if you touch the affected area, does not automatically mean that you will get HSV, even if you touch them with the HSV's preferred site.  In other words, it is possible to kiss someone who has oral HSV-1 and still not get HSV yourself.   Whether you get it or not has to do with whether your partner is actively shedding at the time and how well your own body can fight it off for the amount of exposure you have.  Lack of symptoms reduces (but does not eliminate) chance of transfer, and antiviral medication that suppresses shedding also reduces significantly (but does not eliminate) chance of transfer.   Also, the strength of the viral presence in the infected partner affects how likely you are to catch it, so a partner who has an attenuated viral load is also a much lower chance of transfer.

The following is the results of some research that a layperson did into how likely it was that they would transmit HSV-1 to another partner when the site of their HSV-1 was genital and asymptomatic, meaning they had no symptoms, and whether the antiviral medication used to suppress transmission was effective for asymptomatic genital HSV-1:

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You know, I really hate it when doctors just flat out lie to me. It makes me cranky.

I was able to find some of the clinical trials for antivirals used to reduce asymptomatic shedding.  The doctor had suggested the studies
were "weak" because there's no way to tell if the antiviral is working. But he was totally full of shit! They can totally tell by doing PCR!

So, back in 1994, they did PCR tests of pregnant women who had HSV-2 but were asymptomatic, and found that they were shedding the virus between 1% to > 75% of the time.  In other words the researchers could detect HSV DNA in "genital secretions".  That's not to say that the virus would be easily transmissible at this time, but it was present.

Administration of Acyclovir reduced this shedding by a median of 80% as detectable by daily PCR tests.  Not bad!

Now keep in mind, this is HSV-2, so you might wonder, as I did, if there are any studies on HSV-1.  There are!  There was a study for
Famiclovir, which is in the same family as Acyclovir, and as far as I can tell, behaves the same way (they have done studies comparing the two and found no difference). This study is from 2007.

So, there are several interesting bits of information.  First of all, the likelihood of asymptomatic genital shedding is much less in HSV-1 vs. HSV-2 given a history of genital symptoms (something the doctor told me which was actually true!).  Again, this was tested by PCR.  This confirms the common wisdom that HSV-2 "prefers" the genital site.

As in the 1994 study, they showed that the antiviral reduced the incident of asymptomatic shedding in HSV-2, and they also showed
results specifically for genital shedding in patients with a history of genital outbreaks of HSV-1:


So that's 2% to 0%.  Not bad! And note that 2% is very low to begin with.  (2% chance of asymptomatic shedding x low chance of transmission with asymptomatic shedding)

As far as oral shedding goes:
So if you buy those statistics, that means that the least safe thing a person with genital HSV-1 can do with an HSV- partner is kiss. Though, we're still talking about small percentages (less than 4%).

Obviously, everyone is different and I'm not sure how big their sample set was, so you can't really take these statistics as law, but they are encouraging - both in the base incidence of asymptomatic shedding for a history of genital symptoms for HSV-1, and in the reduction of asymptomatic shedding with an antiviral.

Here's the 1994 study
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Frequent%20genital%20herpes%20simplex%20virus%202%20shedding%20in%20immunocompetent%20women.%20Effect%20of%20acyclovir%20treatment

2007 study http://depts.washington.edu/herpes/php_uploads/publications/Famciclovir%20Reduces%20Viral%20Mucosal%20Shedding%20in%20HSV-Seropositive%20Persons.pdf

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So, this is obviously not an all-comprehensive summary of HSV. But it is important to note that HSV-1 can be found genitally, and HSV-2 can be found orally, although neither really likes those sites.  It is also important to note that both types can be transmitted even when there are no symptoms, and that certain types of antivirals do reduce certain transmission rates by a significant margin.

Also, DON'T PANIC. HSV, while a virus and something that no one wants to catch, is not the end of the world.  The viruses most likely to kill you are also the ones most easy to avoid, through testing and avoiding fluid transfers.  This doesn't mean that HSV is totally harmless so everyone go out and forget about safety, it just means to keep this in perspective - it's a virus like any other virus, and a lot less harmful than some other viruses.  Treat it with the caution that is proportional to the effects of the virus, not with the panic that comes from a social stigma.

There's a big deal happening in the skeptics community because Rebecca Watson was propositioned in an elevator at a conference, told the story publicly, and concluded with "don't do that guys". The entire community exploded in opposite directions, with clueless men saying "what's the big deal? Just tell the guy no" and women and men who "get it" trying to explain why this was so bad.

The biggest complaint is that poor, privileged men got their feelings hurt by a woman saying "don't proposition a woman at 4 AM in an elevator where she can't escape" because, they think, it must have implied that men can't ever speak to or look at a woman anywhere, at any time, ever, because all men are always a threat to all women. Always.

And that is not what the women are saying at all. It's not that all men are automatically a threat. It's that we have been told BY MEN from the day we are born that someday, some man is going to come along and rape us. Not only is he going to try to assault us, but it will be our own fault. Because of what we wear, what we say, or where we are, some man is going to be so overcome with lust at something that WE DID, that he will assault us, and that it is our own responsibility to avoid this attack by choosing our clothing, our behaviour, our words, our locations to prevent some guy from losing control of himself.

No, it's not that every man is a threat. It's that SOME man is a threat, but we have no way of knowing WHICH man he is until it's too late. And that the reason why he is a threat is because of something that we did to bring it upon ourselves, and that we live in a society that will scrutinize our every move and our every thought to see if it can find exactly what we did to bring it upon ourselves, so that the poor man can be absolved of his responsibility for assaulting us (just ask any woman who ever pressed rape charges how carefully her own background and behaviour was dragged into the harsh light of the courtroom so the defense attorney could find some shred of "she was asking for it" to get his client off the hook).

We are told these very things about ourselves and about men being threatening ... by men. By our fathers, by our police officers, by our clergy, and it is reinforced by every one of those skeevy men out there who responds to our rejections, no matter how polite or careful or blame-shifting we try to make them, with accusations of "slut", "bitch", "dyke", or with pressure to change our minds. First, we're told that men are a threat to us, then we're told that it's our own responsibility to police our own boundaries and make sure that all men know what they can't get away with, and THEN, when we dutifully buck up the courage to reject someone (no one likes to feel rejected so many of us don't like to do the rejecting because we don't want to hurt someone's feelings), we are penalized for it by the man's behaviour. We're called names, we're shouted at, we're gossiped about, or we're ignored by those who have been told that "no" is just another word for "maybe".

We are told that "good girls" don't say "yes", so some men are convinced that we are only saying "no" because we're not supposed to say "yes". Other men believe the "no", but don't believe that it is a permanent state. In other words, if they just keep asking, eventually it'll change into a "yes". So even if we DO manage to reject someone, we're still not off the hook. We still have to vigilantly maintain those boundaries, like a fort with an enemy at the gate, probing for weaknesses, just one little chink in the fence where he can weasel his way in.

I don't like to think of men in these terms; I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt. But this is what I have been told, and this is what many women have been told about men ... by men. Who hasn't heard the line about a father telling his daughter that "boys only want one thing", backing that up with "because I was a boy once and that's how I thought". Rather than an entire nation of fathers trying to change their sons' views on how to treat women now that they have wives & daughters that they don't want assaulted (we'll just overlook, for now, that these fathers didn't care about assaulting someone ELSE'S wives or daughters), these fathers are, instead, trying to lock up their daughters to "protect" them from all those predatory boys and men, apparently just sitting at the front door, panting and drooling, waiting for the daughters to take a step out the front door so they can pounce. Women are penalized by being treated as prisoners for the crimes of all these men that we're led to believe are just waiting for us. We're locked up indoors, under clothing, and behind demure expressions all to prevent some man from assulting us. And in some countries, this isn't even hyperbole.

Young women are given earlier curfews, or made to give the information for where they expect to be and what time they expect to be home, or scrutinized by their mothers to ensure that their clothing doesn't send the "wrong impression" when young men are not often given the same treatment. We are subjected to this treatment because our parents believe that we are at greater risk for assault than our male counterparts, in spite of the fact that men are quite often the victims of violent crime such as robbery and beatings. Even though, statistically, men are more likely to be the assaulter in all violent crimes, other men are not told to fear going into a steambath, naked with other men, on the off-chance that one of those men will try to rape him (unless he's a conservative fundie, who DO seem to think that just because another man is gay, being naked in the same room with him is naturally going to lead to being raped by the gay man), beat him for thinking he's gay, or steal his wallet that he left in the locker room. Women, however, are told that we cannot go into certain areas with men, such as a steambath or a locker room, because one of those men will try to rape us, beat us, or steal our purse.

And I'll even concede that this does happen more often to women than men. I have no statistics at my fingertips and I don't feel like looking it up, so if someone wants to insist that women are assulted by men more often than men are assaulted by men, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, for the sake of discussion. I don't believe this is the case, but I'm not willing to argue this point right now. The main point is that our society's solution to this problem is not to change the society to make this unacceptable, nor is it to tighten up security in these areas to allow women the freedom to move about the country as they choose. The solution is not to frown and shake our fingers at men and call them "naughty boys". No, the solution is to make the WOMEN curtail their activities, their clothing, their behaviour, their speech, whatever they have to do to prevent the rare man who might be hiding amongst all the "nice guys" just waiting for his chance to beat us, rape us, kill us, while men are not given the same effort at telling them not to go certain places or dress in certain ways to avoid an assault. So women have to treat everyone as a threat in order to protect ourselves from the actual threats.

Let me tell you a few stories of some of your oh-so-non-threatening bretheren:


1) I and two of my female coworkers went out to the Hard Rock Casino one night after work to hang out - just us ladies. None of us are shrinking violets and we're pretty well able to take care of ourselves, being all butch and manual-laborey, but we're also fairly easy on the eyes, if I do say so myself, and still subjected to the same social programming as everyone else. So we were hanging out at the casino lounge, having our first drinks (mine was non-alcoholic) when an obviously drunk man came over to our table. I don't recall the exact words he used at this point, but I do recall that he had trouble pronouncing them and that they were supposed to be complimentary. At any rate, he expressed admiration for our appearances and then proceeded to indicate interest in sexual relations.

Well, I was much younger then, and still trying to be polite, and I fell into the same old trap that most women do, of giving an excuse for my rejection that clearly says "no" without saying "because you're a douchebag". Most women use lines like "I have a boyfriend" or "I have to get up early" or some other line that says "I can't" rather than "I won't", to try and soften the rejection. I and one of the other girls told him that we were all lesbians and in a committed slave-relationship with the third girl. She was our Mistress and she did not share us and we absolutely could not do anything without her permission, which she would not give. So A) we were the wrong orientation, B) we were in an exclusive relationship, and C) it was the type of relationship that makes straight, vanilla, drunk fratboys at bars uncomfortable.

He looked confused and wandered off, only to return a few minutes later and press the issue. We continued to insist that we were not interested in men at all and we were "taken", to which he responded by trying to talk us out of both, including the "you just haven't met a Real Man yet" trope. Finally, he leaned over to me and tried to kiss me. Right there in the lounge. I ducked and slid off my chair and ran to the girl who was posing as the "Mistress", where I sat at her feet while she put her hand possessively on my head and glared at the jerk.

His eyes opened wide and he slurred "oh, you mean, like, THAT kind of relationship?" I looked up at him and frowned, saying "yes, I am not interested because you are not what I want" or something similar. He stumbled off with a dazed expression on his face.

I wish I could say that was the end of it.

He came back AGAIN and this time tried to kiss the other "slave" girl. She jumped back and this time all three of us pulled out our knives. At the "snick" of my switchblade, he looked up, put his hands in front of himself, and backed up. We decided we'd had enough and left. We never made it to a second drink.


2) I know a bunch of guys through work or school, and this story is told as though it is a specific encounter, but the truth is that I've had this exact same situation on multiple occasions with multiple people. I decided not to write down each one individually because they really are so similiar that I would end up cutting and pasting all but the age and location.

Hanging out with male friends often involves watching movies. When we are poor, or young especially, watching movies usually happens in someone's bedroom, usually due to sharing living spaces like dorm rooms or apartments with roommates, or even as teenagers living at home with parents. There are some circumstances in our society where mixed-gendered socializing just happens in private rooms like bedrooms and there's nothing inherently or automatically sexual about it. When I was 12, my Nintendo was hooked up in my bedroom because my dad hated competing with me for the TV in the living room. My next door neighbor was male. There was nowhere else for us to play video games but in someone's room. That's just how it was.

So, hanging out with a male friend, watching a movie or playing games, or sometimes just talking, occasionally ended up with him aggressively hitting on me in a bedroom. This almost always happened out of the blue, not as the result of some sexy talk or flirting. It was more like I would say something, then he would say something, and I would look at him because he was talking, then he would launch himself at me. If this was the first time this particular guy did that, I would be startled, and probably freeze for a moment, allowing him to get a kiss in, but then he would press his advantage and try to fondle my breasts. At that point, I would knock his hand away and back up, and we'd probably go back to watching movies or playing games.

If a guy had tried this once, he would almost always try it again. By the second time, though, I would not freeze when he came at me. I would dodge him and tell him "no". For the guy who was willing to try it after having been rejected previously, this type of guy would not fall back at the rejection, but he would continue to lean in for a kiss and reach for a breast. If I managed to block his hand from my breast, he would then grab for my crotch. If I succeeded in blocking him there, he'd go again for the breast. By the time I managed to disintangle myself from Mr. Octopus, he would attempt to keep me from leaving by promising to stop if I would just stay and finish whatever activity got me there in the first place, like the movie or video game. Sometimes he did stop. For that visit.

When I was younger, this was just how things were. So I did not know to not visit that "friend" again. I did know enough to insist that he not treat me that way, to say that I wouldn't come over if he was going to behave this way. He would always say he promised not to, and maybe he would keep that promise the next time, but there was always another encounter with these guys until I learned to cut off friendships with guys who behaved this way.

I'd like to say this was all exclusively in my teens, when boys were clueless and dumb or that I lived in a particularly fucked up neighborhood. But my most recent encounter like this happened 3 years ago. I was 31 years old. I believe he is a couple of years older than me. He is still not an unusual occurance.


3) Back in California, where the public transportation system is actually worth taking, I used to wear a silver band on my ring finger of my left hand. That was because I could hardly ever make it through a bus ride without some guy sitting down next to me, trapping me against the window, and asking for my phone number to "hook up".

As I explained to a friend recently, who had never been propositioned for a purely sexual relationship (she thinks - I think she just didn't recognize the propositions), this is not the same thing as getting involved in a conversation with a person where you talk about yourselves or some topic of interest, and he asks for a communication method to continue to the conversation. When a man sees a girl he thinks is attractive and just wants a physical relationship with her, he won't bother to get to know her at all. He will begin his approach with "damn baby, you're lookin' fine! Can I getcha number?"

Yes, seriously.  Often this is yelled from passing cars to women walking on the sidewalk, or from random strangers in a mall.  Yes, both occasions happened to me.   Yes, more than once.  Yes, that was a quote, not a paraphrase.

I'm sure there are some men out there who just don't know about these assholes, and who genuinely see a woman they find attractive whom they want to get to know on a personal level. And these clueless men will ask her for a date or her phone number right off the bat with the intention of actually starting a dialog at a later time or in some other place. But the problem is that, from the woman's perspective, these men are nearly indistinguishable from the "your dress would look AWESOME crumpled on my floor in the morning!" types.

If you are genuinely interested in getting to know the woman as a person, there is no need to postpone that discussion for a later phone call or dinner date. Get to know her NOW. At least ask her name and ascertain just one topic that you might have in common to make it worth both of your whiles to bother with a phone conversation or a coffee date. Because without that, without having something in common to discuss, the both of you are completely interchangeable with any other human since there is nothing about either of you to distinguish each other from anyone else. You are both, literally, nothing more, at that moment, than a body. And THAT'S why this approach is so creepy - it is not flattering in the slightest to most women to be considered as nothing more than a convenient body, no matter how complimentary you think you've phrased it.


4) I'm a huggy person, but like many men, I can't tell when a hug will be well received, when it's appropriate, or when it will be mistaken for a sexual proposition when I don't intend it as such. So I don't hug unless someone offers to hug me first. But I am generally welcoming of hugs.

Many men take the permission to hug as permission to see what else they can get. First, this kind of man will offer a hug goodbye. Since I've accepted, the next time he sees me, he'll offer a hug hello. Gradually, that hug will become tighter and more intimate - a full body hug instead of a shoulder embrace. Then, he'll brush cheeks as he hugs. Soon, he'll start kissing the air by my ear when he brushes my cheek while he hugs me with the entire body touching. Eventually, that air-kiss will turn into a kiss high up on the cheek along with that full body hug. And after a while, I will have to make a concerted effort to turn my head sideways as the kiss migrates further away from my ear and closer to my mouth, to the point where I'm standing in the classic Viennese Waltz pose, bending backwards and tilting my head towards the ground, gazing somewhere just behind my left shoulder, just to make sure he doesn't try to merge with my body right there in public or suck my soul out from my mouth.

And it's always a gradual thing, as the man becomes more and more friendly and I grow genuinely fond feelings towards him, it becomes simultaneously more complicated and difficult to avoid this kind of pressure. When it's a stranger, it's easy to back off and not allow him to invade my personal space. But when it's someone I consider a friend, or at least a friendly acquaintance whom I have fond feelings for, it becomes more difficult to defend my personal space, for two reasons. First, because personal space *does* diminish correspondingly with how close two people become emotionally, and second because now there is a friendship that I might not want to damage in spite of the discomfort of having my personal space be invaded. The more assertive I am, the more potentially damaging it could be to a friendship that I might value, yet the less assertive I am, the more likely it is that someone I am emotionally close to might mistake my friendship and lack of assertion for permission. It can be a difficult conundrum that many of us do not want to have to choose between asserting our boundaries and losing friends, but sometimes, that is the case.

And some may even say that if your friendship is so damaged by one party asserting her boundaries, then it's not a friendship worth keeping. I know I've certainly suggested similar to friends who really feel pressured by people who should not be pressuring them. But the reality is that life and relationships are messy and complicated, and our culture's indoctrination on how Men And Women Should Behave sets up a totally impossible set of contradictory instructions that sometimes, really earnest but clueless people just get tripped up over. Many of the men I know honestly do not want to be sexist and honestly value women, but because of their position of privilege, they have a hard time actually seeing why a casual statement they made is sexist when a woman gets offended by it. Likewise, a given man could earnestly wish to be respectful of women, particularly women he values as friends, but just not realize or understand that something he is doing is comming across as pressure or threatening because *he is not in a position to be on the receiving end of that behaviour* and so can't see it that way.

I'm not excusing them, don't get me wrong. I'm saying that *wanting* to be non-threatening is not the same thing as *being* non-threatening, and when you mix in contradictory social instructions with personal insecurities, rejecting the physical advances of a person I actually like otherwise is a veritable social and emotional minefield - his advances may be undesired, and maybe even a symptom of a very big problem, but I might still find value in our friendship & in him as a person and not want to damage it irreparably while I am forced to police my boundaries.

5) I used to go to nightclubs more frequently, but especially back in CA where they don't allow smoking in clubs. One night, I was sitting at a table, having a drink & and rest in between dances, when a guy sidled up to me and started hitting on me. I could tell right away that he wasn't my type, only I'd be hard pressed at this late date to remember the details of why. But the bottom line is that he indicated an interest in me and I turned him down. He actually said "what are you, lesbian?" as if he could only comprehend a woman not wanting him if she only wanted women.

I've heard rumors about me from men in my social circles or other coworkers who speculated about my sexual orientation, and these rumors always stemmed from men who I've rejected. I've been called a bitch and a dyke for turning someone down. The funniest ones are when I'm called a slut, since, if I WAS a slut, I wouldn't have just rejected the asshole who just called me one. Pointing that out to a guy in a bar got him laughed at by the other men nearby, so that was a bit satisfying.

But there is a penalty for rejecting someone. Most of the time, the penalty is just feeling bad for hurting someone else's feelings. But occasionally, rejecting someone's advances results in some damned uncomfortable public scenes, and every so often it results in much more than uncomfortable PRIVATE scenes - the kinds that make us fear for our safety.

6) Again, when I was much younger and much more willing to avoid confrontation by giving an excuse instead of a flat-out rejection, my sister and I would occasionally go to nightclubs together, along with a friend or two of hers. On her 21st birthday, she and I and her best friend went out, and she told me that she did not want to be bothered by men that night - this was a Girl's Night Out where she could just dance and drink and forget about things for an evening. She asked me if I would pose as her possessive girlfriend if any guy tried to hit on her, and I agreed because I was young and didn't realize that "sorry, I'm a lesbian" is usually heard as "hey baby, hot bi babe action over here!"

So the three of us got on the dance floor and started dancing. Almost immediately, some big guy came up behind my sister and started dancing suggestively with her - we called it "freaking" when I was a teenager, where it's basically vertical spooning frottage on the dance floor. My sister kept moving away, and he kept moving closer. She started moving towards me & dancing suggestively with me, giving me The Look to indicate she wanted me to intervene. So I moved in between them and said "sorry, she's mine".

As you can guess, that didn't dissuade him. Instead, it seemed to turn him on, as he kept trying to dance between us and saying things implying threesomes. Eventually I had to stop, put a hand on his chest, and say "I told you that she's mine and I don't share, now back off." He got huffy and demanded to know what my problem was. I said my problem was that he didn't know when to keep his hands off someone else's property. By this time, the bartender, who was a friend of my sister's and the reason we were at that particular club in the first place, sent a bouncer over to pull the guy away, who was getting all puffed up and blustery about me cockblocking him. If the bouncer hadn't intervened, this very well could have turned into a physical altercation with a man who refused to accept a rejection, if his assertive body language is any indication.

7) As I mentioned earlier, many women use some kind of excuse that implies that we CAN'T accept someone's advances, rather than we WON'T. I dunno, I guess we think it makes the rejection easier to accept, like it doesn't hurt someone's feelings as much. One of my exes used to be a bouncer in a strip club, and he told me how the dancers were constantly propositioned for more than just lap dances. He says that the overwhelmingly favorite response was to tell the customer that she had a boyfriend. Apparently, it allowed the fantasy that she COULD be more continue to exist while still being clear that she WON'T be more than a dancer. But, almost as common as the boyfriend-response, was the customer's response of "you don't have to tell him!" The private reaction (never to the customer's face!) to that was, as my ex used to say, "well holy shit, I don't? Why didn't I think of that? When I think of all the customers I COULD have gone home with, if only I had realized that I didn't have to tell my boyfriend, I just feel stupid now!" That line should be read dripping with sarcasm for full effect.

There has been a lot of talk about going beyond "no means no" to "yes means yes" and about women being more assertive in their rejections. But a few research papers suggest that, even if a woman doesn't use the actual word "no", a rejection is still clearly understood by men in general, which means that men who use the excuse that she didn't say "no" really mean that they chose to ignore it. The conclusions in these papers make sense to me. If you take any social situation other than propositioning a woman for sex, most people have no problem understanding a rejection even when it doesn't use the word "no". When you ask someone to hang out sometime, or to go to a movie, or to have coffee, if you remove the heteronormative dating associations and say "my wife and I would love it if you came for dinner" or "a bunch of us are going to this movie, wanna come?", if the person you're asking says "I'd love to, but...", pretty much all of us recognize that as a rejection.

Sometimes, if the rejection sounds too much like a real conflict, as in the giver really does want to go but can't, and the excuse given is one we can solve, we don't just let the rejection lie, we offer a solution. For instance, if you ask a friend to see a movie, and he says he's broke and can't afford it, well, you might offer to pay for him if you have the spare cash & you really want to see the movie with your friend. But whether we try to offer a suggestion or not, the phrase "I'd love to, but..." is clearly understood by all of us that the person you are talking to is, in fact, telling you "no".

Now, there genuinely are times when a person can't tell that it's a no. For example, I have an ex who once asked a girl out on a few dates. One one date in particular, they were sitting on the couch, and he asked outright for a kiss because he couldn't tell from her body language what she wanted. She kissed him, but he said she didn't seem too into it. So he asked her if this relationship was going anywhere or not. Instead of saying "no", or even giving him a "it's not you, it's me ... I'm too busy with work for a boyfriend right now, and my cat needs my attention, and I have to wash my hair every weekend for the next 20 years", she said "well, it's all about the chase, isn't it?" Yes, that was her answer.

How was he supposed to take that? Was that a hedge, a rejection without saying "no"? Or was that her way of saying she wanted to play the coy-maiden-gets-chased-by-assertive-man game? Cuz, y'know, sometimes that's fun. So he said "no, actually, it's not about the chase. If I'm chasing a woman, it means she's running away from me. So which is it, are you interested or not?" I don't think she ever gave him a clear answer, but he took that ambiguity AS an answer (good for him) and stopped asking her out on dates.

So don't think I'm giving all women a free pass here when it comes to earnest-but-clueless men who really want to do the right thing. I'm not. I DO think we all ought to be more clear and explicit about our boundaries - I've written tons on that very subject. And I am a big supporter of the "yes means yes" campaign, which has at its heart the philosophy that only a clear and unambiguous "yes" should ever be taken as a "yes" and that everything else is a "no". It's meant to subvert the idea that men are not responsible for assaulting women if, for some reason, she hasn't uttered that single syllable, because there is a social penalty for saying that word, or maybe she's drunk or high or unconscious. It's ALWAYS a "no" if she CAN'T say "no".

But generally speaking, we have a fairly well-understood social convention of expressing rejection in a myriad of ways that do not use the word "no", and, generally speaking, we all pretty much accept these rejections in all cases, except when it comes to men propositioning women for sex. Only in this one area do people claim to not understand that they were given a rejection and it falls on the person offering the rejection to defend themselves from an actual assault rather than the person being rejected to ask for clarification or, at the very least, fall back on the safest possible interpretation and just assume she said "no" hidden in her "I'd love to, but..." somewhere.


8) Most of my strong opinions come from experiences where I made some bad choices.  I'm not sitting in my ivory tower armchair quarterbacking other people's relationships.  I learned the hard way how some of these things work.  I made many of the same mistakes I try to tell other people they shouldn't do.  I've gotten into the very messes I try to prevent others from getting into.  I stand here with my strong opinions and my strong will because there was a time that I did not, and I paid heavy prices for it.

I met a guy while working backstage, so you'd think that it wouldn't be a surprise to him that I was a tomboy, right?  You'd be wrong - hence my online profiles & dozens of blog posts reminding everyone just now not-girlie I am.  I met a guy and we seemed to have everything in common.  We were in the same industry, we liked the same movies, we wanted the same things from relationships, we had similar religious backgrounds - we seemed perfect for each other.  Except he wasn't honest with me about who he was or what he wanted.  He didn't actually want a girl who was better at fixing things than he was.  He didn't want a relationship with an equal partner, he wanted traditional gender roles.  He didn't like an inquisitive, curious, skeptical girlfriend, he wanted one who accepted what she was told on face value.  And he most certainly did not want a partner who viewed her own body as autonomous, he wanted a partner who took "what's mine is yours and what's yours is mine"  literally.

After we moved in together, the stress of managing a household, going to school full time and still working to pay the bills but still being the "housewife" and making sure he got fed and the dishes got done and the trash got out, all eventually piled up and my sex drive dropped.  I was just too damn tired to be interested in sex.  I was only getting about 4-6 hours of sleep every night as it was, and I didn't want to sacrifice any of that time for sex.

After the first few nights of saying "not tonight honey, I have to wake up early tomorrow", he started pressuring me.  He'd whine and try to talk me into it.  Let me just say that there's nothing more of a turn-off than a guy begging for sex when I'm not in the mood to begin with.  After about a week of nightly arguments in bed, he started waiting for me to fall asleep and then started touching me when he thought I was unconscious.  When I turned on him & yelled at him to leave me the fuck alone, he said he was only trying to arouse me, that he wouldn't ever do anything against my will or when I couldn't give consent.  We'd get into a big fight about it that would end with me telling him not to touch me until I said he could, and he'd finally leave me alone to sleep.  That night.

The next night would be the same thing.  When I reminded him that I had told him not to touch me, he would say that he hadn't touched me all day, so therefore he held up his end of the bargain, and now it was my turn to provide sex.  Naturally, I said that was not what we agreed on, and it sparked another argument, cutting into my valuable and rare sleep time.  This argument would end the same way, only to have a repeat the next night.

Some nights I gave in just because my experience had taught me that he could argue for longer than he could have sex, so if I wanted sleep, it would be faster to give in than to tell him "no". Of course, he then got pissed at me for not being into it, which would sometimes spark another round of arguing, as if picking a fight with me would fix the lack of interest in sex or the inability to get aroused. I have no idea how many nights this went on, but it was the same thing every night for weeks.  

I was a wreck.  I was exhausted, I couldn't concentrate in school, I was depressed, and I started making excuses to be away from the apartment.  So he started making rules to prevent me from going anywhere without him.  Naturally, I  ignored those rules, but that only caused more arguments at home.  One night, I finally got out of bed with the intention of sleeping in the living room.  He told me that if I did that, he would damage my property in his anger at being rejected.  It was then that I finally understood that I was in an abusive relationship without ever having been hit.  Between the nightly unwanted gropings, the begging for sex, the threats to my property, and the refusal to allow me to have friends or go anywhere without him, I was well and truly trapped in an abusive relationship.

I spent that night sleeping in the adjoining bathroom, because I could not sleep next to him and I could still keep an eye on my property.  That was the first of several such nights.  But I started looking for a way out.  It was hard to leave.  I couldn't afford to live on my own because I was only working part time while attending school.  I was afraid to move back in with my parents because it would injure my pride.  I moved in with him against my parents' wishes and they continually disapproved of him, so I had spent my whole relationship with him defending my choice to be with him.  It made it very difficult for someone as proud as me to come back to my parents and say that I was wrong, can I  please have my old room back?

Fortunately, our roommate decided to move out because he couldn't stand our nightly fights.  Without him, we did not make enough money to keep the apartment, according to our lease agreement, so we got evicted.  I could move back in with my parents under the excuse that we had to move out but couldn't find anywhere else to live in the short time we had to vacate.  My parents said that I could come back home, but I would not get my old room back - my sister took it because it was bigger, &  I would have her old room - and absolutely he could NOT move in their house with me.  I accepted those terms and managed to escape by blaming my parents and the departing roommate.  We couldn't move in with his parents because his parents hated me as much as my parents hated him, and I somehow managed to not find any other apartments that would have us before our move-out deadline approached.

That solved the nightly sexual assault problem, but I still had to figure out how to break up with him.  Once I was away from him, all my property was safe, and I had a place to sleep without him in it, I found my bravery and I broke up with him on my birthday.  It was my gift to myself.  But that relationship taught me that even people I trusted, people I had known for years, could still sexually assault me, and that it would be seen as my own fault because agreeing to prior sexual activity is often seen as an agreement of future sexual activity.  Many people still believe that sex is an automatic part of the marriage contract.  He and I were engaged to be married, therefore I "owed" him sex, and he couldn't assault me because he had every right to expect that he could request sex of me.  I dare anyone to go what I went through and come out of that maintaining that position.


So no, not all men are a threat to all women. But all women are under a constant state of threat because that threatening man could be any one of you and we won't know who he is until it's too late. We are under that constant state of threat because some men really do behave in threatening ways, and because we are constantly reminded BY OTHER MEN that this could happen to us someday. We are also told that the only solution to these kinds of threats is to monitor OURSELVES to make sure we do not do something that might provoke an attack.

To those guys who are totally non-threatening in all cases, all the time, with every woman and in every situation, I do understand that it sucks to be thought of as a threat by women when you have done nothing to deserve that assumption - really, I do. But please forgive me if I'm just a little less concerned with your dilemma when the worst that happens to you is that women cross the street to avoid you, when the worst that could happen to me is that I get killed, beaten, and raped - and if I'm lucky, it'll happen in that order.

If you want to see the automatic fear removed from women's eyes simply because of your gender, you'll join in the chorus of female voices demanding that the rape culture be ended. Because a woman making that demand is often dismissed as a shrill, man-hating shrew by those very men who most need to change. But other men who disapprove of rape culture offer a much higher social penalty for those men than women whom we have already established those men don't respect. I suspect that I would like to see the day when I do not have to automatically suspect someone of potential threat just for his genitals even more than you would like to see the day when you are not automatically suspsected by someone of potential threat just for your genitals, so your public support of ending rape culture would be very much appreciated by all except those few who stand to benefit from it.


***UPDATE***

Anyone who wants to dismiss the use of the phrase "rape culture" would do well to follow Rebecca Watson and see what kind of shitstorm her mild request has started.  Keep in mind that she never called the elevator guy a rapist, never compared her situation with the horrors of Muslim women or any other third world society, never said anything about "all men".  She only said this was annoying, so "guys don't do that". 

For this, she is being accused of being a man-hating bitch, an attention-seeking whore, and she has been flooded with rape and murder threats.  She has posted a few screen captures in her various online feeds.  Guys who think that my experiences above are rare have never tried being a female on the internet.  

Rebecca didn't even post one of my angry rants.  She just said, "guys, don't do that".  That's it.  It IS annoying to have spent all day talking about how many women don't like to get hit on at atheist conventions, to have just left a group of people, telling them how tired you are, to have someone in that group who heard you say how tired you are and how you want to go up to bed now detach himself from the group, follow you into an elevator, where you are alone in a foreign country at 4 AM, and then ask you to come back to his room.  Frankly, I think she handled it with much more aplomb than I would have.

But the reaction to her using this situation as an example was so much more severe than either the original offense or her response to it.  A "rape culture" is one where its members, male or female, think it is perfectly acceptable to trap a woman alone and proposition her.  A "rape culture" is one where it's members, male or female, think it is perfectly acceptable to respond to her offense by threatening to rape her at the next convention.  A "rape culture" is one where its members, male or female, think a line like "I'm totally going to cop a feel on @RebeccaWatson at the next con" is humorous and an acceptable joke.  A "rape culture" is one where its members, male or female, feel justified in sending messages that say "I want to drug you and fuck you" to ANYONE, but especially to a woman who has just made it clear that this is offensive behaviour.

I get that men can be in abusive relationships too.  I've written plenty about that.  There's no excuse for abuse, no matter what gender to what gender.  But there are very few men out there who have to put up with the sheer volume of "just words" that Richard Dawkins seems to think are so harmless.  If I could make these men experience what it's like to be a woman, not for a day or a week, but a lifetime of harassment, I guarantee that they would not find "just words" to be such a minor crime, or that "rape culture" is such an offensive phrase.  Rape culture harms everyone, not just women, and it's not just men who commit the crimes and offenses.  All reasonable, thinking women understand that.  It's only a certain group of men who are reading sexism into the word "rape" who think that the phrase applies only to men as perpetrators and all women as victims.  Rape, abuse, molestation, fear, these apply to everyone and they should apply to no one.

I still have no time - unusually busy beginning of summer, but I have a few posts written up from a while ago that I haven't posted yet, so I may post those in the upcoming weeks until I get more free time.

Until then, here's an article reminding us all that HPV causes more than just cervical cancer.  The article focuses on women, and reminds us to insist on full healthcare treatment if we do show a positive HPV test.  Don't stop at the cervix, HPV can, and does, show up in oral tissue and anal tissue.  

 This post is really not important at all, so feel free to skip it.  It's just another chapter in my Me Manual - the collection of posts that tell friends & prospective lovers important things about me - important mainly to people who have to interact with me and who want a pleasant experience and/or are hoping to contribute to the things that make me happy.  This post is all about my favorite foods, which nobody will care about except those who want to eat meals with me and might have a vested interest in choosing something I would especially like.

( REALLY long post about food )

I've been extremely busy lately, with work & prepping for various trips & attending conferences.  My latest trip was out to CA to see my younger sister graduate college.  This was only a month after learning of my godmother's murder, who lives in the same town.  While there, I visited my godsister (my godmother's daughter) & drove by the house where my godmother was killed.  I learned some more information about the event while there that I wanted to document before I forget it.

The woman who killed my godmother was named Leticia Daisy Martinez.  She was 28 years old, had 4 young children, and had a blood alcohol level of almost double the legal limit at 9:30 AM on a Sunday morning.  She had a suspended drivers license and she was driving an SUV with 3 passengers.

( The full story and my ramblings and rantings about it )There is no excuse for drunk driving.

From Senator Marco Rubio Do_Not_Reply@rubio.senate.gov
to Mrs. D.
date Thu, May 5, 2011 at 6:09 PM
subject Responding to your message
mailed-by rubio.senate.gov
signed-by senate.gov
Dear Mrs. D,

Thank you for taking the time to write to me about federal funding for Planned Parenthood. I understand this is an important issue and I appreciate hearing your thoughts.

Floridians are concerned about the severity of our country's unsustainable $14 trillion debt, and as your elected representative, I have made a commitment to reduce government spending. With a projected deficit of $1.65 trillion for this year alone, every piece of the federal budget needs to be a part of the conversation of how to cut spending and lower the national deficit. We must withdraw our spending commitments to Planned Parenthood, as well as other organizations, in order to develop a long-term budget solution that will seriously address the economic problems facing Florida and our nation.

Again, thank you for contacting me about this matter. I look forward to any views or input you wish to share in the future

http://www.figo.org/news/hiv-drug-could-avert-cervical-cancer-003611

We haven't heard much new about HPV over the last several months. Mostly, it's been minor news about specifically which category of person the FDA has approved to take the various HPV vaccines (girls and boys under 30, but not over 30) or new home test kits that haven't yet made it to market.

Reminder: the vaccine being "approved" for a certain category doesn't mean those not in that category CAN'T take it, it means that the company can't make any claims of successful treatment for those categories, and, consequently, many insurance plans won't cover it for those category.   The current evidence suggests that efficacy is decreased with age (because of likely previous exposure), but not eliminated.  So if you have the cash but are not in the "approved" category, I still recommend you find a doctor to give it to you "off-label" (which is completely legal).

Anyway, while testing an anti-HIV drug, researchers discovered that a drug called Lopinavir actually kills HPV-infected, pre-cancerous cells while leaving uninfected adjoining cells alone.

This could be extremely exciting news if it follows through on its promises and scales up to humans. So far, this drug works in petri dishes on actual human HPV-infected cells that have not yet turned cancerous but are the closest thing to pre-cancerous. In order to work on HPV, the cells require 15 times more drug than the HIV-infected cells, so this will not be available in pill form, but researchers speculate that a topical cream could deliver the appropriate dose.

At the moment, the US has a backwards system, in part because of the awesome work that was done in the past with making female reproductive health care such a priority. Currently, women get a pap smear done, which is collecting cells directly from the cervix and then looking at them under a microscope to see if there are any abnormal ones. Then, if there are, several tests are done to figure out why they are abnormal and if that abnormality is bad, including an HPV DNA test. The research community believe this is the wrong order, but the medical practice community is slow to change (partly because of financial concerns) with the newly available HPV tests.

The research community thinks that we should be having the HPV DNA test done first, to see who is even at risk for cervical cancer, and then when we have determined who actually has HPV, those women would go on a frequent pap smear schedule to watch for changes in the cervix, so they can be treated immediately, while those without HPV can go on a longer pap smear schedule (like HPV-infected women get paps every year or 6 months and women without HPV get them every 2 or 3 years, for example).

Then, with this new drug, should it pan out, instead of bothering with frequent pap smears, women who test positive for HPV DNA could just get the cream, kill all the affected cells, do another DNA test to make sure it's gone, then go back to the more infrequent schedule.

Paps would still be important, however, because HPV is responsible for something like 70% of all cervical cancers and is now the leading cause of oral cancers (thanks to smoking dropping in popularity), but that still leaves 30% of cancers that are not caused by HPV (I may have my percentages wrong, but the point is the same - some cancers are not caused by HPV).  And it is our collective access to pap smears & LEEP procedures that make the mortality rate of cervical cancer so very low in this country (no thanks to the GOP defunding Planned Parenthood).  

Tell Congress to Vote "No" on HR 3. Don't attack women's health and threaten women's lives.  Please send a letter (pre-written, edit, or write your own) to Congress using this form to contact your representatives, even if you don't know who they are: http://bit.ly/stop_hr3

---

----- Original Message -----
From: Representative Daniel Webster
Sent: 05/04/11 03:22 PM
Subject: Responding to your message

May 4, 2011

Dear Joreth,

Thank you for sharing your opinion regarding the sanctity of life and specifically your thoughts about H.R. 3.

The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, H.R. 3, was introduced by Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ-7), on January 20, 2011. The purpose of this bill is to ensure that American tax revenues are not used to provide abortion services. This legislation has been referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and the Committee on Ways and Means for further consideration.

The right to life is one of three unalienable rights, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, which are promised to all individuals in the Declaration of Independence. I believe these rights extend to unborn children as well, and that the right to life is our first given right. I firmly believe and stated last fall, that I would oppose any use of tax dollars to promote or perform abortions or to support organizations that promote or perform abortions. While we may disagree on this very personal issue, I am sure that there are many other issues on which we will agree.

Again, I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with me. I am honored to serve the people of Florida's 8th Congressional District as your representative in the United States Congress.

Your Servant,

Daniel Webster
Member of Congress

---

Then not only have you lost my vote, I will be actively campaigning against you in all future voting issues to ensure others do not vote for you or your positions.

You most certainly do not "serve" me or any other woman.

~"Joreth"
Voter

It was a bright and clear morning - cool but not too cold. A tall, elderly woman went into her front yard to do some gardening. She sent her grandson back into the house to fetch something for her. From inside the house, her daughter and grandson heard one of the most terrifying sounds they would ever hear. Out front, a car careened around the corner, over the curb, and into the yard where the woman was gardening. The car hit the woman, killed her, smashed the front of the house, backed out of the yard, continued down the street, hit another person in their front yard, and kept going until the driver was caught some ways down the road.

The elderly woman in this story was my godmother. The bright and clear morning was today.

When my parents were first married, they traveled from my mother's home state to California to start their lives together. Shortly after relocating, they met John and Diana, a couple who were seeking renters for some of their rental properties. My parents were seeking a home to rent. Over the years, John and Diana became friends, mentors, confidents, and family. They became second parents to my mom and dad. They were there when my parents brought me home from the hospital. They babysat me while my parents went to the hospital to bring my sister home. They were there for every major milestone and many minor events.

I remember being a very young child and looking forward to Friday nights when John and Diana would come over to sit around my parents' kitchen table while my mom made giant bowls of popcorn and melted butter on the stove for everyone and I got to sit at the grown-up table and talk to grown-ups who cared what I had to say. Diana would tell my mother that I had piano fingers and she encouraged me when I wanted to learn to play. She would tell anyone who would listen about how I taught myself how to read at age 3, repeating the story of going to a local store with me where I would spell out the name of the store from the big neon sign over the door. Everything I wanted to do, Diana supported me wholeheartedly, unreservedly, proud and positive that I could accomplish anything I set my mind to, including the time I announced that I would be trekking across the country in an old converted school bus to a state I had never visited, with no job and no place to live waiting for me. She was my biggest supporter.

When her grandson was born and it was clear that he was developmentally challenged, Diana helped her daughter to raise her grandson, sitting up with him at night when he was sick, tirelessly working with him on his unique challenges, relentlessly offering her love and support to assist him in becoming the best person he could be. When her daughter had her own medical issues, Diana took up the slack to assist her daughter in addition to her assistance in raising her grandson. When her husband had a stroke, she nursed him, first from his bedside, and then from his chairside, until he was able to move around on his own again. When he eventually died, she continued caring for her family and managing their home and properties.

Diana was a singularly amazing woman. She loved unconditionally and without reservation. She gave of herself with seeming bottomless reserves. She helped the homeless, she cared for her family, she even helped her neighbor's children manage the estate when the neighbor passed away. And in one morning, all that was taken away by a single, careless decision. All that she gave the world is forever gone by a senseless, preventable action.

It's hard enough to lose a loved one to illness. Long and lingering or quick and unexpected, death from illness is painful and tragic. But it is nothing compared to losing a loved one due to another's stupidity.

When my sister called me today to tell me about Diana, she got my voicemail at first because I had poor cell reception when she called. I listened to my sister's flat voice tell me that she had bad news about Diana. I knew by that tone, the same one that notified me about John's death, and both of my grandfathers' deaths, and my aunt's death, that the bad news would be fatal. But Diana was a senior, whose husband had already died. She was not so ill that I was expecting her death, but she was also not so hale and hearty that the idea was a complete shock either. I felt sad, but I prepared myself to hear how she had a heart attack or a stroke or something of that nature. I railed against death claiming another loved one, but in a resigned sort of can't-escape-it way.

Then my sister called me again and this time the call got through. I walked outside of the restaurant where I was spending the afternoon with friends, to hear better. She began to tell the story much the way I started the story above. I braced myself to hear "and while she was gardening, she clutched her chest and fell over". Instead, what I heard was "a drunk driver hit her in the front yard."

I stood stock still and blinked several times, as if I had misheard and had to rewind and replay that last sentence in my mind. I think I gasped and then held my breath. But I'm not entirely sure. The idea of my godmother's body giving out on her is a horrible, saddening idea. But the knowledge that her life was taken from her was so much worse. Even the idea of having an accident, like slipping and falling, that's tragic but still pales in comparison to the reality of her murder.

Yes, I said murder. The sweetest, most caring, most supportive woman I've ever known was killed in cold blood for no better reason than some fucking bitch was drunk on a Sunday morning and thought she could operate a motor vehicle. There is no "good" reason for someone's death. But there are some reasons that are more senseless than others.

That ... woman ... made a choice. She chose to drink alcohol. She chose to get behind the wheel of a car. She believed that she had enough control of her faculties to safely drive. Alcohol impairs our ability to function at peak efficiency. Part of that impairment is the inability to accurately assess just how impaired our senses are. No one who has ever killed someone from drunk driving ever got behind the wheel and said "I'm really too drunk to drive and I'm likely to kill someone, but I'm going to do it anyway." Everyone who has ever taken the life of another person because they were too impaired to prevent it believed that they had better control than they did.

Anyone who has ever driven while under the influence of alcohol ... fuck you. Anyone who has ever said "Yes, I've been drinking, but I'm fine, I can drive" ... fuck you. How DARE those people treat the lives of others so callously. How DARE they put their own convenience ahead of someone else's life. Next time you choose to drink alcohol, I want you to think about this story. I want you to picture Diana, a tall, thin woman with short grey hair, who volunteers for her church and who donates food to the local homeless shelter and who cares for everyone she ever came in contact with. I want you to picture her daughters and her grandchildren who rely on her care and support. And I want you to feel overwhelming guilt. I don't want to hear "but I would never drive THAT impaired! I know my limits and I can tell." Bullshit. That's what that bitch who killed my godmother thought.

And that woman is damned lucky I live 3,000 miles away. Because if I ever meet her, I will beat her unconscious, then stand over her until she regains consciousness, and then beat the shit out of her again. I hope she's wracked with guilt for the rest of her life, and I hope she suffers. She can't possibly suffer enough to make up for what she did. The world is a darker place without Diana's light shining in it.

UPDATE
http://www.sjpd.org/iNews/viewPressRelease.asp?ID=569 - that bitch's mug shot
http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_17975135?nclick_check=1 - article about the murder

Bluegenes doesn't think you're worth the effort! He actually said so - in public! Sounds like a GREAT catch, doesn't he?

Seriously. My most recent journal post was some simple advice for how to write a first contact email. The bottom line was to READ THE PROFILE and then write a unique email that referenced things from the profile to show that you read it. That's it. Nothing more fancy than that. In fact, I had a much longer list of things NOT to do.

Then this jackass came along and said that reading a profile & commenting on things you had in common was too much work.

Yes, he said too much work. That's not a paraphrase, you can see it if you read the comments in the post just below this one in my journal.

So, basically, you are not worth the effort of getting to know. All that time you put into writing your profile to make sure it reflected you accurately but positively, to highlight your areas of interest, to weed out people who are obviously incompatible, none of that was worth ANYTHING. You do not matter, you are not important. You are just a body with tits that Bluegenes feels entitled to. He expects you to put forth all the effort when he can't even be bothered to take a few minutes to read the profile to see if you're even available or interested in the same things he is.

I bet his partners feel all sorts of important and special. Or, wait, I got that mixed up. Neglected, ignored, and UNimportant. Sorry, that's what I meant.

(Now see, if he had read my profile, he would have known this is how I would respond and he could have avoided this whole thing by just walking away. The whole POINT of online dating is the profile. Otherwise, go pick up someone in a bar - it's just as random as hitting on women based on their pictures without reading the profile.)

cross-posted at http://www.okcupid.com/profile/Joreth/journal/8331765305174442110/Hey-Ladies...

Based on the flood of First Contact emails I get on OKCupid and other dating sites, and based on the numerous responses from other women to my public responses of these First Contact emails, I'm going to assume that there are hoards of men out there who have absolutely no idea how to approach a woman on an online dating site.  So I've developed this handy little guide to help you all out.

First of all, let me preface this with a disclaimer that should be obvious, but, according to my inbox, is not:  WE ARE NOT ALL THE SAME PERSON.  How we each prefer to be treated, what we want, and what we like is all very individual, and you ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT make an assumption that, because we all have similar plumbing,  you can treat us the same way.

With that said, however, there is a "safer" approach - a way to contact a woman that has the fewest pitfalls, least number of opportunities to stick your foot in your mouth, and is least offensive to the most number of women.  After you have gotten to know her on an individual level, you can tailor your approach to her individual likes and dislikes.  For instance, if she likes to be complimented, you can do so AFTER you have discovered that she does, in fact, like to be complimented.  But not before.

So, with that, the Safe Guideline* To First Contact Emails:

---

Dear [username],

I came across your profile, and, after reading it, I noticed that we have ____ in common. How long have you been interested in ____? What got you interested in ___? I got into ____ by _____.

I also see that you are opposed to ____. Can you tell me why? I have never heard of that before.

It looks like you enjoy ____. That's great! If you like ____, then you might enjoy ____, have you heard of it/them/him/her?

You indicate on your profile that you would like to learn more about ____. I happen to know a bit about ____. It's _____. Can I answer any questions about it for you?

You seem like a ____, ____, _____ person and I would like talk more with you, if you are interested. I hope to hear from you when you get a chance.

Sincerely,
[name or user name]


Whatever you do, do not do the following:

1) Do not skip reading her profile.
2) Do not compliment her on her looks. At all.
3) Do not skip reading her profile.
4) Do not insult her.
5) Do not attempt "backhanded compliments" like in those pickup artist handbooks.
6) Do not give her advice about how to make her profile better.
7) Do not skip reading her profile.
8) Do not offer any sexual activity.
9) Do not send her pictures of your cock.
10) Do not presume to know how she feels if she hasn't outright said how she feels.
11) Do not skip reading her profile.
12) Do not waste your time contacting her if you do not like what she has to say in her profile. If you don't like her, move on.
13) Do not send her the same letter you've sent anyone else.
14) Do not send her a letter that says "I like movies", "I like music", or "I like hanging out". Tell her WHICH movies, music, or what you do when you hang out.
15) Do not skip reading her profile.
16) Do not write a letter that has only 1 or 2 sentences in it.
17) Do not use "netspeak" like "ur" - this is email, not SMS.
18) Do not request a phone call or in-person meetup until you have RECEIVED at least 3 positive responses from her.
19) Do not skip reading her profile.
20) Do not get pissy if she doesn't respond back, or if she responds with a rejection. You are not entitled to her acceptance. Just be glad you dodged that bullet and move on.

---

*This letter is a guideline, not a form. Do not copy it word for word. That's too close to violating #13. READ her profile and adapt the suggestions to fit what she actually says in the profile. If she already explains why she is interested in  ____ then you don't need to ask her why she is interested in  _____.

Cross-posted at http://www.okcupid.com/profile/Joreth/journal/17740670489198668865/Safe-Guideline-To-First-Contact-Emails

 Yes, spammers, I have noticed you posting anonymous comments in really old posts.  Your superficial, generic, and vague "compliments" on my posts do not blind me to the fact that you also posted a URL to some unrelated website that collects credit card numbers, phishes for email addresses, and installs cookies & spyware.  I am not so easily won over by flattery that I completely lose my intelligence.  Does that tactic ever work for anyone?

Your comments are deleted without ever seeing the light of day and your ip addresses are logged.

I wandered around the ballroom, feeling sleepy and bored, waiting for my crew chief to give me a job to do but not really wanting him to come up with anything because I was too sleepy to really be in the mood for work that day. A few yards away, several of my coworkers, including those in my own department, were also not doing anything.  Instead, they were standing in a circle, having an animated conversation. I saw John, Phil, and Jim, and a few others who looked like they were peripherally aware of the conversation, but not actively a part of it.

As I got closer John said "Here, let's get a female perspective & ask Joreth."

"Because we're all the same person and have exactly the same perspective. Go ahead, what's the question?"

"No," John said, "I know you're not all the same person, but you're more like them than like a man."

"You obviously don't know me very well," I said.

"Well, ok, whatever, do you like roller coasters?" John said.

"Yes, I love roller coasters, why?" I said.

"Because I have this girl I want to take out on a date and I wondered if Busch Gardens was a good date place?" John said.

Phil jumped in with "I say yes, because they've done studies, and when girls get afraid, they get aroused, and they like to hug on you and be all protected and stuff."

"Yep," I said. "That works GREAT ... for those it works great for. It's a TERRIBLE idea for those girls it doesn't work for. Problem is, you don't know which one she is until you do. I have a novel idea, why don't you ask her if she likes theme parks?"

"Because girls never tell you what they like, they always say 'oh, I like whatever you like' and they want you to take charge and be in control," Phil said.

"Have we met?" I asked. "I don't know a single girl like that. I'm sure they exist, but my point is, again, that we're not all the same person and you have to treat a woman how SHE wants to be treated, and you don't know what that is until you ASK her."

From there, ensued a discussion that involved rising voices and everyone talking over each other, as each of the guys tried to insist that there was a One Right Way to treat women that all involved being "a gentleman", and I tried to explain that being a "gentleman" actually defeated the purpose if the intended recipient didn't actually like that particular behaviour.

"But men are supposed to hold open doors for women and stuff, that's how I was raised and it's a cultural thing." John said.

"I HATE it when men hold open doors for women only and not men. It is most definitely NOT polite, it's insulting and obnoxious. I actually had a guy run from down the street, tripping someone else, in his effort to beat me to the door so he could hold it open for me, but he was on the wrong side, so I would have had to walk under his arm, and he was blocking the people trying to come OUT through those doors. That's stupid and it is no longer a nice gesture when you inconvenience everyone else around you just because you're 'supposed to' do something," I said.

"Well, then I'll know from now on to treat you like a dude," John said, offering me a fist-bump.

"How about you treat me like a human being?" I asked.

"No," insisted Phil, "you're supposed to do these things. Like, when I'm walking down the street, I'll put the lady on the inside, to protect her from cars and stuff."

"I absolutely, fricking HATE that," I said.

"No, it's nice!" Phil said. "Like when you walk with a 5 year old, you put the child to the inside to protect him."

Blink blink.

"You seriously don't see anything wrong with treating an adult woman like a child?" I asked.

"No." Phil said. "It's to show her that I care about her that I want to protect her."

"You put the child to the inside because the child doesn't know any better not to run out into traffic. Putting the woman on the inside & comparing it to the child is implying that she also doesn't know any better and needs you to keep her from running into traffic. You can't see how this is insulting?" I demanded.

"If I let a woman walk on the outside, a Latin dude would think I'm offering her up as a hooker. But if I walk on the outside, the Latin dude will approve and know that I'm protecting her," Phil tried to explain (He's Puerto Rican).

"I don't give a fuck what some random Latin dude thinks, the person you should be concerned about is the woman you are insulting," I said.

This is why I'm bitchy. I'm sick of being treated like a child for the guy's approval rating in the eyes of other guys.

Why the fuck is this concept so difficult to grasp? Is it really so complicated to understand that a gesture of politeness or concern should be based on what the RECIPIENT wants, and not what makes the GIVER feel better, and that the way to find out what the recipient might like is to fucking ASK them what they might like?  Don't answer that, I already know the answer and it's too depressing.

"If I ask my girl what she wants, she'll just say she doesn't know," John said, trying to bring the conversation back to the original topic.

"Well then it's her own fucking fault if she doesn't get what she wants, isn't it?" I said.

"Forget it," John said, "I'm not asking you about girls anymore, I'm going back to what the guys say".

So, apparently, the trick to figuring out the "opposite sex", is to poll all your friends of the incorrect gender, ask one random person of the same gender to be representative of that entire gender, and then throw out all the answers that don't confirm your original presumption.

I've had enough chauvenistic sexism for one day.

I have been asked by several people what they should know on their first visit to a public dungeon, what to wear, and what the dungeon etiquette was.  So I decided I should write up a post with these very answers.  This is for people who have never, ever been to a dungeon or fetish club or public play party of any sort, and who have no experience at all with the kink community or scene, and who wish to attend a fetish event to learn more without offending or insulting anyone, or embarrassing themselves:

---

First, I recommend visiting http://www.xeromag.com/fvbdsm.html and http://www.symtoys.com for ideas, suggestions, tutorials, and explanations of all manner of kinky things.

If you're in the area, I very highly recommend visiting The Woodshed in Orlando. It's the best dungeon I've ever attended, anywhere. They have a website at http://www.thewoodshedorlando.com and they also have a group on Fetlife.

One of the good things about The 'Shed is that there is no dress code. You can come dressed however you want (as long as it's legal between the car and the door). As you get more comfortable and begin to build your kink persona and learn your interests, you can develop your own kinky attire over time.

If you have absolutely no clothing that counts as "kinky" or you have absolutely no idea, but want to dress "appropriately", wearing solid black in whatever you have is usually a safe bet. There is a fetish for everything, so even if the only solid black you have is conservative, office-safe business attire, that will still fit in. In fact, prim & proper, conservative business attire is its own fetish even if it's not in solid black! Red and black is another popular combination, as is purple & black, and silver and black.

When you go to other clubs, they often have more stringent dress codes, and hopefully their website should tell you what that is. Usually, jeans are not allowed, even black jeans. Military clothing is usually allowed, and can be found in camouflage or solid black at almost any Army/Navy store. I often wear black BDUs (the military cargo pants) because they don't look like fetish wear when I have to be in public, they're comfortable, and they're affordable.

Then, depending on whether you become a top or a bottom (definitions at the end), and what style of kink you find suits you best, you may want to look into some leather or latex clothing later on. Some men like to wear kilts and combat boots, some men wear leather pants and vests, some men wear women's clothes, some men wear normal but dressy clothing like slacks, button-up shirts, ties, vests, etc. Women wear sexy nightclub wear, leather pants and dresses, latex, mens' clothing, uniforms, and lingerie (just make sure to wear some form of cover-up if you go that route). Fairvilla, in Orlando, is the best adult store around and has a modest "kink-light" section upstairs with leather and other fetish clothing. JT Stockroom has more hardcore clothing, as does Extreme Restraints. Don't spend a lot of money until you become comfortable with the kink culture and have begun to develop your fetish tastes. Fetish gear & clothing can be quite expensive, so hold off on that for a while. You can also go nude if you're feeling particularly brave!

(P.S. I realize the above paragraph was gender-binary.  Even if people are on a gender spectrum, clothing is not - there is either male, female, or unisex clothing (which is usually just "male" clothing that is acceptable for women to wear), so people of alternate gender identities may still arrive in one of the common fetish outfits described above.  I attempted to highlight some of the most common, perhaps cliche, outfits, to give a new person some direction to go in if they choose to put together a fetish outfit, either from their own wardrobe or from a store (particularly if the club they are attending has a dress code) and to give them things to look for in other people's outfits as ideas when they start to build their own kinky wardrobe.  This is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of fetish attire, nor a recommendation that newbies go out and build a wardrobe before their first club attendance.  Notice the first sentence "depending on whether you become ... may want to look into ... later on")

But if you attend The Woodshed first, you can just go there in regular clothing and look around and just see what's out there. Tell them that you're new and ask for a tour and some guidance. Their staff is more than happy to assist and introduce new people to the club and to other people.

As far as etiquette goes, the rule of thumb is "if you don't know, ask." Ask people if they would mind explaining something to you that you don't understand or would like to learn more about. If someone is wearing a collar, ask them if you are allowed to speak to them or if they have a Dom that you should speak to first. Be clear that you are asking about the appropriate method - do not assume, or imply that you are assuming, that someone with a collar should not be talked to - only some submissives use that particular protocol.

When someone is in a "scene", that is, when someone is actually using some of the furniture in the club, or flogging someone, or tying someone up, or otherwise interacting with someone in any way other than just talking, do not interrupt. If you're not sure if someone is in a scene and you want to talk to that person, ask someone else if it would be appropriate or not.

Many places are a lot more strict than the Woodshed, they have a lot more rules, or they are, what's called, "strict protocol". That's another reason why I recommend the 'Shed first - it's much more relaxed and it's OK if you don't know the rules yet or what things mean.

For your very first visit, I do not recommend actually playing with anyone at all, even your partner. If you have never been to a club or dungeon at all before, make your first visit an observation visit. If the owner or a staff member offers to show you something, you might want to agree to an instruction or tutorial, but I recommend saving the actual playing until after you have had time to process your feelings and reactions to being in a public dungeon, and perhaps even after you have been to a workshop or instructional panel and learned some of the safety issues involved in whatever style of play you are interested in trying.

Playing in public has a very different feel from playing privately, and you may be surprised by your reaction to the idea of playing publicly, so try to spread out the number of emotional surprises and don't do too much in any single visit, especially your first.

Also, you will want to learn more about how to negotiate a scene before you actually try it. Just because someone is a regular dungeon attendee, and even if they have other play partners, that doesn't mean that they have scene-negotiating skills. People can be participants in kink for many years and still never develop good communication or negotiation skills. You don't want to have to process your first exposure to all this kink stuff, PLUS trying to negotiate a scene for your first time, PLUS whatever emotions pop up from playing in public, PLUS whatever emotions pop up from the scene itself, all on the first visit.

Agree to exchange contact information or set up a negotiation date if you happen to meet someone who seems interesting and you want to try playing with them. If they seem pushy about trying to get you to play right then and do not want to set up a future date, it's probably in your best interest not to play with them at all. Someone who is good with first-timers will understand the need to move slowly and take things one step at a time, and they will be willing to play with you at some future event if they are interested in playing/teaching at all.

**ADDED**
More etiquette:  

Flirting in a sexually-charged atmosphere is tricky and filled with landmines.  Some people think it's entirely appropriate to flirt, hit on, or pick up people they meet in fetish clubs, and some people get really offended, and there is no clear, accepted-by-everyone definition for the words "flirt", "hit on", or "pick up".  So, until you have spent some time in your particular local venue and have learned the local customs and etiquette, start here.  These guidelines are not intended to be permanent or concrete rules - if your local venue has a different set of etiquette, switch to that.  These guidelines are meant as the *safest* approach for when you do not know the local atmosphere:

Do not offer compliments on physical appearance until you have clearly established that the recipient of your compliment appreciates them from *you* (some people only like compliments from people they know).  If you simply cannot restrain yourself, limit your compliments to their attire or accessories (in this case, tattoos, piercings, restraints, rope-work, etc. all count as "accessories") - things that the recipient had some control over and made deliberate decisions about.  After you have determined that the recipient appreciates compliments on his or her appearance from you, you can discard this guideline *with that person*.

Do not make sexually suggestive comments until you have had some sort of conversation with the person, where they seem interested in you.  It is not always easy to tell when someone "seems interested in you", and oftentimes, signals get mis-read.  This will happen, and when it does, just apologize and try not to do it again.  But even if someone is "making eyes" at you from across the room, talk to that person first and get to know a little about them (at least, in the context of the venue) before suggesting, even in jest, that they accompany you in some sexual or fetish-related activity.  

Also, people usually like it when you look them in the face while talking to them.  I know there are lots of neat outfits and nudity in fetish clubs, but when actually having a conversation with someone, focus on their face if you're not referring to something specific in the room.

Do not make derisive or negative comments about other guests' appearance or their activities, even if they are not your preferred "type".  If you must, save those comments for when you get home.  While you're at it, attempt to control your facial expressions so that you do not make obvious expressions of disgust or horror.  If you are put off by the people or the activities in the club, leave.  But also know that there are other clubs with other atmospheres and what you see in this club is not necessarily indicative of BDSM everywhere.  It may not even be indicative of that particular club if you are attending on a theme night or there is a particular guest who is not a regular.  There are a LOT of different kinds of people and activities covered under the umbrella of BDSM, and no one will be into every single aspect of that.  If you see something that is not for you, don't worry, there will probably be something else that you will like better.

Do not arrive under the influence of drugs or alcohol.  Some clubs have a strict policy against that.  Other clubs sell or offer alcohol there, so you can "fix" your sobriety after you arrive if you must.  It is my personal opinion that all BDSM activities, which have an element of danger or risk, should be performed sober anyway, but if a club offers alcohol while on the premises, I leave the responsibility in their hands.

Do not assume any consent.  ALWAYS ask for clear consent, for clarification if you are unsure, and permission (remember, this is for newbies - if you already have a partner for whom the issue of consent has been pre-established, this does not apply to you).  This is a big issue with people who tend towards the dominant end of the spectrum.  Even if you have established that you will take a dominant position over another guest, it does not hurt your authority to ask "may I?" before beginning.  It also does not hurt your authority to check in with your play partner throughout the scene, or the event if you are not scening, to ask how he or she is doing and if they want to continue.

Do not assume you have to give consent.  You may reject any offer and any person, for any reason and at any time, even in the middle of a scene.  If someone offers to play with you, you are not obligated to accept.  If you already have accepted but have changed your mind, you are not obligated to continue.

Here are just a few visual signals you might see and what they often mean:

Collars - This often, but not always, means that a person is "collared", or "belongs" to someone. Someone wearing a collar or a choker is usually a bottom or a submissive, and probably has an "owner" of some sort. If their collar has a ring for a leash on it (or the leash itself) then they are more likely to belong to someone. Although some people just like how the collars look, and a top or a Dom might wear a collar that does not have a ring if they like the look of a collar. If someone is wearing a collar, especially if it has a ring on it, and you want to talk to them, ask them if you are allowed to speak to them directly or if you need to ask someone else permission first.

Boots - A person wearing boots, either male or female, is often (not always) a top or a Dominant. The exception is when the boots are especially constrictive, such as boots that chain together or boots that force the foot into an extremely pointed position like a ballerina on point. I will often wear boots just to keep aggressive Doms away even on nights that I plan to play as a bottom.

Bare Feet - Someone who is barefoot is often (not always) a bottom or a sub. The more vulnerable skin that is exposed (i.e. bottoms of feet, backs of legs, butts, backs), the more likely that person is to be someone who receives floggings, spankings, to be tied up, or is someone's slave or property.

Armbands - this is the most common symbol for a Dungeon Master or Dungeon Moderator and will usually say "staff" or "DM" on it. These are the staff members of the club who are here to answer your questions and make sure that everyone is playing safely and abiding by the rules of the club. Some staff members have staff shirts, but some prefer to dress in their own kinky attire, and will have an armband around their arm, or tucked into their waistband like those strips of fabric used in "flag football". Keep an eye out for these people and go to them if you have any questions.  If the club that you attend does not use armbands, ask what identification the staff does wear so you can recognize them easily.

Some definitions of terms used here:

• Top - One who administers some form of stimulation, such as spankings, floggings, or some other kind of stimulation on another person but does not have psychological control or power over that person  
• Dominant / Dom / Domme - A person who assumes a role of power or authority in a power exchange relationship. A dominant takes psychological control over or has power over another person, and may, for example, give that person orders which are to be obeyed.  
• Bottom - A person who receives spankings, floggings, or other forms of stimulation in situations which specifically exclude power exchange. For example, a masochist may be interested in receiving some kind of stimulation but may not be interested in giving up psychological control; whereas a submissive has given up authority and may receive some kind of stimulation on the instruction of a dominant, a bottom does not give up authority and may control exactly how, under what circumstances, and to what degree he or she receives some form of stimulation.  
• Submissive / Sub / Subbie - One who assumes a role of submission in a power exchange relationship. A submissive is a person who seeks a position of or occupies a role of intentional, consensual powerlessness, allowing another person to take control over him or her.  
• Flogging - using an implement consisting of a handle with several tails or lashes, usually made of leather but sometimes of other materials as well.  
• Spanking - smacking someone with an open hand or a flat, hard object like a paddle.
• Protocol - Any defined, enforced code of behavior by which a submissive is expected to abide. A protocol often imposes constraints and limits on the submissive's behavior, particularly in social settings; for example, a protocol may specify that a submissive is not to speak to another person without the dominant's permission, may not speak unless spoken to, and so on.

 No time!

Quick update - the AIM foundation is the organization that provides HIV testing & other sexual health services, primarily for the porn industry, but was open to the public as well.  They were single-handedly responsible for catching 2 HIV scares before it was spread throughout the industry and are the driving force behind the ridiculously high level of safety for the industry.  Their basic strategy is that porn producers opt-in to their testing services, then the actors are required to get tested every 30 days (the HIV test has only a 2-week window, which means it's accurate up until 2 weeks prior to the test), and a recent clean HIV test result must be submitted to the producer before an actor can work.

They also set up the system so that the *producers* get the results directly from AIM, to eliminate the possibility of fraudulent or forged test results from actors.

Then they track their patients.  This allowed them, in the past, to quarantine Patient Zeros, who got infected outside of work, so that the virus did not spread to other actors.  The frequent testing & open sharing of medical information has been shown to be just absurdly effective in maintaining safe working conditions even when condoms are not used (although AIM officially recommends condom use & many porn companies do voluntarily use condoms).

 Oh, wait, that's every day.

I know this isn't every guy, and I know it's not just guys, and I know this happens no matter which privileged/unprivileged group we talk about not just the genders.  But goddamn it if I don't get sick of this!

PZ Myers of pharyngula has tried on several occasions to address "the woman problem".  That's where women are underrepresented at skeptic events, so he asks the women in his blog what might get us to attend more events if we're not already attending.  Every time, he asks the men to butt out.  Every time, he tells the men that if they want to include a group of people, they should listen to what that group of people actually has to say and that responses defending whatever it is that group of people doesn't like is exactly why that group of people don't like it in the first place.  And every time, some men just can't help themselves - they jump in to presume to speak for women, and to tell the women to lighten up or to get over something or to defend whatever it is that the women in question don't like.

In other words, if you actively WANT women to attend an event, then you should ask the women what it'll take to get them to attend.  You should NOT then ask non-women to come up with ideas to attract women and you should NOT respond to "I don't want to attend an event where guys are hitting on me all the time" with "oh, lighten up, it's a compliment!".

So, when a woman who works in a women's abuse shelter posts a horrific story about an 11-year old girl who got raped ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION, and for whom 18 FUCKING MEN have so far been arrested for complicity in the rape, a 6'5", 220 lb, white, tattooed, male, martial artist who has never had to live in fear of his life simply for having a certain set of genitals has no fucking business swaggering into the thread to tell us women that the solution to the rape problem is to just learn martial arts, and to insert that if the girl hadn't been in that place at that time, then she wouldn't have been raped.

He then had the audacity to suggest that he was not blaming the victim, just pointing out a fact, and proclaim that he is for female empowerment because he has daughters himself and plans to teach them martial arts when they get older.

( Seriously, though, think I'm exaggerating or taking it out of context? ) 

I don't know if ya'll can see this if you're not on FB or not the OP's friend, but here's the link of the original thread, in case anyone wants to chime in where he can read it:

http://www.facebook.com/heidihoanderson/posts/131274646946406?

• Courage: to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
• We can't practice compassion with other people if we can't first treat ourselves kindly.
• You can't form connections without being willing to let go of who you "should" be in order to be who you are.
• Whole-hearted people are those who fully embrace vulnerability, who believe that what makes them vulnerable makes them beautiful, and that results in a strong sense of worthiness.
• Vulnerability is the core of shame, fear, struggle for worthiness. But also birthplace of joy, creativity, belonging, love.

These quotes and paraphrases are from a TEDTalk by Brene Brown on her research into vulnerability.  These sentiments remind me strongly of tacit and his approach to life.  This is how I view the world too, but it took me a while longer to get here.



http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html

Brene Brown studies human connection -- our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk at TEDxHouston, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity.

 Him: "Can love be split?"
Her: "It's not that it's cut in half. It doubles."
~My Wife Got Married

One of the biggest fears, it seems, from monogamous people faced with the possibility of polyamory is the scarcity model of love.  The idea is that love is a finite quantity that we have to give to another person.  Therefore, when someone new comes along, there will be less love for the pre-existing partner.  Oh, it's often couched in more reasonable concerns, like finite time, but when you really unpack the idea and get down to the root, it usually has to do with the idea that your partner doesn't love you enough, or as much, if he loves someone else.

There are 3 totally separate events that prompt this journal entry:

1) Minx made a comment in Poly Weekly, episode 264, "Wait, We're Monogamous?" where she addressed some drunk redneck who hit on her. The redneck, upon discovering that Minx had multiple partners, made some comment about how HE ultimately wanted someone to commit to, to count on, to be there for, etc., implying that Minx did not, by virtue of having more than one. Minx responded, "well, I do too." The assumption here is that one cannot, and is not expecting, to have any kind of permanence, future, or intimate relationship if you have more than one romantic partner at a time. Last time I checked, the word was polyAMORY, not polyfuckery, and poly people are generally looking for loving relationships. People who want to have superficial sexual partners on the side are swingers (yes, I know there's a spectrum, that people can do both, bla bla bla, I'm making a point here, move on) and people who just want to "have a good time" are "monogamous" people who aren't ready to "settle down".

2) I have a friend, whom I'll call Cindy, who is one of those tragic isolated polys. By that, I mean that I believe she is naturally polyamorous, but does not have a support network, is not part of any community, has not read any books, listened to any podcasts, or generally has not participated or followed the efforts of other polys. So she's pretty much reinventing the wheel as she goes. She claims to have dated other poly people in the last couple of years, but her description of them doesn't sound like the poly that *I'm* familiar with, and so she makes all the classic newbie mistakes that we've all made, but shouldn't have to at this point in the movement, what with forums and meetups and the like.

Anyway, my point here is that I believe that she is capable & desiring of multiple, simultaneous, intimate, loving relationships AND capable & desiring of her partners having the same. After all, I like to say, the test of really being polyamorous is not how excited you feel at getting all the attention, but how excited you feel at your *partner* getting attention.

So, we were chatting the other day, and she asked me if I ever thought that someday, I might change my mind and decide that I want someone to grow old with, to live with, to support me & to be supportive of, to build a life with. After all, she said, we're still young, so it's all well and good to be living it up now, having fun, but didn't I think I might want something more substantial eventually?

*blink blink*

Uh, I already DO want that, I responded, and that's exactly what I'm building. tacit is a permanent part of my life, and I expect to grow old with him. I don't live with him now, due to circumstance, but he is someone I can count on to support me and I have that level of intimacy with him. I also said that my other two partners, datan0de and zensidhe and their wives, although a much more recent addition to my life, are feeling pretty permanent too. We would all dearly love to live closer together (my preference is for an apartment complex, or a cluster of dwellings within walking distance, cuz I need my space, but a giant communal house that is large enough to give me the space I need would work well, & is certain other people's preference), and are actively looking into the possibility in the future. Coming from someone who, after several years of conversations that led me to my conclusion that she is a natural poly, the assumption that multiple partners necessarily precludes that sort of lifetime partnership & companionship is just mind-boggling.

3) A coworker showed me a picture of the engagement ring she just put a deposit on for her girlfriend and talked on and on about how she couldn't wait to propose, because she was confident of the answer, and to begin their life together as a "married" couple. So, since we were talking lifemates & wedding dresses, I shared with her a little story of my own.

Just this past weekend, there were at least two independent conversations amongst the FLAN (the Florida Local Area Network branch of the Squiggle - my romantic network) wherein it was decided that pretty much all of us view this group as permanent or at least very long-term. We are beginning to make assumptions about long-term plans, as if it is expected that we will still be together next year, or in a few years, when that event is scheduled to happen.

My coworker's response was: "Ya know, I know that people think the whole lesbian thing is kinda different, but Joreth, you're REALLY different!" She went on to say "I think we ALL have dated or fucked more than one person at a time before, but those aren't serious relationships. But you're livin' it, man! I don't know how you do it. I'm just shocked at the idea that your multiple thing is permanent!"

I give these three examples, but they are certainly not the only anecdotes. It seems to be a pretty unanimous assumption that we can't build a LIFE together with more than one partner. Hearing that I have friends who live in a 6-adult poly household for more than two decades & have raised children & grandchildren just floors people - it's so contrary that most people just ignore that little factoid and erase it from their data pile.

"I'm looking for someone to build a life with; someone I can come home to and share my day with; someone I can count on; someone to raise a family with; someone to share the bills with; someone who will understand me intimately and I will understand them; someone to share in all the joys and sorrows of life; someone to grow old with; someone to BE with."

Yeah, buddy, me too. Only I'll have several somebodies to build that life with, to come home to, to share my day with, to count on, to share the bills with, who understand me, to grow old with. I'm not just fucking around, passing the time until someone better comes along. Someones better HAVE come along. I'm not just "sowing my wild oats" or refusing to be "tamed". I've found people committed to enjoying my "wildness" just as it is. Freedom, independence, intimacy, companionship, these are not mutually exclusive goals. A good, solid, fulfilling relationship actually encompasses and provides several or all of these traits. And I happen to have several of just these sorts of relationships. How lucky am I? Oh, that's right, I'm not lucky at all - I worked damn hard to be the kind of person I am and to find the kind of people I have in my life and to structure my life to accomodate all of these variables.

Where everyone else is wandering the planet, randomly hoping to bump into The One who will be the exact perfect blend of every single trait expected who has been fated for them, I have been doing the work on myself to be the kind of partner to provide a stable ground for an intimate relationship, and doing the work to find people who can provide that same stability on their end. My life is what I have made of it, and the end result is that I have not one partner I can depend on and build a life with, but several (and my metamours are also my partners, in this sense of building a life together, if not necessarily in the romantic or sexual sense).

Frankly, I think I got the better deal.

I've always called my cat, Misty, a grey tabby, because she's mostly grey with faint grey stripes & spots, and because I didn't know what else to call her. She wasn't one of the obvious, well-known breeds, like a Siamese or Persian. She just looked a little like a monochrome Garfield.  In fact, her full name is Small Tiger In The Mist because of the grey on grey coloring.

But as I flipped through an issue of Cat Fancy while waiting in the vet office the other day, as Misty was getting her vitamin B shots*, I came across an article about the Egyptian Mau. The description fits Misty exactly - every single trait. Sure, some of the traits, especially the personality traits, could fit other breeds, and especially individual cats regardless of breed trend, and personality traits are tricky things - much like horoscopes, people tend to think that description fits them no matter what it says. But every single trait including those distinctive of the breed matches Misty. I wouldn't doubt that she's a mix, but I'm about as sure as I can get without DNA results that she is, indeed, at least partly an Egyptian Mau.

Egyptian Mau (http://www.catfacts.org/egyptian-mau-cat-facts.htm)

Misty

For instance, "Maus often possess very musical voices. They are known to chirp, chortle and emit other distinctly unusual vocalizations when stimulated". Misty has a wide range of vocalizations, but her trademark sound is a chirruping chitter sound. In fact, years ago, she got nicknamed "chitter" because of the sound she made. When she was a kitten, I called her "squeak" because she didn't meow so much as squeak at me. Of course, when she's stressed, she doesn't sound nearly as adorable. No, she has an ear-piercing, rich, tonal meow that can drive me to want to jam something sharp into my ears just so I won't have to hear it anymore.

"Another behavior, quite common in happy Maus, has been described as 'wiggle-tail.'" This has been sometimes described as "dog-like" in the wiggle since happy tail-wiggles are not a typical cat behaviour, which Misty also does.

"their legs are slightly shorter in the front than in the back".  Misty's legs are noticeably different lengths.

""The Egyptian Mau is the fastest of the domestic cats, with its longer hind legs, and unique flap of skin extending from the flank to the back knee, provides for greater agility and length of stride. Maus have been clocked running over 36 mph". "The longer hind legs are another reason for the breed's startling speed. The Mau also has a loose flap of skin on the lower abdomen, similar to the cheetah, which allows a longer stride while running". They are sometimes called the greyhound of cats, for their speed & agility and have been known to jump as high as 6 feet. Misty also has that extra flap and has always been a jumper. I measured her at about 5 feet straight up, and that wasn't her highest ever. Her big hind feet earned her the nickname "Bunny Feet" by a former boyfriend.  The unusually large feet tend to make them look like they're on tiptoe when they stand up, especially when combined with their shortened forelegs, and, of course, Misty does look like she's on tiptoe.

Maus are known to bond strongly with their owners. "Such owners typically report their Maus eagerly greet them at the door at the end of a long day at work". I have always described Misty as my shadow, since she has to be at least in the same room I am in all the time. She often prefers to walk either between my feet or just behind me, and hates to leave the room unless I accompany her.  Since getting sick, she's even more clingy, and being within sight isn't enough - she has to be within touching range, preferably on my lap, hanging over my forearms so that I can't type.  "The typical Mau is not social with strangers of any species, other cats in particular." I have also joked that Misty is Monogamous Kitty. In addition to being clingy, she jealously guards my time, inserting herself between me & whatever friend or lover is spending time with me, choosing the spot on the bed closest to my head & warning off my other cat, Onyx, from encroaching.

Maus also, apparently, have very sensitive immune systems.  They prefer warm temperatures, are sensitive to medicines & anesthesia, and are prone to asthma.  Misty has had asthma her entire life, but it was worse when she was overweight.

"Eye color is a light green described as gooseberry green ... The forehead is marked with the characteristic tabby M and frown marks, forming lines between the ears that continue down the back of the neck, ideally breaking into elongated spots along the spine. The tail is heavily banded and has a dark tip." Yep, yep, and yep. Misty's eyes are a distinctive shade of green, so much so that when looking up options for memorials of pets, I found one of those places that uses the carbon from pet's ashes or fur to make diamonds, & decided that if I ever have enough money to get one, I'm getting the green diamond to match her eyes. They are often described as having a "worried expression" or "expressive eyes" because of their roundness. She has the forehead M and a heavily banded tail.

"Its lustrous, dense coat can be silver, bronze, or smoke, and is distinguished by a marvelous mixture of striping and spotting," which Misty does, indeed, have. But the clincher is this: "They are the only naturally spotted breed of domesticated cat. The spots on an Egyptian Mau are not only on the coat; a shaved Mau has spots on its skin." ("natural" means that they acquired their spots on their own, with no human intervention to breed the trait into them - they came to us spotted). Misty has spots on her skin exactly where her spots on her fur are. I knew this about her, but she was recently shaved for a procedure and it was quite obvious that her spots are on her skin.

Misty exhibits all the classic personality traits of being loyal, closely bonded, and jealous, and all the physical traits including rounded "gooseberry green eyes", a "worried expression" because of the eye shape, wide-spaced, delicate ears, a rounded face with no harsh planes, an evenly-wide nose, asthma, forehead M stripe, mascara stripe, cheek stripes, banded tail, extra stomach flap, unusually large hind feet, shorter forelegs, excellent jumper, happy tail-wag, a combination of stripes & spots, and spotted skin - the latter of which is a distinctly Egyptian Mau trait.  Her markings are not as distinct as purebred Maus, and she has a white bib & socks, so she is most likely a mix, and I'm pretty sure there's some orange tabby in her history somewhere.  But it's nice to know the breed, and especially pleasing to hear the specifics of her breed.

For a bit of history about the breed: "Ranked as one of the oldest domesticated breeds, the Egyptian Mau is thought to be related to a spotted subspecies of the African Wild Cat. Held in high esteem, this breed was worshipped as deities, protected by laws, and mummified upon death in ancient Egypt. The matriarch of this breed was silver spotted female named Baba. According to historical records, a female Egyptian Mau kitten was scheduled to accompany exiled Russian princess Nathalie Troubetskoy from Rome to the United States. However, they missed getting on a huge luxury ship, the ill-fated Andrea Dorian that sank after being rammed a Swedish liner. In 1956, the princess successfully arrived in the United States and brought the first Mau to this country. Today, the Egyptian Van is ranked 20th in popularity among the breeds listed by the Cat Fanciers Association, which granted it championship status in 1977." (http://www.catster.com/cat-breeds/Egyptian_Mau).  

If the Egyptian Mau really does come from the cats depicted in ancient Egyptian artwork that they resemble, the Mau is probably the oldest domestic cat, the first breed to choose to align its fate to humans.  The species is endangered, with less than 7,000 Maus officially registered.  A combination of outcrossing & inbreeding saved the species from complete extinction, due to war in Europe, in 1953 when Nathalie Troubetskoy brought 3 Egyptian Maus to the US (Baba, her son Jojo, & an unrelated female named Liza), founded the Fatima Egyptian Mau cattery, bred them, and then enhanced the bloodline with Maus imported from Egypt to strengthen the breed.  Without the Russian princess' efforts, this breed might now be extinct, or so diluted as to be unrecognizable as a distinct breed.  It is estimated that most of the Egyptian Maus today can trace their bloodline back to Baba.

Misty's loyalty, charm, and bonding, that are so characteristic of her possible breed, have given me an incredibly valuable relationship for the last almost-11 years.  Her distinctive physical traits have always stimulated the photographer/artist in me and inspired me to pursue animal photography, which has resulted in a stock photo business involving mostly animals.  She is my joy and delight.

*For those who are who don't follow me on Twitter, or are otherwise unaware, Misty sick, but all tests keep coming up inconclusive.  The most likely culprit is cancer, in which case, I can't afford chemo so the next option is to give her vitamin B shots & steroid pills to slow the deterioration by a few months, or the second possible cause is inflammatory bowl disease, in which case the vitamin B shots & steroid pills are actually the cure. The vet gives her 3-4 months with the vitamin B & steroids if it's cancer (which she believes it is), so we're taking this one day at a time. I'm monitoring her weight, waste, and activity level, and hoping that the end will come suddenly once the pills run out their effectiveness, and preferably not during the weekend I'll be in CA (which is right smack in the expected time limit range). If I can avoid watching her waste away to nothing, and I can be there when she goes, I'll be profoundly grateful.

And now, to partially redeem himself after that last song, Braid Paisely singing a nice bluesey ballad about independent women:


She's Her Own Woman by Brad Paisley - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NeawYqxX2c

OK, there's the usual monogamous possessiveness implied in the phrase "she's mine", it's still pop-country, don't expect miracles - the point is that he values strength and independence in women, and doesn't equate "independence" with "lack of love" or "building walls". If more men did not believe independence & an ability to survive without him was the same thing as not loving him, I probably would not be as antagonistic or belligerent about my need for independence now. How I present myself at the beginning is not necessarily how I actually am in a relationship, but I feel as though I have to beleaguer the point in order to be understood & not set up implicit expectations of my behaviour later down the line.

For some reason, when I say "I'm independent", what the men who have tried to date me in the past hear is "I'm afraid of intimacy because I'm afraid to be left alone, so I put up this tough front, but once you convince me of your stability & trustworthiness, I'll let down my guard & you'll see how much I really do need you and need to be around you constantly even though that interferes with everything I have already stated was a priority in my life, such as work, school, hobbies, and other lovers." So I say "I won't ever call you and I'll disappear without notice for days at a time, and you'll always come last after my work, school, or hobbies" in an effort to make them hear "I love you, but I can live without you, and I need some time to myself occasionally."

Anyway, I don't think he presents his viewpoint well, and that he's a victim of his own culture with regards to language and some implicit assumptions (and the unfortunate habit of over-generalizing), but I also think his point is understandable if you know how to strip all that noise away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kugjR-o3WaE

This was inspired by a FB post that said "If she says she doesn't believe or celebrate Valentine's Day ... don't believe her."

---

I'm so sick of the belief that women do, or should, say one thing when they mean another, and the accomodation of those individual women who do actually do this.

First of all, we are not all the same person, so we do not all think the same things. I most certainly do not say one thing and think another, like saying "I don't celebrate v-day" but mean "if you don't buy me something, you're in trouble".

Second, if she says "I don't believe in or celebrate v-day", tell her that you will take her exactly at her word because you trust her to tell you the truth, and that if she ever changes her mind, to let you know because you'll be happy to celebrate with her if it is meaningful to her, since her happiness is integral to your own. And then let her either stick to her story or change her mind. If she sticks to her story but doesn't mean it, then it's her own damn fault for lying when you give her a warning & an out like that.

Third - a "white lie" is never harmless. All lies block paths to intimacy. You can be tactful without lying, even by omission.

To have a truly secure relationship based in love and trust, such a relationship can withstand some harsh truths, especially if said with kindness and compassion. If the issue really was "not a big deal", as the phrase "white lie" implies, then the lie is worthless and only undermines your credibility for no good reason. If the lie is covering up something big, then it is even more important that the truth be spoken.

Our partners are not mind readers, and they should not be punished for failing to do that which is impossible. If we tell them something, they should have every reason to believe we are telling them the truth. What kind of relationship is it, when the automatic, default assumption is that one person is always lying?

I have a revolutionary idea: how about we tell our loved ones what we *really* want out of our relationships - so they can better offer us the kind of relationship we want? We can't reasonably expect to get what we don't ask for.

---

1) First of all, I wouldn't ask if I looked fat in this dress. I'd ask if I looked OK in something, or if someone whose opinion matters to me thinks I look attractive in something. And I absolutely want to know if I don't look right. When I care enough about how I look in a particular outfit, I most definitely do not want to go out in public looking bad.

2) Don't eat my food if it sucks! How else am I supposed to know that I screwed up so I can fix it? I will never improve myself if I'm not told where improvements could be made.

3) I wouldn't mention your weight gain only because it doesn't matter to me. However, if I am aware that *you* are concerned about weight gain, I might discuss your weight with you because it's something that *you* indicated is important.

4) Again, I wouldn't mention hair loss because it doesn't matter to me. Yes, really. However, I *will* express my preference for hair styles/clothing/etc. if you care what I think about your appearance for the same reason that I want to know about my own appearance.

I knew someone who was hypermasculine & it was important to his sense of self-worth to be viewed as masculine, without a thread of possible femininity anywhere. He kept his hair long, which is not automatically a feminizing thing, but for some reason he preferred to keep it just slightly shorter than shoulder-length, where it curled up at the bottoms - like a paige-boy cut. That's a hairstyle I associate with women - to be "masculine", IMO, it should be either longer or shorter. Since he cares so much about not having any feminine traits, that was something I expressed to him. But I did so by saying "I like it when you grow your hair out longer" and "since you said you don't want to look feminine, I would suggest not cutting your hair to that length. The chin-length with the curls at the bottom is something I associate with women, but really short or longer-than-shoulder-length is something I associate with men." You don't have to be mean about these things when you're honest.

I'm actually a pretty big fan of Brad Paisely. He has some pretty progressive songs, for a country artist - and a huge chart-topping artist at that. He has pro-technology & pro-science songs, he has songs poking fun at strict gender roles, and I just like his sound. But he has a couple of songs that just make me shake my head and say "Oh Brad, Brad, Brad, you were doing so well! Why did you have to backtrack?" This is one of them.

Hey Brad, I fixed your song title for you! "That's Not A Lie, That's An Insecurity So Deep That You're Willing To Jeopardize Your Credibility & Intimacy To Protect It". It doesn't have quite the same ring to it though.

The following was inspired by a post on my Facebook friends' list that said "If she says 'I don't believe in or celebrate Valentine's Day', don't believe her"

---

I'm so sick of the belief that women do, or should, say one thing when they mean another, and the accomodation of those individual women who do actually do this.

First of all, we are not all the same person, so we do not all think the same things. I most certainly do not say one thing and think another, like saying "I don't celebrate v-day" but mean "if you don't buy me something, you're in trouble".

Second, if she says "I don't believe in or celebrate v-day", tell her that you will take her exactly at her word because you trust her to tell you the truth, and that if she ever changes her mind, to let you know because you'll be happy to celebrate with her if it is meaningful to her, since her happiness is integral to your own.  And then let her either stick to her story or change her mind. If she sticks to her story but doesn't mean it, then it's her own damn fault for lying when you give her a warning & an out like that.

Third - a "white lie" is never harmless. All lies block paths to intimacy. You can be tactful without lying, even by omission.

To have a truly secure relationship based in love and trust, such a relationship can withstand some harsh truths, especially if said with kindness and compassion. If the issue really was "not a big deal", as the phrase "white lie" implies, then the lie is worthless and only undermines your credibility for no good reason. If the lie is covering up something big, then it is even more important that the truth be spoken.

Our partners are not mind readers, and they should not be punished for failing to do that which is impossible.  If we tell them something, they should have every reason to believe we are telling them the truth.  What kind of relationship is it, when the automatic, default assumption is that one person is always lying?  

I don't know about you, but the last time some guy treated me according to how some other woman used to behave, I got pretty pissed off.  This seems to me like one of those things that it might be safe to make a generalization about - if you act as though your new girlfriend was exactly the same as your old girlfriend, the odds are that she is likely to not respond well.  If many women were to get upset at knowing that their boyfriends were treating them as if they were exactly the same person as their old girlfriend, i.e. interchangeable commodities, then wouldn't you think these same women would not be pushing the idea that all men should treat all women as if all women are lying, deceitful people?  But no, both men and women seem to like to tell men "this is what all women value, so treat all of your partners exactly the same way, even though you are no longer with your former partners, so clearly your methods didn't work in the last relationship".  

You know how you just can't seem to "figure women out"?  I'll give you the secret answer:  WE'RE NOT THE SAME FUCKING PERSON.  That's why you can't "figure women out" - as soon as you think you figure one out, you meet another who does it different.  As soon as someone else tells you What Women Want, your wife or girlfriend goes and does something unexpected.  If you try to find the grand, unifying formula to all women, you are doomed to not understand us for the rest of your life.  Your better option is to work at understanding the one  whom you are with right now, and get to know her well.  If there are several, you'll just have to get to know each one of them.  Oh no!  You actually have to put in the effort to TALK to each of them (either all your partners now, or the several you will have in your lifetime) and get to know them, and you have to do it over and over again!  Horror of horrors!  Sorry honey, but there is no cheat-sheet to women, we are unique works in progress, and not only are we not exactly like any other woman you've ever known, but we won't be exactly the same as ourselves over time.  You'll just have to suck it up and pay attention.*

I have a revolutionary idea: how about we tell our loved ones what we *really* want out of our relationships - so they can better offer us the kind of relationship we want? We can't reasonably expect to get what we don't ask for.

*This whole thing also applies in reverse - but the example that set off this rant was a specific gender situation, so I'm keeping the pronouns the same for simplicity.

Conveniently, someone wrote an article in Psychology Today about how open marriages are healthier than closed marriages. It cites the contributing factor as a relationship that encourages and supports personal growth and change - and that growth and change is facilitated through interactions with others.

Sounds kinda familiar.

It also makes the point that sexual relationships are not mandatory for achieving this growth and change, which is a point I made too. But I maintain that personal growth and change is correlated with the level of intimacy of the relationship that fosters it - so a person who has no or few intimate relationships with people other than the spouse is a person who has little opportunity to have the kinds of experiences that foster exactly that kind of personal growth and change, whereas a person who has several intimate relationships (platonic or not) has just that many more opportunities for experiences that foster that kind of personal growth and change. And that romantic relationships, by their very nature, tend to be extremely intimate, and therefore likely to be more influential on the people in them. And, therefore, people with multiple, simultaneous, intimate relationships are more likely to have the opportunity to have those kinds of experiences that foster personal growth and change, and therefore become an incredibly rich and nuanced type of person.

Polyamory, by its very nature, requires that we either embrace, or learn to adjust to, change. And here we've just seen that change can lead to personal growth, which usually leads to the highest degree of satisfaction in marriages.

Of course, not all polyamorists are enthusiastic about the idea of change, not all use their relationships as a vehicle for personal growth (some don't see it as being about "growth" but about "getting my needs met" and some think they're very well enlightened enough, thank you very much), and not all relationships are satisfactory just because they're labeled "polyamorous". We're still human, after all, and still prone to make many of the same mistakes (and invent a few new ones, just to spice things up) as monogamists do. But, if you're wondering why we go through the trouble of maintaining multiple relationships, how we can possibly love someone when we're already "in love" with someone, what are the benefits to being polyamorous, that's one of them.

One of the benefits to polyamory is the ability to explore and express multiple facets of your personality through relating to other people. This isn't really as pop-psychy as it sounds. How many of you ever discovered a new interest, hobby, or passion because someone you dated was interested? I mean, something you carried with you even after the relationship ended, or, if the relationship didn't end, something that became a genuine interest of your own and not just something you do because your partner likes it? How many of you learned something new about yourself because of a relationship? How many of you changed in some significant way because of a relationship? That's what I mean by expressing multiple facets of your personality through relating to other people.

When I was 17, I began dating a guy who introduced me to pewter miniature painting. I had never even heard of Dungeons and Dragons, let alone any other RPG, I had no interest in learning what those geeks in the back of the classroom did after school, and I hadn't even fathomed the idea of an entire subculture of people who used math and fantasy to create entire other worlds, sometimes representing their characters as small, pewter figurines, and an even smaller subculture who specialized in painting those figurines.

But I was introverted, creative, nocturnal, and detail-oriented. So my high school sweetheart introduced me to his passion of painting miniatures. I was hooked from day one. It was the perfect hobby for me. We stayed up all night long, watching horror movies, bent over the table in his parents' back room with flourescent hobby lights clamped to the table, hardly even speaking to each other except to show off a particularly tricky paint job successfully pulled off. I began spending most of my paychecks on miniatures, paints, and paintbrushes. When we broke up, I kept up the hobby and it is still one of my greatest passions. In fact, the name "Joreth" comes from the second figure I ever painted.

Before that boyfriend, the only thing I knew about comics was that they printed them in color on Sundays in the newspaper. It never occurred to me that anyone could dress up in a costume for anything other than Halloween, and I was supposed to have outgrown even that years before. And action figures were those awesome toys for kids that my parents never let me play with growing up, but that's it. He brought out my inner geek. And I was forever changed because of my relationship with him. Not only was I a changed person, but his influence has forever influenced all the relationships that came after him.

Just prior to my high school sweetheart, was the guy who introduced me to biting, which is now a regular kink of mine and a fairly important element of my relationship with datan0de . After my high school sweetheart is the guy who introduced me to Goth nightclubs, which, to this day, remains the only non-ballroom and non-country bar I will willingly attend, and where I can feel that oh-so-sweet surrender and just become both music and motion. Then there was the guy who taught me how to orgasm during penetrative sex. I don't think I need to explain what a life-changing event that was. There was the guy who became a lover during a particularly rowdy session of wrestling and rough-housing, as we had been prone to do for our entire friendship. That particular kink is probably my strongest kink to date, the one I feel the most desire for, the one that I feel the strongest sense of loss when I can't express it. I knew, before him, that I enjoyed rape play, but I didn't really understand what was going on in my head during it, nor did I understand how to express it in a healthy manner. Through him, I worked out some of my anger issues and learned how to experience rape play in a healthy, safe/sane/consensual way.

Next came a guy who taught me what a cowboy was, and taught me that "love" requires respecting the other person as they are, not trying to change them in ways they don't want to be changed. There was also the partner who taught me how important passion and creativity in a partner is to me, and the guy after him who taught me how equally important practicality and logic in a partner is to me. Let's not forget the guy who taught me that there really is such a thing as an irresistable physical chemistry with someone who is absolutely incompatible with me & is probably my polar opposite. Then there are my two female lovers, who gave me the insight to learn about heterosexuality, bisexuality, and sexual fluidity. Then there is the female metamour who taught me that being straight does not preclude the ability to enjoy a very special woman during group sex. tacit has taught me so much about dignity and compassion, and is the first person to ever manage to keep up with my voracious appetite for self-exploration and self-knowledge. He has introduced the concepts and community of BDSM to me, explored with me all those other kinks I didn't even know I had, helped me refine my communication skills, and turned me on to science and skepticism when I had previously believed in all manner of woo, including alternative medicine and water molecule snowflakes.  He is the first person to admire me for my inquisitive nature & devotion to self-analysis, instead of merely tolerating me (and growing tired of the work I require in a relationship of introspection and communication).

Everyone I have ever been in a relationship with has explored some aspect of who I am that no one else ever has, and never will. That particular combination of facets to my personality that are expressed when I relate to a partner's personality is unique to that partner. Oh sure, there is plenty of overlap. I've always been stubborn, no matter who I date, and I've always been an avid reader, and I've always liked well-done steak. But some people bring out the extrovert in me, some the creative side, some the practical side, some the dancer, some the teacher, and some the student. I am always me, with every relationship, but I am never every single aspect of me at full simultaneously.

Just like we all show particular sides to who we are when we're around our family, versus our coworkers or friends, we also do that with our lovers. It's not necessarily a deliberate hiding of certain aspects of ourselves, it's just that certain people bring out certain parts of us more strongly than others. Have you ever said or heard "he just brings out the worst in me!" or "she's so good for him, she brings out his best side"? That's what I'm talking about.

Serial monogamists have the opportunity to experience and express more of themselves as time passes, with each new relationship. But polyamory gives us the opportunity to experience and express those sides of ourselves simultaneously within a single time period of our lives. This is actually what is meant by "meeting needs". But that phrase implies that we all have this list of 100 needs that someone else is responsible for fulfilling, and that we can just mix and match people until we get them all filled, sort of like building a Franken-Partner - the perfect mate out of 3 men, for example. And that's really not what it's about.

My partners do not perform a job service of Activity Partner or Person To Talk To or Man Who Does Stuff For Me. If I have a "need", and a partner is not "fulfilling" it, getting someone else to do it doesn't make that "need" go away with the person I am not getting it from. Each relationship must meet the "needs" of the participants all by themselves. The thing of it is, though, is that not all relationships "need" the same things. I "need" communication with my partners to feel as though our relationship is healthy and to satisfy me. It doesn't matter who I am dating, if I do not feel as though we have quality conversations, it does not feel like a romantic relationship to me. Having one partner who doesn't talk to me cannot be fixed by getting another partner who does.

But each relationship might have its own level of discussion that makes me feel like it is a Relationship. And each relationship might have its own topics that make it feel like a Relationship to me. And through those discussions, I get to express a slightly different aspect of myself than I would with anyone else. I get to develop who I am into a rich and complicated tapestry of Me, filled with nuance and shading and depth, where conversation never feels stale because the next time I have a conversation, I will have become a slightly different, more nuanced, person due to my recent conversations and experiences with other people.

Relationships influence who we are, and we become new people from our experiences. That is one of the benefits of relationships - all types of relationships. As tacit likes to say, that's a feature, not a bug. Of course monogamous people are also affected by their various relationships - even life-long monogamous people who grow and change through the experiences with their platonic friends and family. But, as monogamous people who feel threatened by polyamory like to remind us, there's something special about a romantic relationship - there's that special sort of depth to the intimacy that is rarely rivaled in non-romantic relationships. There is a certain thing that happens to make a relationship truly intimate that is very rarely found in platonic relationships, although it can be found there. It's that nebulous, undefinable quality that makes life really worth living, and missing that intimacy can often make some people give up their lives rather than live without it. The ability to experience that kind of relationship more than once in a lifetime is awesome and amazing. The ability to experience that kind of relationship more than once simultaneously, without requiring the ending of one relationship to experience another, is something that I can't even come close to describing how awesome and amazing it is. The ability to grow in so many different directions, to become through an intimate relationship is just one of the many benefits to polyamory.

You all absolutely MUST go read this.  If you agree, you'll be grateful.  If you disagree, then you doubly need to read it:

'If She's Amazing, She Isn't Easy; If She's Easy, She Isn't Amazing.' What rubbish. http://tacit.livejournal.com/347489.html

I originally made a list of podcast episodes that I was compiling for a sample CD of skeptical topics. I have been unable to produce a small enough file containing all the audio in the list that I could reasonably upload or have people reasonably download. But I have put together my discs and I handed out my first one today.

I have made 3 discs - one for religious episodes, one for pseudoscience episodes, and a DVD with video episodes of both. I also rearranged the episodes so that they were grouped together by topic, instead of by show. I believe it will be easier for people to find the episodes they want to listen to, since they won't have any idea who the show producers are anyway, so "Skeptoid" or "Quackcast" won't mean anything to them. This way, they also may have a couple of shows to choose from on the same topic that they can find easily, and can switch to another show's episode if the one they're listening to isn't doing anything for them, like if they don't like the format or the host or something.

( In case people are interested, here is my recommended episode playlist, with all the episodes in order )

I often have people asking me sex advice. Not all from poly people either, but many non-polys ask me sex advice because, as I have been told by these seekers of sex-truth, my willingness to discuss the topic plus the demands that multi-partnering places on me to be self-critical, honest, explicit, and generally knowledgeable about sex equals someone that they feel comfortable discussing deeply personal and intimate subjects with and trusting that they will get a fact-based answer while simultaneously maintaining discretion. Boy, that was a mouthful of a run-on sentence!

Anyway, I get questions about sex. I get a lot of very similar questions from people in wildly different locations, backgrounds, and outlooks. Which leads me to believe that some of these questions and concerns are common, perhaps even endemic of our society. Of course, I don't have a true, scientific, sample population to make an unbiased judgement, but clearly, lots of different kinds of people have very similar kinds of fears.

This email is so incredibly typical in its content, that I feel I should make my answer public. Apparently, many men are still afraid their penis isn't big enough, and many women are still afraid of sex.

---

I have a new girlfriend and she married her high school sweetheart so she's only been with that one other person, and apparently he was "abnormally large." She is a small girl so she says it was always an issue, and that we "fit together" better. She says she enjoys everything with me and we've had a great time together, but in the back of my mind I keep thinking that since she's used to him being "abnormally large" that I just don't measure up... So, I guess my first question is the stupidest guy question there is: Does size matter?

My second question is actually more important- She also said that she doesn't/can't orgasm from intercourse, and due to other issues is not comfortable being touched/rubbed whatever... I'm not even allowed to go down on her. Is there a position or something that works better, or do you have any other suggestions??? She's against getting toys or anything so really it's all on me.

No, size really isn't important all by itself. It really is more important how you use it than how big or small it is, although how big or small it is might affect how you use it.

There are a few women who really are size queens, but for most women, size doesn't matter. Keep in mind that at some point the larger sizes cease to feel comfortable even if it's physically possible to fit it in. Anyway, the vast majority of women really DON'T like them big, and this whole big-dick thing is all in you guys' heads, and coming from other guys, not the girls. So, really, your size doesn't matter except in the inverse - that bigger is not only not always better, but is often much worse.

As for her orgasm, yes, it's totally normal that she can't orgasm during penetration. Many women can't. Most of the nerve endings are on the outside, not the inside, so many women can't orgasm during penetration alone, although many of us enjoy the feeling of being filled even without the orgasm. If a woman does orgasm during penetration, it's often because there was some friction on her clit too. Some women do have G-spot orgasms, but it's actually relatively rare, in spite of the magazine recommendations that all women should or can have them. It's also really uncomfortable to LEARN how to have a G-spot orgasm, because it involves pressure on the bladder, so even if more women are physically able to have a G-spot orgasm, many can't get past that feeling of needing to pee while being penetrated, so many just avoid G-spot stimulation because it's too much work for too small of a chance that it will pay off.

However, the key to good sex and to more orgasms is being comfortable and familiar with your own body. This means that if she wants to have more orgasms, the work is all on HER, not you. She needs to relax and do some exploration. If you can't give her oral sex, you can't use your hands, and you can't use toys, there's nothing else you can do except find positions that don't actively cause pain (and every woman is different for which positions she likes). The clit is really where the attention needs to be paid, and she isn't letting you give it any attention at all (and I say "the clit is where the attention is needed" because I'm assuming you understand that attention should not be paid *exclusively* to the clit while you forget everything else). Being afraid to let you pay her some attention is something SHE needs to get over. She will never have orgasms with the mindset that it's bad to look at, touch, and taste the genital area, even if you do manage to find the G-spot or some other kink or erogenous zone with her. She has a mental block against it because she views sex as something negative. Even if she tells you she enjoys it, she views it as something negative (people can think of something as bad while still enjoying it, like holiday junk food ... let's thank the Catholic church and the like for that).

Without speaking to her directly, I can't get into specifically what's going on with her or how to fix it, but it really is all in her own head. You can try to encourage her to loosen up and relax and experiment more, but that will be a fine line to walk, because too much nudging may make her feel pressured and may trigger her own insecurities about her performance in bed. But, really, there's nothing much you can do because she doesn't want to enjoy sex, for some reason. Whatever she does enjoy, she enjoys it IN SPITE of her issues, and that may even make her feel more guilty or shameful about it, which could actually be causing a spiral effect.

But women just do not get off on penetration alone, with the very rare exception. It's often painful without the extra pleasure hormones being released by stimulation (and that stimulation includes, in part, the foreplay and other activities, not just clit stimulation alone). Those hormones are what provide the lubrication, and what help the vaginal walls to relax and open up, and what activates all those nerve endings to receive the rubbing sensations as pleasurable instead of annoying friction. She is probably extremely embarrassed about her genitals, maybe she thinks they look weird or smell funny and is trying to keep you from finding that out. Maybe she had something actually traumatic happen to her in the past. Maybe she just buys into the idea that girls are supposed to orgasm from penetration and doing anything else means she's defective in some way.

Does she masturbate? You could encourage more of that, even if you don't participate, even if she does it at home, alone. But her masturbation is what will teach her the types of things that work for her and don't work for her and she should use that knowledge to teach her partners how to pleasure her. Different things work for different people and people's tastes will change over time. That's why we're supposed to keep experimenting.

Sometimes women have a hard time orgasming until they actually do. It's almost as if the body has to be taught that something is supposed to feel good, and once you show it that this feels good, it becomes easier to acheive orgasm that same way the next time. So if she starts masturbating & bringing herself to orgasm, it could make it easier for her to orgasm with a partner, especially if she lets him try what she was doing to herself.

The best lovers and the people who enjoy sex the most have a curious and adventurous outlook to sex. They know their own bodies and they're not afraid or ashamed of them. They're willing to try different things and they're willing to share experiences with their partners. In the end, the only changing that can happen will come from her. If she won't let you learn her body, there isn't any magic trick that you can learn, no special pelvis thrust, no perfect angle, that will give her an orgasm.

Really, the thing is that she needs to be willing to explore, because even if you do attempt other positions and specific techniques, if she's embarrassed or traumatized, it won't work because she'll have a mental block.

Keep in mind while you're searching for the perfect orgasm - sex should not be about the finish line. The harder either of you try to maker her orgasm and the more often you fail, the harder it will be for her to do it the next time. If either of you have a "goal" of orgasm, the pressure to perform makes it more difficult to do so. Sex should be about the experience - for both of you.

You ought to try having sex some time where the goal is for *neither* of you to orgasm. Pick different things to try and just see how they feel without the pressure of trying to make each other come, in fact, with strict orders NOT to come. If you keep trying for orgasm and she keeps not having one, that's gonna add to her issues and make her feel like she's failing you, and you'll start to feel like you're not good enough for her and down the spiral goes.

The goal should be exploration, not orgasm. And, possibly even building intimacy. THAT'S what will get her to orgasm, not technique or positions.

Positions that make the angle of penetration more shallow can reduce or eliminate the pain, but to cause pleasure, that's something only she can allow you to do and no magic position will do it if she's not open to it. Reverse cow-girl can sometimes help women who are embarrassed about being on top, because she can't see you looking at her but she still has all the control. Again, using toys or hands to stimulate prior to and during penetration help to relax the vaginal walls to accommodate penetration, but only her willingness to let go will allow her to orgasm.

Also, don't fall into the trap of blaming the victim - if she is willing to explore but still can't orgasm, don't let her think it's all her "fault" for not being open-minded enough. Good sex is created by openness, honesty, curiosity, and self-knowledge, not by technique or positions. First she needs the openness, then she needs the curiosity about her own body and about yours, and she also needs honesty with herself and her partner to go along with that, which will all lead to self-knowledge, and only then will orgasm be reliably achieved. It can happen without all of those elements, but without them, you'll have trouble repeating the event reliably or consistently.

But what you really need to be doing is talking to her about this. You need to express your concern about hurting her, you need to express your willingness to explore and experiment *for her sake*, and you need to ask her to work WITH you to discover what she likes and doesn't like. Ask for feedback before, during, and after sex. Get her to talk to you and get her to make suggestions. This really requires her full participation. Without that, the best you can hope for is to accidentally stumble upon things that cause less pain. To create pleasure, you need to share it, and that means she needs to share with you. She needs to know herself (which is where masturbation comes in), she needs to be honest with herself about what her body likes even if it embarrasses her, she needs to be honest with you and tell you what her body likes, and she will find all that out only if she approaches sex from a standpoint of curiosity and eagerness, not trepidation or hesitation.

You have to talk to her and get her to talk to you. But she won't have anything of value to tell you if she has all these other issues preventing her from exploring her sexuality.

I've lost it now, but someone once wrote a blog or a forum piece about the failure rate of polyamorous relationships.  This is one of my pet peeves - polyamory is held up to impossible standards of "success" by monogamists, yet those standards are not applied to monogamous relationships.  What I mean is, when a relationship ends, the Monogamous Mindset declares that relationship a "failure", whether it's poly or mono.  But when a poly relationship "fails", it's a sign that polyamory itself is doomed to failure.  Yet, when a monogamous relationship "fails", monogamy itself is not seen as inherently flawed, just that couple is seen at having failed in their relationship.  I HATE this double standard, and I also hate the bunch of assumptions that underly the idea, including that longevity is the sole measuring stick for success in a relationship.

So, someone wrote a piece somewhere on the internet asking how many of our poly relationships have to fail before we give up clinging to the idea of polyamory and just admit that it's doomed.  Naturally, I had a few things to say about that:

---

How many monogamous relationships have you witnessed that ended? How many were great for a year or two before some form of amicable split? How many went down in flames? How many people have you witnessed that got involved with a single person EVER and remained with that person until death? Personally, I know only a few, the majority of whom are in my grandparents' generation (and even my grandparents are divorced). I also know more monogamous people who remain involved with someone who tried to hit them with their own cars than monogamous people who haven't (seriously, I can give you 3 names just off the top of my head, and more if I think about it). Should I then extrapolate that monogamy is bad because so many monogamous people try to commit vehicular manslaugher on their spouses? Or is it perhaps more likely that I know a lot of dysfunctional people and it's not necessarily monogamy's fault?

Of course I'm not saying that monogamy is always bad or a "failure", or even a death sentence. But I am saying that confirmation bias is a logical fallacy. Statistical analysis requires a large sample population to be representative of the population as a whole, and a method to remove personal bias from interpreting the results. "What I've seen" does not count as representative, nor unbaised. It especially does not count when coming from counselors whose sample population is made up exclusively of their own therapy practice. They (and you) have a skewed sample popluation because of the types of people they are likely to see - in the case of the counselors, people whose relationships are already in danger, hence the reason for a trip to a therapist. People with functioning relationships don't tend to seek counseling, don't tend to make headlines, and don't tend to get noticed by friends and neighbors without intentionally sharing the details of their relationships.

Also, because of the stigma, and in some cases, legal threat, you probably know more poly people in "successful" relationships than you're aware of because a large number of poly people are still in the proverbial closet. There have been countless people who were rendered speechless upon discovering old love letters and other evidence of lives they never knew their parents had, when going through their personal effects after death: same-sex love affairs, mistresses, swinger partners, kinky sex lives, even whole other families. My paternal grandmother was completely unaware of my existence until 30 years after my birth. If people can keep secrets this big from their spouses, children, and parents, it's ridiculous to think that your friends, neighbors, and acquaintances aren't also keeping secrets from you, let alone the cute waitress who serves you coffee at your favorite restaurant, your hunky UPS guy, the guy sitting next to you on the bus, or your kid's soccer coach. You have no idea what people are doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms (or kitchens, or dungeons, or play parties) if you aren't there to witness it and you are completely unaware of what you don't know.

I'm also saying that if you hold these standards up to polyamorous relationships and suggest or imply that polyamory doesn't have the appropriate numbers to count as "successful", then you have to hold monogamous relationships up to the same standard. And, as studies have actually shown, people are NOT clamoring for the end of monogamy when shown the high "failure" rate. In fact, when we see headlines like "49% of first marriages end in divorce", the article is not usually calling for an end to monogamy, it tends to be calling for a tightening up of the standards of monogamy so that we can get that failure rate down. As for that statistic, keep in mind that it's for "first marriages" - second and third marriages have an even higher failure rate and every relationship prior to the first marriage had a 100% failure rate. Monogamy's track record for longevity is really not very good at all.

Longevity alone is not a good measuring stick for "success" in a relationship, be it polyamory or monogamy. Millions of people are stuck in loveless, even abhorrent, marriages because of pride, of religious edicts, of legal complications, of "family values". If those relationships last for life, should they be counted among the successes? If they were to end, would they be counted among the failures? And how would we know which relationships they are? Relationships are rarely what they appear to people on the outside.

A relationship is successful if it meets the goals set by the participants. For some, longevity may be the only or most important goal, and in that case, simply ending *would* be considered a failure. But for others, the happiness of the participants may trump that. Some may be to raise a family. Some may be for financial incentive. Some may be for companionship.  Some may be a combination of goals.  Personally, since you asked for personal stories, my goals tend to be about intent, rather than longevity. I intend for my relationships to emphasize communication, for the participants to actively contribute to (but not try to be responsible for) each others' happiness, to find compromises and common paths, to support each other in our endeavors including personal growth and discovery, to be compassionate, to learn from my mistakes, to grow as a person through the influences of my partners & metamours, and I intend to be a friendly ex should the relationship no longer be a source of happiness to all the participants.

My relationships almost never end because of polyamory. They end for the same reasons that monogamous relationships do - compatibility. They end because we eventually figured out we are not romantically compatible in some way, just like how most monogamous relationships end. They end when we want different things from our relationship, or when we have different goals, or when we have personality conflicts that just can't be overcome. Why is it that so many people want to blame polyamory for the ending of a poly relationship even when the polyamory part wasn't the problem, but when a monogamous relationship ends, it's not the fault of monogamy?

A relationship can also be "successful" when it has a successful transition from one form to another, and sometimes that means transitioning from a romantic relationship to a platonic one. As a line in a movie once said, I don't tend to think of breaking up as a relationship ending, I tend to think of it as two friends getting back together.

People change over time and sometimes they just don't change in the same way or at the same rate as the people with whom they are in relationships, and sometimes the relationship cannot remain in the same state when the people have changed in certain ways. That doesn't necessarily indicate a failure of the relationship. It indicates the luxury our society has of demanding such an enormous amount of responsibility from a romantic relationship. Insisting that marriages include love is a relatively recent addition to the structure, and with the almost-equality between the genders regarding income and independence in our society, we can now have the luxury of requiring higher demands of our relationships than ever before in our history, and the luxury of ending a relationship when it doesn't meet all the demands we place on it.

The "failure" rate of relationships is not a sign of degrading family values, as some would like to think. On the contrary, it's a symptom of HIGHER family values, demanding even more from relationships than ever before and not settling for less. Relationships are no longer simply about property and alliances. Now our partners are expected to be our best friends, confidentes, lovers, and co-parents in addition to securing property for our offspring and allying our families. Because of all that monogamous relationships have to live up to, monogamy itself has a very high "failure" rate.

One of the advantages to polyamorous relationships is that they do not need to live up to this high standard of a single person being everything to someone else, much like past relationships did not need to - with family, friends, church, and lovers taking up the slack for emotional intimacy and childrearing since the spouse was not supposed to fulfill all those roles. Poly relationships have a lot of flexibility and they can look like a lot of different things without being a "failure" or coming up short in comparison to some Happily Ever After relationship that has been pre-charted for us in fairytales and romantic comedies. A poly relationship can look like whatever it wants to look like, and if it doesn't look like someone else's relationship, or if it ends without one of the partners dying, if the participants think it was successful, then it was and no one else has to agree or approve of it.

If I fall in love with someone who is not compatible with me as a live-in partner, I can enjoy that relationship as it is without ever having to cohabitate. Since monogamous culture has a prescribed path for relationships (first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage), a loving relationship that doesn't have the goal of marriage and cohabitation might seem like a failure. But in polyamory, it doesn't have to be if we are happy with the arrangement.  And if a cohabitation situation is still desired, continuing to enjoy this fulfilling but non-living-together relationship does not prohibit a cohabitation situation with someone else who might be more compatible in that role. Rather than being disappointed at the relationship for not living up to its enormous expectations, I can enjoy the experience for what it *does* provide, which is usually fulfilling in its own right if not constantly being compared to a fairy tale.

This is fundamentally different from "settling", by the way.  "Settling" is "taking what you can get", it's accepting something you are not completely happy with because the alternative, which is to go without, is worse.  I'm talking about liking my roasted chicken because I like roasted chicken, and not being disappointed in my chicken just because it doesn't taste like grilled salmon.  Settling is more like eating a rice cake because you're hungry and don't want to go without *something* but you're on a diet and you'd really rather have a chocolate cake instead, so you munch the crispy rice as a diversion just to shut your stomach up so you won't keep thinking about chocolate cake when you know you can't have it anyway.

If my relationship does not follow the love-marriage-baby path, if we do not cohabitate, if it ends before one of us dies, but we are all happy at the time and we do not regret it when it ends, why should that be considered a failure? And if you're going to hold us to that standard and declare "success" or "failure" on other people's relationships and an entire relationship style, that standard ought to be held up to your own chosen style.

So, I ask you, when do you call monogamy a personal failure and move on? Do you just keep trying? Or redefine and create relationships of a different type?

 (via pharyngula)

 Whatever Works by Woody Allen, was recommended to me by corpsefairy.  I'm not a Woody Allen fan.  I get awfully tired of his neurotic-old-man-gets-hot-younger-woman schtick that seems to be the only kind of relationship he is capable of writing about.  But corpsefairy told me this movie has a functional poly relationship as sub-characters and that I should watch it.

So I did.

I was pleasantly surprised.  The main character IS a neurotic old man who gets a hot younger woman, but I liked it anyway.  Boris is a cranky, atheist, nihilist, genius, egomaniac, and other than the nihilism part getting tiresome rather early, I actually kinda liked his character.  He bitched about religion and stupid people, which I can TOTALLY get behind.  His constant dismissive and condescending attitude towards others, assuming that everyone is dumber than him, got annoying, but otherwise, I found I had a lot in common with the old crank.

( The Plot With Spoilers )

So I liked the movie because the protagonist was a cranky, atheist, son of a bitch, and the poly triad had no drama or issues whatsoever.  Marietta discovered much more of herself through her relationship with her two male partners, which is exactly what happens in poly relationships (if you do them "right") and is one of the greatest benefits to poly relationships.  The relationship worked and the movie ended with the triad still functioning and happy.  And throwing in that bit about the homophobic, gun-toting Republican coming out as gay was just a fabulous cherry on top.

I recommend the movie for a bit of light viewing, and it definitely deserves to be on the poly list, even though the poly family is not the main plot focus.

For more movie reviews, click on the "reviews (movies)" tag below.  For a list of poly movies, visit www.theinnbetween.net/polymovies.html

 I had such high hopes for this movie!  It's based on the true story of renowned feminist writer Vita Sackville-West, during the early part of the 20th century.  It follows her through her marriage to diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson, and her affair with her childhood friend, novelist Violet Keppel.  Vita and her husband Harold had several same-sex affairs each during their life-long marriage, including a relationship between Vita and famous author Virginia Woolf.  So I was expecting this movie to rank up there with Carrington, which I also reviewed and loved.

But this movie did not have the same feel.

( Spoiler Alert! )

This movie should have been a classic poly story.  Even the biography sounded more poly than the movie ended up being.  It's not the ending of various relationships that make this story not-poly, it's the screaming, jealous, drama that made it not poly.  The movie portrayed the women as jealous, spiteful, deceitful, selfish women who completely screwed over their husbands.  Even the gay husband with his same-sex lovers and STD was a more sympathetic character, and his willingness to overlook his wife's lesbian relationships as long as it didn't destroy their family should have set this up perfectly for a poly arrangement.  And knowing that, in real life, the main character did, in fact, continue to have relationships outside of her marriage (as did her husband), this movie could have portrayed all of this in a much more poly light, like the way Carrington did.

But it didn't.  I really wish I could put this movie on the poly list, because even with the drama in Carrington, it was still clearly about people who understood the concept of multiple loving relationships.  But this one was not.  It only showed this one multiple-person relationship and the "multiple" part is what destroyed it.  Knowing that Vita, in real life, continued to have outside relationships leads me to believe that her life was more poly than this movie portrayed it, like Carrington.  Which then leads me to suspect that the script-writer disapproved of open relationships (or at least of women having same-sex affairs) and wrote that tone into the story.  I'm highly disappointed.

For more movie reviews, click on the "reviews (movies)" tag below.  For a list of poly movies, visit www.theinnbetween.net/polymovies.html

of atheist charities:

http://techskeptic.blogspot.com/2007/12/atheist-charities.html

Also, http://www.charitynavigator.org/ Charity Navigator, to help you choose the proper charity for your needs.

I've had these tabs open for ages, meaning to write a post about them, and I never seem to get around to it.  So I'm throwing them all in one post:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-discovery-may-offer-cure-for-human-papillomavirus-hpv-110968774.html - New Discovery May Offer Cure for Human Papillomavirus (HPV). "Test results confirming two of our lead compounds showed excellent in vitro antiviral activity and no cellular toxicity at dose levels tested for Human Papillomavirus (HPV). Testing was performed using the HPV 11 strain, which along with HPV type 6, is responsible for ninety percent of genital or anal warts."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-12/uovm-mie121510.php - Marinomed's iota-carrageenan effective against H1N1. "In animal experiments, Carrageenan demonstrated equivalent efficacy when compared to the drug Tamiflu".

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/45/19195 - Evolutionary history of partible paternity in lowland South America. "Partible paternity, the conception belief that more than one man can contribute to the formation of a fetus, is common in lowland South America and characterized by nonexclusive mating relationships and various institutionalized forms of recognition and investment by multiple cofathers."

http://www.journey-quest.com/ - "JourneyQuest is a fantasy comedy web series from the creators of "The Gamers" and "The Gamers: Dorkness Rising"."

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/enemies-reason/ - "The Enemies of Reason is a two-part television documentary, written and presented by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. ... Watch the full documentary now"

http://atheistmusicblog.blogspot.com/ - " aggregate all the Atheist, Pro-Science and Free-Thinking Songs, under the one roof." (I need to comb through this and add songs to my Atheist Music YouTube Playlist

http://bababrinkman.bandcamp.com/album/the-rap-guide-to-human-nature - The Rap Guide to Human Nature by Baba Brinkman "Immediate download of 19-track album in your choice of 320k mp3, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly desire. Buy Now name your price"

http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1160-martha-speaks-the-truth.html - Rationalist Kids Show Martha Speaks The Truth

Just had a conversation with another polyactivist, emanix, and out of that conversation came a few new terms:

KISS: Colloquial; A group of polyamorists, i.e. gaggle of geese, flock of birds, kiss of polyamorists. Example: "I was out at the pub with my kiss this evening." or "I went to a party with a kiss of polyamorists last weekend." May not necessarily imply that all members are romantically related to each other, only that everyone in the group be polyamorous. See related: intentional family, intentional community, french kiss, polyfamily, tribe.

FRENCH-KISS: Colloquial; A group of polyamorists, specifically a group who are all romantically connected to each other, i.e. gaggle of geese, flock of birds, kiss of polyamorists. Example: "I was out at the pub with my kiss this evening." or "I went to a party with a kiss of polyamorists last weekend. See related t intentional family, intentional community, kiss, polyfamily, tribe.

PDP (acronym): Colloquial; Public Displays of Polyamory. Commentary: there is a lot of discussion within the poly community about how much PDA, or Public Displays of Affection, is appropriate, and all the issues surrounding being publicly affectionate - either being affectionate in public in general, or being affectionate with one partner in front of another partner. PDP came about to describe displays of affection that are explicitly polyamorous, such as holding hands with two partners at the same time while in public, or kissing multiple partners goodbye at the airport, etc.

These have all been added to the Poly Terms page at www.theinnbetween.net/polyterms.html.

Holy crap! Bookmark this page! http://debunkatron.com/

Remember that whole Skeptics CD List I put together? Yeah, this goes way above and beyond! Save it, use it.

 So, it's the holidays, and being a member of several minority groups, everyone wants to know how I handle the traditional holiday season as a non-traditional person.  I was interviewed for a UK magazine about how polys spend the holidays, because apparently the idea that we spend them pretty much the same way monogamous people do is an unusual concept.  I'm also reading The Atheist's Guide To Christmas, a book I have been curious about for some time.  I know it's difficult to imagine, but atheists, and polys, are actually made up of more than one person, and sometimes we actually have different thoughts, ideas, wants, likes, and dislikes!  Shocking, but true.  So that means that there isn't a single way to exist during the holiday season, for either polys or atheists.  But with everyone reminding me that I'm "different", it got me to thinking ... how does a skeptical polyamorous atheist deal with a holiday that is more or less seen as a religious family holiday?  Apparently, people want to know.

I can only answer for myself.  Everyone else will have a different story, just like every monogamist and every religious person will have a different story.  Because, and here's another shock, they're not all the same person either!

( How do Polys spend the Holidays? )

( Shouldn't I be out in the trenches, fighting the War On Christmas? )

So, Happy Holidays everyone, whichever holiday you celebrate!  And if you refuse to accept my wishes for a good holiday because I didn't specify *your* holiday, then you don't deserve my wishes for a good holiday anyway.

December, 2010

This was another packed year! I made another gingerbread house for the holidays last year. It was a scale model of the Haunted Mansion at Disney Paris, complete with lighting behind the sugar-glass windows. I took it to a New Year’s Eve party to be devoured. I have the whole story on my website. I will do another one this year, but I haven’t decided what yet.

For my birthday, I went to see my one of my favorite musicians, Jonathan Coulton, and I also went with a group of friends to Rebounderz, a building lined with trampolines, including the walls! A good time was had by all.

This summer saw the opening of The Wizarding World Of Harry Potter at Universal Studios’ Islands of Adventure theme park. It is probably my favorite park anywhere. Islands of Adventure has all my favorite rides anyway, but WWOHP went out if its way in immersive realism. The same guy who designed and built all the movie sets built the theme park too, so it really feels like you walked right into Hogsmeade Village. More pictures are on the website.

As usual, the FLAN (Florida Local Area Network branch of the Squiggle - my romantic network) all went to Dragon*Con again, but no new costumes this time. I wore Laurie Jupiter again, since I put so much effort into making her, and I wore a bunch of t-shirts from one of my online t-shirt stores (I have three now) as advertising.  datan0de  and I celebrated one of our first anniversaries (we have several anniversary dates) together by riding a giant slingshot at a local carnival to symbolize falling, since it was the day we told each other we were "falling in love". Pictures and the video of our slingshot ride are up on my website.  tacit  and I had to celebrate our 6th year together online again, now that he lives in Oregon and couldn’t make it to Dragon*Con.

For Halloween, I had 4 parties to attend and had to turn down 2 more. One was a Dexter/serial-killer themed party, so I modified my old Mad Scientist costume since it had a butcher’s apron and added lots of knives. Another was western/Firefly/steampunk themed, so I just pulled out my old boots, hat, Wranglers, & denim duster for that. The other two were on the same night, so I dressed again in Laurie Jupiter for both of those. I even got to swing dance with one of the party guests.


In October, datan0de , femetal  and I went to the Bahamas since I had such a good time last time. We went shopping, sat around on the beach, watched the sunset over the Caribbean Sea, and went snorkeling with a barracuda. I got some great underwater pictures, and several underwater videos!

Work this year has been really slow, much slower than anticipated. But I’m still working behind the scenes for live events, still operating a camera, and staying afloat. Onyx’s flea problem is almost completely cleared up and she has put on a lot of healthy weight. Misty, however, is not doing as well. She has lost a lot of weight but the vet can’t find anything wrong with her. She just doesn’t want to eat. She’s also really cranky, so I’m worried about her.

In December, I was interviewed for a UK magazine about how polyamorous people spend the holidays, and I expect to receive my copy of the magazine any day now. The answer, for me, is that I will be spending the holidays with datan0de , femetal , zensidhe , and redheadlass , just like last year, sleeping under the Christmas tree in the living room. I also plan to watch my nephews open their presents over Skype, just like last year.

More pictures and videos of my adventures throughout the year are on my website at www.theinnbetween.net (in the Imagery section).  Hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season!

~Joreth

You can also find this calendar on my website at www.theinnbetween.net/fldancecalendar.html or by clicking the direct URL below the embedded calendar:



http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=lod1uqlmknhlt3nftj46obc42s%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York

Dear Santa... Dear Santa, This year I've been busy! Last Friday I committed genocide... Sorry about that, figmentj (-5000 points). In February I ruled Canada as a cruel and heartless dictator (-700 points). In May I pushed the_no_lj_d in the mud (-17 points). Last Monday I caught a purse-snatcher who stole seinneann_ceoil 's purse (30 points). Last month I bought porn for madmanatw (-10 points). Overall, I've been naughty (-5697 points). For Christmas I deserve a spanking! Sincerely, joreth

Write your letter to Santa! Enter your LJ username:

Dear Santa... Dear Santa, This year I've been busy! In October I had a shoot-out with rival gang lords on the 5 near LA (-5000 points). Last Sunday I invaded Iraq, broke it, and couldn't glue it back together before Mom got home (-1012 points). In February I pulled over and changed corpsefairy 's flat tire (15 points). In October I didn't flush (-1 points). In June I helped datan0de hide a body (-173 points). Overall, I've been naughty (-6170 points). For Christmas I deserve a spanking! Sincerely, joreth

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I am appalled by your uncaring, criminally negligent promotion of any charlatan that crosses your path. I am holding you personally responsible for the upcoming death of Kim Tinkham. She took your recommendation for The Secret and other medically unsound advice, and is now dying of a cancer that could have been prevented.

You should feel ashamed and guilty at the part you played in her death. You are the most powerful woman in the world; what you say, your readers take as Gospel; what you endorse, your readers accept as Truth, trusting you to have done the proper research before presenting it to them. They are not stupid, make no mistake that I am insulting their intelligence. They are human, and people trust important celebrities like you to not deceive them when they present pseudoscience as science and lies as fact.

You have had Kim Tinkham on your show and I will give you credit for looking uncomfortable when she admitted to eschewing all proper medical attention for her cancer. But you continue to promote The Secret, which is directly responsible for her decision to do so, and you promote hucksters like John of God, with his obviously fake parlor tricks that have been revealed and denounced decades ago.

Kim Tinkham is responsible for her own decisions, and her "doctor", Robert O. Young is not just criminally negligent, but criminally murderous for his role in Kim's (and others') case. But you are responsible for encouraging and spreading the types of lies and myths that result in otherwise intelligent and educated people like Kim pursuing these quacks and snake-oil nostrums. You have such a broad reach, that one whisper from you is like that fateful butterfly whose wings cause a breeze that results in a tsunami on the other side of the world.

As trite as it may seem, coming from a comic book movie, "with great power comes great responsibility". You, Ms. Winfrey, have great power to influence millions of people. You are not living up to your responsibility. If you can't handle this kind of responsibility, if you can only palm it off on your audience by leaving it up to them to do the research your money and staff should have been doing before you promoted the quackery you did, then you do not deserve your power.

Do the honorable thing and possibly redeem a portion of the respect that the legitimate science community has lost for you by retracting your support for The Secret, John of God, and the other quacks who convince your audience that wishful thinking can cure their cancers or that the "medical establishment" is "out to get them". You have the power to actually influence the tide of public opinion in this country, and you could contribute to the improvement of health of the entire nation if only you wielded your power for good.

Do the right thing.

(posted as an Open Letter on my blog at http://joreth.livejournal.com)

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(Want to write a letter to? Want to know what this is all about? http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/12/let_oprah_know_that_kim_tinkham_is_dying.php)

OK, let's see if this clears it up:



BTW, found this through The Atheism Daily, posted by The Godless Atheist, but can't tell from the image URL where it comes from because the image URL is just a photo sharer, like "twitpic".  So if anyone knows the originator of this image, I'd love to give him credit for it!

If you plan to do any online shopping for the holidays (or the rest of the year), I recommend using an Affiliates Link for your favorite organization. There is no difference in price for you, but a portion of what you spend will go directly back to that organization. So it's like making a donation to your favorite charity or non-profit organization without actually spending any money you aren't already going to spend on holiday gifts.

Here are the Affiliates that I recommend. By clicking on these links, you will be taken to that store's website, but a portion of the money you spend at that website will go to support organizations that foster reason, critical thinking, and science education:

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The Skeptics Society:

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The James Randi Educational Foundation

- Apply for a JREF Visa card, and $50 will be donated to the JREF on your first purchase, and 1% of all charges made on every purchase thereafter.

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tacit of Xeromag and SymToys (OK, he *does* encourage reason and critical thinking, but he also encourages lots of kinky fun!)

Poly Charms - Another location for poly jewelry, with some of my favorites highlighted. The only problem I have with this store is that it's all full of woo, and you can't choose which stones are used in some of the items because the ones chosen are there for some mystical purpose. But there are a few items without stones and a few that you can chose specific stones. These are almost all charms, which means they're very small. They can be worn alone as a pendant, or added to a charm bracelet, which should tell you just how small they are.  The prices may vary if you customize it.

Triad Gemstone Ring - will let you customize the 3 stones    $41.25

Gold Infinity Heart Earrings    $26.12

Infinity Heart Locket - this is VERY small    $40.32

The Triad Faceted Gemstone Pendant - can customize the stones  $16.87

Hinged Charm (for poly Vees) - can customize the stones    $10.87

Couple & Couple - can customize the stones    $20.76

Steampunk Poly    $24.56

Poly Molecule - will even make a custom molecule!    $20.42

Garnet Infinity Heart Ring $29.37

My other posts on poly jewelry and gifts:
http://joreth.livejournal.com/228467.html
http://joreth.livejournal.com/151787.html
http://joreth.livejournal.com/205419.html - there's only 1 poly item on this list
Abzu Emporium
And there's always Poly Tees!

By the way, if you are a poly vendor and would like to have your business card displayed at our local monthly discussion group meetings, contact me and I'll give you an address to send them to.  We have a table set up where we can display business cards for poly vendors and services.

A friend recently asked me how I get over relationships that have ended. She seemed to really like my response, so I'm posting it for everyone else to read:

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How to get over someone is a tough one, and why so many people take breaks where they don't come in contact with their ex for a period of time in order to process things and re-adjust to the situation. Other people jump right into another relationship to sort of replace their ex, or at least fill a void that their ex used to fill.

I do a number of different things, some of them constructive and some of them destructive, when I'm going through a breakup. What I've found most useful is in reminding myself of the status change and looking towards the future, sort of re-writing it now without him in it, or in a different role. After a while, I find that I'm holding onto the future I lost more than I'm holding onto the person. All the things we were supposed to do together, all the things I could have shared with him. Sometimes, mourning that future-that-will-never-be is really what's making me upset. Because, if I think about it rationally, either the relationship was not actually a good one by the time the breakup happened, or the relationship appeared to be good to me at the time but he turned out to be not who I thought he was and it was really better for me that I discovered that as soon as possible. I end up missing the person I hoped he was, and not so much the person he actually was.

So I reconstruct my life and my future without him, either the real him or the him I hoped he would be.

If you are trying to break a pattern that includes using a breakup as an attention getter, presumably to try and coax him back or as incentive to change behaviour because he now has to face the reality of losing you, then re-writing your future in your head as one without him in it, or in a different role, may help. If you can get it into your head, really into your mind, that his role in your life is something other, such as a friend, mentor, etc., then your behaviour should reflect the role you think he ought to play, meaning that your behaviour will naturally change to reflect the new mental model you have of this next version of your relationship. Sometimes having some distance can help in getting the clarity I need to do that mental status-change.  But I try not to let that go on too long, or I end up building a pattern that includes avoiding him, which doesn't help the transition to friends.  

Sometimes intentionally arranging to be around him again (or talking to him if distance is a factor) in such a manner that emphasizes the new role can help reinforce the idea in my head. That tends to be somewhat emotionally charged, and I can come away from the event feeling like crap at first, but the tangible reminder of the change in our roles to each other can help me get over things faster. Sort of like pulling off a bandaid quickly vs. procrastinating and trying to pull it off slowly.