My Class Notes From The Jealousy Class I Teach, And Also My Breakups Class

After I presented at Kinky Kollege a weekend ago, I had some people asking for my class notes on my presentations.  I’m a little leery on that, because my notes are sketchy – they’re not detailed notes, more like waypoints to remind me to hit all the topics I wanted to cover.

However, a lot of these cryptic class notes are referencing essays I’ve written in the past – and so I went through and linked to those essays, so you can read more in-depth if you’d like.  This isn’t quite the in-depth seminar experience I give when I’m yammering before a crowd – but if you’re looking for a cluster of Ferrett-thoughts on a topic, well, here they are.

Jealousy Is Not A Crime: Troubleshooting Broken Polyamory
If you’re dating multiple people, bumps will occur, sure as death and taxes. The question is, how do you figure out what’s wrong… and how do you repair the faults so that you emerge stronger and saner? Kinktastic writer Ferrett Steinmetz will lead a discussion about how to fight fairly, how to be respectful to all the people in your poly web, and tout the merits of a solid set of dealbreakers.

Class Notes for Jealousy Is Not A Crime

You Don’t Perform Surgery With A Butter Knife: Holding Safe, Sane Breakups
One thing’s guaranteed in every poly community: eventually, you’re going to run into your exes. And as such, learning how to break up responsibly becomes of paramount importance – you don’t have to adore them any more, but you should be able to at least function in the same spaces. So how do you call it off with a minimum of drama, even when people are trashing you in public?

Class Notes for Safe, Sane Breakups

As a reminder, in addition to these I also teach the following classes:

• How to Fight Fairly
• Ten Perilous Poly Patterns
• Wet With Words: Writing Erotica
• Burninating the Peasants: Fireplay 101

If you’d like me to teach at your event, feel free to contact me at theferrett@theferrett.com – I usually ask for travel/hotel fees, and a small stipend.  But if my schedule’s free, I’m happy to come teach wherever I’m wanted.

I’m Married To Her, But I’m Not Her Primary.

I’m my wife’s secondary relationship, even though we’ve been happily married for almost twenty years. And it’s been that way since Day One, when she said to me:

“Look, Ferrett Steinmetz, I love you with all my heart. But if there’s a house fire and I can rescue either you or my daughters from the flames, there will be Ferrett Flambé.”

And that is the truth of our marriage: her kids come first. Which I’m fine with; even though I’m technically their stepfather, they’re my kids too. I’m very content to be secondary, which means there’s been any number of times the kids have been prioritized.

But here’s the trick:

“Secondary” does not mean “Continually overshadowed.”

Just because the kids’ needs come first does not mean that I am expected to have no needs. My wife juggles. If, on a scale of one to ten, I am having an absolute meltdown day of a 9 when our eldest is having a pretty poor day of a 6, she’ll do triage on our kid and then come and comfort me. Likewise, if our youngest is having a horrible 8 day and I’m having a mildly depressive 4, she’ll still make time for a hug or two before heading out.

Because “secondary” does not mean “dispensable.”

Yes, technically speaking, if there is a flat-out conflict between my daughters’ needs and mine, I will lose. But the trick is that my wife does absolutely everything she can to ensure that direct conflict never happens. She advocates for both the kids’ needs and also mine. She negotiates with all three of us to see if there’s some happy medium we can all reach, asking whether this might be a “want” and not an actual “need.” And when an argument breaks out, she serves as mediator and not arbiter.

Which is why, in almost twenty years of marriage, there’s been no dealbreaking conflicts. Life is not a television drama, and moments of absolute need (the “10” on the one to ten scale) are rare for any actual functioning human being, let alone for two human beings to be in absolute crisis at the same time.

Which is why I hate it when I see the term “secondary” used in polyamory to indicate an auto-lose situation – sorry, I know you want me to be with you at your mother’s funeral, but my husband needs help washing the car.

The truth is that a secondary’s important needs should sometimes take priority over your so-called primary’s sorta-wanna needs. “Being secondary” should not be an excuse to blow someone off, just as “being primary” should not be an excuse to become a tyrant. The job of a functional relationship should be to balance needs to make as many people happy as possible, not to cut off emotional support when it becomes inconvenient for the “primary” people.

I’m okay with being secondary to my wife because I trust she’ll be there for me when I need her most of the time. I’m not “someone who’s important to her as long as the kids don’t yell too loud,” I’m someone she advocates for and defends when I need it and also, yeah, if the kids are in a bad place she’ll be there but she also elbows space to make room for me.

It’s a good space.

I wish I could say the same for a lot of secondary relationships.

The Privilege Of Being A Male Writer

My corner of Twitter has been talking about women, typing books.

Not their books.

Their husbands’ books.  Often when they’ve also just had a child, and also had an academic position (sometimes at the same damn college), they were expected to type up their husbands’ notes into manuscripts as well.  Because, well, that’s what wives did back then: clerical work.

Which has sparked a discussion among my writer-buddies about how often, the wife is expected to do the housework and take care of the kids if she’s a professional writer – there’s a fair number of working examples of that in the field – whereas if the man becomes a Writer, the default is that he is cleared space to Do Important Writing.

This is actually true in our house.

Basically, for about two hours a night, I head downstairs to the word mines.  My wife does more of the cleaning because it’s understood that I am trying to make a career out of this, and so she takes on a disproportionate brunt of the housework.  She runs more errands, because she has more free time.  She cooks the meals so I can get three hours in if I have to.  And my God, does that poor woman have to endure me yammering on about how this plot point doesn’t make sense, I’ve written myself into a corner, what do I do, let’s go for a walk and try to hash this out?

My wife works a lot more to support me at being a writer.  That’s just how it is.  We didn’t discuss it, we just settled into that mode.

Except.

When she was going to law school and working full-time, I did all the cooking.  (In fact, I taught myself to cook nice meals to make things easier on her, but that’s a separate story.)  I did more errands back then, because I had more free time.  Looking back at our history, if something’s been important to either of us, we’ve made the necessary sacrifices to try to make it happen for each other.

And if I weren’t conversant with how privilege ought to work in the field, I would scoff loudly and go, “See?  There’s no privilege here!  Look, we are equals, pass by, we have done it correctly!”

But the truth is that the fundamental nature of understanding privilege – in this case, the male privilege of “Men’s work is generally considered important, women’s work is generally considered less so” – is that you’re not supposed to flog yourself with guilt for it.

You’re supposed to use it as a corrective lens to consider.

Because the deeper truth is that one of the reasons our household works is because I am, in fact, aware of traditional gender roles, and I am aware that I’m leaning on Gini heavily to make my writing career easier.  If I see a mess lying around the house, I go, “I’ve been acculturated to let women handle that, but I should really take care of that for her if I have the time, just to make things fair.”  I make sure to thank her profusely for sorting my pills and doing the laundry.

I don’t lean on privilege – I interrogate it.  Is what I’m doing actually fair, or just a decision I’ve sleepwalked through? If it’s not that fair, what can I do to even the scales?

And in this case, the personal scales are “We both make time for each other’s dreams.”  That’s a healthy dynamic.  But underlying that is a quietly sexist assumption of “The wife does the housework” that could actually undermine that healthiness, if I didn’t work to combat it.

That’s what privilege should be, if you could acknowledge its existence.  Privilege often winds up being a club because folks don’t want to admit that any portion of their good luck might have come from millions of people lining up and quietly deciding you randomly benefited…

….Because my wife has “assumed she’ll do the housework” as one of the minor dings of being woman,  but she also benefits from being born white.  Privilege isn’t The One Benefit To Rule Them All, as it often gets argued by mooks, it’s a complicated intersection of identities, some of which are helpful, others are not.  Privilege often gets dumbed down a game of playing Identity Uno, in which everyone’s trying to score the most points instead of working to see who can learn the most.

As I’ve mentioned before, I had a lot of privileges in being able to publish my first novel by being physically healthy, by having solidly middle-class background that helped get me a desk  job so I had time to write, by having the wealth to attend the writers’ workshop that unlocked the stall I was in.

None of that takes away from my relentless work ethic, or the mental illness that makes it harder to write.  It’s just something I consider as I write: Wow, I benefited from that.  Is that something everyone gets?  If not, is there something I can do to make it easier for those people?  

(Hint: Even if you can do nothing else, acknowledging “Wow, that’s hard for you” usually helps people by letting them know they’re not deluded for seeing a division in circumstances.)

In my case, there’s covert sexism threaded through my marriage.  We work to examine that, to pluck out the threads and sew those gaps up with healthier patterns.  If I didn’t, I’d probably just quietly go, “Yeah, that’s what she does, she’s a good wife” whenever Gini picked up my slack, and Gini would actually be more overworked, and our marriage would suck a lot harder because I’d be bellowing at someone in an online forum that I don’t ask my wife to type, I worked hard for my novels, I don’t have any privilege.

I have privilege.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing if I use that privilege to examine why I’m privileged, and to make my world as fair as possible.

That’s what it should be for, in an ideal world.

Pokemon Nails, Fix On Audio, Alex Shvartsman Special: Three Things Make A Post, Right?

1) Pokemon Nails!
It’s been a couple of months since I updated my Pretty Pretty Princess Nail Gallery, where you can see a visual history of my fabulous nail designs – but this week Ashley damn near killed herself to do Pokemon nails for me.  She had to redraw Jigglypuff like four times, and now hates Jigglypuff. But the nails came out great!

2) Fix On Audiobook!
For you fine audiophiles, the final book in my ‘Mancer series is finally available as an audiobook on Audible! For a mere $14.99, you can listen to weaponized paperwork magic, a battle at the heart of a dying Europe, the struggle of a brainwashed daughter, and also – as always – testimonies to the goodness of donuts!

(EDIT: And apparently, if you bought Fix through Amazon, you can get the audio upgrade for a mere $3.49. Nice.)

Also, I hesitate to mention again, but my upcoming book The Uploaded is available for pre-order, and pre-ordering super-helps authors. I’m also stoked about it because for the first time, the copyeditor made an alphabetized list of all the proper names and terms used in the book to keep everything consistent, and the lists make this book sound even weirder than it is.

3)  Me In A Story!
So I was complaining to my friend Alex Shvartsman (a name old Magic fans may recognize as a former pro from Magic’s Grand Prix circuit) that nobody tuckerizes a guy with a name like “Ferrett.” I mean, my books are rife with names of real-life people I’ve slipped into there as minor characters, ranging from Ken Liu to an appropriately gender-swapped Ann Leckie to Sean Patrick Kelly and other buddies… but it’s hard to put in a guy with a name like “Ferrett” and not have it stand out.

“I’ll do it,” Alex said. “I like a challenge.”

So he wrote me into a science-fiction golfing story. Seriously.

And I thought, “Wow, that’s great,” but then Alex had to sell the story. And who would buy a story about science-fiction golfing with a guy named Ferrett as a side character?

The question I should have been asking is, “Can Alex sell that story?” And you bet your buns he can! He even sold it at pro rates, damn his talented soul! And so if you want to read that tale – and why wouldn’t you? – it’s currently free to read for the next five weeks or so.

Thank you, Alex. Seriously. It’s nice to see my name in print.

So I’m Two Hours Into Mass Effect, And…

I can see where it’s getting the “meh” reviews.

Because I love the backstory of the new Mass Effect.  It’s a great sci-fi story with a lot of room to maneuver, classic space opera – and it feels big.

I just don’t see how I connect with it.

Like, as an example: an early mission has you scanning walls to find enough evidence to stop a saboteur – your standard “Find the foozle” quest, wrapped in a story to make it compelling.  And you scan enough evidence, and the trail leads you to your saboteur.

Except the game says, “Wait!  That’s not the saboteur!  The real saboteur is trying to frame these two people!”

Which is a great twist, if I the player had any decision in that process.  If there had been some evidence I could have overlooked where I might have accidentally jailed an innocent person, thus having to make the hard decision of putting away someone who claims they didn’t do it, that would be dramatic!  Maybe I could do the wrong thing by mistake!  But literally your AI buddy kicks in to go “WHOAH, NOPE, YOU GOT MORE WORK TO DO.”

And so the tension is defanged.

Then you find the real saboteur, who is mildly angry about how the previous administration did his family wrong.  But again, the game doesn’t ask you to take sides – the guy doesn’t even tell you what the new administration did except in really abstract terms.  And you don’t even get a chance to let him go, or try to talk him out of his deadly saboteur nature, as far as I can tell from the dialogue options – either way, he’s meekly caught, even though you’re just one dude and you didn’t bring any security and I guess the game didn’t feel like ending this mission with a chase or a battle or a dramatic emotional decision or anything.

So my reaction at the end is, “Uh, well, I guess some people are angry at the government.”  But I don’t feel it.  I’m not invested in any of these schmucks because while it’s a great story, Mass Effect seems to have forgotten to add the decision points that get me involved.

I could have jailed the wrong person, thus getting mad at those fiendish saboteurs.

I could have been asked to side with the saboteur thanks to the righteousness of his cause.

I could have been presented with a chase sequence to stop some suicidal madman.

But instead, I got railroaded along a series of decisions that weren’t actually decisions.  And if Mark Rosewater has taught me anything, games are about interesting choices.  If I ask you, “So do you want this magical wand of destruction at to fight with, or this stubby pencil?”, that decision is automatic for everyone but the people who want to make it purposely hard.

“Do you want to continue this quest or not?” is not an interesting decision.

The decisions in Mass Effect thus far aren’t interesting.  The story is interesting, on a meta level.  But I am not given an access point so I personally am invested in what happens.

I mean, it’s still fun.  I like levelling up.  But if these guys want me to care more, they need to have less people telling me, “Oh, here’s a gout of backstory” and more of me making emotional decisions based on that backstory.  And until now, there’s a whole lot of people telling me how they feel and very little of me deciding how I should feel.

People Have A Right To Be Stupid.

One of the running responses to yesterday’s discussion of female attraction was that women frequently fall for handsome assholes. I can’t really debate that. Those of y’all who remember The Wolf’s abuse will recall that he was propelled into the spotlight in part based on Hot Abs and in part based on a cadre of women who really wanted to get Wolfucked. (And yes, unbelievably, that was an actual term.)

However, I will also note that men frequently fall for women who are also completely wrong for them. They see a pretty girl, they sand off all the potentially-conflicting bits of their personalities to try to masquerade as what this pretty girl wants, idolizing away all her manifest flaws because she’s got a curvaceous figure – and then wind up miserable because “OH MY GOD I WAS SUCH A NICE GUY AND WOMEN DON’T LIKE NICE GUYS.”

Turns out “making riotously bad decisions” isn’t confined to one gender. Whoops.

Look, there are people making terrible decisions all over the damn world. And the sad thing is, you gotta let them make those awful decisions.

People have a right to ruin their own lives.

Part of that is because often, the people who want to “rescue” people from bad decisions actually just want them to make equally bad decisions that benefit them. The guys who are lamenting about womens’ bad decisions are, quite predictably, hoping that these broken women will take a deep and meaningful consolation from their penis. You’ll see spouses and family members shouting, “You can’t leave me? Where would you go!” when what they really mean is “I’m dependent on you and you abandoning my abuse would inconvenience me!”

Part of that is because often, the “bad decisions” people make are only bad from an outside perspective – the born-again Christian mother who’s convinced her daughter living in sin must be miserable because she would be miserable. The cis dudebro who’s convinced his trans friend must be transitioning out of a need for attention. The vanilla girlfriend who’s convinced her boyfriend’s need to be beaten bloody means they’re on the path to suicide. You know, people who just don’t get it.

But the main reason is simple: the people who bear the brunt of the consequences for their awful decisions are the only folks who should get to make them.

(It gets a little more complicated in interdependent situations, of course, particularly if your 50/50 rent roommate decides to quit her job to become a professional sparrow-raiser, but in the end you’re the one who can probably scrounge up a new place to live when her broke ass cannot.)

I am a fan of disseminating information. I’ve spoken at length of the known dangers of the one-penis policy. I’ve talked about the myriad ways in which polyamory enables abusers. I’ve discussed how men can be bad to women, and women to men, and people to people.

But in the end, if someone’s making a bad decision, that’s on them.

Maybe it’ll work out. Sometimes things do – because other people didn’t understand what you needed, or because of dumb luck. (I had unsafe sex with better than 50 women in my slutty 20s, and every test I’ve taken indicates I picked up no known STIs from it. I took a really insanely dumb risk, and yet I wouldn’t advise you to play the STI lottery and hope the odds are ever in your favor.)

But you gotta let ’em go.

Yeah. People make staggeringly dumb decisions all the time. It’s a truth of life. But the question has to be, “Why are you so attracted to these people who make staggeringly dumb decisions?” Why are you spending your time chasing stupid people who aren’t interested in you in the hopes that one day they’ll change their mind?

Isn’t that a pretty staggeringly bad decision on your own?

I can’t stop you from making that decision, of course. Not my tempo. But I can at least raise the question that maybe you could be looking for partners who aren’t looking to date people you despise.

Just a suggestion.

You are free, of course, to ignore it.