Thanks For The Boobs, OKCupid

I absolutely love OKCupid, even though I haven’t gotten a date out of it in almost two years.  But it is the perfect form of people-watching.
I actually adore sitting down in a train station and watching all the people go by.  I like imagining their past histories, where they’re going, trying to read the history on their faces.  And OKCupid is this place that allows me to see who’s near me in the neighborhood, gives me a match percentage so I can imagine what kinds of friends we’d be, and read little snippets of their personalities.  I rarely contact people, but I love seeing who stops by.
And lately, the attractiveness of the people I’m viewing has stepped up.
As anyone who knows me knows, I have a type: pale, large-chested, plump, smiling.  And the photos of almost everyone I’ve looked at have fallen into that pattern, whether I’m selecting for match percentage or not.  There’s a lot more pictures with ample cleavage, a lot more paper-pale women smiling at me.  Walls of heartbreaking beauty.
Is that OKCupid homing in on me?
It’s a serious question.  I’ve written before about how Facebook quietly mutates to present you with your own customized world.  And OKCupid’s sadly-discarded blog shows that they’ve been able to do some fairly sophisticated analyses of what makes for an attractive picture way back in 2011.  They have the processing power to look at JPGs, break them down, and determine what’s attractive in general.
Two years later, it’s entirely possible that they’ve determined what’s attractive to me.
And that’s the fascinating thing about these large-scale social networks: there’s no incentive for to share their techniques with us.  It’s all back-end stuff, quietly massaged to try to keep us logged in and coming back.  How does Facebook decide what posts make your stream?  Nobody knows, except for Facebook’s engineers.
Which lends an oddly deity-like atmosphere to social networks as a whole.  It could well be that the past couple of weeks have been mere coincidence, that whatever algorithms choose who gets presented to me have randomly shown me the busty beauties who stir my affections.  Or it could be that some monolithic parallel processing machine behind the scenes has ticked into place, having finally ascertained what I want and now routinely doles out only women whose photos it knows I’ll find appealing.
In a strange sense, I wind up in the position of ancient man: attributing intent to things that may be completely random.  Or maybe attributing intent to something that moves according to rules I don’t quite understand.  In either case, I am a dumb caveman, goggling at the world, creating gods from clouds.
Except in my case, I know something is watching me.  I just don’t know how much.  I’ve just spent the past 500 words pondering, “Does OKCupid know how much I love boobs?” – and the question is, at its core, a quite serious one, as I’m pretty sure OKCupid would benefit from this knowledge if it could get it.
The question is, does it have it?
…Yet?

I'm Too Tired To Discuss Duck Dynasty, So Let's Bring Up Trayvon Martin

A while back, I discussed how Twitter twisted world views of Trayvon Martin, presenting customized versions of the world depending on what your friends were like.  My Twitter-feed, f’rinstance, consisted of tales of how badly the defense was doing and how clear it was that George Zimmerman would be convicted.
And after I said, “I hope George Zimmerman is convicted,” an LJ-friend replied:

So you admit your information comes from The Daily Show and an overtly biased Twitter feed, yet you have presupposed the ‘correct’ outcome.
You, sir, are part of the problem.

Which I thought about for a good long time.  For I could be a part of the problem.
Except that my biased Twitter feed linked directly to the coroner’s report, which I read in full, and several transcripts of various testimonies.  Now, admittedly, I did not watch the case with the full attention of, say, a juror, and it’s possible some damning evidence in Zimmerman’s favor slipped through the loop.
But my very point in that essay was that when you have a biased Twitter-feed, you need to compensate.  Which I tried to do so, by skimming the more morally-superior essays and drilling down to what facts were presented.  In short: I compensated.
And what I saw from that evidence was a man who was not irredeemable – he was trying to accomplish good – but someone who, as I once described a friend, “Would break a little old lady’s hip in his eagerness to escort her off the street.”  Zimmerman seemed to be acting from fear, not quiet justice, and I do believe from the evidence I saw that he placed himself into a position where he shot Trayvon Martin in, if not cold blood, extremely reptilian-temperatured blood.
Was Zimmerman an active racist?  Hard to say.  But was he the sort of guy who’d automatically jump to “kid in a hoodie in strange neighborhood who refuses to answer questions from a terrified stranger” == “mortal threat”?
I think so.  He was certainly driving around seeking danger.  Maybe he did it because his neighborhood had gone to shit and crime was on the rise, but you know who’s the last guy I want running around my block with a gun?  The guy who’s treating his turf like it’s territory to be defended in a videogame.
So I said that I hope he was convicted.  The man shot a teenager who literally no one has seriously argued was doing anything illegal at the time of the shooting.  That fact left conservatives twisting in the wind, because there were all sorts of arguments of who should be threatened by what, and whether a hoodie should equal suspicion, and brought up all sorts of facts about what Trayvon had done in the past.
But based on what Zimmerman knew as he stepped out of that car, I think he was a danger to innocents, and is a danger.  The only reason he’s not in jail is because the “Stand Your Ground” laws vindicated him – but vindicated in the eyes of the law does mean that someone is safe, unless you’d care to invite OJ Simpson to date your daughter.
And frankly, Zimmerman’s actions since then have done not one iota to contradict the impression I built up from reading those biased articles.
Which is not to say that I couldn’t be wrong.  The accusation leveled against me is serious, and I take it seriously.  It’s too easy to drink the Kool-Aid of whatever social stream you swim in, picking up outrage and narrowing to a sclerotic world view.  Which is why you have to compensate, working hard to see past the obvious to what’s there.  And if you don’t, yes, you become the danger.  You become George Zimmerman, convinced so utterly of his righteousness that he steps out of a car against police advice to start handling problems his own bad self.  And, armed with twisted information, you leave truth dead on the sidewalk.
The distinction my friend failed to make is that yes, I’ve convicted him in my heart.  But I did it based on a fair amount of evidence, and I am not a jury.  The jury acquitted him, and they did so rightfully – based on the box they got shoved into, they had to.
That does not make the laws right, it does not make George Zimmerman a stable man, and it doesn’t make the shooting a good thing.
It does not also make me right.
Now.  Go read the best article you’re going to read on the Trayvon Martin case, a wonderfully balanced take not just about the case but how people reacted, and draw your own conclusions.

Why Twerking Does Not Taste Like Bits of Carob

It was my hippie aunt who, inadvertently, taught me the power of the right word.  And she did it in nine words:
“Try it, Billy! This carob tastes just like chocolate!”
See, at the age of nine, I trusted my aunt.  She was my favorite relative ever.  She brought me up in the summers to stay at her house way out in the sticks, where I got to play on the neighbors’ farms.  And she was all crunchy-granola organic, and trying to get me off of my junk food fix, and so she said the fatal words.
I bit into the carob eagerly.  Here was something just like chocolate, but healthy!  And I –
– wait.
This isn’t like chocolate at all.
To this day, “betrayal” tastes like carob to me. For this carob wasn’t sweet, the way chocolate was, but sort of carroty-sweet, and the texture was different.  I could see the similarities between carob and chocolate, and maybe if it had been presented to me as something yummy in its own right, but it was by no means just like.
And this is how I feel about words.  Each word is a very specific taste to me, filling a slot as precise as chocolate.  And when someone wants to remove or change a word, there’s often no good replacement.  The thesaurus would have you believe that “quick” is the same as “fast,” or “swift,” or “rapid,” or even “break-neck”; to me, each of those words have their own unique flavor, and I could not use them interchangeably.  To me, swift is the surge of whitewater, pounding majestically down the steep slope of a waterfall; quick is an animalistic word, red-furred as the fox, jumping in nimble arcs over a series of obstacles.
I don’t claim that these are universal definitions, mind you.  But to me, saying, “Quick is the same as fast” is like telling me olive oil is the same as canola oil.  I guess you could make popcorn from olive oil if you tried, but the flavor wouldn’t be what you expected.
And so when a word slides in meaning so much that there’s no handy word to replace it, as it did with the term literally, I get vexed.  (Not irritated, or upset, or disgruntled: exactly vexed.)  And when it becomes clear that a word like “retarded” is hurtful to people and I shouldn’t use it, I do drop the usage – but I also lament a little, because that word filled an exact space in my personal lexicon that no other word can quite fill, and saying, “That’s ridiculous” doesn’t carry all the weight and implications of a bunch of fifth-graders expressing indigant disgust at discovering that the world is often not just unfair, but often completely insane.
(Which is not to say that it’s correct to use that word, I hasten to say – for the very good reason that, as mentioned, these definitions aren’t universal, and those who actually are retarded or have loved ones who are hear that very differently.  Part of being a grownup is coming to realize that while you may mean “gay” in no way to refer to actual gay people, it’s actually quite rude of you to expect gay people to make that distinction.  So it’s something I’ve stopped doing.  But, like a quit bad habit, I may have stopped smoking cigarettes for very good reasons, but these lollipops I’ve substituted don’t quite make up the difference.)
So when I got tagged in a Facebook status by Riv Swanson, I was surprised to see this Conan O’Brien quote presented as though I’d agree with it:

The Oxford dictionary has named “selfie” the word of the year, narrowly beating out “twerk.”  In a related story, the funeral for the English language is Saturday.

Why would I be upset by that?
These are specific words that describe very specific situations!  You know what would upset me more?  If we had no specific word to cover twerking, and instead had to refer to it awkwardly as “that gluteal dance people do.”  Selfies are a phenomenon that can only exist in the age of cheap cameraphones and social media, and I exult in the fact that we’ve had to devise delightful new words to cover all the magnificent ways that human beings act!
I suppose I should be enraged that newness makes its way into the OED, but no.  I love slang of all sorts.  I love the creative ways that human beings keep finding bizarre things to do that no word in the long history of the language can quite describe, and that we’ve had to patch together some new term to describe a behavior.
I adore that we can have a dictionary of twenty thick volumes, printed in microscopic type, and still that’s not enough words to define everything people can do.  All the shades of meaning.  All the dances, all the emotions, all the inventions.  We keep having to make that thicker, and the truth is that it’ll never be big enough because we, as people, are going to keep doing these grand shining-new things that are so vibrant we’ll need to hammer some letters together in order to describe it in a single word.
So no.  Twerking is wonderful.  It’s another thing to add to that colorful list of dancing, mamboing, cha-chaing, foxtrotting, rumbaing – another distinct shade for my palette.  I’m glad it’s here.  And welcome aboard, little butt-dance; I don’t think you’ll last, but I’m pretty sure you’ll delight someone eighty years from now looking up the crazy trends that seized us in the early 2010s, and discovering that this was A Thing.

Choose Carefully Who You're Kind To

On FetLife, there is the Spammy MicroDom – the 21 year-old “master” who gets an account, finds every woman within 20 miles of him, and emails cut-and-pasted orders for her to kneel at his feet.  This kind of behavior is widely mocked, and rightfully so; at least three times a week, you’ll see vicious parodies of the MicroDom hitting the “Most Popular” boards.  Women have contests to create the most insulting reply, and there are whole boards dedicated to shredding these pathetic attempts of domination.
Believe it or not, I have some sympathy for these guys.  Not a lot; just a glimmer.
I say this because I got an email from someone asking me to look over one of his posts, where he argued – and correctly – that a lot of this idiotic behavior comes because the media presents an impression to men that this is how they’re supposed to act in BDSM situations.  These guys have heard through various badly-presented filters that this is what “submissive” women want, and so they arrive on Fet and treat women in the way they’ve been told that women “in the scene” want to be treated.
Now, the reason I lack most sympathy for these guys is because they’re from-the-hip idiots.  A single Google search would tell you that this isn’t how things work in reality, and any understanding of how human beings actually work when they’re not your masturbatory fantasies would tell you “Hey, women usually don’t want random strangers splurting their sexual desires all over them.  Women, in fact, are drowning in dumb generic offers like yours.”  (I mean, this isn’t unique to FetLife; I’ve heard many similar horror stories from women on OKCupid, where the sexual innuendo actually seems to be more prevalent.)  And they’re often emailing women who self-identify as Dommes, presumably on the basis that “these women are pretty” and “I want to sex them” means “So they must be submissive.”
So these guys are misled, but only because they’re short-sighted and lazy.  Fail.
However, the guy writing the post essentially said (paraphrased by moi), “Why aren’t we more compassionate to these guys?  They’re stupid and ill-informed, yes, but instead of responding with mockery to drive them away, why don’t we as a community concentrate on educating them?  Guys who look at the Kinky and Popular board will see nothing but parodies of them.  I feel like all we’re accomplishing is creating this negative atmosphere for new male doms.”
To which I replied, “This mockery accomplishes something more vital, in a way: creating a more positive space for women, both dominant and submissive, who are less likely to have to deal with this shit – and more likely to stay. And who would you rather privilege – newbie male doms who are acting reflexively like assholes, or all the women on FetLife?”
“Think carefully,” I concluded.  “There’s some very encoded and subtle sexism built into your thought patterns here.”
Don’t get me wrong; I am all about the teachable moment.  I think you’ve got to allow for them, and someone has to stand up and be nice and take someone’s hand to walk them through all the dumb mistakes.  But every time you “open up” a community to make it more welcome to those expressing dumb and insulting behaviors, you alienate those who are insulted.
And you have to choose.  There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be compassionate.  But if you create a place where people are very tolerant of the MicroDom’s mistakes, then more MicroDoms are likely to thrive there.  Which means that the women get more dumb emails.  Which means that the women are more to leave rather than being harassed.
Classic liberal thinking has “the big tent,” where everyone can stand underneath it.  I’m here to say that the best reality can do is a largeish tent, where you can either choose to evict a rowdy subset, or have them drive off some portion of people who don’t want to deal with them.  In either case, not everyone will be in that tent, and whoever’s not in the tent will feel alienated from you, whether you intended it to be or not.
I’d argue that it’s far better to intend it.  Yes, it’s a wonderful goal to have everyone able to act however they please, and all of us being tolerant of their quirks.  But what happens is that some people’s quirks are so unpleasant that nobody wants to be around them – and if you don’t choose to eject them, you unconsciously choose to be okay with certain groups of people leaving.
I feel a little bad for the MicroDom.  He’s uneducated, stupid, naive, and maybe could become someone worthwhile with a little guidance.  However, I feel way worse for the forty women he emailed, who routinely wake up with an inbox clogged with mails not just from him but from everyone like him… and I’d far prefer they stick around.  They’re more likely to have something interesting to say.
And maybe we could apply pressure in a way that includes less mocking.  I agree that it’d be nice if we were all a little less hateful.  But on the other hand, if we’re asking people to change their behavior, I’d probably prioritize the people who decided that random strangers were worth harassing, you know?

How Can You Be So Ugly?

One of the things that always amazed me about the Baby Boomers is what they did to marijuana.
They smoked it, almost all of them, during those crazy hippy days.  They knew it didn’t drive you frothing mad, or strangle your soul; it just made you hungry, and maybe a little unmotivated.  So when I was young, I figured that by the time I was twenty, pot would be just this other thing like alcohol and cigarettes.
And the Baby Boomers treated marijuana like it was the Antichrist.  They were terrified of anyone touching it, ever.  And the jail sentences went up, and the laws clanged down, and by the time I was twenty you could get your whole house confiscated for selling a dime bag.
I never got that.  I thought that people who’d been through that would understand.  But as it turns out, there’s this sort of violent reaction that people have to stupid things they did in their youth, where they get to the Age Of Lawmaking And Morality and thunder, “Well, we did that, but nobody else should ever!” and act as though anyone who would do such a thing is the scum of the earth.
And I think of this Facebook generation, where you see teenagers posting the dumbest goddamned statuses everywhere, embarrassing photos and insulting jokes and ill-thought-out political statuses.  And I’d like to think that by the time these kids are all fifty and pretty much every Congressman has a picture of themselves doing a beer bong hit, society would say, “All right, we all sent a naughty picture to a lover, we all have a photo of ourselves embarrassingly drunk, we all held opinions in our twenties that we regret now” and accept that a) saying and doing stupid things when you’re young is a fact of life – I mean, when else are you going to be at your most stupid except when you’re least experienced? and b) a person’s politics at age eighteen are often as transient as her love of Justin Bieber, and we should acknowledge that as human beings, we evolve.
Yet what I see happening is like the marijuana situation, where people assume that one stupid post is the whole of who someone is.  The moment someone says something dumb, society freezes to a halt and that’s who they are – that dumbass who said that thing.  They said that five years ago!  What scum!
Can people ever learn?
And I see this increasing hostility towards people even having to defend their positions on the Internet.  “Hey, I’m on the side of righteousness and good!” they seem to cry.  “And can you believe this jerk is asking me questions?”  And yeah, I get that it’s exhausting to be the teachable moment all the time, and I’m not saying that anyone should be forced to serve as a continual FAQ – but god damn, people, the teachable moment is how we take people who don’t understand why this is a big deal and show them.  It’s the moment of potential enlightenment.  It’s the moment where you were ignorant, but you got it.
Yet I feel a constant pressure of “Man, what a kneebiter, he didn’t agree with me the instant I showed him the true path!”  And that, I feel, is part of this sociopathic Internet sense that you either get it or you don’t, and if you sinned once – or even had to be convinced of the correctness of someone’s argument – then you’re not really worthy.
I’ve sinned a lot of times, man.
You can still read them all.
I had someone ask me a question, upon reading one of my older essays, that was, essentially, “Your classic essays are so horrible, full of casual misogyny and ugly humor and fratboy antics?  When did you have your moment of conversion?”
And I’ve thought about that comment for almost a year now, and the answer is simple: there wasn’t one.
I had no sizzling flare of comprehension, no singular moment.  I merely evolved, one interaction at a time, over the course of two decades.  The guy who had all of these disastrous love affairs and tried a hooker and hid in a bathroom closet to stop a pervert has a lot in common with today-Ferrett, but god damn if I don’t look back and wince at what a clumsy, hurtful oaf I was.  I just had a thousand interactions where I recognized my own insufficiency, usually by hurting someone, and said, I can be better.
And so, slowly, I became better.
And it would be a lot better for me, in many ways, if I quietly deleted those essays, as they don’t reflect who I am.  People who read them risk thinking, “Well, that’s who Ferrett is, what a kneebiter,” and walking on.
Yet I keep them up.  Because yes, there are people who are going to freeze me (or anyone else) in amber. But I leave all of my ugly bits out in the open as a form of protest – yes, I was stupid when I was 22 years old.  Weren’t you?
And I refuse to bow to the folks who seem to think that “who you are now” has an exact correlation to “who you were then.”  We learn from doing stupid things.  Often, we learn because we did stupid things.  And it’s not right that we say hurtful or thoughtless things, but the people who confront us are doing us a great service by revealing their pain, and risking being callously written off because it might change how we act in the future.
All you people who I slighted, erased, or slandered: I leave my stupidity up as proof of how much work you did.  I am not monolithic.  I am evolving, continually striving to make myself better, and I am here to battle the concept of innate perfection.  I am here to battle the idea that one bad day can swallow every other achievement in your life.  I am here to battle the idea that one thoughtless moment means you can have all of your self-worth stripped away by people who want to feel superior.
You’re going to make mistakes.  That’s okay.
Just make up for them.