Blurker

If I hear one more gay person say that they are “not like all those other gays”, I will lose my fucking mind. I hate to break it to you, but you are not special just because you like sports and have a bro-y affectation. Do you get a buzz out of telling people you’re gay only to hear, “You’re gay? Wow, I had no idea!” Yeah, I used to feel that way too, but then I grew up.

It’s probably a weird thing to say about a guy who just slaughtered seven people, but watching the last video by the UCSB shooter, all I could think was, “What a fucking drama queen.” He clearly had that speech rehearsed, complete with evil laughter. I would never dream of being dismissive of the tragedy that he caused, but seriously. What. A. Douche. Yes, college can be difficult, especially for those of us who feel like we have something to offer even though we’re not getting laid or going on dates. But I have no sympathy for this guy, certainly not after what he did. Sex is weird that way–no matter how bad you want it, you still aren’t entitled to it. It’s not like food, water, or shelter, which I believe everyone should have even if they can’t afford it or provide for themselves. You have to earn it. Besides, anyone with half a brain soon figures out that all of their peers who brag about getting laid or make a big show of how in love they are are just pretending. Relationships that are built on PDAs never last, and any man who brags about his sexual prowess has a miniscule dick.

It has now been just over two years to the day since I started grad school. It has been one year since I finished grad school, and three years since I finished undergrad. I look forward to the day when I see summer as just another season. Even when I was in elementary school, I remember those reflective days on the last or second-to-last day of school where you have a field day and a class party, talk about what you’re going to do over the summer, and reminisce on how quickly it all flew by. I fucking hate that. If I can’t make time move slower (and really, who wants to?), perhaps I can stop thinking of fall as a new beginning and summer as an ending. It’s just not healthy. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one of my friends. I’m kind of hoping one of them would invite me to a party or something for a change, because I can’t get everything started all by myself. There is no rule saying you have to be friends with the people you work with, but it never ceases to amaze me how easily everyone else settles into a groove and gets to know one another. Maybe they’re just better at faking it.

My mother is really something. We got into another fight lately. Maybe calling it a fight is a bit strong, but that’s my point: She doesn’t seem to understand why I’m so annoyed that she keeps asking me stupid questions. I blame my father. He’s like Moriarty in all this, essentially pulling the strings. Regular readers may recall that I mentioned having most of my belongings in a storage locker in Queens waiting for me when I return to New York someday. When my father complained that it was costing him $50 a month to keep that locker, I told the storage people to charge my debit card rather than my credit card (which is on my father’s account), thinking that would be the end of it. Instead, my mother called me up to ask when I was planning to go back for all that stuff. The subtext was that she doesn’t believe me when I say I’m going to return to New York. There’s no explaining things to people who just don’t want to get it. When I say that the specifics of my healthcare plan are none of her damn business, it means that the specifics of my healthcare plan are none of her damn business. She still feels the need to email me a response every time I tell her to back the fuck off, but I don’t even read those anymore.

My mother called me twice on my birthday. I didn’t want to talk to her because we had had a fight a few weeks before, and I was still mad about that. But she didn’t take the ever-so-subtle hint, and kept calling me until I relented. I have close friends who live nearby who I barely see because they never seem to have the time for me. I don’t have the fucking time for this fucking bullshit. It’s like she senses that I might be having a good time and calls me up just to ruin my day. Would it kill her to wait for me to contact her for once? Or even just give me one fucking month where I don’t have to listen to her? I’m at my wit’s end here. I don’t see why it’s too much to ask to have one fucking month, but since she won’t let it go, I guess I have to.

Some people are remarkably dense when it comes to figuring out something that, to an outsider, would appear to be common fucking sense. But the further I get, the more I realize that I won’t make the same mistakes my parents did. My mistakes tend to be in assuming people have my best interests at heart. Theirs tend to be in believing they have my best interests at heart when they don’t. But sometimes, there really is nothing more to be said. If you can’t let me have the last word, maybe you can at least try not to waste my time.

I Hate the Internet

You might have seen that idiotic video that is being passed around on Facebook and shit in which people apply for “the world’s toughest job” and find out that the world’s toughest job is…being a mother. Fuck you. What a load of cynical, pandering, tearjerking claptrap. Did you fall for this crock of shit? Go jump off a cliff. Maybe I’m not totally serious, but it’s hard for me to put into words just how deeply this video offended me. I’m not even going to link to it. It basically said that no matter how difficult your life is, you can take comfort in knowing that your mother still loves you. No, you can’t. When I’m broke, unemployed, and desperate for a leg up, I don’t need to be reminded of whose vagina I was pushed out of, I need a fucking job. Wasting the time of people who were so in need of work that they would respond to that ad is only fair if you follow it up by writing them a big, fat check and landing them an interview for a high-paying job for which they are totally qualified. Something tells me the numbnuts who made this video didn’t do that. No, they just wanted to make a viral video that would make the people who sob at Hallmark cards and buy Thomas Kinkade pantings feel good about themselves. Fuck the world. I hope you all die.

I think what really pisses me off here is the implication that having a job and being a mother are the same thing. No, they aren’t. My mother had a job in addition to raising us. My father was a stay-at-home dad for my first couple years, but as soon as that was done, he fucking started work again as well. It is possible to have both a career and a family, and I think it’s telling that this video is about mothers and not fathers. Women, as we all know, are all warm and nurturing and shit. Dads go to work and bring home the bacon, just like in the 1950s and the minds of Fox News pundits. We need to stop revering parenting as if it is the highest aspiration that anyone (especially women) can have. I don’t plan on having children. I have friends and colleagues who do. Good for them. But I can’t stand the little bastards.

What do applying for a job and being a mother have to do with each other anyway? I fail to see how the two are even connected. It makes no more sense to me than if I ordered something from Amazon and they sent me an empty box with a note inside saying, “Think of all the wonderful things your mother bought you!” No, I’m not going to do that. I ordered a thing, why didn’t you send it to me? If I ever see someone get violently raped, I’ll tell them to think of all the hard knocks their mother took in raising them rather than calling for help. You think I’m taking this too seriously, don’t you? No, I’m not. There is a deep undercurrent of misogyny to this whole thing. I can no more endorse it than I can listen to “Blurred Lines”.

I am sometimes asked how I define empowerment. For me, it is not about endorsing everything that every woman does. It’s about asking people if they’re doing something because they really want to, or because they think it will make people like them. The internet feeds on our insecurities. Social media makes us obsessed only with how many likes, shares, or whatever else that we get. This is not news. I am not breaking new ground by saying this shit. But every now and then, you have to unplug and go do something that doesn’t involve looking at a screen. So I’m going to do exactly that and write the rest of this when I’m good and ready.

I’d like to throw my lot in with the people who say Captain America: The Winter Soldier was the best Marvel movie yet. The Avengers is one of my favorite popcorn flicks of the past ten years, the first comic book movie I’ve seen that actually looked like a comic book, and Winter Soldier, through its use of human drama, slam-bang action, and not-too-heavy-handed contemporary political commentary, surpassed it. The biggest reveal—the identity of the Winter Soldier, which is hardly a spoiler since all of the marketing reveals it—was already ruined, but otherwise, I went out of my way to learn as little about the film as possible, not even the basic premise. If you haven’t seen the film already, see it immediately. I’m already wondering if I should wait for the DVD or see it again in theaters.

I’m not opposed to optimism, but you have to understand that even positive outcomes still have consequences. If your solution to a problem is to return everything to the way it was before somebody else changed it, you have nothing to contribute and should really just retire from human society. Change happens for a reason, and there is a difference between reminding people that sometimes there is a better way out and just blind ignorance. And it all has to do with the takeaway. Don’t just say, “It’ll all work out”; take steps to make that a reality. And when you’ve said everything you need to say, move the fuck on already.

In case you can’t tell, this whole thing has been a stealth rant about Doctor Who. Because I really have hated the last few seasons that much. And I’m not ready to let go. On the contrary, I want to murder Steven Moffat with my indifference.

Looking for Inner Peace

There is a point at which the fight against marginalization turns into an addiction. Most people who have had to grapple with feeling “different” have had to face the possibility that maybe they really are. For me, the quest for acceptance and normalization (to use a loaded word) is less about assimilating into society as a whole than about realizing that everyone else is just as crazy as I am. I’m not out to make myself exactly like everyone else; I just recognize that the whole point of fitting in is to understand that we really aren’t so different, even if we’re not all exactly the same. Where am I going with this? Let me explain.

I hear a lot of misogynistic bullshit these days about how feminism is destroying the American family. You can dress it up however you want, but that’s all it is. Mainly, what’s hurting us is this deeply held conviction that so many of our, well, primarily religious and right-wing friends have that the only way to live is to marry somebody of the opposite gender at a young age and have monogamous sex with them for the rest of your life (after saving yourself for marriage, then eschewing contraception because we all know both of those things are sinful sinful sinful). Their logic is purely circular. Why must we do things this way? Well, because we always have, obviously. What’s that you say? Polygamy and even gay marriage have all been practiced at some point in world history before now? All the more reason we should ban those things, because they were the hallmarks of less-civilized societies. Basically, just don’t disagree with us. Because God always agrees with us about everything always. Even when the Bible contradicts us, because then you’re just not interpreting it selectively enough correctly.

In a way, the reason why we need gay marriage and perhaps even polygamous marriage to be legal in this country is to shake things up for straight, monogamous people. I believe that no relationship is automatically superior to any other, provided that the participants are consenting adults. Period. End of discussion. No, seriously, that’s all there is to it. Spare me this nonsense about how allowing people to follow their hearts undermines the fabric of society. Society is an arbitrary construct. You’re just jealous of people who are living more freely and openly than you are. There might be something about the Y chromosome that makes the male sex drive somehow more immediate and animalistic than the female sex drive, but that doesn’t mean that sex is less important to women or that they can’t initiate it; it just means that men and women might have subtly different points of view when it comes to how they approach sex. But to boil that down to “women want commitment, men just want sex” is idiotic, reductive fucking nonsense.

Dan Savage, one of my idols and someone whose praises I sing around here pretty often, gets dinged a lot for supposedly hating asexuals/bisexuals/transgender people/women/Christians/whoever. It’s all nonsense. Dan has a long history of being blunt. He has told off asexuals for going on dates with sexual people and failing to disclose that they aren’t interested in a sexual relationship. I think that’s fair. Sex and dating, for most people, are inextricably intertwined, and if you don’t see it that way, that’s fine, but it’s on you to inform the other party of that. Being straight might not be “the norm” so much as the default, but there’s nothing wrong or even heteronormative about assuming somebody is straight unless given reason to think otherwise. It’s numbers, nothing more. People are individuals. Making assumptions isn’t bad, just don’t hold onto your assumptions even after someone has corrected you, that’s all.

Basically, what I’m saying here is that everyone is responsible for standing up for themselves. When I was a teenager, I read my fair share of shitty gay teen romances because that’s what I needed to escape. Those books bear little-to-no resemblance to real life, and the only difference between them and Twilight or whatever teen girls are eating up today is that they don’t shy away from the sex. It’s funny: we spend so much time telling men to act like men and women to act like women that when bigots are confronted with a couple that upsets that paradigm, their only response is to deny that party’s right to even exist. If the only valid sex is penis-in-vagina intercourse, then why do bigots care at all what gay people do? Shouldn’t they just shrug and say, “Well, I don’t approve, but whatever“?

I don’t know if anyone else here is watching Looking, the HBO show about gay guys in San Francisco, but the last episode was phenomenal. Basically, it was a two-character play about young lovers getting to know each other. It starts off with randy sex, then moves to getting-to-know-you shit like exchanging coming out stories and talking about HIV and topping vs. bottoming. If you believe, as I do, that there is universality in specificity, then you should relate to that. You may not have dealt with those issues yourself, but certainly you can recognize the basic beats of a budding relationship. A straight or lesbian couple is not likely to deal with exactly those same issues. The words are different. The music is the same. And Richie is the most perfect fictional boyfriend I have ever seen. I can’t remember the last time I wished a fictional character were real that hard. I want to have his babies.

*fans self*

Since I’ve run out of things to say about sex and gender and stuff, I’ll just say that for a guy whose stuff seems aimed primarily at kids, Weird Al is still pretty funny. His act has not gotten stale. I haven’t moved on from that part of my life, not entirely.

Call Me By My True Name

I think we need to retire the phrase “check your privilege”. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s nothing more than a backhanded way to tell somebody that their opinion is less valid because they are in the majority. Privilege exists, but there is no way to check it. My existence is my existence, and if I were a wealthy, straight, white, Christian male, I would not be any more able to separate those aspects of my existence from who I am than I would if I were a poor, gay, black, Jewish female. Generally speaking, I would be inclined to take the latter’s word over the former where matters of discrimination are concerned. But ultimately, you don’t speak for anyone except yourself.

I have a tendency to dwell on old conflicts. I might have even mentioned this one before, but if you want to, click on this link and scroll down to my second comment, where you will see me get pummeled by the other commenters for, as far as I can tell, daring to suggest that the readership for 50 Shades of Grey is predominately female. To this day, I have no idea why this is offensive.

It is always a bad idea to get offended on behalf of someone else. That’s why I stood my ground. The other commenters wanted me to stop bashing 50 Shades of Grey, yet none of them made even the slightest attempt to defend it. At one point, one of them even claimed that by implying that women are sexually repressed, I’m slut-shaming and driving the book’s sales up even higher. Dude…do you even live on planet Earth? From a very early age, women in virtually all cultures are socialized to be ashamed of their bodies. Almost every woman alive has had to deal with sexual repression at some point or another. So if it’s all the same to you, I will continue to associate sexual repression with being female. Because reality.

The most troubling accusation in the whole thread is the claim that gendered language perpetuates violence against women. Last time I checked, the words “he” and “she” are gendered, and everyone still uses them. I do not believe that gender neutrality is the best antidote for sexism. I believe that men and women are different in ways that go beyond what we are socialized to do and say. I also believe that there is nothing wrong with this. “Different but equal” does not mean “separate but equal”. It’s time we understood that.

I think the real reason people were so angry at me is that I pointed a finger not just at the book, but the readers. The readers, however, are part of it, too. The whole point of art is that the artist and their audience are engaged in an active dialogue. If I believe that a book is not only abominably written, but glamorizing sexism, I have to ask why so many female readers (and I’ll be dollars to fucking doughnuts that 50 Shades of Grey‘s readership is almost exclusively female) would be complicit in something like that. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If somebody wrote a book in which a Gary Stu got into an abusive relationship with Christina Grey, it would not sell one one-hundredth as well. And you damn well know it.

There is nothing sexist about saying that women can do better. Anyone who says that I should just lay off the readership has no idea how the world works. I’m not a fan of Larry the Cable Guy. He used to do mediocre comedy under the name of Dan Whitney, and now he does awful comedy that caters to the prejudices of only the most stereotypical of rednecks. Dan, from what I’ve heard, is a really nice guy. That doesn’t excuse his shitty comedy, but it does make you wonder how much blame he deserves for essentially just going with what works. In all the mania over 50 Shades of Grey, the person I’m least angry at is the author. I can’t say the same about Twilight.

You’re not going to get anywhere in life if you can’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt. The reason I still think about this argument months later is that everyone made up their mind about me the instant I used to word “estrogen”. My attempts to clarify came off as nothing more than “the lady doth protest too much”. But if the clarification makes more sense than the original statement, go with the clarification. I don’t think the original statement was all that sexist anyway. Roger Sterling says worse things every week on Mad Men. I think my views on gender are a little bit more evolved than his.

There was an incident some months ago in which Amanda Palmer wrote an open letter to Sinead O’Connor criticizing her for her open letter to Miley Cyrus. Basically, Sinead thinks Miley needs to realize that she is being exploited and stop exposing her body to make people like her, and Amanda thinks Sinead should stop slut-shaming. Amanda Palmer is full of shit. I’m a casual fan of her and a huge fan of her husband, but supporting women doesn’t mean supporting everything a woman does. And I don’t support reading 50 Shades of Grey. If that makes me a horrible person, so be it.

Numb

I still have more to say about sexism. Take a look at this article, for example. (Better yet, don’t.) The author has views on gender that are so dated they make Tucker Max look like a feminist. At first, I thought it was satirical, but eventually, it sunk in that this author really is that big of a douchebag. And I don’t normally say this, but good luck getting laid with that attitude. See, even Tucker Max has has the decency to be upfront about what he wants. Yeah, he’s an asshole, but so what? He likes to use and discard women, and so he has sex with women who like to be used and discarded. Is there a single female on the planet who would choose to be with someone who tells her to her face that he finds her insecurity sexy, that she needs to be swatted on the ass and sent back to the kitchen? Maybe there are one or two, but they’re probably not much fun to be around. And even they would probably wise up and want out after a while.

My favorite thing about that article (and you really shouldn’t click on that link unless you’re a masochist) is the part where the author links to one of his own articles to prove his point. He claims that date rape is a joke, and as evidence, cites an article he wrote in which he claims that no man would ever have sex with a passed-out woman. Are you familiar with the “no true Scotsman” fallacy? I think this is a textbook example. This douchebag is so insecure that the only way he can support his claims is to assert that he is right, then quote himself asserting that he is right. 9/11 Truthers quote each other a lot, but at least they’re separate people. They’re an incestuous group, but not a purely masturbatory one. The only mention that this author makes of his own personal experiences is one girl he dated that he wanted to marry, but apparently didn’t. I wonder why.

At a certain point, it’s useless to talk about idiots like this one. He is so obviously full of shit that it’s almost not worth it to pick apart his argument. What jumps out at me is his sheer aggression. He can’t argue with feminists or their allies, so he just shouts at the top of his lungs in hopes of shutting them up. I really don’t think that’s going to work. Truth doesn’t win out by volume, but by persistence. You can try to all you want to shut it up, but at the end of the day, you will have worn yourself out, and the truth will be the only one left standing. Bullshit is bullshit. You can’t change that; you can only cover it up until somebody gets clued in.

I read 1984 years ago and liked it a lot, but had some problems with it. Sure, it’s conceivable that fascists could take over the government and turn England into a dystopia where fear is the law of the land and change is nothing more than a dream, but how likely is that? In order for such a society to function, everyone would have to be complicit. And as President Snow says in The Hunger Games, the one thing stronger than fear is hope. You can’t kill it no matter how hard you try. Sooner or later, a resistance movement would spring up. Somebody would uncover a stash of books that had been hidden away from the government all these years. Somebody would get dragged off to Room 101 and not break after all. (For such a concept to work, you would have to assume that the people watching the populace are infallible and can always figure out your greatest fear. Surely they can’t be right all the time?) I’ll quote one more pop culture character who fascinates me: Columbo once said that the reason getting away with murder is tricky is that the detective can make mistakes and still get on with their life, but the murderer only has to be wrong once. It’s dangerous to make your own security dependent on getting others to agree with you.

These past few weeks have been kind of weird for me. I’m trying not to get too worried about what’s to come. My father has gone from urging me to get a job to urging me to get a better one. Again, fuck him. I don’t want to say that I’m enjoying my job at the coffee shop, but that’s just because I never enjoy anything. I’d like to keep working there, at least for the foreseeable future. I feel like I’m starting to fit in. I make mistakes occasionally, but I’m pretty sure that people are understanding of that just because I am, after all, the new guy. My boss says that what it really boils down to is whether or not I can see customers leave satisfied. I could be wrong, but I think the customers like me. So that’s nice. I screw up sometimes, but I try not to let it get to me. I figure if I can just show that I’m learning from my screw-ups, I’ll be alright. I hope I’m right.

I know it’s a weird thing to fixate on, but I really wish I could get some more fucking traffic on this blog. I think the problem is that since my life lacks any clear direction, nobody reads it anymore. There was a time when I was in grad school when I was averaging at least 20 or 30 page views per day. Now, I average about five. I was stupid to think my relative success would last. I will keep doing it, though. I just don’t know where it’s going.