Badness

http://oitnb.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/111.jpg Finished watching Season 2 of Orange is the New Black. Every now and then what is in the zeitgeist filters into their dialogue. One example that struck me was a woman talking about her marriage being too tame or nice guys negating the “fear” of romantic or sexual engagement. She says that fear is an essential ingredient in her passion, whether it is fear of discovery or danger projected onto the male or partner. This is an idea that has been pushed aside by the blogger culture and those who might compulsively post links on Facebook. One recent post I’ve read asked men to ensure that they project a non-threatening presence when approaching or sharing an elevator with a woman, to engage her to diffuse tension, all of which sounded contradictory to me and overly self-conscious. Much is being said about something called “rape-culture.” This appears to be in bizarre tandem with compulsive use of the term “slut-shaming.” Shame in general is considered uncool, just as perhaps shyness may be considered repression. One – perhaps unrelated – line I appreciated on Orange was, “That stuff about don’t snitch was probably made up by someone who needed to be snitched on.” The concepts of loyalty are especially transparent for their contrivance in a prison setting, where loyalty to a psycho or a criminal is especially absurd and most likely one-sided at best. There are conceits in life that are exposed as false when placed into a dramatic structure. If we talk about cracking down on bullying, are we pouncing on the kid who throws a punch or the person who badgers him/her verbally leading up to that? And are social dynamics in school part of a set of trials we have to go through, or should schools micro-manage kids to make sure they have to make a show of including each other? Is it naive? Is it necessary for a child to identify his or her sexual identity as soon as possible and then be loud-and-proud of this through High School to test the system, or is it okay for kids to feel the slings and arrows of adolescence and rejection that everyone pretty much has to go through? Later in life, the reality is that many people put on whatever mask is necessary to get a job or to rent an apartment or make their way and package or market whatever goals they have. The same with marketing – instinctively – whether a girl is in control of her image or a boy is in control of his. One axiom going around is, “It’s none of your business what people think of you.” That seems like a head-in-the-sand mentality. Of course it matters. A girl might want to project a conservative image and if asked how many guys she has been with she may say skew her number lower than reality, while a guy being asked how many girls he has been with might skew his number higher than reality. This has been true for a long time, and might be the product of generations of frontier societies where a woman’s future was presumed to be either wife or prostitute. But regardless of its origin and its compatibility with modern society, people are still working the numbers that way. Thoughtful men don’t want to be jerks on-line and to be the target of lectures, so they will likely avoid playing devils advocate or offering the dissenting opinion when it comes to the assertion that equality means embracing all and pretending that we have no preference between a completely independent woman with hundreds of lovers or someone focused more on one person who may be content and less restless in a relationship. I mean if you throw out the idea of marriage or monogamy, then it is easier to be accepting of this trend. But if you don’t want a relationship based on a lie, eagerness and enjoyment of sex may not increase in a woman with the number of lovers she has nor necessarily will her confidence; a boy or man’s confidence will increase with the number of women he has had sex with, however, and this confidence does have more value to a woman than a man’s genteel or shy or repressed virginal image. Even his full dedication and devotion to her will not be ultimately what keeps the fire burning. This brings us back to the line in Orange about fear and now the nice guy or the tame husband routine is not going to hold her interest. There is an axiom that goes or may as well go, “Talking about sex is like dancing about architecture.” I’m seeing links to a lot of talk about what must be done to regulate “rape culture” and to get rid of the word “slut” while still making use of the neo-feminist-blog term “slut-shaming.” This all ends up in a context where every guy from Marc Lepine in 1989 to Elliot Rodgers who have done something horrible gets knighted as the poster boy for the ostensibly heterosexual male population. While I acknowledge that everyone has an opinion, I don’t respect every damn one in the sense of admiration. So I won’t throw around the word respect. There may be well-meaning bloggers and fans of these but most of what I see is just self-serving propaganda, and not even ideas to be contemplated and weighted but matter-of-fact-sounding babble that makes me nostalgic for Andrew Dice Clay being accused of isms and phobias. The culture is so used to being placated, for marketing or seduction purposes, that a person looks ten times colder and meaner by offering a dissenting opinion. Speech or conversation is inherently political. We make choices, either off the cuff or carefully considered. Therefore, what we say can be judged. What people feel, as instinctive reaction or attraction or repulsion, is not a choice and can’t reasonably be judged. But here’s where it gets mechanical and our flesh and blood humanity is turned into data and digitized and categorized until mere admission of taste calls for punishment or shunning. I’ve seen it too often, the artificial camps that pop up. Someone jabs two fingers at your eyes and if your reflexes are healthy you evade impact, and then your tormentor punches you twice in the shoulder, “Two for flinching.” There are many forced-answer questions out there, opinions or platforms we are supposed to pay lip service to, many of which are nicey-nice lies. In one’s forties, a conversation about whether high school girls call each other slut is exasperating. In my old Catholic high school, the girls pretty much did what they did. People are going to want to prop up their own stock market value. Whatever they have, that’s what you need in order to be cool. Pretty basic. But that is at the heart of bullying – status. If someone asks a guy at any age whether he finds a set of attributes or characteristics attractive, it is academic what the truth is. A woman might prefer a man with confidence, and might not care that some of it comes from his “score” with women; after all, it is part in parcel. She might find power attractive or his status, so if she ends up dating her boss maybe it’s not coercion or harassment but just mutual attraction. I’ve seen some exciting women with much older guys and appearing to be happy. Men are not especially attracted to the power or status of a woman. Those things are incidental and may even pose a challenge to his own ego and how he is perceived with her. As for external beauty, there is an expectation that a woman will lose appeal to a younger lover when she ages. If a man finds success later in life, in his forties or beyond, he might not be seeking out someone who merely remembers the same era of music videos but someone who has a physical draw and someone he expects to maintain interest in as a monogamous mate for decades ahead. He could compromise and lie to himself and to whoever he is with, because that is the politically correct thing to do. Imagine living to satisfy TMZ or the local gossip with who you are marrying, since they are not the people who have to sleep with her and wake with her. The opinion of the community therefore is useless. It may read as cruel to point out what should be obvious. What we know is there under the surface. I struggle with weight, so I don’t expect petite angels to fall at my feet. But I don’t want to register for any kind of dating service either and write in my weight when I know how it reads to me and when I historically feel no obligation to play couple with someone merely because we have the same size waistline. When that bubble bursts it will be a mess. I don’t feel the driving need enough to have someone fill the position of girlfriend for me to “learn to love” someone I might only have empathy for. But again all of that is noise, brain chatter that is like the pentagon shape of thought coming to terms with unpleasant reality – the finger turning in a circular motion beside your head indicating crazy. There is the effort to make the world better, even the will to do your part, and openness to ideas, but also against the tide of your own identity. We observe our own personal reactions and this can be much like observing characteristics of others and yet it will be judged if only because it has been perverted into language because words are often choices – truth can be rude or unkind. Maybe those of us who would rather talk about movies or sport statistics know more than they are being credited. Sometimes there is no point in openly pulling something apart until it shapes into the right comforting lie or over-simplification.