Tag: sexuality

On vocabulary

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

I learned a new word while reading a sex scene tonight, and I’m both surprised and a little alarmed by that. I thought I knew all the words for the different ways humans can rub their bits together! I did not.

(That’s all I’ve got. My students shit the bed on another test today. If someone can explain to me what I need to do to keep 8th graders from consistently, from year to year, underperforming on anything I call a test, I would absolutely love to hear it, because nothing I’ve ever tried has worked. You’ve seen this post before, and I’m pre-exhausted by it without even writing it.)

#metoo and me

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, PoliticsLeave a comment

So a friend of mine, a friend who will likely see this, so it’s not as if it’s behind her back, posted this on Facebook the other day.  Forgive all the blurriness:

allofus

And here’s the thing: yeah.  It does.  It makes me uncomfortable.  The notion– a notion I believe without the remotest qualification, by the way– that literally every woman I know has experienced sexual harassment makes me profoundly uncomfortable.  Hell, uncomfortable’s not even the word, although it’s part of it.  There’s a fair degree of fucking rage in there too, for example.

And no, I didn’t “like” the post.  In fact if I have hit Like (I don’t use any of the other options, ever; don’t ask me why) on any posts associated with the #metoo hashtag, I don’t remember doing it– and I’m pretty certain there aren’t any.

I hit Like on her post and then deleted it.  Wrote a comment, and then deleted that too, and then spent the next couple of days fighting off this post.  The reason I haven’t interacted with any of these posts online isn’t because of some feeling of discomfort or shame, is the thing.  I haven’t because none of this is about me, and I feel like it’s pointless at best and empty virtue-signaling at worst for me to interact with a thing that isn’t supposed to be about me in specific or men in general.

So, yeah.  All of them.  #allofthem, if you prefer.

I’ve spent the last few days– longer than that, really, but it’s come to a head in the last few days– thinking a lot about my own actions as a cishet guy throughout my life.  And in a lot of ways I’ve been resisting the temptation to paint myself as one of the good guys.  I’ve never raped anyone, obviously.  (Is it obvious?  Probably flattering myself.)

But there was that one time, with that one woman, where she indicated her lack of consent to a certain action at the literal last possible moment, and it’s haunted me ever since.  When I say last possible moment, I’m not exaggerating, not by a millisecond or a fraction of an inch.  I didn’t go any further– of course I didn’t– but my first immediate visceral reaction was wait what the fuck are you kidding and I don’t know how much of that reaction got through to her.

I’ve never catcalled anyone, not once.  Never hassled a woman in a bar, never got angry with anyone because they wouldn’t give me a phone number or something like that.

(I have what I’m pretty sure is a funny story about accidentally approaching the wrong woman in a bar who I thought was one of my friends; maybe I’ll tell it sometime.  It’s not for this post.)

But I had years– years— where I bought into the idea of the friendzone, and where the idea of just telling a woman that I was interested in her and thought we should go out/make out/fuck each other senseless was pure anathema.  No, she (whichever she was at the time) was gonna figure it out sooner or later and fall into my arms.  I was a Nice Guy.  Sooner or later she’ll figure out that all the guys she dates are assholes and I’m right here, all not being an asshole and shit.

I can think of some moments, some interactions that make me cringe right now, honestly.  I’m pretty sure there were times when I was being creepy as fuck and didn’t even realize it.  There are others where I know I was being creepy as fuck and I regret the hell out of them.  Some of them probably involved the woman who originally triggered this post, honestly; we have a bit of history together, not all of which I’m proud of.

(True fact: the first time I kissed the woman who eventually married me, we were sitting at a table in a diner and I literally said “Let’s go make out in the parking lot,” and it worked.  Sooner or later I broke past the idea that doing nothing would get me somewhere.  That said, if that line doesn’t work?  Possible eew.)

I remember one time in high school when a bunch of us– too many to fit in the car– were all going somewhere, and one of the girls decided she was going to sit in my lap.  I put both my hands in my lap, palms-up.  She shrugged and did it anyway, probably knowing that having both hands on her ass would make me twice as uncomfortable as it was making her and that it wouldn’t last more than a moment, which it didn’t.

I still remember that.  I wonder if she does.

(I was gonna say “I’ve never groped anyone who didn’t want me to,” which is what reminded me of that story.)

I remember a week– one very, very weird week in middle school– where for some reason everyone, boys and girls, were all going around trying to yank each others’ shorts off.  By the end of the week everyone had their belts on so tight or their pants laced so tight that I suspect some of us were cutting off our circulation.  I was on both sides of that little game.  But I can’t say I’ve never tried to take anyone’s clothes off who didn’t want me to, either.  I still remember the two girls I targeted; I know one of them took a swipe at me at one point too, although I don’t know who was first.  I don’t remember what the other one thought about it.

(God, I’m glad my middle schoolers never had that bug hit.  I can’t imagine what the teachers were thinking.)

I don’t know that I have a single, overarching point to all this.  Okay, yeah, there’s obviously an element of the confessional here but that’s not the entire point.  I have contributed to this culture of rape and harassment, or at least participated in it, and the fact that I’ve learned (tried to learn) to be better in recent years doesn’t affect the facts of who I was and what I did, even if I can point to any number of men who were maybe worse.

You don’t stop rape, or sexual harassment, by controlling women.  You stop rape and sexual harassment by insisting that men learn to be better.  One of my most important jobs right now is to raise my son to be better than me.

Maybe men need a #metoo hashtag.  Or an #allofus hashtag, because right now, it is all of us.  We’ve all contributed to this.

Or maybe we could just stop, and fucking listen, which was what the point of the hashtag was in the first place, and try to learn to get better.

Maybe.

#Review: DREADNOUGHT, by April Daniels

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

51CxH4-aSoL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgI don’t remember buying this book.  I don’t remember where I first encountered it, either, but it must have impressed me, as I must have pre-ordered it immediately.  I got a notification from Amazon that it had been shipped and actually had to look it up to figure out what it was.  And then I read the blurb and I was like, oh, right, this is definitely something I want to read.

I can’t call this the first great book I’ve read in 2017– it’s the third, actually– but one of those three was a kids’ book and the other was the third book in a trilogy.  So is it okay if I call this the first new hotness of the year?  It’s my blog, so yeah, it is.

This is one of those books where the premise will let you know right away whether you should buy the book or not: Daniel Tozer is a fifteen-year-old boy who happens to be the closest person when the world’s greatest superhero is killed, and he inherits the powers of that superhero, Dreadnought, when he dies.

And the first thing Dreadnought’s new powers do is remake Daniel’s body into the perfect body Daniel has always wanted.  Which means that Daniel becomes Danielle, and wakes up with unimaginable power and a woman’s body.

So that’s the first three pages, and there we go from there.  The broader beats of the story are sorta predictable, and you can probably imagine several of the complications that work their way into the story– friends, parents, a superteam that may not be what Danny thinks they are, and another high school friend who turns out to be a hero too.  The worldbuilding is solid (this is the first book of a series, so there’s room for not everything to be explained) and the action is solidly written– as fascinating as the premise is, you absolutely have to be able to nail action sequences to properly write a superhero novel, and Daniels excels at it.

So, whoever it was that turned me on to this book (Charlie Jane Anders blurbs it, so maybe it was her?), thank you.  I can’t wait for the next book in the series, and you should go read Dreadnought right the hell now.

In which I settle on a topic eventually

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

rmzyzrgeominqun2qwga(I’ve used this image before, but I feel like it’s appropriate given yesterday’s events.)

I haven’t written an actual post in a couple of days; everything’s been pictures and links since Tuesday evening.  This isn’t from a lack of stuff to talk about or anything; I have a lot of posts on the back burner but I don’t particularly want to write any of them specifically right now.  I haven’t heard anything, positive or negative, about any of the interviews I’ve had; if I haven’t heard back from District Four by Tuesday of next week I’ll assume they don’t want me.  I’ve been getting a fair amount of fiction done although the deadline for the Baen contest is seriously breathing down my damn neck and I don’t have anything I like for it yet.  Again, I have like four different working ideas for it, but none of them have forced their way out onto a screen yet, especially with BA 8 eating up so much of my time.  Hell, one of them is even a BA story.

Actually, hell, I’ve already got the glitter image up; I may as well talk about the gay marriage ruling yesterday.  I had a hazy idea that there was a case pending in federal court somewhere but didn’t know that we were close to getting a decision, so abruptly seeing a Tweet just as I was about to shut down my computer and meet my mother for lunch was an immensely pleasant surprise. (I texted her immediately and told her I needed a few minutes for celebration and to do the Facebook equivalent of yelling “First!” as I posted the information everywhere I knew how to.)

I don’t know that I’ve changed much as a person since getting married; I suspect you’d have to ask my wife about that.  One way that I know I’m different, though, is that I’ve really lost all patience with dudebro humor about what a horrible trap marriage is or comedy that is mostly centered on complaining about wives and significant others.  Lemme make this clear, in small words: Marrying my wife was hands-down, no-doubt the best thing that has ever happened to me in my life.  There is literally nothing more important to me than keeping my marriage strong and my family together.  Nothing.

This means a couple of things to me:

  1. I have no patience whatsoever with people who whine about their spouses/being married.  Let me make sure I’m clear: the word I chose was “whine.”  Plenty of people are trying to save a struggling relationship; that’s not “whining.”  You want to hear whining?  Pull up any comedy station on Pandora and wait a few minutes.  Divorce is legal.  Nobody made you get married.  Fix your relationship, quit your whining, or get the fuck out.  Oh, you have kids?  I don’t care; you’re fucking them up whining about their mother all the time and probably raising your sons to be assholes.  Stop it.
  2. I have less patience with the idea that someone shouldn’t be able to marry someone else because some third party, unconnected to the two getting married, thinks it’s gross if they rub their bits together.  I’ve dropped friendships with people over this.  It’s horrible evil fucking bullshit and I will not put up with it in my life.  Note that if you attempt to argue with me about this in comments my response will be to ban you and delete your comments on the spot, no discussion.  Whine about tolerance for your evil all you want; you’ll be whining into the void and I won’t hear you.  Enjoy your inevitable historical irrelevance; your heartache amuses me.

So glad my state isn’t part of this anymore.

I… wait, what?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics13 Comments

I’m not good on gender/sexuality issues, okay?  I admit it.  I’m trying to get better about this stuff but half the time just keeping track of the pronouns and the prefixes and the abbreviations is so fucking exhausting that I just try and default to “leave everyone the hell alone” and try not to worry about it beyond that.

But… okay, the author of this article is being a prat, right?  A word that I very carefully chose because as far as I can tell it’s gender-neutral while still being insulting?  I want to take real problems seriously but I don’t think you get to simultaneously complain that 1) you use the ladies’ room because you feel safe in there and 2) you are constantly assaulted in the ladies’ room because you don’t look like a lady.  Those shouldn’t both be true.  And apparently this person identifies as trans, but is biologically female and not looking to transition, which is the part where my lack of knowledge screws me up because I thought “trans” meant you were biologically female but wanted to present as male (or vice versa) which… once you’ve made the decision to go out of your house looking like a man, should mean “just use the damn men’s room, nobody makes fucking eye contact in there anyway?”  Right?  I think?

(Men do not talk to each other in the men’s room.  You could be a goddamned three-legged blue-skinned space alien with an echidna dick and so long as you didn’t try and peer over the damn stall dividers ain’t nobody gonna look at you.  This is known!)

Somebody help me out here and let me know what I’m missing.

(EDIT: relevant detail:  I have been a man with long hair, long enough and curly enough that I’ve been addressed as “ma’am” by people who weren’t approaching me from the right angle to see my beard.  Never had a single second of trouble with anyone in a men’s room.  I call bullshit on the “every long-haired male” line.)

On teaching and money (and Miley and Sinead)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Politics, Teaching1 Comment

ku-bigpic

I am– forgive me for knowing about this, much less bringing it up– kind of really enjoying the Sinead O’Connor/Miley Cyrus thing going on right now.  The first one was just interesting in an intellectual sort of “hey, this happened” kind of way; the second one interests me as a writer.  I knew Sinead O’Connor was kinda fucked up but I wasn’t aware she had a bitchy side and I certainly wasn’t aware that her bitchy side was awesome.  The second letter has this wonderful sort of “Ok, look, we can end this now, but here are my knives if you are foolish” sort of feel to it, as if O’Connor has absorbed Cyrus’ semiliterate trailer trash Twitter response to her initial letter, shrugged, and moved Miley to her mental “destroy” file.  The phrase “you have one last chance” doesn’t appear anywhere in the letter, but it should.  I really hope there’s a third.

I mean, Christ, the line “You could really do with educating yourself, that is if you’re not too busy getting your tits out to read” is art.

I voted to approve the contract, but I’m not terribly happy about it.  Oh, it’s not bad, as they go– we’re getting a small stipend this year basically just for the hell of it and we actually get our first real raise in seven years (two whole percent!) next year, that is assuming we don’t get placed in one of the two lowest evaluation categories.  More money is good.  I like money, even if 2% after having frozen salaries since 2007 is kind of bullshit.  It’s still better than the no-money we’ve been getting on the last several contracts.

The problem is that this round of negotiation really has driven home one important fact for me:  That two percent hike got eaten by inflation years ago.  We are never really getting a raise again, and by “we” in this case I basically mean all of Indiana’s teachers.  I get a yearly pay raise at my fucking minigolf job, people.  The way things used to work, we got yearly step increases until you hit sixteen years of experience and after that you’re depending on actual increases to the pay scale (ie, “raises”) for any further increase in salary.  What this meant is that if you stuck it out long enough eventually everybody made the same amount– sixteen years is a long time, granted, but it leveled you out sooner or later.

Now?  Anyone in my district who makes more money than me right now is going to make more than me forever, and anyone under me– particularly anyone unfortunate enough to have started in the last few years since even step increases became impossible– is going to make less than me forever.  There’s no merit pay of any kind that can increase salary– not that I even think that’s a good idea, mind you– and no bonuses for good performance.  There’s only the stick; you don’t get any raise of any kind if you end up in the lowest two evaluation categories, but it’s not like you get more money if you get a superior ranking.

It’s unfair in a way that I really, really don’t like.  Teaching is already a career with effectively no mobility– a teacher is a teacher is a teacher and while most districts do name team leaders and things like that (a job I’ve held myself on a few occasions) there is no actual salary increase attached to that.  As a teacher, I’ll never be anyone’s boss unless I move to administration– which isn’t teaching.  There’s literally no way to be promoted.  Which means that the fact that there are teachers in my district who not only make ten grand more than me but will make ten grand more than me forever really stick in my craw.  Similarly, I’m mentoring a first-year teacher this year; I make fifteen thousand dollars a year or so more than she does and I will make fifteen thousand dollars a year or so more than her forever, until she wises up and realizes that spending her entire life making $32,000 a year is untenable.  (She gets a raise to $34,000 in 2014-15; the poor schmucks stuck in the bottom two pay steps get a little bump.  But she’ll be stuck there forever.)  Once she realizes that she can make better money and have much less stress in her life doing something else, she’ll be gone, and she’ll be replaced by another 22-year-old making the same $34K that she did until she quit.

Note, also, that while teachers making more than base pay will be quitting a lot, or retiring, they will only be being replaced by teachers making base pay.  Which means that you travel far enough down the road– and I bet it won’t be more than seven or ten years– and something perilously close to all of us will be stuck at that base pay level.  Which people will put up with until they have kids, then they’ll move on to jobs where they’re actually treated like educated professionals, and kiss teaching in a public school district goodbye.

Which is a feature, and not a bug.  This is what they want, and this is what state law is written to do.

I fucking hate Indiana.

Two deeply depressing anecdotes

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting, Teaching1 Comment

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Mostly depressing, at least; one of them is sorta funny because I’m an idiot and one of them has a tiiiiiny ray of humor that will force you to cackle and then feel bad about it if you have a really twisted sense of humor and are a bad person.  Which: you’re reading this, so… yeah.

My lovely wife has not been feeling well these last couple of days, so I was asked to pick the boy up from day care on my way home from work.  Normally this is her job; she drives past day care on the way to and from work so it makes a lot more sense for her to do it than me.  She also physically pays the bills for day care so the office staff knows her from that.

Me, I’m around there much less often.  I generally only pick him up or drop him off if she can’t do it, which works out to about once a month.  Lately they’ve had some turnover in their staff and apparently a couple of people who worked elsewhere at the day care have moved into his room, so my face is even less familiar to everyone than usual.  Also: I’m a big fat bearded bald guy, and I tend to scan white supremacist until my not-quite-as-obvious nerd nature takes over.

Included in the text from my wife to pick him up was the important detail that he had a box of snacks in the refrigerator and a jacket that I needed to remember to bring home.  Okay, no problem.  The jacket will be underneath his cubby.  Cool; I can handle that.  What’s the door code again?  New text with that; I’m on my way.

I let myself in, nod at the front desk people (who don’t stop me) and walk into my son’s room.  At first it’s obvious that no one in the room recognizes me and the boy is facing the other way; for some reason, rather than call out to him, I wait for him to turn around and notice me, at which point he comes running over with his arms up and the adults in the room appear to breathe somewhat of a sigh of relief.  There are hand-painted leaves hanging on strings all over the ceiling; he points these out to me and I happen to notice his.  These weren’t hanging up the last time I was in there and he seems really happy to be showing them to me.

This is the part where I’m an idiot, but keep in mind what I do for a living.  The leaf has his name and 8-23 on it.  In my line of business, when you put a date on something, that’s the date you did it.  I remark, mostly talking to him, but loudly enough that the adults in the room hear me, that that’s been hanging there for a while and I didn’t remember seeing them the last time I was there.  I then make eye contact with one of the minders and ask about the jacket.  She points out his cubby.

There are two jackets on the peg underneath his cubby.  I don’t know which one is his.  This one gets me some serious side-eye and she grabs his jacket.  Understand that I have a good reason for this:  the jacket was unearthed from the basement like two days ago and I’ve never seen him in it– because I don’t take him to day care and the way weather in Indiana works this time of year is that you have the heat on in the morning on your way to work and then have the air conditioning on on your way home.  The damn thing is effectively brand new, and since we pulled it out of a box of hand-me-downs as opposed to going out and buying it I have a perfectly good reason to be unfamiliar with it.  Hell, it’s not like he could have picked it out.

I sign him out and turn to leave and my eyes happen to fall on another leaf.  This one has a date in July on it.  And it hits me:  that’s not a turn-in date, it’s his goddamn birthday.  I know my son’s birthday, goddammit.  Even if I can’t remember exactly what time he was born anymore.  Middle of the damn night, I can tell you that.

Point is, as far as these folks are concerned, I’m the shittiest parent ever, and as far as I’m concerned I’m not a shitty parent– at least not for this– but I may not be too quick on the uptake, so it’s not like I’m coming off well to myself.

(Sidenote:  My wife and I do not have the same last name; she kept hers when we married.  The only time I ever regret this decision at all is when we’re dealing with the boy.  I don’t care if she has my last name, but I would like it if the three of us had the same last name, if that makes any sense.  Him having a different last name from her makes me look like an absentee father and I don’t like that at all.)

Anecdote the Second, the more depressing one:  I’m in the gym this morning when a couple of sixth graders, both girls, run up to me.  I know one of them fairly well, at least for a kid who’s never been in my room, and know the other one not at all.  They hand me a note that the one I don’t know found in her locker at the end of the day yesterday.

“I didn’t write it,” the one I know says, which is kinda weird because I’ve not accused her of writing it yet.

I read the note.  It may be the most obscene, sexually explicit thing I’ve ever seen in a school before.  It’s from another student– presumably, another sixth grader, who bills himself as this other girl’s secret admirer.  It begins by talking about how much he’d love to put his fat dick right into her mouth and have her suck on it for a while, and by the end of the note he’s fucking her in the ass so hard the tip of his dick is coming out of her mouth.  At the end it asks her to write back and put her response to this well-considered proposal into a nearby locker– which, as it turns out, is the locker of the second girl– thus the panic about me accusing her of having written it.  She offers to show me a sample of her handwriting; I decline the offer.

Perhaps the worst thing about this is that I genuinely can’t tell whether this note is meant to be sincere or whether the writer is trying to make fun of the girl or hurt her feelings.  It’s obviously horrifyingly inappropriate, and God how big of a fuckup as a parent do you have to be that your kid thinks it’s okay to write notes like this to someone– but what makes it worse is that I think he thinks it’s going to work.  The kid’s not trying to scare her or harass her– he may actually think this is a love note.  Which may be the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever encountered as a teacher.  Honestly, I think if it hadn’t referenced the other girl’s locker I might never have seen it.  The girl who brought it to me seemed a little grossed out but otherwise wasn’t as bothered by the note as I was.

Sixth graders.  And sixth graders in September, which is important– this is a year with a lot of development happening.  This would still be surprising in May but not nearly as much.  And, again– this note is beyond the pale even compared to the other shit I’ve confiscated over the years.

I bring the assistant principal over and hand the note over to her.  We both suspect that we can catch the culprit with the cameras; I haven’t followed up yet to find out if they caught anything.

I promised a funny part.

The last line of the note– before the “Please reply in locker blah blah” part, and right after the bit about the trans-abdominal reverse blowjob– is “If it’s okay with you.”  One sentence.  All by itself.

I’m going to fuck you in the ass, eleven-year-old, until my dick comes out of your mouth… but only if you think that’s okay.

Yeah.