Blog Wallowing

Since starting this blog, I've spent a lot of time wading through the sex/sexuality blogosphere. Anyone who's done this knows that it can be a mixed bag. Mixed bag may be too kind. There are more dicks hanging out than Chat Roulette. There are fascinating accounts of people's sexual lives. There are the hotwives, the cuckolds, the BDSM lifestylers, closet-cases, swingers, adult babies, hedonists, and cheaters. The whole lot form a fascinating tapestry of the complex modern sexual world.

Sometimes, you find yourself reading a blog because it's so well-written or interesting that you simply can't stop. Other times, you throw the bullshit flag and move on, realizing quickly that the person is making up a life to appear cool to the other sex bloggers. And then there are the ones that have you aghast because of the sheer awfulness of what is unfolding.

The cheaters often fall into the latter category. In nearly every cheating blog, the rationalization post is near the beginning. It's always a "don't judge me because of my actions" post. Usually those posts are gentle. Dear Husband (DH) likes sex less than I do. Dear Wife (DW) lost interest in sex after our twins were born. In some cases, though, the rationalization post is so full of nastiness and vitriol, it can't be contained in a single post. In those cases, there are typically multiple posts containing jabs at the spouse.

One of the most appalling spent more than two years tearing down her spouse. When he discovered the blog, he was upset. The blogger then decided to use it to attack her husband for not being man enough to fight for her but railing about him trying to keep an eye on her activities. Another initiated a tirade about how she's such a giver and her husband craves her attention that she looks for men just willing to pay attention to her. The post was buttressed by dozens of accounts of selfish lovers slipping in through the back door of her house to get blow jobs and then slipping out. One claimed his wife didn't like sex, and later added that the reason he cheated was that their sex life went downhill after she was diagnosed with cancer and failed to account for his sexual needs.

Many cited a spouse who traveled too much for work as a reason for cheating. One, after several affairs complained that her spouse was just not motivated like the "alpha males" she was fucking and convinced him to start his own company, which took up much of his time, that she used to justify sleeping with even more guys.

I had originally intended to put links in this post, but I started it just over a year ago. Since then, nearly all of the ones referenced have gone dormant or disappeared. A few hinted that their divorce attorneys wanted them stopped. Others referenced getting caught. These blogs seem to have a lifespan of about 18 months. New ones are always cropping up, so anyone seeking to wallow I as did should mosey over to Google. New infidelity blogs seem to crop up just as fast as they collapse, so there's no rush.

What ultimately amazes me is that so many of these cheating blogs are so short-lived, and yet, many more get added. It's one thing to fuck around on a partner. It happens. Life is messy. To create an on-line persona around it and document at length how inadequate your partner is in comparison with your lovers is something else entirely. It's the deepest hurt one can add. Piling on cheap justification doesn't make it better; it only makes it more selfish. In the mean time, these blogs get discovered and the lawyers get involved. Is there any good in it all?

Fuck The Rules! Part 1

So The Boy spends a lot more time on "lifestyle" blogs than I do, because he has a far stronger stomach than I do.  For example, he's been reading Sadie's Open Marriage for years, written by open marriage/polyamory expert Sadie Smythe, although he's not exactly a fan of hers.  Given her sometimes turgid writing style and tendency to resort to psychobabble, I can't say I blame him.  Still, I wasn't particularly interested in her blog until I happened upon the Boy's netbook, which had this entry from her blog up.

Oh hell no.  As you guys know, there's few things that piss me off more in non-monogamy circles than One True Wayism.  And once again, we have an "expert" declaring that a couple dipping their toes in open relationship waters are "doing it wrong" if they decide to agree upon some basic boundaries.

Sadie describes chucking out the rules she and her husband had agreed upon, saying that rules are:

"...monogamous behavior, monogamous thinking, and that sort of thinking doesn’t fit within the open relationship paradigm. Our partners are not ours to control. Hell, they aren’t even ours at all. Open truly means open in this sense – open to allowing our partners the possibility to navigate their outside relationships without our interference."


Oh really?  I thought "open" meant that my husband and I choose to open ourselves up to a possibility other than strict monogamy.  Beyond that, what "open" means is totally individual and negotiable for every couple that decides to give this unique way of living the ol' college try. Not that I had to adhere to the prescribed notions of some blogger*.


Obviously, Sadie is far from alone in this mindset, which seems to come out of the "Secondaries are people too!" camp.  Because couples who have clearly stated expectations and boundaries hurt secondaries, or something.  Not that I should even be using the word secondary, as it's hierarchical and offensive to imply that my fuckbuddy may not carry the same weight as my husband when it comes to major life decisions.  Sure, I'm exaggerating (a little) but the idea that rules are just a misguided way of controlling relationships with secondaries has gained serious traction in the online poly scene.


Problem is, Sadie and those who agree with her are misapplying basic therapy concepts to relationships in baffling ways**.  "The only person you can control is yourself," is a truism so basic that it hardly needs repeating, but Sadie takes that to mean that there's no point in having established rules with your partner, because that's controlling.


Established boundaries and rules are not necessarily an attempt to control your partner, but rather a verbalized set of agreements about expectations around another's behavior.  I accept that I cannot control my partner and realize that if he wanted to, he could go out and fuck as many women as he wanted and there's absolutely nothing I can do about that.  However, I know and trust that my partner values me and our relationship, so he wants to know what my boundaries and expectations are with regards to him being intimate with other people, so that our relationship can continue in a happy and healthy manner.  And not communicating to him what I'm OK with or what makes me uncomfortable is just a recipe for bitterness, feelings of betrayal, and resentment.


The fact is, open or not, romantic or not, every human relationship is based on explicit or implicit rules and expectations.  My husband expects that I will take care of the food shopping and preparation unless I explicitly ask him.  He expects that I will handle our finances, because that's what we agreed upon.  I expect that he will go to work so we can pay our bills.  He expects that I will not jet off to Berlin for two days without checking in first.  This isn't controlling behavior.  These are all expectations based on discussions and negotiations we've had.  Why are expectations and boundaries when it comes to behavior outside the relationship different?  


Sure, at any point, I can decide to stop cooking and paying the bills and checking in with him if I'm not home, and he can't control that.  That doesn't make the concept of these sorts of agreements invalid, it would just mean that I'm being a really shitty person for changing the status quo without discussing it first.  Relationships function well when people articulate what they are willing to do and what they expect from their partner.  It isn't about control - it's about that favorite Poly word: communication.  Two people sharing their lives simply aren't going to get on very well if they aren't sharing what they expect and what makes them happy or unhappy about their partner's behavior.


Hypocritically, all the "Fuck the rules!" advocates in non-monogamy land ignore the fact that almost all of them have a hard and fast rule even if they claim they don't have any rules: they all have a rule about practicing safer sex.  The majority of people in long-term, established relationships don't use barrier protection with each other, which makes it pretty imperative that they do when playing outside the primary relationship and I have yet to encounter anyone in this relationship model who admits to not having a rule about safer play with others.  (Surely, the most soap-operaish drama in polyamory comes from "fluid-bonding" issues or when, god forbid, a primary-secondary couple end up pregnant.)  


But let's face it: "You must practice safer sex with other partners" is a rule, guys.  A controlling, nasty rule!  After all, you can't control your partner!  S/he could choose to not use a condom with another partner, after all, and there's nothing you can do about it.  I guess rules are futile.  Why do we have them? 


I think that most people who are in these types of relationships trust that their partner will abide by that rule, because it's pretty morally reprehensible not to.  But how is this, then, strategically or morally different from choosing to agree upon other rules?  Why is this a rule the non-rules folks employ while shitting on the concept of other rules?  Don't look at me like I have an answer: it's just silly.  Either rules are "monogamist thinking and unhealthy methods of control" or they're a tool that some people utilize in different ways to create a sense of comfort and safety in their relationships.  


Next time, I'll talk about why the two most maligned rules: "Love" and "Veto power" serve a valuable purpose for some people.  


*Having not read Sadie extensively, I could say I have no real issue with her other than I'm not a fan of her writing style.  But then I saw this abject travesty of a spoken word performance in which she fetishizes, otherizes, and stereotypes black men to justify of her love of "black gangster porn"  and I've decided I'm kind of OK with actively not being a fan based on limited information.  If you think I'm wrong, feel free to say so.


**It would be somewhat inappropriate of me to mention that Sadie announced her separation from her husband just weeks after writing about chucking out the rules.  Wait, whoops.

Jezebel turns three (but is it worth reading anymore?)

Jezebel, Gawker's "feminist" blog turns three today.

Former editor Maureen (Moe) Tkacik also provided the well-timed cover story for this month's Columbia Journalism Review, regarding the navelgazing hybrid of journalism and blogging that seems to be the fate of modern media (it's kind of TL;DR but I actually did read the whole thing and loved it. It explained a lot about why I ultimately walked away from journalism as a female writer in my 20s and haven't looked back since.)

And most importantly in this string of fateful events, I got promoted to a Gawker "starred commenter" after several years of commenting on Jezebel, a privilege that I'm not sure if I should be more proud or ashamed of.

Moe's article provided a lot of interesting insight to Jezebel:

"2007, I took a job at Gawker Media helping launch a sister blog targeted at Gawker’s demographically attractive female readership—a property that was named Jezebel, at the insistence of Gawker CEO and founder Nick Denton and against my vociferous objections, after the blasphemous Old Testament whore who was eventually eaten alive by dogs."

and

"For most of my time there, bloggers earned bonuses that were tied to the page views their posts received, so the leisurely three minutes required to download a haggard image of Amy Winehouse from a celebrity photo agency and post it with a five-word caption was rewarded as generously as the frenzied hour and a half spent compiling the daily roundup of celebrity gossip, and at least twice as generously as anything I actually wanted to spend an hour and a half writing about."

That would explain the glut of "filler" that the site suffers from- celebrity tweets, cute animal pics, reposts from tabloids, lazy re-hashes of articles written better elsewhere.

I read Jezebel to kill time at work, I don't read it because I think it actually offers that much of substance at this point. And while it boasts its fair share of feminist indignation, it's 90% fluff that I'd probably ignore if I wasn't bored at my office job.

I actually got into reading Jezebel through editor Tracie Egan's blog One D at a Time, which appears to have gone AWOL since Tracie got married and promoted to Senior Writer (though the majority of her "writing" at this point reposts of celebrity tweets and clips from trashy TV shows, which is a shame because she's an awesome writer. But it all goes back to page views=dollars, and that's what's easy and gets hits.)

Back in the day, Tracie(then a staffer at Jezebel's underpaid paper analog BUST) wrote One D at A Time under the moniker "Slutmachine." Slutmachine was like an X rated Williamsburg version of Chelsea Handler- coked out, shamelessly promiscuous and snarky, the crazy friend we all like to live vicariously through. She reminded me a lot of myself- we were the same age and we both had a lot of weird sex and wrote about it, except she was making a lot more money than I was at what I then considered to be my dream job. She took impressive risks as a writer, and it paid off. She wrote about having herpes and why this is wrongfully stigmatized (which is fucking brave, in my opinion.) She and another Jez blogger took secret video at American Apparel of them trying on skanky outfits in what is possibly the greatest Jezebel post ever. Her piece de resistance was an essay she wrote for Vice about paying a male hooker to fake rape her- it's shocking, hilarious and brilliant. Pictures appeared on Jezebel of her getting out of a car sporting a giant fake bush, and re-enacting the Lindsay Lohan knife play photos with other Jezebel staffers in her kitchen. It didn't hurt that she was a gorgeous brunette with huge boobs and amazing fashion sense either. OTOH, she also posted various and sundry fat-phobic and uptight/conventional shit that made me like her a lot less (loosely quoted via Pot Psychology:"I'd rather fuck a fat dude than a dude in a kilt." I'm sorry, that's just weak.)

And then, in her coup de grace, she got got married, retired the Slutmachine moniker, got rid of One D at a Time, and now posts reality TV clips to Jezebel in lieu of, ya know, actual content.

I totally understand and respect why Tracie retired the Slutmachine persona, putting one's scandalous personal life in the public domain has the potential to really fuck up your life. And now she's married and (presumably) monogamous, which changes everything. I hope she's happy, but I do feel a weird sense of loss as fan.

I keep reading Jezebel because I hope that someday it'll be what it once was- sloppy and occasionally gross, brave, and funny, but instead I find another sterile fashion roundup or debate on potential photoshopping of Blake Lively's boobs.

This is what feminism looks like? I want my money back.

Where Are The Good Blogs? And! I Got Called Out!

Ah, my first brush with e-fame.  In the (sigh) third post at Tiger Beatdown on the Sady Vs. Freddie drama, Sady goes into a rant about how she is being perceived as egotistical because women are not supposed to trumpet how awesome they are.  As a woman myself, boy do I get that.  But! She uses a quote from a comment I left on Freddie's blog to illustrate the point: "...self-obsessed even for a blogger..."  Of course, she doesn't attribute the quote to me, and lumps me in with threats of physical violence from male-identified commenters, and fails to mention that I use the quote in the process of telling Freddie that he's acting like a sexist douche.  I guess being somewhat underwhelmed by the degree to which Sady Fuckin' Doyle manages to make both feminism in general but also other people's oppressions All About Her puts me in the same camp as dudes getting annoyed at women having a little bit of self-esteem.

Now it's not my intention to make this about some imaginary, Kathy Griffin-equse feud between me and what I am often told is now one of the best and most popular feminist blogs on the Internet (it's a good hook though, isn't it?) As I said here, on TigerBeatDown, and in Freddie's blog is that I think Sady is funny, and the opinions on the blog more thoughtful than not, but for the aforementioned reasons, I'm not really a fan.  I don't quite get why that bothers Sady, since she has really more than enough fans to outweigh my lonely, bitter old voice.  But this brings me to my point: where are the really good blogs? 

Frankly, I'm not much of a blog reader.  A post on ontd_feminism on LiveJournal discussing the best feminist blogs reminded me of why.  I was generally familiar with the majority of blogs listed, but aside from the ones that we link to her, I have been underwhelmed.  I think the LJ user DraperyFalls puts it well:

"i find blogs that just regurgitate other blog posts or quote liberally from news articles and post predictable thoughts extremely dull. unfortunately, many blogs like feministing, feministe, pandagon, theangryblackwoman, womanist-musings, etc. fall into that category."

I do like some of these blogs (as I link to them, obviously) and I cerintaly don't feel like Womanist Musings falls into that category, as it's chock-full of great content and commentary, but ze's overall point resonates: there are a ton of blogs that relate to the issues we're interested in here at SexOrTelevision that are largely link fiestas, drawing you into a recursive and yeah, boring loop.  Somewhat problematic blogs like TigerBeatDown and I Blame The Patriarchy are exceptions, as in they often provide lots of real, meaty content, which is great. Of course, content means opinions, and some of those are tiresome or in the case of IBTP, difficult to defend, given the history of commenters' transphobia on IBTP and Twisty's ignoring of it, among other issues. 


When it comes to writing about sex, a huge number of sexuality blogs seem to be filled with bad erotica and personal tales of deviancy.  Which is great and there's certainly a place for that, but when that's all you've got, it's yawn time.  Where's the analysis?


So I'm going to ask you, dear readers, all three of you: what are YOUR favorite feminist/trans/queer/gender-examining/sex-obsessed/anti-racist/kinky blogs?  And why do you like them?  I've discovered a few more the other day that I do want to add to our blogroll, but I am open to suggestions.  Alternatively: why do you think this part of the blogosphere is the way it is, and what would you like to see change?  


I'm not trying to be super-critical here (even though that's our nature over at SOT) - but I do think that when you have literally thousands of followers and get brought up of as "the best" in your field, you open yourself up to some nitpicking from the (secretly jealous) peanut gallery.  We can only hope that one day we're widely read enough to have peeps rolling their eyes at us, saying, "I just don't understand why it's so popular," with a derisive snort.


Semi-relatedly, in our ongoing effort to make SexOrTelevision awesome, I am extremely pleased and excited to introduce our newest guest author, GirlAboutChiTown!  My association with Chi goes back many years, as her writings on sex, kink, queerness and culture inspired me to start writing about these things myself.  She's one of those real writers (i.e. published!) and just all-around awesome.  She talked me into attending International Ms. Leather convention with her on Thursday, and I cannot wait to read what she has to write about the event.  In the meantime, I'm going to be trying to figure out what to wear.

Gossip! Or: How To Be A Privilged Ass

So being new to the blogosphere I haven't really had the chance to throw myself into the kind of rough-and-tumble arguments I'm used to having spent 10 years (ugh, really?) on LiveJournal.  The thing you kids have to understand is that LiveJournal is different - it's basically the rough yet ridiculous high school of the Internet.  People are mean there - me included.  It's the kinda place where a simple disagreement over terminology ends with phrases like, "Fuck you and your mother, you racist cunt!"  Rough and tumble, you get the idea.  Having spent my e-adolescence (i.e. my real-life 20s) in such an environment, I tend to come off as a bit hostile to the more sheltered parts of the Internet, such as the horrible PolyWeekly forums, where the response to genuine disagreements over issues like silencing of queer voices or transphobia is a lot of weird passive-aggressive versions of "Fuck you and your mother." No, really, at this point I pretty much dare any reader of this blog to go to the PolyWeekly forums and try to start a substantive conversation about identity issues and see how far it gets you.  No, I AM FUCKING SERIOUS, I will pay you ten dollars, I just want to watch.

Oh, the point!  So unlike the drama of LiveJournal or the faux-niceness of a lot of message boards, the blogosphere (I will never not un-italicize that, not ever) seems to be about a sort of refined politeness, a salon, if you will, where we all meet and exchange ideas and recursively link to each other endlessly because really, 80% of serious blog content is just linking to another blog.  Social status in the blogosphere, as I understand it, seems to be about three things: how many people link to you, how many people comment to your posts, and how many new blog posts an argument on your blog can inspire.  Obviously under this rubric, we're doing pretty poorly (which is not our fault, as nobody is arguing with us in the comments! Get with it, kids!).

But I did find myself drawn into one particular drama-fiasco by two bloggers I'm not particularly fond of.  What's fun is I can be impartial observer.  The two blogs in question are the feminist blog Tiger Beatdown (already winning points for best name) and L'Hote which is a really boring blog by some dude.

Here's the rundown:
Sady at TigerBeatdown makes a funny although rambly post with another blogger about men, uh, sort of.
Our man Freddy from L'Hote gets offended at Sady's humor (which is really what makes her blog appealing) and her characterization of men who identify as feminist and wear "This is what a feminist looks like!" t-shirts and attend Take Back the Night rallies with the intent of getting laid.  So he makes a stupid comment:

"Look, I have to tell you: your whole enterprise here, the whole long and short of it, appears to be an edifice designed to give you a platform that paws at discourse while denying the possibility of you ever getting called on anything. I mean the whole apparatus of the place. It’s like this constant recursion of LOLspeak/serious speak/LOLspeak, this Russian dolls style thing you’re so enamored with. It’s just a mechanism to introduce a self-limiting aspect on what you want to say; you want to be heard and to be taken seriously, but you want the out to be able to say that you were just goofing. Well, goof away, it’s the Internet, and it’s your dime, but understand that you are denying intellectual rigor when you do so."

Look, peeps, I don't need to see your eyeroll, because no matter how many times I read this comment, I DO IT TOO.  Even better, in the same comment he linked to this bit of brilliance about the sad, sad tale of men in the feminist blogosphere.

OK, so here's where I'm going to out myself: I'm a misandrist, straight up.  On the whole, I am not a fan of straight, white, cis men as I do not like their version of masculinity, and I generally find them tiresome and obnoxious at best: at worst they are violent, harassing, and dangerous. This isn't to say I don't like men.  When I say I'm a misandrist, I mean I hate popular male culture and the behavior that it engenders, and that I do not automatically assume men are my friends or allies until they prove themselves to be so, regardless of how they identify.  I don't think men and women are considered equal in our culture so any attempts to equate this to misogyny or any other form of harmful prejudice are not going to resonate with me because that would be facile and stupid.

Despite my misandry and my years of e-experience, I chose to engage with Freddy, because, why the fuck not?  I guess I was bored.  So let's have a quick rundown, my lovelies, of how not to act if you are a man displaying sexist behavior in a feminist space - and really, let's remember this applies to anyone who is attempting to be an ally in a space where we have privilege, right?


Freddy said something stupid, wrote a stupid post about it (already previously linked) and then Sady decided to slap him a new one.  And he whined, because HOLY FUCKING SHIT some feminists were not nice to him even after he told them he was a feminist and he cared!  THE GALL OF THOSE BITCHES.  So he writes a new post about how insecure Sady must be and how mean they were to him but he wants to know if he did really fuck up, well, please tell him, but also, he's a nice feminist guy and they were mean because they made jokes about his peen.

OK honestly, I did, for a brief moment in all this, feel bad for the guy.  Getting called out on your privilege is hard, making an ass of yourself in front of hundreds (thousands?) of readers is hard, and being defensive is a natural reaction.  A small part of me wanted to believe Freddy when he claimed he really wanted to know if he was doing something wrong, and if so, how to fix it.  So I wrote several comments to him - frank, but not particularly mean - explaining how he'd fucked this up and what he could do to un-fuck it, as did many other nice feminists.

Freddy continues to make stupid, whiny posts because Freddy is not particularly interested in examining his own behavior and luckily he has an echo chamber of high-fivin' bros to reassure him that any feminist - regardless of whether we're fans of Sady's or not - who finds fault his his ridiculous behavior is just a goose-steppin' idealogue spewing our hatred of men all over the 'tubes. 

I guess they're not wrong, in which I mean, this kind of behavior really does reinforce for me why I happily, cheerfully identify as a misandrist.  I get to live in a wonderful bubble called the Bay Area which already means I've pretty much weeded out the conservatives and libertarians for the most part.  Better yet, I get to choose my own circle of friends which means that although I do in fact surround myself with men socially, I never have to hear in my real life the kind of shit that Freddy spews.  And it's funny, because Freddy clings to his feminist label as a way to bludgeon actual feminists, while I only think maybe one or two out of a dozen guys in my social circle would actually identify themselves as feminists.  But the thing is, these guys have proven themselves to be loyal, trustworthy, listenin', right-on dudes, even if they don't have a background in women's studies or really care about identity politics.

And that's what Freddy and his ilk - and let me tell you, they are Legion - will never understand.  For them, "feminism" as a label is seen as a shortcut to the kind of acceptance and validation they crave from women, yet they don't understand that is earned through actions and behavior, not by what you claim to be.