Friday May 2 2003

Every day people

Blogging every other day seems to be working for me better, actually. I don't know if it annoys any of my regular readers, no one has said anything about it. Actually, I'm not entirely certain I have any regular readers, but what the hell. Since my blog is different from all other blogs, I have to do all my archiving by hand, so I don't keep several days worth of entries on one 'front' page. (Also, since I write much lengthier essays disguised as blog entries than most people do, putting more than one day's entries per page would make for a very large page, which I'm sure I'd also get bitched at for.)

Anyway, leaving stuff up for 48 hours or so gives the stuff longer to accumulate comments, which keeps my frusration level down, and keeping my frustration level down is always good.

In local news, no job yet, and it looks like the North Nebraska one is going to someone else. I also haven't gotten an Unemployment check yet, although I got something that looked bewilderingly like a payment stub for a check I never got yesterday. I'm waiting on the mail today to see if more enlightenment arrives, as I'm reluctant to enter the maze of trying to get hold of someone from the local Unemployment office by phone. I tried this once back in 1999 and it was a complete nightmare.

I now turn you over to our regularly scheduled ranting, raving, rending of clothing and guh-nashing of teeth. Enjoy.

ALL SEX, ALL THE TIME

Now if that title doesn’t cause a spike in the hit counter, I don’t know what will.

My lovely cuz-in-law Melanie sent me a link to www.speedmonkey.net, and I checked it out a bit… not much, I didn’t have a whole lot of time in my previous net session. I don’t know if all the material on the site is written by one person, or it’s an assemblage of trendy, snarky, occasionally mean-spirited pop culture ‘wisdom’ by various different pundits, or what. (Most of the stuff seems to be written by a guy, or guys, but one article on how fragile women are and how they need compassion and forgiveness while they are suffering from PMS induced derangement, was clearly written from the female point of view.)

However, in a couple of the columns in the general ‘what women want’ and ‘dating tips’ sections, the male POV (single or multiple, I don’t know) kept repeating the same thing over and over again, and it’s something I more or less take issue with, so I’m going to bitch about it here:

According to de Speedmonkey, "All men want is sex".

Now, I’m not going to parse that Clintonesquely, I’ll just assume that’s meant to be taken in the context of ‘from women’. (However, if I wanted to get snippy, I’d say that no, occasionally we want carbonated beverages, pizza, some fresh pornography, and a new Tom Clancy novel, too.) Nonetheless, even in the context of ‘from women’, I still have to take some exception to this.

As always, I speak only for myself as an individual, and make absolutely no pretension to speaking for all my fellow males. And I’m deeply weird, so far all I know, I could be the only male human being in the history of the world who feels this way, and in point of fact, ALL that every other male on the planet with a functional pair of nads wants, from women, is sex.

However, as far as I can tell from my own experience, that simply isn’t true.

First, again, we’ll leave aside carping about things like the 10% of ‘all men’ who are gay, and presumably, don’t want sex from women, but who wouldn’t mind occasionally getting advice on color coordination. We can, I think, more or less safely assume that with the sweeping generalization ‘all men want is sex’, Speedmonkey in fact means ‘all heterosexual men want is sex, from women’. Still, I point these things out not to be a snarky fisker, but merely to underline that sometimes, a bit more precision in our sweeping generalizations would be desirable.

However, having arrived at what Speedmonkey most likely meant – ‘all heterosexual men want from women is sex’ – well, I still beg to differ.

The way I would put this is, ‘heterosexual men always want sex from women they find attractive’. That’s a statement that I will stand behind, because, to the best of my knowledge and personal experience, it is absolutely true. At least, I can say quite confidently that if I, a heterosexual man, am interacting with a woman I find attractive, in any manner whatsoever, I want sex from her. Lots of it. In many different and specific ways and positions, and in a variety of locations, and on a great many separate occasions. If you’re an attractive woman and you’re talking to me or even standing within eyeshot and I am aware of your existence, I would adore to get naked and horizontal with you, and actually, mostly clothed and still pretty much vertical is perfectly acceptable, too, if you’re into elevators or something. Sex with attractive women is something that Darren pretty much always votes ‘yea’ to; I am, in fact, the President of the Attractive Women Should Have Sex With Darren Society. (I’m also, alas, the entire membership, it often seems, but we wear the chains we forge in life.)

Further, I will endorse a bit more of what Speedmonkey seems to be trying to impart as some great mysterious wisdom to all the supposedly clueless women out there: if a heterosexual male is carrying on any kind of voluntary, ongoing positive relationship with a woman he is not related to by blood, he wants to have sex with her. I don’t care how platonic and wonderful and just good friends the chick in the relationship thinks it all is. I disregard entirely that she regards her platonic male friend as the big brother she never had and would simply be hurt and crushed to know that he actually has working erectile tissue and would like to employ it with her in the vigorous pursuit of their mutual erotic happiness. And it does not matter how certain the woman in question is of the deep spiritual bond between her and her 'big brother and bestest bestest friend EVER' is, she’s still kidding herself. If a heterosexual male is enabling, validating, and maintaining a voluntary and ongoing relationship with a woman who is not related to him by blood, he wants to bang her. It’s honestly that simple, and I agree with Speedmonkey; all you girls should just get used to it.

Ladies, we are not really the big brothers you never had, and we don’t really love you 'just as friends' and there is simply no way in this universe that we never think of you in that disgusting sexually objectified way. We just let you believe that in the hopes that one day you’ll drop that idiot you’ve been sleeping with for years (while bitching to us relentlessly about what a meanie he is) and give us some for being nice guys all this time.

Now, I admit, this last involves a typical social delusion on the part of male 'nice guys' and is very probably never actually going to happen. Women decide within 90 seconds of meeting a guy whether there is any hope of voluntary coitus taking place between them and that particular guy, and short of being carried out of a burning building over the shoulder of her 'big brother' and 'bestest bestest friend EVER', she's not likely to ever change her mind, regardless of what we see in the various Norah Ephron movies. (And, guys, even if she sleeps with you after you carry her out of the burning building, it's not because she thinks you're suddenly a babe. You will never be a babe to her. You were not a babe to her the first time you sat down across the table from her in the school cafeteria or at that restaurant near where you both work and sexual first impressions last a lifetime. If she sleeps with you after you save her life, it's simply out of gratitude. I'm not knocking gratitude, but you can't build a long term relationship on it, so just be ready to accept that and move on when she's done being grateful, okay?)

Now, where the women involved are being delusional is in thinking we male nice guys and 'big brothers you never had' put up with this nonsense just because we’re sweet. Wrong. We like the way your ass looks in those blue jeans, hon. We just know that in your addled little mind, no matter how nice we are for how long, the minute you realize we like the way your ass looks in those jeans, you will for some insane reason feel threatened and affronted, and then you will stomp off in a huff forever, so we keep it a secret.

However, despite all that, sex is not ALL men want – or at the very least, it’s not all I want – from women.

Leaving aside cheap and easy cracks like ‘I’d also occasionally like my laundry done and the dirty dishes washed’, the simple fact of the matter is, just because I want to bang a fellow human being, that does not mean I cease to regard her (I’m afraid it’s nearly always a ‘her’ with me, I’m pretty much, for the most part, hopelessly orthodox in my sexual orientation) as a human being. In fact, I often think of attractive women as being, for my intent and purposes, better, broader, more all purpose human beings than men, because, well, pretty much anything I might like to do with a guy I can probably do with a girl just as well, and in addition, if she wanted to, I could also have sex with her. This seems like an awfully nice potential bonus.

But you must bear in mind, at least, to me, women are not in any way excluded from being perceived as potential providers of all the other stuff I look to other humans for, as well, which I suppose can be best summed up with the words ‘friendship’ or ‘companionship’. In fact, I am not only perfectly willing to be good friends with any woman I am lucky enough to be getting sex off, I honestly prefer it. I not only like doing the horizontal bop with women, I also like watching movies with them, talking to them on the phone, walking and driving places with them, talking about books or TV with them, and sharing meals with them. In fact, I think women are spiffy keen, in general (there are certain specific exceptions to this, but then, there are specific exceptions to every generality) and back when I actually had friends, in a previous life, it sometimes seems, quite a few of them were women. So, while I certainly would not make any attempt to speak for my entire gender, I will say uncontrovertibly that I want considerably more than sex from women.

(Actually, I can also say uncontrovertibly that there are at least some heterosexual males out there who want more than sex from women; I’ve met a few who like to scam money off women. However, I don’t really regard them as ‘men’, so I suppose Speedmonkey’s original generalization would still be true in their regard.)

BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER

You know, when I first started out I tried really hard to be an all-politics, all the time, liberal power blogger, screaming vituperation at Dubya and his younger, smarter brother and re-posting all the spiffy links and articles about the War on Terror and all that good shit. And I was really, really bad at it, which is why, lately, I’m not bothering to write any of that stuff, and there’s no reason I should, either, since we have bloggers like William Burton and the Armed Liberal and Skippy to do that for me, and they do it really well, too.

So, instead, I just write about whatever social disaster has most recently enveloped my life (which you’d think, having no social life at all, I’d be pretty much immune to, but if so, you’d think quite wrongly) or what I’m reading or what TV shows I like or my responses to something provocative I read on the Internet recently.

And, what I’m reading on the Internet lately that isn’t about the idiocy of Republicans in general and Dubya in specific often seems to revolve around the mysterious and enigmatic interactions of men and women.

Now, you’d think that someone who hasn’t been laid since, hmmm, 1999, and who is so socially clueless regarding male façade in our culture that he’s willing to admit to that on the Internet, wouldn’t start talking about this stuff, because, clearly, I know nothing. However, in actual fact, that’s not true. I know quite a bit about the mysterious and enigmatic interactions of men and women, and despite my many, many disadvantages on the social playing field, I could most likely be getting laid a great deal more than I am, even without employing illegal pharmaceutical agents to do so.

The problem is, well, pretty much all the effective dating/mating/seduction advice I’ve ever heard or read, and which I know for a fact would actually work (yes, even for me) boils down to two things:

Lie to the bitch.

Get the bitch drunk.

My use of the term ‘the bitch’ in the above two sentences is very intentional. It is not meant in any way to demean women as a gender or a sub-quadrant of humanity. It is meant, instead, to shock the reader, and give you some small notion of exactly how repulsive I find those two pieces of advice, or, if you prefer, those two apparently very effective, seduction/dating/mating tactics.

The simple fact is, I have, all my life, known guys who were undeniably very successful with women. (I don’t say ‘more successful than me’, because there are Trappist monks who are more successful than I am with women; being more successful than me with women is not much of a distinction.) And all of these roving, smiling, charming, rogueish fellows have been, to a man, vastly talented liars, and all of them, to a man, have made liberal use of alcohol (at the very least) to obtain the affections of the current object of their (usually very short term) attention.

I find this, to say the least, kind of objectionable. (I find it at the most to be despicable, but varying guys I’ve known employ these techniques to varying degrees, hence, the range of my reaction.) But women don’t get a free ride here at Scorn Central, because you know, ladies, the reason that guys who want to get into your panties lie to you, and get you drunk, is because it works. I’m not saying if you were less gullible, and you didn’t regard free mixed drinks as a civil entitlement most likely handed down from God to Eve in the Garden of Eden, then men would stop being such bastards to you immediately, but I am saying, you’d probably find yourselves wondering ‘what in the world am I doing in a relationship with this jerk’ a great deal less often.

The fact is, women want really weird stuff from men. (In comparison to what men, in a social context, mostly want from women, I mean: sex.) I’m not just talking about intimacy, romance, and significant relationships, I’m talking about, well, power and authority. For some bizarre reason, a vast majority of women, despite the fact that we all now live in a culture with electricity and automobiles and mass production and birth control and female suffrage and such like that, continue to regard men primarily as meal tickets, and worse, as some sort of instant doorway (if only they can find the right one) into fulfillment, validation of themselves as a human being, and, of course, The Good Life.

Now, many, many men do not want to have significant relationships at whatever particular point in their life that they may currently be at (but this is especially true of guys in their early 20s) so they lie about that in order to get sex. That one I don’t blame women for; it’s often hard to tell a guy who really wants to settle down with you forever from a guy who is only telling you that to get laid (other than by common sense; if he’s telling you that ten minutes after he bought you your first drink, little bells should be going off somewhere in your head).

Well, maybe I blame women who fall for it just a little; what the hell are you doing, trying to settle down with a guy forever when you’re in your early 20s? We’re going to live a lot longer than 28 these days, babe, or at least, we can reasonably expect to. Try to keep the ‘shopping for a diamond ring’ gleam out of your eyes until you’re at least in your late 20s and you’ll be a lot happier, trust me.

However, it’s the power and authority thing that really stokes most women up to the point where they will give it up – ‘it’ meaning ‘a boatload of sex’, pretty much – to any guy who makes a remotely credible presentation that he has any. And this is, frankly, stupid, for many reasons. For one, it’s the early 21^st Century in the United States of America; if women really want power and authority that bad, they can go get some their damnselves. Insisting on the ages old game of glomming onto a man who can get all that cool stuff for you is a colossal waste of energy. It makes women vulnerable to smart predators who know exactly how to fake it, just for starters.

Beyond that, well, if you set out looking for a powerful, authoritative man, you just might end up with one. And if you do, you will almost certainly regret it, probably not too far in the future, because in this very imperfect world, powerful and authoritative men are, for the most part, bastards. That’s how they got to be powerful and authoritative, and that’s why they stay that way.

(Let me break to admit that there is some geek bitterness in those words, or at least, there would be if I were speaking them to you aloud. I have been a wonderful, lovely, sweet, romantic, kind, decent, loving, considerate, thoughtful fellow all my life, and I even have some reason – albeit not in the last few years, I admit – to think I’m pretty decent in bed, and the vast, vast majority of women in this world that I find remotely attractive are either unaware I have ever existed or seem to be rather annoyed by the fact when it is called to their attention. There is, or used to be, a minority of very attractive women who adore me, as their bestest bestest friend and the big brother they never had, and if you think that’s a lot of fun when you’re completely affection starved, you’re as crazy as Hannibal Lecter and nowhere near as smart. So, yes, I’m rather annoyed that I’m exactly what nearly every woman I’ve ever been attracted to has wept on my shoulder at some point that she really, really wants, while, of course, she is in the middle of a long term relationship with a prick who alternately ignores her and every once in a while maybe even smacks her around, who she is going to go home and climb into bed with right after she dries her face on my shirt, kisses me on the cheek, and thanks me for making her feel much better about everything. So, fine, I admit it, the fact that pricks get all the great women and all the great women insist they want nice guys while screwing asswipes who treat them poorly makes me crazy. However, the bitterness does not necessarily invalidate the observation. Still, I apologize for being exasperated about this, while noting that I’d probably be less entertaining on the subject if I weren’t. Now let’s get back to our muttons, although, honestly, when it comes to mutton, you can have all mine, I’ll just eat some dinner rolls.)

Okay, back to it…

The really nice, sweet, romantic rich guy who owns half the planet and who will always leave a rose on the nightstand for you in the morning, just does not exist. Even the one who starts out the movie as a human piranha, but ends up as a nice, sweet, romantic rich guy after he falls hard for the hooker with the heart of gold who looks just like Julia Roberts, does not exist. These are myths. Powerful and authoritative men are pricks, and more often than not they’re actually abusive pricks, and if that’s what you want, and you’re drop dead gorgeous and absolutely amoral about how you go about it, you may get one of your very own… but get used to him cheating on you, and be thankful if you’re one of the lucky few trophy wives who doesn’t get smacked around on a weekly basis, as well.

All of which is pretty much why men lie to women, and in addition, men get them drunk: because another simple equation is, there just ain’t that much power and authority to go around, however, we all want to get laid. Add x and y together and what you end up with is, a lot of guys pretending to be something they’re not, because a lot of women want them to be something they’re not… and, a bit further down the road, what you end up with is a catastrophic divorce rate and an even worse cultural incidence of people who are deeply miserable in their relationships and who cannot seem to understand exactly why.

Getting back to me (and the reason I have a blog is so I can always get back to me) this is pretty much, as far as I can tell, why I don’t get laid. It’s not that I have no money and am utterly powerless, it’s that I idiotically refuse to attempt to project any other appearance. I could spend a lot of my little money on better clothes, and I could, if I wanted to, lie like a rug. (I can, if I put my mind to it, lie really, really well. It’s some weird talent I have. It has, on at least one occasion in the past, kept me out of jail, and it has frequently gotten me out of various other sorts of trouble. I prefer not to lie whenever I can avoid it, but if I’m about to be arrested or fired or evicted or lose my Unemployment Benefits, well, special circumstances apply that do not apply simply to getting laid... at least, by my own weird standards of social morality.) And of course, there’s always booze, which is the reliable sidekick and faithful companion of all men who, like me, have to somehow create a believable façade of power and authority on a really low budget. Because, if your special effects budget isn’t large, it still won’t matter if you get the audience drunk enough.

And, beyond that, for the same amount of money I’d spend on clothes and a haircut and buying women enough drinks to get them so plonkered they might actually believe, for the remainder of an evening, that I’m even remotely authoritative and powerful and therefore they should sleep with me, I could always call one of those ‘in home masseurs’ listed on the back page of the Weekly Planet every week. (I understand, more or less vaguely, that this is for the most part regarded by our culture as being in some way ‘cheating’, but in all honesty, it seems like as honest a way to get laid as getting some chick too hammered to see straight.)

So, it’s not that I don’t know about women, and what they want from men, in general, because, in fact, I do. It’s just that, well, what women want from men is, for the most part, stuff I don’t seem to have a big supply of, and where most of my fellow males see no problem in pretending to have that stuff in order to get laid, I stubbornly insist on being accepted or rejected for who I really am. (Acceptance levels have always, at least, since I first noticed a significant difference between males and females, been low, and have lately dropped off to pretty much zilch. Rejection, on the other hand, has pretty much always been in above 90%, and over the past several years has, in the words of some snotty academics, ‘achieved unity’… which, in this context, is a pretty ironic term.)

Naturally, I could simply conclude that I’m just not a very sexy guy. However, as always, I prefer to blame everyone else: it’s all you chicks’ faults, for wanting stupid stuff from men, and it’s all my fellow males’ fault as well, for not just… I don’t know… killing yourselves, or something. I suppose if I were, literally, the only guy on Earth, some reasonably cute babe would have to go out with me eventually…

* * * *NOTE: * * * * The above columns appeared previously on 'Major Attitude Adjustment's Webblog'. Like a few other previous entries to 'A Brown Eyed Handsome Man', they are being reprinted here because my day to day life right now is really boring and because I have a slightly larger audience to outrage and offend here than I did there.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough with, style, and/or panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.

NOTICE

There is such a thing as a social contract. Even among bloggers. And I pay attention to it.

ABEHM