Moving In

[TRIGGER WARNING: Don’t look now, but methinks Satan is already behind thee.]

“Oh, stop those stupid tears, Jeanette! Don’t you realize how fuckin’ lucky you are?

“So I fucked you. So what? You should thank me! That’s right, thank me! Look in a goddamned mirror, little girl; it’s not like there’s a long line of men, gonna wait around for a chance to get their hands on a disgusting thing like you! Be real with yourself, you dumb little bitch: this right here, between us? This is as good as it’s ever gettin’ for you.

“I mean, fuck— who the hell d’you think you are? You and your mother owe me everything. Do you actually think that woman would keep you around if I weren’t here, giving her a roof over her head and a medicine cabinet full of pills? Shit no! She’d be living in a trailer with a meth cook, and you’d be sleeping on a cot in some homeless shelter, gettin’ fucked by someone else, someone who won’t take the time to make you like it.

“And I know you like it; twice tonight, by my count. If I stopped comin’ in here after she goes to sleep, I bet it wouldn’t be long before you’d be knockin’ on my door, tryin’ to worm your way in between me an’ her. Yeah… yeah, if I tried to stop now, you’d do what you always do and ruin everything for everyone. You’d spoil it for her, wouldn’t you, you selfish cunt?

“That’s why I’m in charge of this house and everything in it. In charge of you. An’ that’s why I’m comin’ back in here tomorrow night, an’ you’re gonna like it three times in a row.”

…

How was that? Did I sound like your stepdad?

I’ve been practicing, you know; I pay close attention when he starts telling bullshit, feel-good stories over holiday dinners. I sit there beside you at the dinner table, my hand secretly busy in your lap, while you instinctively mimic your mom’s plastic smile, and I listen to how he brags and holds court, the words he chooses… even the way he breathes. For three years now, I’ve watched it all so very closely.

After all, this is our first night in our new house together, and I wanted it to feel like home to you.

Last night I came thinking about a group of guys raping me and killing me. Do you think I’ve gone too far?

I don’t know; maybe you have. Killing is a complete waste of a piece of ass, and basically something you don’t deserve. You deserve to live through your shit and find your place in the world. You deserve the time to learn to be what life has made of you.

If “what life has made of you” turns out to be “a cheap cunt,” hey, at least you can be the best cheap cunt anyone has ever befouled!

“Victim of Love” – The Eagles

What kind of love have you got
You should be home, but you’re not
A room full of noise, and dangerous boys
still makes you thirsty and hot

Long before any of us wandered on to Tumblr, The Eagles were out there in the trenches, bringing Southern California-style misogyny to the masses. Don Henley and Glenn Frey didn’t exactly invent slut-shaming, but they damned near perfected it over the course of the 1970s.

Seriously, in these dudes’ inner worlds, every woman was a femme fatale or tainted meat, ready to wreck a man’s dreams from the inside out. Which actually sounds bad-ass and empowering when I put it like that, but that’s never how they execute the material. The Eagles’ version of a Bad Grrl is always sad on the inside, secure in the knowledge that she’s a moral cadaver, rotting in the damp moonlight of masculine disdain. The general attitude seems to be: “women would be great, if they weren’t all such whores.”

Little did they realize that the great ones are the whores. With The Eagles series of smash-hit temper tantrums, they basically wasted the ’70s, which, for the record, was unequivocally the greatest decade for loose women and the despicable men who justify their existences. There was no AIDS, man. No internet to help them track you down. No DNA tests to prove you’re their babies-daddy, even if the bitches did find you. If you ever wanted to experience the raw thrill of taking a sexually-aware woman in her nascence, using her up in a drug-fueled orgy of eroticized contempt, and then disposing of her on a park bench at 4AM, I’m thinking sometime around 1974 had to be the perfect time to be alive with an erection. And yet here’s Don Henley, whining like a bitch about the sea of emotionally-stunted nymphomaniacs he was dog-paddling his way through. Gimme a break.

Spoiled old white guys are the fucking worst.

Victim of love, I see a broken heart
You got your stories to tell
Victim of love, it’s such an easy part
and you know how to play it so well

How do you feel about fifty shades of grey?

A few things:

(1) I’ve never read the book, and am unlikely to see the movie. If I want to watch a film about people wrecking themselves with sexuality, I’ll watch Steve McQueen’s Shame again.

(2) I think the “romanticizing abuse” meme is horseshit. Romance is abuse; even at it’s most benign, it’s self-flagellation. Romance is suffering, and aching, and longing. It’s the right word said at the wrong time, the missed connection, and the crossed wire. Romance is the hunt, the capture, and the quiet, empty hours after the feast. Even those adorable, romantic photos of 80 year old couples holding hands are just a way of smiling in the face of death. If we didn’t romanticize pain, there would be no purpose in romance at all.

(3) I don’t care if Ian Fleming’s stories gave people unrealistic ideas about spycraft, and I don’t care that some horny Twilight fan has given people unrealistic ideas about kinky sex. Fiction isn’t advocacy.