I'm Soaking In It: On Flirting

I am, apparently, a very flirty guy.  I’m told by women that I have a habit of sending playful signals that tell them that I am, if not actively interested, at least amenable to smooching.
I don’t necessarily mind this, but there are days I would like to know exactly what the hell I’m doing.
For I rarely intend to flirt.  It’s just sort of this radio signal I emit, occasionally broadcasting at women I didn’t actually have any interest in, which makes things awkward on occasion.  I suspect it’s even more awkward for the women who have negative interest in me, who I don’t necessarily intend to smother in flirt-pollen… but as noted, I have zero idea how to turn it off if I’m comfortable around you.  So, you know, sorry about that.
Yet the truth remains I am not cloistered in my usual straight-jacket of social anxiety, then I am probably exuding some flirtiness.  At least according to the women I deal with.
I’ve tried to break it down, but the interesting thing about being naturally flirty is that it also makes one remarkably oblivious to being flirted at.  The only flirt-receptors I completely, 100% get are the moves that I don’t do – if someone repeatedly touches my arm, I know that it is on like Donkey Kong.  Or they’re Southern.  I’ve been repeatedly convinced a Southern Girl totally wants this Ferrett-bod, and have prepared to make my excuses as to why this coupling would be unwise at this moment in time, and then saw them interact with someone else and had that deflating realization of Oh, okay.
(Because it’s nice to be attractive to someone, even if they’re not your type.  I’m always baffled when dudes are all like, “WHAT IF THAT GAY GUY LIKES ME?!??” as if merely being the target of someone’s affection will corrode your sexuality.  I’ve been flattered by some attentions, expressed respectfully, even as I did not reciprocate.)
But anyway, like many people, women will flirt with me and I’ll just be obliviously happy.  “How friendly they are!” I think.  “What lovely people, to compliment me so effusively!  What a brotherly gesture, to kiss me on the cheek!  What wondrous companionship, that she’s touching my… oh, wait.”
Which, again, is often compounded by the fact that they’re getting my flirtatious signals, and now we are caught in an inadvertent feedback loop.  Thankfully, I like people on the whole, so I’ve rarely inadvertently stumbled into smooching with people I’m opposed to – but it’s sort of like being caught in a warm summer storm: pleasant, a little moist, but this might have been enjoyable if I’d known it was incoming.
Then again, I know flirt-blindness is a chronic thing.  I like Neil Gaiman’s idea of inviting someone to a seduction. “Wear the kind of clothes you would like to be seduced in.”
But my point is, it’s disconcerting to be exuding an aura that you have no idea where the kill-switch is located.  I’m doing something.  I don’t know what the mechanics of it are, I can’t give you advice on it, it’s just… there.  Whether I want it or not.  And it’s a positive thing on the whole, but there are days I wish I at least knew how this process worked so I could excuse or refine it.

The Worst Thing About Bad Transitions

I’ve mentioned before that polyamory should start with a series of a genteel negotiations, but more often begins with a dramasplosion of cheating and boundary violations that settles down into “Well, actually, I’m… more okay with you fucking them than I thought I was.”
That isn’t fun.  It isn’t fair.  But quite often, the need for polyamory just sort of surges out and surprises everyone.  It happens so often it’s a pretty identifiable pattern.
Yet it gets worse when they’re not really okay with what happened, and you still need whatever triggered the cheating.
The central problem with polyamory is that yes, it’s about loving all your partners.  But self-love counts, too: you can’t keep yourself trapped in a relationship that’s destroying your soul just because it makes someone else happy.
And so though it’s severely counterintuitive, sometimes the best way to show love in a poly relationship is by an abrupt breakup.  You love them.  You love them so much that you realize that the relationship you’re able to have right now cannot possibly make both of you happy.  And when you have talked enough to realize that this is indeed the inevitable conclusion, the kindest thing you can possibly do for everyone involved is to end that relationship as quickly as possible.
What frequently happens in the beginnings of “polyamory” is that the partner cheats because they have a need – often it’s D/s, finding that online master who they have hot email exchanges with.  (And yes, an emotional/sexual commitment without a physical component is cheating in most monogamous relationships.  It’s still giving a part of your heart to someone else.)
The relationship is uncovered.  Hearts are broken.  The cheated-upon partner feels shattered, because here is their husband/wife exchanging intimacies with another person – intimacies they cannot fathom, because they don’t get this whole BDSM thing, they feel icky about hitting their partner, they have an actual negative interest in going to any kind of club.
Yet as it turns out, once uncorked, it turns out their husband/wife really fucking needs this shit.  They have for years.  They’ve been quietly starving for this experience all along, and now that they’ve had a taste of what fulfills them, they realize how shitty their life is going to be without it.
And that’s the toughest thing of all.  To say, “Yes, I cheated on you to get this thing.  That’s inexcusable, and condemnable, and I owe it to you to do better.  I want you in my life more than anything… Yet for all of that, I still need this thing.”
Because yeah.  Here’s one partner, tattered and shamed, hungering for two things: BDSM, and their vanilla partner.  And here’s the cuckolded partner, stung seriously because BDSM has come to symbolize everything that’s wrong with their marriage, and yet their partner is telling them that they can’t live without the thing that just shattered their heart.
Sometimes they bridge that gap.  Sometimes, the cheated-upon partner is extremely fucking brave and manages to transition to a working polyamory where they get their needs met too, and a healthy newer relationship blossoms.
But more often, it falls apart, because the BDSM is now this hot-button, where the partner says “NO.  You had BDSM once, and that was what made you cheat on me.  We’re never having BDSM because I don’t want it, and it made you crazy, and this isn’t anything we’re discussing.” And the cheater becomes a penitent monk, having glimpsed the promised lands just long enough to ache to the end of their days.
Or relationship shambles along a different power dynamic, with the new partner saying “I’m getting this BDSM or I’m leaving you,” and so the cheated-upon partner’s ego implodes and they stay at home, feeling like shit that they can’t give their lovers the thing they need so badly, sacrificing their self-esteem on the altar of keeping their loved one in their lives.  Just endless lonely nights at the apartment, imagining what they’re doing that you can’t give.
It’s actually a mercy if they break up.  But they often don’t.  Sometimes, they shamble to the grave hand-in-hand, one of them having given up something vital to keep the other.
That’s understandable.  And it’s sad.  Because the saddest thing in not just poly, but relationships everywhere, is where one partner has to lop off the best parts of their lives in order to stay with the person they love.
And when it starts with the sin of cheating, it’s so much harder to compromise.  So much harder.

How Not To Weaponize Your Desires

When I wrote about how The Fish In The Pond Are Not For You To Eat, I argued that it wasn’t wrong to put filters in place to screen people out of your dating pool because you don’t think they’ll make you happy.
And it isn’t wrong.  You don’t have to date everyone.
The problem is that some of your filters can get weaponized.
Which is to say that if someone said, “Sorry, I don’t date people who won’t meet me at a munch first,” the potential dater might see that as a silly hurdle to jump, and refuse to do so- but it probably wouldn’t get their hackles up.
But if someone said, “Sorry, I don’t date trans women,” the hackles would start to rise.
And if someone said, “Sorry, I don’t date fat women,” the hackles would be up and teeth firmly bared.
Thing is, under the right circumstances, all of these can be valid filtering criteria.  Yes, some are behaviors, while some are inherent traits, but all of them can be things that someone would not want in a partner.
I’m a straight dude.+  Very few rational people would expect me to date a gay man, because they acknowledge that’s not where my kinks lie.
Likewise, it’s entirely legitimate if someone isn’t attracted to fat people!  (And mind you, I speak as one.  Check my pics; you’ll find an abundance of adipose.)  Nobody is obligated to find anyone else desirable; “attraction” is an ephemeral thing that’s not fully under most people’s control.  If someone doesn’t get turned on by fat people, it’s as unfair to them to demand that they must date you as it would be for a gay guy to demand to date me.
But.
The desire for skinny people frequently gets weaponized into insults at fat people.  And that shit is *trouble*.
You can see some of that in the FetLife comments to my fish in the pond post.
RIGHT: “If someone doesn’t want to meet me at a munch, they are likely to lack the characteristics I want in a partner.”
WRONG: “If someone doesn’t want to meet me at a munch, they’re probably some furtive creeper.  Something’s wrong with a dude like that.”
Aaaaaaand weaponization is complete.  We have now taken a desire on our part, and turned its absence into a character flaw that should be corrected.
The thing I didn’t mention in my previous essay is, “Would I meet up with a first date at a munch?”  And the answer’s no.  I’m not particularly good at meeting strangers.  And I’d have some valid concerns about going to a munch to get to know a potential date, and finding that she didn’t have the time to talk to me.
The fact that I would not go does not indicate an objective flaw in me.  It means that I have certain priorities and desires of my own, and they don’t mesh with yours.
But that’s how you weaponize a filter: you make it into something objectively wrong with everyone who has that trait.  It’s not that you don’t find fat people attractive: it’s that fat is evidence of some slovenly laziness, and walking around with all that weight is an offense they’re perpetrating upon the world.  (This fat dude is a workaholic who spends fourteen-hour days writing and programming.  Lazy, I ain’t.  And my wife, who is fifty pounds overweight, did three triathalons this summer.)
And so some of those filters get really tricky.  Because many people do use them as legitimate filters – as in, “I’m not usually attracted to super-skinny women, so I generally refuse dates from them because I know that doesn’t do it for me personally.  But I think they’re fine people, and they don’t need to ‘eat a sammich’.”
Yet many more people do use those filters as weapons.  They don’t like skinny, so shit, why aren’t those women fattening up?  They find trans people unsettling, so shit, why don’t those people give it up?  They don’t find brats appealing, so what the fuck is wrong with brats?++
The core trait of all of these weaponizations is “I have a preference, and the hubris to demand that the world must bend to my desires.”
So it gets really hard to put up some sorts of filters, because you try to say “Sorry, fat people aren’t my thing,” and what people hear is that hurricane roar of condemnation that fat people are bad, fat people are wrong, fat people are all horrible failures at life who should be shunned by every righteous person that every idiot with a weaponized filter spews, and they assume you’re just another hater.  When you’re not a hater, you’re just someone who finds that trait not to be a turnon.
(This would be a good time to reference @Manic_pixie’s excellent essay Don’t Tell People Why You’re Rejecting Them.  Often, it’s kinder not to get into specifics.  Also, despite what either side may say, nobody owes anyone any explanation as to why you don’t want to date them.)
How do you fix this?  Well, you can go to lengths not to weaponize your own filters.  Just because you want something doesn’t mean that other people are somehow deficient in lacking that quality.
More importantly, when you speak, speak with the knowledge that the default is often to assume that this lack is a character defect, and specifically correct that.  Seinfeld made a running gag out of “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” but that sort of caveat is often necessary.  When you say “I don’t like old men,” you may well mean it in the sense that this is a personal preference, but the weaponized elderly-haters around you are taking this as agreement that yeah, all those old dudes are just wastes of flesh.  Putting that disagreement in there helps stop the spread, even as it often feels ludicrous.
And then apply that filter thoughtfully.  One of the problems with dislikes is that you’ve settled upon them long ago, and they’ve crystallized.  After a while, you start snap-dismissing people because they don’t fit a very elaborate set of criteria, and that snap-dismissal often leads to irritation – goddammit, yet another person who failed to fulfill my needs!
Yet just as you’re not here to fulfill their desires, they’re not here to fulfill yours.  Them failing to live up to your standards doesn’t make your standards objectively good, it just means that they’re not compatible with what you need.  That doesn’t make them failures at life, it just makes them not good dating material for you – and the minute you start conflating “Not good for me” with “Bad at life,” you have written your preferences into the fabric of the universe.
And that’s always a sin.
+ – This isn’t strictly true, but it might as well be. I’ve written about the difficulties I have in finding dudes to date in a fairly explicit post over on Fet, making me effectively straight if not actually so, and one of the problem is that I’m not attracted to men who look like me.  I see all the me I can get in the mirrors, man.  If I’m gonna be dating a guy and taking some radically new genitalia for a spin, my partner’s body needs to be radically different from what I’m actually toting around.
++ – It gets super-tricky when you do actually believe it’s a character flaw and it’s a character flaw that someone’s chosen to believe – what the hell do you do when you think that believing in MRA/feminism/Republican/Democrat/libertarian/Christian/atheist/brat/flying Spaghetti Monster issues is, in fact, something that’s perpetrating injustice upon the world and needs to be corrected?  What happens when a group is in fact carrying out subtle wrongs upon the world thanks to their philosophy?  But that’s an essay for another time, kids.

"Why Are You Poly People Always Yammering About Polyamory?"

“Hi.  I’m poly.  And since I’m poly, you can expect at least five essays on my profile detailing how I do polyamory.”
We poly folks are kind of infamous, like vegans and hipsters and the much-feared vegan hipsters, because we talk about being polyamorous.  A lot.  We talk about how we do poly, and we talk about bad ways other people do poly, and we discuss poly in the media, and I have heard some befuddled monogamous folks wondering why we’re so damn self-centered that we can’t shut up about this relationship choice that we’ve made.
Alas, we are not discussing polyamory because we wish to be walking billboards for the lifestyle.
We’re discussing it because we haven’t had this conversation before.
Look, by the time you were eighteen, you’d seen at least a hundred movies showing you how monogamous people met and fell in love.  They were simplified and often stupid versions of monogamous love, usually leaning heavily on the trope of “the moment you fall in love is the most critical part of the relationship,” but you got taught how to do this.
And if you watched enough television shows, you saw all the ways that monogamous love could go wrong: all the events that triggered fights, all the personality conflicts that caused breakups, all the neglects that caused love to die.  Again, most of ’em were simplified… but oversimplification is often a necessary tool when you’re setting out.
Add that to the fact that you probably had a ton of personal experiences in high school and college, watching how couples formed and spun apart, and by the time you were twenty, well, you had a good solid idea of what made for a good relationship and what didn’t.
Whether you know it or not, you’ve benefited from a decades-spanning discussion on how monogamy works, and what the best practices are for healthy monogamous relationships, and who’s good to date monogamously and who isn’t.
Polyamorous people have not had this discussion.
We’re starting from scratch here, because polyamory in a Western culture is pretty much unheard of.  Not that it hasn’t happened, but it’s a lot like homosexuality in that our records tend to get smeared muddy or just outright washed away.  (There were, I’m told, a lot of gay cowboys, but hoo boy you wouldn’t know that from listening to any of the traditional historical narratives.)
We literally don’t know how to do this.  The Ethical Slut, the bible for many people, was written less than twenty years ago.  You won’t find polyamorous relationships in blockbuster movies.  If you see three people in a love triangle on the WB, that triangle is going to end in disaster because damn, people, monogamy!
So we lack examples.
As a result, we have to become our own examples, sharing our stories so that we can understand what works for us and what doesn’t.  (Polyamory is also far more complex than monogamy, because “traditional” monogamy has a clear line of succession – date, fall in love, move in, get engaged, get married – and polyamory has a lot of “Well, we’re dating, and we’re happy, but how can we tell whether this is healthy stasis or just mashing the ‘pause’ button on all the problems we’re not addressing?”)
Sometimes we get sick of rehashing our issues, too.  But the truth is that we talk about polyamory means to us because we have to.  We need to figure out what it means to us, because there’s no largely accepted definition that we can start with and then pare away details or add them to.
We’re trying to figure out what our own narratives are.  And sometimes that sounds a lot like boasting, or needless head-up-our-ass meanderings, or even attention-seeking behavior – but often, the core is just that question of “How do we do this?  Bueller?  Bueller?”  And realizing that Ferris Bueller isn’t going to appear in this class, he nipped off to steal a car and will not be providing the answers today, so we’re gonna have to sit down and have our own discussion before we figure out how this is gonna make us all happy.
It’s fine.  But we’re gonna have to be a little loud about it sometimes.  And you don’t think of your rom-coms as yammering on about monogamy, but really, they kinda are.

The Noble Starving Artist

Gentle reminder that the ennobled Starving Artist is an invention of the people who profit most from the exploitation of creative people.
— Iron Spike (@Iron_Spike) December 12, 2014

As usual, I think things are a little more complex than that.
The Noble Starving Artist is certainly used by those who profit from creative exploitation – and for that, I’ll point you towards Yog’s Law, which is “Money flows towards the writer.”
But the people I’ve known most who hammered on the Noble Starving Artists were, sadly, unsuccessful artists. Note that I do not say failed artists; were you to ask me at any time between 1987 and say, 2010, I would have characterized myself as unsuccessful. Most artists have a period where they’re unsuccessful, which is usually a good sign: it means they have taste, and they’re not living up to their own taste. In time, with effort, hopefully you’ll get closer to your own values. And usually, “Getting closer to your own values” has a strong(ish) correlation with “getting people to hand you cash for your efforts.”
Unfortunately, a lot of those guys who were traversing the wastelands felt really embarrassed by that lack of success. You can’t not be successful in America, man; that’s the main sin. And so rather than go “Yeah, I’m not doing well, I wish I was better off,” they wrapped that lack of success around their shoulders.  People who were successful had sold out.  They must have wanted to make money.  In fact, people who optimized their artistic transactions to make money were sellouts, too!
You could only really do art if you were suffering for it financially.  Like, purely by coincidence, the art they were making now was doing.
And look, that’s bullshit.  There’s nothing wrong with trying to earn cash for your art.  That gives you more time to make art, more cash to pay doctors’ bills so you can stay healthy, better equipment for you to make art with.  If you can make some cash for doing what you love, then do it.
Unfortunately, I don’t often see the content purchasers making claims about the wonderfulness of starving.  (They usually talk about how it’s about exposure, as if this free shit you give away so they can make money off of you will somehow chain into money pouring through your windows.)  For me, at least, it’s other artists who tell me about the nobility of starving.  Usually because it’s a lot easier on their egos, saying this is what they were aiming for.
Honestly, though, I don’t care who does it.  Shit needs to stop regardless of sourcing.  If you’re an artist, make buck.  Don’t compromise your vision – but when you find someone who likes whatever the fuck it is you do, negotiate like a fiend, and value yourself.
Art’s all about personality.  Nobody else can make the art you do.
Value that.