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Serial anon, here.
This will probably be one of many expressions of gratitude.
I am an autistic object who looks like a linebacker and has experienced extreme psychological isolation for most of its life.
When you began writing about Cruising from a SKILLS perspective, another universe opened in it. It could learn how to be social and, someday, cruise. This is a long way off and may never happen in a normative way.
What has opened up for it is practicing situational awareness and many lovely impromptu conversations with neighbors. It is cruising for conversations.
It has been so lovely! Neighbors respond, and we end up exchanging names. A real social life is possible for it.
This feels like hope. Thank you.
This is so fucking amazing to hear. I couldn't be happier to hear that piece landed in a practical, adaptable, skills and growth oriented way. I love that you are using cruising skills to meet new people and engage more with the world!!
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A thread of unmarried women who say they were never "picked" by men for marriage or children just popped up on my Substack feed. I think everyone can probably intuit my view on that entire framing of things -- if you fully internalize the patriarchal message that you must be selected for what you want out of life rather than being capable of pursuing it, you've been pretty thoroughly fucked out of ever getting it -- but this response in particular stood out to me. "I won't put up with a man's ambivalence [about marrying and having kids with me] nor his existing kids."
I don't mean to bag on straight women for how they make sense of a dating market in which most men are moving politically rightward and women are expected to both be fully economically and socially independent and yet also capable of fulfilling all patriarchal ideals. it's just, man, the hyper-individualism and adversarial approach to romance that as been sold to them as their liberation has just really put them in a completely unwinnable spot.
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hi devon, wondering if you know of any good, readable sources about the research telling us what tactics actually make people change their minds or behaviors? no worries if not i can do my own research too but it’s something you talk a lot about and i’m really curious about what the research shows
thats what i wrote this boooook forrrrrr
I should provide this initial caveat tho: changing someone else's opinions and behavior is NOT something that you have the power to do. We are never in control of how another person feels, thinks, or acts. Attitude change is incredibly SLOW, and only happens with a willing party actively desiring to change and having an *emotion based* or *socially based* reason to do so. Behavior change requires structural shifts that facilitate the desired behavior, which is also largely what the book is about.
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wish it was easier for people to understand that criticising the way rhetoric is framed is not the same as criticising the movement as a whole. "I agree with you in principle, but you're being super ableist/racist/transphobic/etc about it, and you should probably think about that" is just wholesale a different sentence from "your ideology sucks and I disagree with you". come on now
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Grace Jones at her 30th birthday party with Divine, Jimmy Baio, Julie Budd and Nona Hendryx at Xenon nightclub in New York City, 1978
Photos by Ron Galella
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i wish he would come down from heaven & kill every instagram fitness liquid diet ozempic green juice low calorie food blogger
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one thing that often eludes the queer people who bend over backward to include trans guys in "women and femme" spaces (while demonizing cis men as undesirable and evil) is that some of us actually do derive great meaning from being a man, find manhood to be quite healing and special, and see other men (both cis and trans!) as our brethren. Some of us actually do love being men, love other men, and love being around them. I don't expect non-men to feel the way that I do and they don't have to cater to me (I'm arguing for quite the opposite! I do not belong at your woman and femme night!), but I don't think any kind of useful, lasting, resilient queer community building can happen if you really view manhood as evil. You're kinda excluding a lot of oppressed people when you do that.
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This website is too mobile focused these days. Reblog and tell me what your desktop/laptop background is.
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“There's already American contractors here, bidding to rebuild this joint. You're gonna tell me. You know, that's all the defense department is. We're bodyguards for American contractors. [...] The U.N.? They don't... We own the U.N. The U.S government owns the U.N. We foot the bill for the U.N. The U.N. does what we want it to. Except for who? Libya and Cuba. So what. We wanted to go in there in a week, we'd take those over if we wanted to anyways. But we foot the bill for the U.N, they'll vote how we want them to vote. That's just our, that's, that's the U.S puppet. You guys should know that you're, you've been in college, I haven't!”
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Uhh the Nakba??
"The first most tragic story" so you don't think the Palestinians being killed constantly for a year is all that tragic. Ok.
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ENM/Poly circles explicitly discourage real talk around jealousy, and practical considerations around nonmonog in ways that routinely exclude and excise POC and disabled people.
ENM/Poly expects everyone involved to act as though “love” is the reason for every relationship choice. Cliche #1: love isn’t finite. Which… sure. Maybe love isn’t finite, but attention and time sure are— and those are at a premium.
Cliche #2: Love is all you need/love is what makes a family. I am familiar with criticism of this from a family abolition, anticapitalist standpoint, but I have seen this be uncritically repeated by ENM/Poly people. It’s not true that love is what makes a relationship work or not work. It’s also about dumb shit, like geographical proximity and practicality. Good luck being ENM if you can’t regularly host because you have roommates or live at home. Good luck being the gold standard of ENM (out to everyone, including family and maybe even the workplace!) if you are any kind of marginalized. Love is simply not enough. There’s real world shit to consider.
Most ENM/Poly people are white gen x’ers and older millenials for a reason. It’s a framework that works awesome if you have abundant spare space, disposable income to blow, and free time. Plus most ENM/Poly people are heavily in therapy, and just have a fuckton of time to deal with their various baggages… or at least like to posture as though they are doing those things.
Non monog can be liberatory— disabled polycules caring for one another. QPRs! Multiparent households! But ENM/Poly is very lodged in a liberal, hyper-independent Super Good Boundaries Thank You Very Much world of its own, and so most of the “resources” like More Than 2 or Polysecure have hella flaws in that respect.
COME OFF ANON SO I CAN FOLLOW YOU! Because you just said a whole word.
I find "ethical nonmonogamy" and polyamory circles to be viscerally unpleasant and alienating to be in as a crazy, chaotic antipsych person who does not always make choices for carefully therapized, restrained reasons -- and who doesn't believe that most other people do either, no matter how much they claim to.
I don't fuck multiple people to serve some higher purpose; I do it because I'm horny, impulsive, and have a variety of niche fetishes that are really difficult to satisfy.
I didn't choose to be openly nonmonogamous because I nurtured my soul and found that it was abundant with love that I just had to give -- all my relationships already were nonmonogamous at one point or another, either because I cheated or the other person did or both, and I eventually decided to move with my feelings rather than against them, and to stop denying all that is inside me -- all of the hunger and darkness as well as the light.
And I can't say that my nonmonogamy is inherently "ethical" either -- just like my monogamy sure wasn't! I'm a human being, and a crazy one at that, I get jealous, I have emotional blowups, I lash out and fuck other people to make myself feel better or to affirm that I am desired, I make big demands of the people I date, I fail to show up for people consistently, I get hurt, and I hurt others, and I will continually have more to learn. I will also continually have wild animal emotions and triggers, and I won't always deal with them in the way my partner(s) might want me to. I try to avoid hurting other people needlessly, of course, but sometimes your own needs are incompatible with another person's, and hurt is inevitable.
When there is only so much time and attention available in our lives, it's true that somebody's often going to come up short. And ultimately the person that I choose above all others is me. And so, no, I can't say I'm always doing nonmonogamy in some caring yet dispassionate way, or that love is the solution to all problems -- I am driven by passion and need, and sometimes being alive in those ways means getting hurt, or hurting in turn.
I would echo essentially all that you've said. We need time and resources and spaces to enjoy privacy with other people, and if you're not some rich work-from-homer, that shit's all in short supply. I hate the sheen of calm positivity that "ENM" and polyamory folks tend to place on everything -- as if no choices they make are fueled ever by bitterness, dislike, resentment, or hell, fucking white hot irrational DESIRE. With how fair and measured so many of them make their polyamory sound, I don't even see what's fun about any of it.
Sometimes you want to upend your whole life because you're so down bad for a person. Sometimes you hate the shit out of your partner's partners and you say and do little manipulative shitty things to convey those feelings, or to try and blow the relationship up. Sometimes the hours just don't add up and somebody gets shafted. Sometimes you make a promise and then you can't follow through, or just don't WANT to anymore because you have changed.
These are real human realities whether we like it or not, and I find it terribly unrealistic AND unsexy to refuse to acknowledge all the darkness and frustration that comes out in any relationship. I think a lot of the ENM/poly crowd that is white and middle class and heavily therapized is so averse to naming anything edgy or prickly in themselves that they make their spaces actively hostile to anybody who openly expresses negative feelings. That means Black & brown people get tone-policed a ton, "mad" people like me get no-true-scotsmanned out of "ethical" nonmonogamy for ever doing anything messily, and all the romance and sexiness of relationships gets sanded down into a Canva-graphic beige blandness of weekly polycule meetings and processing sessions.
In this world of self-optimization, even fucking and loving other people has to be cast as therapuetic -- our desires must justify themselves by somehow making us better, more capable, more controlled people, But fuck that. Sometimes sex or love is worth exploding your whole life over. The ENM/poly crowd says their way of loving makes them more even-keeled but it seems like a kind of death to me.
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Every time somebody confronts you on you're political views you never dispute them. You just say something to the tune of the person is being ridiculous, then redirect the conversation to one of the many shitty things the dems are doing. You're just trolling right? Like it's flame bait to get people worked up and you're just keeping up the facade? It really seems like that.
My position this entire time has been:
There is no greater crime than genocide. Nobody who is killed today in the genocide was doomed to die. America could choose today to cut off arms to Israel and withdraw its military support from the genocide. Every Palestinian who is exterminated could have been saved had the US changed course. I will not support a candidate fully dedicated to perpetuating genocide. Ethnic groups are not bargaining chips to be traded away for the safety of Americans.
I've made no indication that my views are up for debate. I've made no indication that I'm going to be convinced to vote for Harris if she commits to doing anything other than stopping the US-Israeli genocide. I haven't focused on anything else other than the genocide in over a year, especially not on this blog. Why am I obliged to fucking refute anything from people who think genocide is a small price to pay for the continuation of American liberalism?
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Not that anybody asked, but I think it's important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.
It's a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.
Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.
Let's say you're a parent and your kid is having issues.
Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)
Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that's what shame does!
You can't guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!
If you want it in a simple phrase:
You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can't shame them into being a good person.
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Actively hate the discourse against 24/7 places like I get where you're coming from but in my ideal world a lot of shit would be 24/7 just with more shifts and better pay because plenty of people prefer to work nights or have to be out at weird hours to get basic necessities for one reason or another and acting like necessary services keeping to almost a 9-5 operating hours and having multiple days closed ignores people sometimes do need things immediately and it's not all some lazy selfish desire and isn't inherently harmful to the employees
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