If you missed part one of this three-part series, read it here.

Just as I didn’t understand that racism can and does exist in a form less overt than racial slurs and lynching, I didn’t always grasp that a man doesn’t have to put his hands on somebody, or even be in the same room with them, in order to violate their consent. And that’s pretty disappointing in retrospect; for someone who’d rather hurt himself than another person, it can be difficult and even shameful to acknowledge that your idea of harm doesn’t align perfectly with that of the person at risk.

And that’s not to say that these violations were the sort to drive a person to see a therapist, join a support group, or take anti-anxiety meds. But just because something isn’t on the more extreme or offensive side of the spectrum doesn’t make it right. Not to mention that even if the only side effect is the other person thinking you’re just another clueless, entitled male, that’s still pretty hard to live down, at least for me.

There’s been much said about unsolicited cock shots, certainly by individuals more qualified to speak about them than myself. To my credit, I’ve never been one to lead with a photograph of my penis, glorious though it may be. I’ve always been a fan of more traditional greetings along the lines of “Hello”, at least when opening communication with someone for the first time. So the thought of someone springing such a picture on an unsuspecting person who has given them no reason to think such a thing is welcome is abhorrent to me. At best, it is ignorance born of entitlement and apathy, and at worst it is malicious visual assault; either way, it sucks.

These days it’s rare that I send a cock shot to a woman, but when it happens I treat the transaction like a drug dealer who’s wary of entrapment: The recipient needs to state in no uncertain terms what they want me to send, even if we’ve spent the last two hours mutually masturbating via private message and trading dirty talk and sexy photos. Departing from the drug dealer parallel, this is not because I want to cover my own ass from a legal perspective but because I would feel like shit if I misinterpreted the rhythm of the conversation and sent the other person something they didn’t want to see. But I don’t think I was always this conscientious.

In the past I might have sent a cock shot on the assumption that, based on the steamy conversation we were having, the other person must have wanted to see it: “She’s mentioned my cock half a dozen times in the last four messages and has talked about putting it in multiple places on her body. I’d better show her what she’s dealing with.” I might have sent a cock shot if I’d done so by request in a previous conversation: “She’s seen it before and liked it, so she’s fine seeing it again.” I’d like to think I never sent one out of the blue to a person who’d seen it before, i.e. outside of an ongoing conversation without verifying that it was a good time to do so, to say nothing of whether she even wanted to see it again; however, I can’t guarantee that this is true. Hell, I’m pretty sure I once sent someone a cock shot in the midst of several non-sexual photos in a misguided attempt to be cheeky or flirty or whatever.

On a completely different tact – though still related to consent – over the last few years I’ve noticed many bloggers and Twitter users, especially those who write about sex and relationships or who share sexual photos, decrying the use of terms of endearment such as “babe”, “sweetheart”, “sweetie”, “dear”, and “honey” by random men who don’t know them well enough to address them in such a fashion. It is a perfectly understandable perspective; using any of these pet names suggests familiarity where none actually exists. And while I’m sure many men who are guilty of doing so consider it complimentary, it’s actually pretty disrespectful.

Anyway, I wish I’d noticed many bloggers and Twitter users decrying this practice a decade ago because it’s definitely something of which I have been guilty. The following may sound like responsibility-dodging at its worst, but it literally never occurred to me that this sort of thing could be seen as disrespectful until I noticed a groundswell of opposition amongst the women I follow on Twitter (and the women those women follow and retweet). Call me a typical ignorant male, but I just figured it was a pleasant way of referring to someone whose actual name I don’t know. The idea that it wasn’t my place to do so, or even that any given woman might not like any possible form of address I might use, was something I unfortunately needed to be told.

When I asked for the thoughts of my Twitter friends, BeingBella said, “It’s a total turnoff to have someone I don’t know well call me ‘babe’, ‘hun’, ‘doll’, etc.”

DearSweetSub offered, “I’m not a fan. I feel like pet names are earned.”

“I dislike it,” said Miss Scarlet. “Especially babe. Terms like that make my skin crawl.”

And according to Sophic Siren: “To me there’s a difference between using a pet name and using those terms, which a lot of people raised rural and/or southern use routinely, generally indicating being warm / friendly / welcoming/ nonthreatening. It can create unintential friction based in cultural differences. Case in point: Not long ago I got upset someone I didn’t know was calling me sis. I finally asked them to stop. Later, I realized it was a cultural thing. To them it was generally nice, like I use sweetie etc. To me sis is special. But fine if I’d understood cultural context. I try to remember but I was raised rural midwestern and it’s just such an ingrained thing in my everyday language I often don’t realize I’m doing it. I do make a point of not doing it with men I want to go stop bothering me, because I don’t want to convey being open or friendly.”

As I was wrapping my head around this revelation I considered that none of the women I’d addressed in a familiar way had ever told me that they prefer I not do so. I remembered the mea culpa I’d use as a much younger man when the woman I was dating expected me to know exactly what I was doing wrong without being told: “I’m not a mind reader!” And it’s true that without admonishment bad behavior is not likely to change, but I had to consider the position of the woman being addressed: A man who feels sufficiently entitled to use an impersonal pet name when speaking to a woman is likely to feel sufficiently entitled to call that woman a cunt when she politely corrects him, or maybe even do worse in retaliation for damaging his fragile ego.

I have apologized to women to whom I’ve done this. Generally speaking the apology is brushed off as though it’s no big deal, but I still feel retroactively foolish for the social faux pas. It’s not unlike the time I accidentally stepped on the tail of my friend’s dog. That was twenty years ago, and every time I see my friend or even drive down his street I can’t help but remember poor Fido yelping in pain.

These days I see the responses to the average sexy photo posted by a woman, whether on Twitter or some other platform, and it’s enough to make me wince. Beyond the expected grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes, all the instances of “baby”, “darling”, and “love” come off as exceedingly creepy, the digital equivalent of being pawed by a locker room’s worth of men who believe it’s their right. At best it’s clueless, while at worst it’s an insidious attempt to imply possession: “My use of this word to address you is an assertion that you exist to titillate me.” It’s just gross.

The woman being addressed in this way is often sharing something sexual, often involving her body. This is risky enough given how willing we as a society are to respond to a woman’s sexual agency with slut-shaming and rape threats; having a bunch of throwback miscreants crawl out of the sludge to pelt her with presumptuous expressions of unwarranted intimacy is just adding insult to injury.

Throughout my life I’ve had no trouble acknowledging that I’m not perfect. However, it’s always been my intention to come close. In my single days I used to tell the women I dated that I wasn’t perfect, but that I’d do my best to convince them otherwise. And generally-speaking, I think I did well. Not always great. Maybe not always good, even, but I never deliberately caused harm, and when I did so inadvertently I always tried to make amends. Still, it can be humbling to come face-to-face with the reality that you were sometimes way off the mark, especially after decades of the world kissing your ass just because of the societal cohort to which you belong.

If I was this clueless then, it stands to reason that I’m similarly misguided about other things now. Sometimes I wonder what views or actions I might regret in a few years. What everyday behaviors might be seen as microaggressions in the future. But given my self-awareness I can’t foresee anything specific that is part of my life today being undesirable in five years. I’m not saying there won’t be anything, only that I can’t predict it. So I remain facing forward. I can only strive to do my best, and hopefully be better than I was the day before.

On Twitter I think I’ve managed to cultivate a pretty good reputation. If asked to talk about me, I suspect that those on the platform who know me best would speak of my kind, generous heart and my unwillingness to judge others or even speak unkindly, a general attitude of “live and let live”. Granted, I’d love to be known for my charm and sense of humor, my sexual prowess including but not limited to my skill at locating and pleasuring the G-spot, and my cock; however, I’m more than happy to be thought of simply as a good person, especially given the woeful state of the world in 2020. If I can bring some light to the darkness that’s fine with me.

In addition to being a geeky font of interesting pop culture knowledge and an advocate for mental health who always tries his hardest to see the positive, I’m a die-hard leftist, and an unabashed feminist who acknowledges that such values have probably cost him his guy friends. I’m very pro-representation in entertainment despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that I’m a cishet white male who grew up in the 1980s very accustomed to seeing people who looked like myself on screen and on the printed page. I’m empathetic to a fault and I try my best to always be self-aware because nothing pisses me off like a person who’s managed to convince themselves that they are the only person on the planet who matters.

Beyond that, I talk about the importance of consent so often that you could be forgiven for thinking it’s overcompensation or even just an act, but it isn’t. Obviously there are many women in my life who I love dearly and who I don’t want to imagine being victimized. But that’s not why consent is so important to me; I’ve felt this way since long before I was the father of a daughter, or even married to a woman.

All that is not to say that I’ve always been as decent as I’d like to think I am now. I have benefited from my while male privilege, and I probably continue to do so even without always realizing it. Being part of the dominant cohort on the planet, or at least in this country, has not only paid off for me on a personal level but as also perhaps taken away some of the urgency with which I resist, and in fact actively battle against, the rapidly encroaching fascism that threatens the United States.

I was largely unaware of the concept of institutional racism, and less aware of more covert forms of discrimination (as well as the likelihood that I had benefited from it, if not actively participated in it outright), until perhaps a decade ago. Until then, the only racism I really understood as such was the sort that manifests itself in hate speech and cross-burning. Don’t judge me too harshly for this; the default societal attitude seems to be that white people shouldn’t feel bad about treating people of color like shit as long as they’re not using ethnic slurs or wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods while they do it.

But less obvious forms of racism such as banning dreadlocks in the workplace, assuming Black shoppers are shoplifters, calling the police on children of color selling lemonade and families of colors barbecuing in the park – hell, even gentrification? All of that is probably akin to self-preservation in the minds of the white collective.

On a similar note, I’ve always bristled at toxic masculinity, even before I was aware that it was a thing that had a name. I sometimes wonder why I’ve so easily and willingly adopted the “feminist” label and why most of my friends are women. Is it because of the close relationship I had with my mom growing up? Is it because I consider it a necessary part of my far-left persona or a fundamental aspect of being – pardon the expression – woke? Most alarming of all, could it be because my overactive sexual appetite draws me to individuals I might view as potential partners? Upon closer reflection the reason is because while I’ve had unhealthy romantic relationships with women over the course of my life- abusive, even – the ratio of women who’ve victimized me to men who’ve done so is skewed toward men, and it’s not even close.

As a child I was short, soft-spoken, often overweight, and probably overly sensitive, something that was definitely viewed as feminine back then. I wasn’t particularly into sports, cars, or any of the things a boy was expected to like in the 1980s. I was an easy mark for bullies, and even just for boys who were threatened by non-conformity.

However, there have been times in my life when I exhibited behaviors that came too close to toxicity to align with my current values, or even my values at the time. When I have erred in this fashion I don’t think I did so with malicious intent; more likely it was the result of entitlement, laziness, or acquiescence to gender roles with which, despite their reinforcement throughout my childhood and early adulthood, I never felt comfortable. When the only examples you have to follow walk a very traditional, mainstream path, it can be difficult to ignore what you think is expected of you in favor of what you actually want.

One thing I’d like to believe is that I was always conscious and respectful of consent. I am reminded of a date I went on in my late twenties: Dinner, a movie, and then a drive to Ocean Beach in San Francisco. We didn’t waste much time watching the autumn moonlight reflecting off of the crashing waves before the groping and making out began. We hadn’t been dating long, and while there had been some very basic intimacy, we hadn’t yet had sex. I was looking forward to it happening eventually, but I was never one to rush or force things.

When my hands ventured from her breasts down to the insides of her thighs she asked me to slow it down a little. I did, of course. And while I may have felt bad for trying to take it further than she wanted, I respected her feelings, I appreciated her taking care of herself, and I admired her for not letting me move things outside of her comfort zone. I didn’t get angry. I didn’t try to manipulate or guilt her into letting me do whatever I wanted. That’s never been something I was okay with. As entitled as I may have felt to various things throughout my life, and for that matter as focused as I’ve always been on sex, I will say without hesitation that I’ve never been one to disregard another person’s “no”, certainly not in a sexual context.

For a long time I assumed that most women were annoyed by my propensity for checking in. After all, the sudden focus on consent in the form of the “No Means No” acquaintance rape awareness campaign around the time that I came of age in the early 1990s was met with ridicule from certain corners; as I wrote in 2014:

“I remember my college days in the mid-1990s, when women didn’t seem quite as marginalized as they do today. In this much more politically-correct time, it was drummed into the collective brain of my generation that getting explicit consent was vital, so much so that the phenomenon was frequently satirized in the form of crude cartoons and comedy sketches depicting amorous couples stopping just long enough to have a formal contract notarized allowing sex to take place without legal or criminal ramifications.”

I knew some of the women I dated or even slept with casually were relieved by my attentiveness and appreciated my check-ins, so I didn’t worry too much. However, in the wake of #metoo, and given all that I now know about sexual assault being a near-universal experience among women, I think far more appreciated it than were annoyed by it, even if they acted put off at the time, likely out of a sense of propriety or a desire to reassure my male ego. I hope they felt safe with me.

All of the above is not to say that I’m perfect. I try to be, of course, maybe even harder than I should. It is my intention to always be self-aware and to consider how my words and actions might affect others. And while I think I do a pretty good job, I know I’m not always successful. While I haven’t had sex with someone who didn’t want to (as far as I know), I admit I’ve violated women’s boundaries in other ways. Ways that were perhaps not as traumatic as physical sexual assault might have been, but ways that I should have been more conscious of nonetheless.

I hate to leave you in suspense; Part 2 will look closely at how I’ve failed to respect the consent of others. Please don’t think poorly of me until you’ve read it.

This isn’t actually an advertisement for a specific brand of faucet but if it was I’d probably buy said faucet.

See who else is being sinful at Molly’s Daily Kiss!

 

As soon as I’m done washing my hair I’d love to wash yours.

See who else is being sinful at Molly’s Daily Kiss!

I’ve had a good week and I’m feeling confident.

See who else is being sinful at Molly’s Daily Kiss!

 

Happy Holidays! Wishing you much happiness in 2020 and beyond.

See who else is being sinful at Molly’s Daily Kiss!

 

“I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes.  The Devil’s eyes.” – Halloween (1978)

As Thursday was Halloween, this is Prompt Week at Sinful Sunday. “Quote Me a Halloween” is the prompt, and I have chosen to interpret a quote from my favorite horror movie, John Carpenter’s Halloween.

See who else is being sinful at Molly’s Daily Kiss!

As I dry off, I’m imagining your hands playfully tugging down my towel.  You know I wouldn’t stop you.

See who else is being sinful at Molly’s Daily Kiss!

 

I’m not one to refuse a request from the birthday girl.

See who else is being sinful at Molly’s Daily Kiss!

[CW: Threats of harm/self-harm]

I belong to a few different polyamory groups on various social media. A few weeks ago I noticed that someone on one of these groups was having an issue with her relationship. She was new to both the group and to polyamory itself, so I thought I’d offer her my admittedly limited perspective, or at the very least a sounding board against which to throw her current dilemma.

I enjoy helping others; it’s something that truly makes me feel valued. Additionally it was a local group, and we have no polyamorous friends in the area, no one we can hang out with and talk about the trials and tribulations of non-monogamy. I trust it goes without saying that the fact she lived nearby and was apparently okay with non-monogamy held additional appeal for obvious reasons, but that wasn’t the first thing I thought of when I reached out.

She appreciated my getting in touch, and laid out the basics of the situation. I answered some questions and offered advice; we even had a brief video chat because it was too much for her to type out. At the end of the conversation, she said she was feeling better about everything, she expressed her appreciation, and I felt good for having helped.

We talked more the next day, and have continued since; from our subsequent chat it was clear that while our initial talk gave her peace of mind, it didn’t actually fix the issues affecting her relationship.

To give you some background, she and her boyfriend have been together two years, and he recently proposed opening their relationship. What he wanted was to find another woman in the hopes of entering into a closed triad, i.e. a relationship wherein each of three partners are romantically and sexually involved with each other, but not with anybody else. They quickly found a suitable woman, and the three of them hit it off well.

However, the person I’ve been talking to – I’ll refer to her as “L” – reported that it wasn’t long before her boyfriend and the other woman began spending more and more time together, alone, at the other woman’s place. While this was happening, L stayed at their apartment, looking after her boyfriend’s teenage daughter. Picking her up from school. Cooking her meals. Making sure she went to bed on time.

Although the boyfriend and the other woman have been wanting to spend the night together, L isn’t okay with that. She didn’t rule out being okay with it in the future, but for now she has insisted that he return home at midnight. However, in every single case her boyfriend has called at the last minute letting her know they needed more time together, and returning home a few hours later.

A couple weekends ago, L had the brilliant idea of dropping him off at the other woman’s place and picking him up at midnight, thus ensuring he would respect the agreed-upon time. Of course, he called before she left and asked her to pick him up later, around 2:00 AM. Now, I’m no mind-reader, but I’m thinking the boyfriend and his new partner hoped she’d just acquiesce to them spending the night together.

Remember, this guy has a daughter; she’s fifteen and clearly not stupid. Given her father’s constant absence she knows something is going on, and she can almost certainly tell that whatever it is is affecting L in a major way. I asked her if she felt her boyfriend was modeling suitable behavior for his daughter, and she admitted that he was not, even going so far as to say that his daughter had stopped respecting her curfew and other established rules.

In other words, without knowing or needing to know any details about her sexual orientation, if the guy’s daughter ends up dating men, she has been shown that a man in a relationship will frequently be absent, and will also pressure her to adjust her boundaries to better suit his needs.

Anyway, L ended up picking up her boyfriend hours later than originally planned, and while one might roll their eyes at her failure to insist that her rules be respected, she deserves kudos for not giving in to her boyfriend’s manipulation and letting them spend the night together after repeatedly voicing her objection to such a thing.

For now I’ll ignore his lack of concern about how his not returning home at all might have been viewed by his daughter. And let’s not spend time dwelling on the fact that, over time she will lose respect for him for obviously carrying on with another woman, and for L herself for not demanding better of him. It’s worth mentioning that I suggested they simply tell his daughter the truth, that they’re attempting an open relationship, but apparently the stigma would be greater.

One night last week, he brought the other woman to their apartment to stay the night, under some flimsy pretense that L and apparently his daughter both saw through. It was clear that once his daughter had gone to bed he was hoping for a threesome, although L told me the following morning that the other woman balked when he brought it up.

L has admitted to thinking about leaving, which I initially thought was her boyfriend’s objective: Freedom to be with this newer, younger, and presumably more exciting* woman without the guilt of dumping his domestic partner. But when she told me that he begged her to stay when she once threatened to leave him, that made sense too. If I was able to fuck someone new and got free live-in childcare so I could stay out all night, I’d do whatever I could to maintain that arrangement.

*Nothing against L; I’m sure she’s very exciting. But new relationship energy, or NRE, is a thing. Even if you’re not polyamorous, you’ve undoubtedly felt that swell of excitement and other emotions at the start of a relationship. When you’ve been with someone for two years, your eye is bound to wander. It happens. And when you get the go-ahead to be with someone else, you run the risk of getting sidetracked. As someone who has felt that pull, I can attest that it sometimes requires much effort to find the right balance between the familiar existing partner and the allure of what’s new.

So why does she stay? I can admit I haven’t talked to her about that. She’s got her reasons and if she wanted to share them, she would have. In addition to half a dozen other reasons that have occurred to me, I suspect she truly loves her boyfriend despite the fact that he’s obviously a shithead. Which begs the question: Why do we love people who are harmful?

I’ve dated people who were harmful to me. (I’m sure I’ve probably been the harmful person in the relationship, too.) So why did I stay? In some cases it was emotional manipulation: “If you leave me I will [do some horrible thing up to and including suicide and/or murder].” That’s something I unfortunately heard on occasion when I was a much younger man.

But sometimes it’s nothing so dramatic or traumatic. Sometimes we stay out of obligation, or familiarity, or the unwillingness to be alone. Certainly society posits the notion that our worth comes from our relationship status, i.e. whether we are loved by someone else. This is especially true for women, and while I’m not certain it’s true in the case of L, I have more than a couple women friends for whom it absolutely is true.

The problem is that staying for any of these reasons often leads to large-scale compromise. Over time, we’re not the same person we were before we entered into the relationship, and I don’t just mean that in the subtle ways we all change when we’re dating. I’m talking about the kind of devolution that prevents our friends and loved ones from even recognizing us. Gloom. Bitterness. Envy. Anxiety. Rage.

Compromise is a natural part of being in a relationship. Has anyone reading this not compromised for their partner in some way? I’m pretty sure we all have, though the degree of compromise varies. Some people convert to their partner’s religion. Others deign to accompany their partner to a marathon showing of all the Twilight movies. Some people begrudgingly attend Sunday dinners with their partner’s family. Others steal plutonium for that thing their partner is making in the basement. Wait – that might be an extreme example. Let’s go with exhuming corpses for necrophilia purposes instead.

“Exhuming corpses to fulfill Jeremy’s favorite sexual fantasy is illegal and morally wrong. I should break up with him, but if I do I’ll have to find somebody else. And there’s no guarantee they’ll like the same shows I like.”

Learning Spanish in order to converse with your partner’s mother is a reasonable compromise. Having sex less often than you’d like to in order to accommodate your partner’s limited sex drive is a reasonable compromise. Sharing financial expenses is a reasonable compromise. Allowing your children to be raised in a certain religion, or no religion whatsoever, is a reasonable compromise.

Handling all the household chores, as well as providing childcare for a child who isn’t even your responsibility while your partner, the child’s parent, has sex with someone else under the guise of ethical polyamory, and who ignores your emotional needs completely when you actually do spend time together, is an unreasonable compromise.

Likewise, putting up with constant boundary-pushing despite your having explicitly made your opposition clear – whether to being tied up and flogged, letting your significant other spend the night with someone else, opening your relationship in the first place, or even to something relatively innocuous like eating a food you dislike – is an unreasonable compromise.

Of paramount importance is the ability to differentiate between a reasonable compromise and an unreasonable one, or to find the strength to leave a situation that requires unreasonable compromises. Maybe someday L will acquire these abilities, but I don’t see it happening soon.

Case in point: Earlier this week she told me she feels like completely giving in, letting her boyfriend and his new partner just have whatever they request. It takes too much out of her to keep arguing about it only to have her boundaries pushed and her wishes disregarded. I’m unclear as to whether she thinks continuing to live with this arrangement will somehow take less.