#hope these men are happy for their contribution towards the dehumanization of women

[robbyykeene]

might go quiet on here for a while. not feeling particularly fond of this show or charitable towards its violent misogyny at the moment. for obvious reasons i hope

[onetenthoddity]

A Big Personal Post

So word of warning, this is gonna be a very long tl;dr post about my struggles with my sexuality and I’m gonna get into some real TMI stuff. Also, while it is Pride Month (Happy Pride Month to any LGBT people reading this by the way!!), this is completely unrelated to that and has nothing to do with my sexual orientation or gender identity or anything similar. I’m just a boring cis straight guy. Sorry men, you just don’t do it for me.

This might seem like a weird and unexpected post coming from me, but I constantly keep all this locked away tight and it’s been eating at me for years and years and years and it’s gotten really bad recently, to the point of real emotional distress and depression, so I think I need to just let it out already. So that’s what I’m gonna do.

I’m just gonna jump right into it; I have a very high sex drive. I like sexual stuff; fanservice, big titty anime girls, lots of nsfw art and artists, the dreaded sexualized depictions of women, you know. The usual suspects. And it’s not like any of that is bad. Humans are sexual creatures, it’s biologically wired into us to have a sex drive and experience sexual attraction and desire. Pretending that’s not the case/telling people it’s wrong to feel that way is honestly absurd and really harmful. The real problem is I feel really bad about all of it; I have a huge amount of shame and guilt and embarrassment towards my sexuality. I never really talk about sex or sexual things with anyone, and I get uncomfortable whenever it gets brought up. Like I said, I bottle it all up, and that only makes me feel worse about it all. I’m not even religious at all by the way, I’ve been to church for religious purposes a grand total of once in my entire existence. But unfortunately the US is still a sexually repressive society whether you’re religious or not thanks to those good ol’ puritan roots that still fuck everyone over to this very day, so it was still hammered into me that sex is bad and something to be ashamed of. It’s so ridiculous; I live in an extremely liberal town right outside Boston, my family is full of accepting people, I actually got a good sexual education from school, and yet here we are. Even though I logically know it’s a load of shit, I just can’t seem to get rid of the idea that sex and sexual desire is inherently harmful or wrong. 

But that’s not the only reason I feel so negative about my sexuality; as one of my exes once put it, I perhaps drank TOO much respect women juice. And while I lean very left/am a very progressive person in general, it’s not like I’m one of those male feminists that seem like they’re just trying to get brownie points or moral superiority, nor am I a “nice guy”. No; for most of my life I’ve just been around women. When I was little me and my older sister spent all our time together; she’s even the one taught me how to read. From middle school and beyond basically all of my closest friends were all girls. And since I was an art boy, I took a lot of art classes and went to art club, which were demographically mostly female. Hell, I was the only boy in my AP Portfolio class, and like one of three total in art club. And after that I went to an art college with a 30/70 male to female ratio. No exaggeration, for the past decade I have not had any close male friends, and for the past four or five years I haven’t had any at all. I feel much more comfortable around women than men; I actually have trouble talking to guys, especially guys who are more stereotypically masculine (which I am not at all nor care to ever be). I don’t just like girls from an attraction standpoint, I genuinely like and care about women as people. But because I have such a high sex drive and I like women in a sexual manner too, it kinda makes me feel like a hypocrite; like I’m betraying that fact. There’s always so much talk about how sexualizing women is wrong and harmful, and women face so much sexual abuse from men, that I feel like I’m a bad person for liking things like fanservice or porn or whatever. It makes me feel like I’m contributing to the problem. But of course, this too is absurd; sexualization and sexual objectification aren’t the same thing. You can both depict and view someone in a sexual manner without dehumanizing them, and to think just by making someone sexual you also objectify them is honestly kinda crazy. Once again, a lot of this thinking also stems from repressive religious ideologies. Men being shitty to women is much more a problem of gender and cultural norms. But even more importantly; I am absolutely not a bad person. I don’t harass women and I’ve never sexually mistreated anyone, and I have no desire to in the first place. I don’t try and make friends or relationships or do favors just for sex. I’m not a “nice guy;” I’m a genuinely good person. And I know I’m a good person because I can never admit to myself that I’m a good person despite literally overwhelming evidence.

The final problem is that I have built up an extreme amount of sexual frustration. I am a super introverted person with a lot of social anxiety and self esteem issues, or, as a therapist might put it, a very lonely person. I don’t have a huge desire to be social and I spend most of my time at home, and my anxiety tends to prevent me from being social when I actually want to. So, shockingly, I’ve never had sex. I’ve had a grand total of two relationships, both recent. One lasted four years and another four months, and while both had a sexual component to them neither went all the way. The four year one was especially frustrating, and in the last year of that relationship we basically stopped doing anything sexual, which really piled on the stress/guilt/shame for me (it turns out she was actually a lesbian; we had an amicable break and we’re still friends to this day). I’m also not interested in casual sex at all; I’m one of those truly disgusting people that needs an emotional connection and genuine feeling and such, which really doesn’t help matters. It feels like my sexual frustration is completely out of my control, and a lot of the time I feel like I’ll just never have sex. Like it’s something for me to admire from afar and never get to participate in myself, no matter how much I want to. I also feel like I’m just not very sexually attractive; the idea that someone would want to have sex with me doesn’t seem believable to me (if you knew what I looked like you would probably smack me upside the head for saying that, by the way). I do my best to try and manage my frustration on my own, but in the end I can only do so much. All of this frustration just ends up making me resent my sexuality, which just makes me feel more shame. It also makes me feel lonelier than I already am, especially in a romantic sense.

I made a deviantArt where I post NSFW art (along with my usual stuff) as an attempt to channel my frustrations and to try and accept and express my sexuality, but I don’t know if it’s helped that much, and honestly I’m terrified of someone close to me finding out. The link was on my tumblr before, but I tried to not draw attention to it because, you know, the shame and embarrassment and stuff. You can find it here: https://www.deviantart.com/asaragi

I think that’s everything I wanted to get off my chest. As I said my negativity towards my sexuality has been growing and gnawing at me from inside for a very long time, and combined with my sexual frustration it has really impacted my mental health recently. I’ve made a lot of positive changes in my life recently, and by all accounts I should be feeling a lot better yet I keep falling back in a depressive low, and I keep having trouble sleeping. I knew this was a problem but I was hoping I could just ignore it, that I could work on the other areas of my life that were causing stress and that would fix my depression. I was really hoping that the other stressors were just exaggerating my sex issues. I didn’t wanna face my shame or talk about it with anyone; I can’t even talk about it to my therapist. But no more; it’s time that I accept myself. I’m never gonna get past this if I don’t, and besides, it’s not healthy to hate yourself. If there’s one thing I’ve really come to understand recently, it’s to be kind to yourself and embrace yourself. My sexuality is an important part of who I am. It’s not something for me to be ashamed of, and it doesn’t make me a bad person. It’s simply part of being human.

This was really hard for me to write, so if you read it all, thank you. I hope you have a wonderful day, and remember to be kind to yourself <3

[4lorne2]

Desire

I find that in conversation, when people ask me about myself in the future, I tend to answer in a detached manner: as if it were someone else. For example, when asked whether or not I believe that I will be able to make a living in the field that I am pursuing, I list all the potential opportunities I might have, but don’t express a strong belief in any particular future.

The reason for this is that I really can’t see myself in the future. I can’t imagine myself doing the jobs that I might qualify for. My personal philosophy is essentially “maybe I can do it”: which is to say I leave options open to see what happens. I don’t commit strongly to anything, and even what I do work towards I tend to do so in half-measures.

Now, society tells me this is a problem. “Give it your all” is the familiar refrain in a plethora of media directed at children, but also by the self-help gurus and life coaches. I have two ways of looking at this. On paper, I have been successful in many of my endeavors, but personally, I have been a frequent outcast. Does it really matter if I’m an outsider? So far I have succeeded in many other aspects of life that don’t involve my personal ingratiation with my peers. I suppose it only matters if I myself want to be closer to other people.

But returning to society, there is another question that goes how willing society is to include outcasts. In a way, I take American individualism to an extreme, beyond American Puritanicalism to a kind of individualism of pure dissensus. If life is a practical art, a socially mediated performance, in some ways it helps to think ones life as an ironic deconstruction of Democratic Ideals. But deconstruction is cold, and ultimately ends in death, and as such, I do not spiral towards it entirely willingly. I want to be part of society to the extent that it will have me, but what I fear with grim disquiet is that society will not have me at all.

Ultimately, the question becomes do I need the coherence found in the certainty of incoherent destruction expressed in an act of critical practice, or put more plainly, do I need to see my life as a “work of art”? Or is there someway to break the metaphorical glass that houses the exhibit and ensures “perfection” without me having to give up on one of the only things I belief in.

I’m incredibly sensitive about belief. In many ways its all I, or any of us have. I have often flirted with outright cynicism, but more so than in recent years I am beginning to lose the kernel of hope that is at the center of my favorite philosophy, Nietzsche and Deleuze. In fact, It has been a somewhat crushing experience listening to the music of Father John Misty. His beautiful album Pure Comedy was just released in which he presents his scathing rebuke of Western Liberalism. To summarize with the use of the first and final songs on the album, human life is “pure comedy, like something that a madman would conceive” ... “but I look at you, as our second drinks arrive. The piano player’s playing this must be the place and its a miracle to be alive, one more time.” Evoking the squeals of gleeful children demanding another turn, for FJM it’s the companionship and the fulfillment of his desires that make it all worth it. “Play it again Sam.” However, FJM’s nod to the eternal return is predicated on a fulfilled desire that I struggle to believe in.

After watching the film 20th Century Women (2016), I discussed with my parents the ways in which I felt the film worked towards establishing a re-conception of masculinity for the 21st century. There’s a character in film played by Billy Crudup, who despite being the one man living with Annette Benning, is the only one who is not asked to help her son played by Lucas Jade Zumann become a man. Crudup’s character is not quite self-sufficient, relying on Benning’s hospitality, but he is thoroughly independent and largely ignored by the women who live in the house. Crudup is an island, he’s stable and dependable, but also boring and predictable. Ultimately, in his favor, he is sensitive and kind and that seems to be enough. Women come to visit and they leave just as suddenly, but he keeps going, and he’ll remain a kind of constant, even after he starts his own pottery store and marry’s two time (the ending ascribed to him via voice over). I said to my parents that so much of society, and patriarchal society especially, has functioned through the commodification, exchange, and possession of women. From Marcel Maus’s accounts of the bond that formed early societies in The Gift (the gift is a bride, of course) all the way to sexual objectification of women in contemporary media, women’s bodies and agency have been disciplined through socially constructed economies of desire. 

We have a somewhat rosy picture of desire, often celebrating it and brushing aside its dark side, but a history of patriarchy informs us that desire is a force that is done to others against their will (or to the detriment of their potential agency) as much as it is someone else’s ability to exercise their will. I am dubious that what I might think of as “my desires” are truly mine, and don’t belong to something I want no part of, but regardless, “my desires” are not free of consequence to others any more than my ability to fulfill said desires is guaranteed. You might try to reassure me, ‘you as just one person can’t do anything about the restrictive structures of gender and the demands they place upon our bodies. You can’t deny that you have inherited our cultural lust for the female body, just follow it, try it, it will make you happy and feel fulfilled.” And while I would agree that many many many many times I have wanted to “try it,” I don’t believe in it. These desires don’t give me hope. Ultimately, whether it is my insistence on countering the imposition of desire onto women’s bodies, or merely that I’ve lived too long without it happening, each and every day my  belief in the satisfaction of my sexual desires gets more untenable.

Upon hearing what I had to say about Crudup’s character, my dad asked me, what about a geeky guy, a guy who women don’t seek out. I told him that that’s me, and that what happens is that they are alone on their island. My dad said that that was sad and that he hoped I didn’t feel like I had to hold myself to that, but unfortunately, that is more the way I feel everyday. Being alone for my principles is ultimately the only price left to pay. I may not believe in the ability to adequately address my sexual desires, whether practically or conceptually, but I do believe in desire. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze describes desire not as a lack that needs to be filled, but as a force that is satisfied with itself and does not depend on any concrete end or external means. I’ve felt this kind of desire before, and while it pains me that in my life it is more frequently associated with media constructions than with warm bodies, ultimately I take some solace in Deleuze, who never puts one “Plateau” of pleasure above any other, and thus never dictates the forms in which may flow. This is the image of desire that I believe in and that I have only rarely found this desire in my interactions with other people, I find it in other places and it at least gives me something to believe in. 

If I insisted on exploring these desires and their relations to other people, I begin to enter into actions that I can’t intellectually reconcile. I think that despite all my knowledge, all my sensitivity, and all my desire to contribute something to this world that I am sexist and a mysogynist. That I objectify women and objectify myself. As it relates to myself, as I said above, my belief is in my life as a snow globe or an exhibition. But I’m a person and even intellectually I can accept at some level that I can’t protect myself if I don’t want to be alone. But when I think about letting down these walls I remember that I’m no better than any other man and my desire would just be a burden placed upon someone else. 

I started looking at pornography when I was middle school, maybe 5th or 6th grade, which would mean when i was about 11 or 12 years old. I learned to masturbate from porn, although my dad did tell me what masturbation was first. I though the men were peeing on the women until I saw that the pee was white. I also remember some pleasurable friction applied to my penis on my own before I knew what would happen, but I had never followed that through to the point of climax, if it had even been possible. I distinctly remember seeing anal porn very young. I looked at cartoon porn often as well. I went through phases with what kind of pornography I was interested in, but at a certain point as I gradually moved through categories I got into rougher and more humiliating kind of pornography. I have watched what is called “facefucking” pornography primarily for several years. It’s distinct from “oral sex,” “blow jobs” or even “deep throating” because the man is the one thrusting into the woman mouth, rather than the woman performing oral sex on him. It seems evident that this kind of pornography is pretty darn dehumanizing. Treating a woman’s mouth as a sexual orifice to be penetrated is certainly transgressive, but it also distinctly eliminates the woman’s pleasure from the act of sex and robs her of the agency afforded to her as the active performer of the “blow job.” But it actually gets much worse. Not only is the woman stripped of her agency and her pleasure removed from the sexual scenario, in fact the woman’s displeasure becomes necessary to the mans pleasure. Clearly it is infused with S+M tendencies, and I did actually begin watching bondage porn through my watching of facefucking porn, but there’s something distinct about the woman’s discomfort in facefucking that remains particularly arousing. (In bondage, I do respond to restraints, as in the girl is restrained in uncomfortable positions, but a huge part of bondage is spanking, whipping, and otherwise hurting women which is not something I respond too outside of the context of penetrations. Hair pulling or slapping during penetration on the other hand is a turn on, as is forceful sex in general) Beyond mere oral penetration, one of the focuses of this kind of pornography is on gagging, and act that I can attest to as being quite unpleasant if a history of stomach bugs and vomiting are anything to go on. As the scene progresses, the woman’s eyes begin to tear, her make-up starts to run, her hair becomes disheveled: the elements composing her feminine mask start to dissolve and the act of sex is that which can alter and transform appearances. This happens even more graphically in what has been standardized as the most frequently employed face-fucking position, in which the women lies upside down on a bed or a couch with her leg up in the air and her head hanging down just beyond the edge of the bed. In this position the man who stands at the edge of the bed/sofa has the greatest amount of leverage over the act of penetration, especially if he takes the back of her head with his hand in order to push her head up into the downwards penetration. Not only does this position put the man in the position to penetrate further into the woman’s throat with more control of her body, it also is the position which is most conducive to the inevitable spittle and potential vomit that can occur from this kind of penetration. In this position, the woman’s spit/vomit is only able to travel in one direction, which is straight up her face to dangle in beads off her hair and forehead. This only further contributes to the disfiguring effects of facefucking in any other position. Going even further, some pornographers specifically attempt to make the woman vomit so as to cover her face and their penis in vomit and then force them to continue felating them. (I’m less into it, it seems to be more like scat porn or waterspouts, i.e. urine, but it can be a part of very arousing facefucking). Ultimately this position take on a kind of goal in which the man attempts to enter the woman’s throat as deeply as possible and remain there until she gags, forcing her to expel her spit and his penis. It can get pretty degrading, especially when the man forces the woman to gag on his penis so that she is essentially leaking spit down her face while keeping his penis in her throat.

I’ve tried to be as specific about this as possible, and while it is graphic, its something that I feel like I could never tell anyone about, so its good to tell it to the keyboard and maybe I’ll be able to share this with them at some point. I went into such detail, because although I do watch other kinds of porn, facefucking is the most arousing/most difficult to reconcile for me by far. 

Obviously S+M is a somewhat accepted thing, and generally people are fairly accepting of other people’s sexualities, especially when those desires are not directed towards them, but there is something about my desires that I have always found painful and difficult to reconcile. It leads me into association with people I disagree with, who are proud of themselves and their belief that there is no harm in objectifying women. I also have to contend with the idea of rape and the semblance that my mysoginy would make me a potential rapist. Even though I would insist that rape is indefensible and rapist belong in jail, I find simulated rape arousing and I don’t really know a good way to deal with that. I guess that’s just something that you don’t tell other people, but it is the truth. And beyond that, what’s also true is that I don’t know what having sex with a woman would be like. Would I want to do all these things that I watch in porn? Would I be unable to get aroused by “regular intimacy?” Is my desire culturally wired and it’s too late for me to have anything else? As if there weren’t enough obstacles standing in between myself and intimacy, the entire question of my desire and what forms it might take as something unpleasant and wrong in some way makes it really hard for my desire to take me towards intimacy. It seems instead that through my desires, I actually get further away from intimacy and that feels a lot like being broken. That feels like something that’s going to prevent me from having relationships. And although I guess someone else could accept all these things about me, would they really want to? and perhaps more paralyzing, how could I even go about telling them?