Category: Essays & Bad Ideas

An assortment of ramblings; some thoughtful, some thoughtless

Cranky Old Man Shit: #MeToo

I’ve written at least a couple dozen variations of this post over the last few months, but it was Quentin and Uma that finally made it all click for me. I tried with Louis, and Aziz got me close, but their cases were too messy. I needed something clear to work from. And this is it.

Here’s the thing, gentlemen:

It’s okay to be a creative genius who pushes the boundaries of his collaborators. Similarly, it’s okay to be a dominant man who pushes the limits of his women. It isn’t necessarily good, but it’s not inherently awful, either.

I mean, if you’re That Guy, and you surround yourself with the right people, the results can be amazing. Having a worthy woman submit herself to your vision is pretty much the ultimate destination of the conventional masculine journey, and it’s a fortunate guy who reaches it when he’s still young enough to enjoy it.

But using women –leveraging their trust in your intentions and your talents for the furtherance of your goals– and putting them through the physical or emotional wringer comes with two ironclad fucking requirements. The first is that they buy in; that you show them you’re actually special enough to make all of your bullshit worthwhile.

The second is that when you fuck up –and you will fuck up, because the limits you’re pushing exist for a reason, and you’re kind of an asshole– you must acknowledge it. Right there, on the set or in the bed. No equivocation, and no redirection. “I fucked up.” Say it, every time. And if it comes up later, say it again.

You don’t need to bury the lede in a monsoon of apologies; “I’m sorry” doesn’t mean much, honestly. What she needs to know is that you’re both working from the same set of facts: a wrong thing happened, and you made it happen. Everything else is emotional window dressing.

Because –and I know this goes against everything you’ve been told– most women are very reasonable people. They put up with an enormous amount of shit with surprising grace, and whether you believe it’s due to social conditioning or physiological imperative, their instinct is to look for ways to get and/or move along. They just need you to help, by giving a shit about the impact your mistakes have on them.

Yeah, I know it sucks to render yourself vulnerable and admit your occasional fallibility, but it’s the scaffolding she needs to help her off the ground and back to work. And it’s the gut-check you need to remind yourself that you’re not half the god she thinks you are.

Cranky Old Man Shit: Deep Fakes

From Motherboard, regarding r/deepfakes and the intersection of neural networks, data-rich social media silos, and men who are at best vaguely aware that women are people:

“An incredibly easy-to-use application for DIY fake videos—of sex and revenge porn, but also political speeches and whatever else you want—that moves and improves at this pace could have society-changing impacts in the ways we consume media. The combination of powerful, open-source neural network research, our rapidly eroding ability to discern truth from fake news, and the way we spread news through social media has set us up for serious consequences.”

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjye8a/reddit-fake-porn-app-daisy-ridley

What this means to you:

It’s probably time to stop shaming girls for their nude selfies and warning them that they’re gonna ruin their lives; if the men of today want a girl’s life ruined, her participation is entirely superfluous. An even slightly motivated asshole can now turn the primmest of young ladies into abject sluts with little more than a good GPU and a persistent erection.

Or put another way: that bitter, bowl-cut douchebag you dumped in the 11th grade and haven’t thought about in five years has enough data from your Instagram feed to convincingly insert you into a clip named dogrape.mp4 and share it with everyone you know. (Congratulations on being a woman!)

And because it’s still early days, the focus is currently on civilian faces projected on to sex worker bodies. That will change. As the tech improves and can better compensate for the grain and shitty lighting found in the average homemade porn, your vindictive soon-to-be ex-husband will be “working late at the office” while inserting your sister into that video he shot of you getting your ass railed on your honeymoon, and then spreading it around Tumblr. Your body will become a canvas upon which he’ll paint your entire family’s public humiliation.

Also, truth is dead.

Pillow Talk

You’re educated, but kind of stupid. You’re grown, but an infantile mess. You’re overflowing with the future, and yet studiously fixated on an ever-shrinking sliver of the past. The only truly volitional, defining acts of your life have been your squandering of opportunities and refusal of responsibilities. You’re a laughable sham of an adult, a makeshift assemblage of ruinous instincts, warped ideas, and recursive anxieties that somehow looks fetching in a skirt.

But sure, I guess I love you. Why do you ask?

Memories

My first sexual fantasy came to me in a dream. A dream that I had every night for weeks, and then sporadically for months on end. And it was –perhaps unsurprisingly– quite fucked-up.

I don’t know exactly where my child-brain got the raw material for the dream. My babysitter hadn’t yet given me a guided tour of the female reproductive system, but I did have a neighbor girl who kept trying to expose herself to me… that could have had something to do with it. More likely, it was the result of my parents’ questionable decision to let me watch both Logan’s Run and The Stepford Wives.

Either way, every night, they’d come to my room… the sacrifices, I mean.

You see, something had gone catastrophically wrong out in the world. I didn’t understand everything –I was just a boy, after all, so they hid the details– but it seemed that someone, somewhere, released something terrible into the wild. An exotic contagion had worked its way through the adult male population, ultimately rendering it sterile. Humanity lived on in anxious misery, knowing that the only thing standing between it and extinction was a single generation of boys who were still convinced girls had cooties.

The only solution? Brave young lads such as myself would have to dedicate our lives to looking beyond the cooties, toward our genetic destinies; with our world crying out for help, we couldn’t afford to falter. It was decided that the ruined, wasted men of the world would send their wives and daughters to boys like me, to be used as training material… as fodder for a fire to be lit in the empty hearth of womankind. The program was voluntary at first, but after burnout proved to be an issue, lottery conscription inevitably began.

So the sacrifices came to us, one, two, or a few at a time; some dedicated (or at least resigned) to serving a Greater Good, and some longing for a choice they couldn’t have. They were assigned to our homes for short tenures, but through their vital, compulsory work, the reproductively mature men of tomorrow would prove to be the finest force of fast-fathering fuckers to ever bestride one godforsaken planet!

Of course, I was a kid, so the backstory was the most interesting part of the dream. The action consisted entirely of women in fur coats and heels filing into my room, approaching me, dropping their coats to reveal bikinis, and then… well, the rest was a bit of a mystery. There was some light petting, stuff happened, and I woke up. Again and again, night after night.

Sometimes the sacrifices were happy and enthusiastic about doing their duty; sometimes they were sad, and I had to comfort them while they taught me to use their bodies. Sometimes I would fall in love with the latest girl and want to keep her; sometimes she would disappoint me and I would have her sent away. The only constant seemed to be a baseline understanding that my sexuality was all-important and must be served at any cost.

Which, honestly, is a crazy idea to have in your head when you’re six.

Foreseeing the future and living in it are two different things.

I dreamed about a lot of stuff as a kid. Back in the early ‘80s, when I sold my beloved BMX bike to buy my first computer, I dreamed of a day when everyone would have such devices in their homes. I dreamed of random people actually getting my X-Men references, and of girls who wouldn’t walk away if you said you loved video games. And I dreamed of modem networks that would let people all over the world communicate asynchronously about anything that interested them, including the X-Men, girls, and video games.

Through unrelenting, geeky advocacy and hard work, those dreams all came true; the 21st century is basically a bespoke era, designed by me and my ilk to suit our priorities. We won. I got everything I wanted and more.

Ah, that sticky, messy, unfortunate “more”.

Everyone has a computer in their pocket, but Google and Facebook are actively trying to convince them that algorithmic search results and the half-baked opinions of someone’s belligerent uncle or freshman niece are useful substitutes for knowledge. Half the TV shows and movies made today begin with a MARVEL title card –turning the 35 cent passion of my childhood into mainstream fare– but the underlying comic books are reduced to glossy, deeply cynical cash-grabs that prey on the obsessive-compulsive inclinations of middle-aged malcontents. We finally figured out how to make games interesting enough to catch a woman’s attention, but then immediately started looking for ways to keep those bitches from getting any of their touchy-feely girl-goo all over our fantasy fiefdoms. And the networked, nerdy Algonquin round tables I sought? Well, Donald Trump joined Twitter.

Be careful when you dream, children. The universe is often listening, and has ideas of its own.

TFW you see something really stupid on Tumblr that you would normally ignore, but a lot of people are lavishing praise on it and it seems like you ought to add a critical male voice to break up the misplaced harmony, but you can never fucking tell who’s a Colbert-esque pseudo-misogynist and who’s actually a bipedal, ambulatory bag of dicks, so you just kind of grind your jaw and move on.

Also, TFW you know you’ve probably given other people that feeling.

My Fetishes?

I like chicks who feminize all the significant inanimate objects in their worlds. Their cars are girls, their computers are girls, their phones are girls; whether it’s pink and covered in flowers or jet black as the empty eye sockets of Death, if a thing exists, it’s a “she”.

Because with women like that, all you have to do is wait a while until one of those objects breaks down or disappoints her; then you’ll hear it.

“What the hell? You stupid, stupid bitch!”

“Don’t you die on me while I’m using you! Fucking cunt!”

“Please, just start. I need this. I’ll be good to you from now on, I promise… OH, YOU WORTHLESS WHORE!”

It’s like porn to me.

Mea Maxima Culpa

The American Right is deeply disturbed, but it’s time the American Left copped to our part in making them so. We spent the 1990s gaslighting them over Bill and Hillary Clinton, successfully convincing the body politic that up was down, black was white, and wrong was perfectly okay if you were cool about it.

I can’t help but think about the shit we fed them, and then pause to savor the flavor that currently dominates my own palate; it’s a pretty gross way to learn a pretty gross lesson.

  • “That wasn’t a lie, that’s just the way he talks.”
  • “She was horny and desperate, and he was famous. You know she was asking for it.”
  • “There’s nothing strange or inappropriate about a President’s unelected family being injected into major legislative efforts and foreign policy.”
  • “This special prosecutor is a partisan hack who’s chasing a fake story!”
  • “That wasn’t a lie, because it sounds true.”
  • “Who cares about shady business deals where the family lost money?”
  • “Rape? Don’t make me laugh! They just want to be on TV and file lawsuits.”
  • “Why do we keep talking about stuff that might have happened years ago? What about the economy right now?”
  • “That wasn’t a lie, he was only defending himself.”
  • “She’s so brave, standing by her man like that, not letting those greedy little bitches take them down.”
  • “All men are like that, so who cares?”
  • “We’re so lucky to have a President with a woman in his life who’s even better than he is.”
  • “That wasn’t a lie, because being in charge is fun.”

At some point, we really need to stop doing this to one another.