30 Days of De-Objectification: X-Rated

30 Days of De-Objectification:

X-Rated

Initially, being crude and crass may seem edgy and cool. The edgelords think they’re just “telling it like it is.” They don’t want social conventions to hold them back from blurting out the most inappropriate things. Being lewd and crude shows just how badass they are.

Except it really doesn’t.

Reading unfiltered smut with real people as its subject is like watching porn, only not as entertaining.

I honestly don’t watch porn anymore, but when I used to, there was a distinct pattern with it. Porn is sexy for about ten minutes. Then it becomes boring and silly. The only way I’d watch a porn flick all the way through was if they were clever enough to have a funny little story with it. However, I’d find myself fast-forwarding through the sex scenes. There are only so many different ways to have sex.

Y’all’s smutty fics about real people aren’t that good.

Mostly, they’re embarrassing to read, and you should be embarrassed to be making them public.

It isn’t that I’ve never written explicit fantasies involving real people. I’m not going to say who, because I don’t think that’s something that needs to be public knowledge.

Also, I honestly don’t think my personal smut is a particularly great read.

There’s a reason why it’s personal.

I have a bawdy sense of humor. I cut my teeth on Monty Python. I enjoy innuendo and double entendre. One of the reasons I thought AC/DC were such great fun was because of their cheekiness. However, part of the art of being cheeky is knowing when to hold back. Dropping trou and flashing your ass to a receptive crowd for a lark is a laugh. Turning around and yanking your crank (or diddling your clit) in public is not going to be well-received.

There is a difference between a well-crafted explicit fic involving fictional characters and an over-the-top jerkoff fantasy about real people.

Let’s say that you have a thing for a musician by the name of Ace Bass, because I’m not going to write explicit shit about any real musicians.

It’s fine to write your own secret fantasies about you and Ace.

It’s fine to share your secret fantasies with trusted friends.

It’s gross and unnecessary to tell the world on your public blog that you want Ace to bend you over the railing on your grandpappy’s farm and slam his big log into your tunnel of love.

It’s also unnecessary to publicly reveal that you’d like to watch Ace and his bandmate, Guitar Charlie, cornhole each other like a couple of horny homosexual farmhands in the middle of Grandpappy’s ole cornfield.

Even when I was young and dumb and horny, I always thought how utterly embarrassed I’d be if the person I was writing about read what I was writing about him. So, I kept that shit to myself.

“Oh, come on, what’s the likelihood that they’d ever read it?” you may be saying.

Well, not that great, maybe.

But then again, I never thought I’d chat with Nikki Sixx, and I did.

These people are real people.

I’d feel terrible if I wrote something explicitly sexual about them and they saw it, because it would embarrass them.

As I’ve said before, I can find someone attractive, even extremely attractive, and not objectify them.

I’ve been objectified.

I don’t like it.

I don’t think most people like it.

Things don’t always need to take a turn down Sex Street.

Think about how the object of your lust would feel if he read what you were writing.

Do you really think he’d like it? Or would he find it crass and disrespectful?

Keep the X-rated RPF on the Down-Low.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

30 Days of De-Objectification: Worthless

30 Days of De-Objectification:

Worthless

Trigger Warning:

Discussion of sexual assault 

Mention of self-harm 

I am going to reveal something very personal.

Twenty going on twenty-one years ago, in the early morning hours of November 1, 1997, I was sexually assaulted by my ex-boyfriend.

I was in my early thirties, but I was very naïve. Even though I broke up with the guy because he had a very callous sense of humor and everything physical that happened with him had been coercive, I thought it was the right thing to do to remain friends with him. After all, I had broken up with him. So, I thought that we would start our new friendship with my taking him to a work friend’s Halloween party.

Not only was I very naïve, I also had untreated type 2 bipolar disorder, which would not be correctly diagnosed for another six years.

I took my son, who was seven years old at the time, with me because my co-worker had kids around his age.

I proceeded to get extremely drunk.

One of my other co-workers was flirting with me.

My ex-boyfriend became extremely angry.

To avoid having him start a fight, I took him out of there. I also did something which makes me flinch to remember to this day. I took my son with me over to my ex-husband’s parents’ house. I drove drunk with my child in the car. I didn’t know who I could call.

After dropping my son off with his grandparents, I went back to my apartment with my ex-boyfriend, so he could get his car. I went to bed fully clothed. I woke up undressed with him on top of me. I begged him to stop, but he didn’t. When he was done, he said “well, now we’re back together again.”

For the next year, I had panic attacks every twenty minutes for about five hours from the time I woke up. I didn’t want to go back to sleep because I knew it would start all over again when I woke up. Eventually, I would become too exhausted to stay awake, and the cycle repeated, every day, for the next 365 days.

I was falling apart. Nobody thought what I’d been through was “that bad,” because this bastard didn’t grab me and throw me on the ground or beat me up.

I felt like garbage. I felt worthless.

I was very vulnerable, and about six months after the event, I went to another co-worker’s party, where I became involved with one of the most predatory men I’d ever met. This creep expressed sympathy for what had happened, but he really just wanted sex. He took advantage of the fact that I was extremely vulnerable and my self-esteem was completely in the toilet. He would be affectionate towards me and then threaten to withdraw his “love” if I didn’t do what he demanded, which included watching a lot of pornography. He got a sick thrill out of my disgust over the bestiality videos he enjoyed watching. He eventually took up with another girlfriend and flaunted her in my face. He told me I was his “only girl,” but said he needed “a cheap piece of ass” too.

I ended up at his door one night with bloody wrists. I still have the scars.

Neither of these men saw me as human. I was a thing, an object. I was garbage.

Twenty years later, I still feel like I’ve been thrown in a sewer whenever I talk about it.

It is never right to look at another person and see an object rather than a human being.

It doesn’t make it better if you’re a girl objectifying a man.

There are some who will say “well, look what these guys did to you! We should turn the tables and have our revenge!”

I don’t believe that will make anything better.

I believe that objectification is never right.

I believe that it’s particularly awful to exploit and objectify vulnerable populations.

I took care of old and sick people for a lot of years.

I feel protective towards people in that population.

People who have lost their health and their ability to continue their careers should be honored, not objectified.

One of the residents at the retirement community I used to work at started hallucinating. One night she called me to her apartment in hysterics. She said that there were men who had come out of her closet and beat her. She said that these men told her that they were going to have sex with her. She said: “you’d think they could leave a seventy-five-year-old woman alone, wouldn’t you?”

These men in their sixties, seventies, and beyond don’t want to be objectified by teenage girls.

They have enough problems.

Don’t treat people like things to do with as you see fit.

Don’t deny others their worth.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

On Porn: The Blinders are Off

Image copyright 123rf.com

TRIGGER WARNING:

SEXUAL ASSAULT

PORNOGRAPHY

SELF-INJURY

The short version is a response to a post on Alternet about the summer's most popular porn.

Reading this turned me off rather than on. 

Porn is utterly unrealistic, and yet it's what people have come to expect sex is like. It harms rather than helps relationships. Yet we as a society glorify it.

A lot of people think of porn as just people being filmed having sex. You've got your guy-girl porn, your girl-girl porn, your guy-guy porn, and your group sex. If it's consenting adults, no big deal, right?

If it were just consenting adults having sex, it would be no big deal and would, in fact, be kind of boring. If you're not the one having sex, sex looks kind of silly.

Once on the Howard Stern show, Howard asked one of my favorite people, Angus Young, how much porn he watched. Angus replied: "I don't get off on watching butts bouncing up and down, especially not hairy man butts."

Angus may not be aware of just how much more disturbing than butts bouncing up and down porn can be. Hopefully he never finds out. I use his statement to illustrate that for the uninitiated, "butts bouncing up and down" tends to be what they think porn is. Thus, they can't understand the argument that porn is harmful, and view those making said argument as pearl-clutching fuddy-duddies.

For many years I had myself convinced that porn was okay and that I was being closed-minded in my knee-jerk reaction that it really wasn't okay and was exploitative of women. 

I also had a complicated relationship with porn, because my own past abuses led me to be simultaneously aroused and disgusted by humiliating fantasies. Part of me believed that I deserved to be hurt and humiliated. While I would never have sought it out in real life, I would spend entire days sometimes watching scenarios in which one person was the target of sexualized demeaning acts.

Back in 1997, I was involved with a very bad guy. He was looking for a victim, and he found a perfect one in the thirty-two year old me, with her untreated mental illness and terrible self esteem.

I had a history of two full-on sexual assaults, and most of my sexual experiences had been coercive. I was molested when I was very young. I was everything a guy like this abusive misogynist could want.

It started out with regular porn, and then he started bringing in worse stuff. At first it was scat, then it moved to bestiality. When I got upset, he laughed at me and threatened to withdraw his "love" from me if I left. 

If you're saying that anyone with any sense would have left, you're partly right. My sense was telling me that I needed to get away from him. My butchered self-esteem told me that I was throwing away "love." I was so desperate to have someone care for me that I put up with this abuse.

My boyfriend started flaunting his other conquests in front of me, and when I got upset he told me that men were incapable of being monogamous, and I needed to understand that. He made me kiss his feet.

At one point I showed up at his house at two in the morning with my wrists slashed, after having wandered about the neighborhood cutting myself repeatedly.

I finally mustered the courage to leave him for my son's sake rather than my own. I didn't care about myself. I thought I was garbage. I was still obsessed with him. It took months for me to fully realize what an absolute piece of crap he was and that nobody deserved to be subjected to his monstrous behavior.

It would be another seventeen years before I could break free of the cycle of psychologically abusing myself by watching demeaning pornography.

I'm going to keep this post in the material realm. One of these days I'll talk about how Gem helped me break free of my porn obsession.

Follow-up:

I should not be surprised that I had someone Mansplain to me that my argument was "completely invalid" because his experience with porn had been the opposite of what I described. Porn is totes realistic, you guys.

As we know, nothing will change a woman's mind quicker than Mansplaining. The poor dumb bitches don't know their own minds, after all.

Well, you've convinced me. Porn is wonderful and makes the world a beautiful place. It does not create unrealistic expectations about what sex is like, and it is never violent, demeaning or ugly. I will now return to my invalid existence, gleeful in the knowledge that at least I can always have porn.

~Cie~

A to Z Blogging Challenge 2015: B is for Bias

The above video contains an example of cultural bias. This person is certainly not the only one to hold such views.

Bias:

a particular tendency or inclination, especially one that prevents unprejudiced consideration of a question; prejudice.

The author of the above book, Michael Savage, refers to his views as "conservative nationalism."

First, I'll go with the idea upon which I agree with him.

When it comes to sex scenes, often less is more. I generally dislike overly explicit sex scenes in movies. If I wanted to watch porn, I'd watch porn. If I'm reading a book, unless I'm going for erotica, I don't want graphic sex scene after graphic sex scene. Before you ask, no, I am not a fan of "Fifty Shades of Grey."

As to what was offensive in the author's statement:

"If they were Islamists, they'd cut each other's throats. But since they're Americans, they usually have a drink and go to bed with each other."

Granted, the statement is hyperbolic. Obviously, if Muslims killed each other all the time, there would be no more Muslims. However, the statement is also a glaring generalization regarding Muslims.

Also granted, there are extremist Muslims. There are problematic attitudes in the Middle East regarding the treatment of women. However, not all Muslims are extremists. 

Believing that all Muslims are extremists is comparable to saying that all Germans are bad because of the actions taken by the Nazis. It simply isn't true.

Attitudes like Mr. Savage's do nothing to combat the extremist attitudes held by some Muslims. Instead, they create an attitude of bias against all Muslims.

Biased attitudes do not create solutions. They only create further animosity.

~Illsa~