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From a m4w ad, posted without further comment:
I think that this time I'll work the intelligence angle. I've noticed that I seem to get along best with people who consider themselves to be smarter than the average person walking down the street. I mean, yes, physical attractiveness is of course important, but I think that there's something to be said for mental attractiveness as well.Do you feel the same way? If so, send a pic
I have a bit of a backlog of questions from readers, which I'll try to work through in the next couple of weeks.
I read something on your blog that leads me to believe that you don’t like cheating, yet apparently you have main squeeze and you sleep around. Do you consider that cheating or do you have another definition? This is all new to me since I was married and monogamous forever, but I am not interested in going back to that. Soooo how do you have a main squeeze, and still fool around without someone getting hurt?
You're right; I don't like cheating. In general, I find it foreign and questionable. I understand that there are lots of situations where cheating is the lesser of the available evils, but I have a hard time understanding how people end up in situations where that's the case. Honesty is important to me (though I'm not fanatical about it), and I prefer to involve myself with people who are living basically up-front lives. Furthermore, I am continually baffled at cheating people's openness with strangers about their status while being deceptive with the person who is, in theory, the person they've chosen to spend their lives with. But, hey, I'm also baffled at people's fascination with American Idol, so, big deal.
What do I do? I do have a regular lover and I do sleep around. My lover knows I sleep around, and if we were more serious, I would tell him about all of my hookups. As it is, I just tell him about the extra fun or interesting ones. And if he asked, I'd tell him about the less spectacular ones, too; it's just not normally important to bring up. What is important is that he knows that I have hookups and that a) I'll talk about them sometimes and b) he can ask whatever he wants or needs to know. Meanwhile, he has other lovers, too, and people he's dating more seriously than he's dating me. I know about them and they know about me. In fact, I met him through his longest-term partner, with whom I'm very good friends.
Is your head spinning? Then you've probably never heard the term "polyamory", though that's not a term I particularly care for. Still, if you do a web search on it, you'll find more web pages full of people spouting on about how to do it right or wrong or best or worst than you'll know what to do with. Some of these might be useful. I haven't done such a search recently, so I have no idea what the state of information is at the moment.
Personally, I prefer the term nonmonogamy, and I describe my variant of it as consensual nonmonogamy. I keep people informed, and I expect they'll do the same. Those might be additionally useful search terms for you to consider. I bet they'll lead you to a variety of useful and useless places, but with any luck, you'll find something good.
I'm not going to go into more detail about this stuff, because I find it largely boring to talk about, but before I sign off, I do want to say one thing, and that is that I don't think it's possible to have relationships without someone getting hurt from time to time. More important than pussyfooting or tiptoeing around hoping never to cause pain is being clear and honest and communicating effectively with the people you're involved with. And when pain results, then it's your big chance to be thoughtful and considerate in dealing with it. This is true in any kind of ongoing relationship, whether sexual/romantic, familial or friendly. We can't avoid hurting people close to us, though I hope we avoid doing so on purpose; what we can avoid is being an asshole after we've caused pain. Ignoring or avoiding addressing the unintentional hurts we cause strikes me as vastly more problematic and flawed than causing them in the first place.
People sometimes gets confused about what it means to be a slut. I am a slut. But what does that mean? It means I like sex, and I enjoy it on a casual and non-casual basis. Some sluts like fucking strangers while others like sleeping around with their friends. Some of us do both.
But it's a mistake to think that slutty people don't have standards. My standards may be different from your standards... in fact, I hope they are, because, frankly, you're not getting laid enough for my tastes, and if we were competing for the same pool of sex, one of us would be cranky. But it makes me more than a little grouchy when I hear, "Well, you know CC, she'll sleep with anyone."
Don't mistake sluttiness for lack of discernment. This is like looking at the person who chooses different clothing from you and saying they have no taste. They have taste; it's just not taste you share. And you come off like a lame-ass middle class prig when you do it.
Yes, I mean you.
So, here I am, reading one of my favorite feminist blogs, feministing, when I ran across this post about porn for women. Apparently, the Cambridge Women's Pornography Cooperative has put out a book called Porn for Women. This pink-covered tome draws you in with the steamy, sultry image of ... a man vacuuming? This is a joke, right?
From feministing:
The book is simply titled, "Porn for Women," and consists of hot, sensitive men who are supposed to be a woman's wet dream. For example, one page features a guy reading the sports section of the paper saying, “Ooh, look, the NFL playoffs are today. I bet we'll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair.”
I'm sorry, no.
Now, I'll grant you that I may not exactly be your everyday kind of woman, but I happen to hang out with a lot of women (granted, they also are not exactly mainstream, but they are women...), and here's the thing.
A man vacuuming is not enough to get me wet. And furthermore, it's patently ridiculous to suggest that women are so fucking desperate for a man who will help around the house (and let's not get into what's offensive about that little concept, shall we?) that a mere image of one will send her dashing off for her Hitachi.
The front flap has speech bubbles (speech bubbles?? this is hot??? what are we, twelve?) saying such scorching things as, "God, that's so interesting. Tell me more." and, "Want to snuggle?"
No. Just, no.
Now, listen, I like a sensitive guy as much as the next woman. I can totally picture jumping a guy in an apron. He can even be wearing something under it. Especially if what he's wearing is a black velvet shirt, and the apron is burgundy, and he's being all hot and skillful with a spatula and... oh, excuse me, I got distracted, there. So, yeah, that can be hot, and there's a place for it, but probably not for a whole book of it. Especially not when the book is full of simpleminded, trite phrases like, "Have another piece of cake. I don't like you looking so thin." (That's also from the front flap.)
What gets me hot is not a guy who wants to go to a craft fair over a football game but a guy who likes to do things with me. What turns me on is not a guy who gives me some line about being too thin but a guy who gets a hard-on when I rub up against him and lick his ear.
If I'm going to look at a picture of a guy to accompany my jilling off, it sure as hell isn't going to be some guy (no matter how attractive) gazing soulfully into the camera accompanied by an inane quote. It's going to be some attractive (but not necessarily fucking jock-y, thank you) guy doing something competently. But since that's hard to show in a photograph, you should have a quote from him talking about what he's doing and why he's passionate about it.
The Cambridge Women's Pornography Cooperative has entirely missed the mark. If you want me to like a guy for his personality, give him personality. If you want me to like a guy 'cause he's hot, make him attractive and give him skills. If you want me to gag on your overly simplistic stereotypes, publish this book.
One of the most fun elements of meeting people online is the excitement of a promising new contact. There are a lot of duds out there, or people who just aren't good matches (guys, that's a good thing to keep in mind when you don't hear back from a woman: there's a good chance that if you'd even gotten as far as meeting, you'd've decided, "Eh, she had promise, but, ultimately, no dice.") but there are also good matches, and you do occasionally find them, or they find you, and that's awesome.
But you don't know early on if someone will be a match or a dud, and hope springs eternal (or for a really long time, anyway), so on first contact with someone who seems just perfect, I often find my imagination running away with me. Just because he's articulate and witty in email doesn't mean that I'll like him when we meet, or, for that matter, the next time he writes to me, but it's the necessary first step. And because I'm an optimist, I like to look at those promising first emails as the door into something wonderful.
This is especially easy for me to do when he describes a fantasy sexual scenario that's perfectly up my alley. Er. So to speak. That makes it incredibly easy for me to get wrapped up in thinking about a) the fantasy b) with him. And that's a good thing from his perspective for obvious reasons.
Now, this is only moderately helpful for you guys out there, because you can't know for sure which of your fantasies might strike a chord with the stranger you're contacting, but if you pick one of your favorites, and you write it well, you'll at least be in good shape for finding someone who shares it. And that, after all, is the goal, right?
