25 March 2008

drive thru husband order...the new way to pick a mate

"Hi, I'd like to order one husband please."

"Sure what husband package would you like"

"Um… how about package 3 but can we add a side of extra income, please?"

"Of course. Please pull through and we'll have your husband waiting."

http://images.salon.com/ent/movies/review/1999/06/25/ideal/ideal.jpg

Is this what it is going to come to for choosing a mate? Simply ordering the one who fits you best on paper. Taking notes and writing off those who simply don't fit your ideal standard of a life partner? How do you write someone off before you really get to know them? What if the perfect person for you is right in front of your face and you knowingly pass them by?

Should we forfeit passion, romance and love for someone who fits with us perfectly on paper? If I wrote down all the ideal characteristics I wanted in a man, or more so, ones I thought I could not live without does that mean simply because a man met those criteria that he would be the one for me? That he would offer me everything I ever dreamed of? Of course we all have wants and desires, but how soon should you write someone off because we fear they may not stack up to our paper criteria?

At this rate, we might as well just forgo dating completely and have everyone fill out a questionnaire of himself/herself and then match people according to their answers. Would it be a better alternative? Hell, why not we already have tons of websites out there that almost fit this to a tee. Foreign women seeking husbands. Beautiful women seeking wealthy husbands. Forget finding love on your own. Visit a website, create a profile, and the virtual partner of your dreams will materialize before your eyes.

If you are looking for these ideal characteristics in order to maintain the sanity of your mind and spare your heart any pain, you are a fool. Just because someone matches up with what you think you desire doesn't mean that they don't have the capability to shred your heart to tiny pieces. Don't believe me, look around at the divorce rate. Surely these people thought they had found their ideal match when they got married, and now?

When do you say when to someone?

Since when did love become this logical and rational way of picking people? Last time I checked it was about passion, romance and the feeling that this is a person you don't want to live without. Not logically approaching love by basically having them fulfill a questionnaire on who they are at the moment. People change so what is to say that someone that matches your criteria now will still match it in five years. What about someone you wrote off because at this moment they didn't fit one thing you were looking for but in a few years they are your ideal and you have lost out because you wouldn't take that risk. You wouldn't take a leap of faith. There are no guarantees in life, especially not when it comes to relationships.

Twice this year I have been written off in a very short time span. Not because there was a lack of interest but for what I consider to be petty reasons, these guys could not vision a life with me 10 years down the road due to current circumstances. Not definites. Not hardened facts about me that would never change. Not on aspects that had a direct impact on life during these 5 minutes but on items that would come later, down the road. These were not on areas that would never change but on something that was believed to be at this moment, during this five seconds of my life. Should we fail to take a risk on someone simply because they may not want something at this very moment, something that isn't a factor at this moment but may be years down the road? Should we possibly forgo years of happiness with someone on an off-chance?

What if you pass up the perfect person because all you cared about was having the perfect person on paper and thereby hoping to save your heart from inevitable pain? A pain that you can't guarantee won't happen because as great as perfection on paper is, you are forgetting about the inevitable human flaws that make us unique and unfortunately cause us to constantly re-evaluate what we seek in life.

How do you know that what you want this moment in life will be the same desire that you have five years from now? Can you guarantee it?

Should we write off actually getting to know people and instead just have them fill out a questionnaire to find out if they are compatible? Forget about if they can make us laugh, provoke us to look at the world in a different light, enlighten us to things we never knew existed, give us butterflies every time they look at us and make us a better person overall. No, let's forgo all that. Do they make enough money, are they tall enough, fit enough, know for a hardened fact if they want kids, do they live close enough, come from a respectable family background, smoke or do drugs, or will provide sex on a regular basis. Of course these are the more important matters in life. These of course are the things that make us happy. Not a person but facts and trivialities.

Forget taking risks and flowing your heart, let's just do what the paper says. Then we'll know they are perfect and therefore incapable of hurting us.

At what point do you write someone off as not worthy of risking your emotions on?

Broken-Heart.jpg Broken Heart image by shatteredstar8885

07 March 2008

Learning to Bleed Love Again

The image

In 2003, my mother questioned me, at the ripe age of 23, how I turned out to be so jaded when it comes to relationships and love in general. I wrote that at 23, when most people are still hopeful or still hopeless romantics, I am neither. That I had given up on both for what should I be hopeful for. Hopeful for someone to show up and break my heart? That I would love to believe I will get one of those fairytale romances that you see in the movies but I'm realistic. Those things simply don't happen in reality. Being jaded keeps you from suffering the pitfalls of love. Keeps you from believing in false realities.

But what if all it really does is keep you from living?

What if pretending to be a badass independent heart breaker does nothing more than keep you locked away behind a wall, a wall where you have no heart and soul and where you are only seen as some elusive figment of a fantasy?

It's been over three years since I've had any inkling of a relationship and sometimes, over time, we forget what it is really all about. Over the years we become bitter and disillusioned, wondering 'does love really exist?' As a teenager, we are free with our heart, we may wear it on our sleeve, but we also know the meaning of loving unconditionally. We have lofty ideals of love and romanticism, how could we not given the way it is portrayed in the media that we lap up like eager kittens. Through romantic-comedies, Disney fairytales, love songs, classical portrayals such as 'Romeo + Juliet' and 'The Phantom of the Opera,' as well as romance novels, we embrace the notion of true love.

The image

When I was younger I wholeheartedly embraced the motto of 'the greatest thing you will ever learn is just to love and be loved in return' (Moulin Rouge). But after your heart has been shattered and you watch relationship after relationship crumble around you, you begin to wonder if wholeheartedly giving yourself to someone is a wise move. Then, you freeze, you hide, and you barricade yourself behind invincible walls so you don't feel any pain. You begin to cherish your emotional barriers for they are your painkiller. You learn to strategically play the game, keeping your vulnerability at bay. Only unleashing the parts of you that open yourself up as a human without really ever individualizing you.

And for what – to keep your heart from taking a beating? A loss not compared to sacrificing all the great moments because you are simply afraid to leap. Are we unable to go the distance for love on the off-chance that we may get stung?

But what if all these barriers came down? What if you let yourself go live, actually live. Live in a world where you can actually wholeheartedly give yourself to someone. Where you are free from the fear of pain? Is love supposed to be logical, reasonable, and law abiding? Or are you supposed to see where the wind takes you?

What if you actually realized that 'once in awhile, right in the middle of an ordinary life, love gives us a fairytale.' Does it matter if it is eternal?

Deep down inside I keep the young idealistic and romantic version of me locked away. The one who's favorite movies are still and will forever be 'Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,' 'Romeo + Juliet,' and 'Moulin Rouge.' And who hopes that if she ever gets married that her husband will have the talent to sing her favorite song to her and mean it. Even though I have had my heart shattered, I would never sacrifice all the happy memories I had with him just to save me a bit of heartache. Yes, deep down, my teenage self still dreams of my knight in shining armor. I just want to bleed love again for someone.

I was reminded today of the little joys that come about from love and so I decided to flip back upon the pages of my journal to a time when I was amidst love and this is what I discovered. A tribute to all that I loved and it made me remember that there is so much more than just perhaps a bitter outcome with kinky sex in the middle.

love.jpg love image by HEYbby_x

is…

The way I feel when I am in his arms. His stubborn streak that rivals my own. The way he shakes his butt. The way he thinks he can swirl ice cream in a cone better than anyone else and yet he only gets the ice cream for the sprinkles in the bottom of the cone. The way he sings to me, not only real songs but also ones he makes up just for me. How he tries to make up his own words like raxxle, paxxle and schnaxxle. How he hates to have his photo taken and still lets me use him in my black and white photos. How he noticed how much I used the OED online and bought me one of my own. How he knows when I get into bed and he rolls over and surrounds me in his arms. How paranoid he gets about his hair. The way he makes me still want to be in his arms even when we are fighting. The way I feel when I am in his arms.

What is love to you?

Have you protected yourself inside an invincible fortress simply because you are afraid of being hurt?

Would you sacrifice all of your happy moments in a relationship to offset a heart-break?

secretly, we are all sexual deviants


"Rabat, Morocco. Every evening Amal the octopus vendor looks on as sin returns to his beach. It arrives in the form of handholding couples who hide behind the tall, castle-like quay walls in the city's harbor district to steal a few clandestine kisses. Some perform balancing acts on slippery rocks and seaweed to secure a spot close to the Atlantic Ocean and cuddle in the dim evening light. The air tastes of salt and hashish. On some mornings, when Amal finds used condoms on the beach, he wishes that these depraved, shameless sinners -- who aren't even married, he says -- would roast in hell." (Sex and Taboos in the Islamic World)

In a time where sexual liberation confronts centuries of prudish conservatism in a death match fit for the ages, how do the sexually liberated, sexually free, sexually taboo present themselves in a society that clearly condemns their behavior as freakish, unpleasant, unnatural, sinful, violent, problematic, and sexually abnormal. And when even they, the believers and desirers of these sexually taboo fantasies, are so reluctant to admit, even to one another, for fear of being seen as odd, strange, perverted, abnormal, or a sexual deviant, their own sexual fantasies. How do you embrace that which you sexually desire in a society that anything straying too far from missionary in a marriage?

Are our Puritan roots still strongly at play?

In the 1600s when Puritans ruled England death was decreed for adultery. Until recently, as a result of tremendous church pressure, nearly every state in the US had Old Testament-style laws against 'fornication' and 'sodomy.' And it wasn't until 1972 that the US finally allowed married couples to purchase birth control. Scholar Ray Tannahill claims that early Christian leaders made sex and sin synonymous. Surely that is no shock as Western religions have spent millennia inflicting shame, guilt, repression and punishment upon human sexuality. And yet, in 1996, according to the US News & World Report, Americans spent $8 billion on hard-core videos, live sex acts, adult cable programming, sexual devices, computer porn and sex magazines. Clearly we are all sexually starved but the American clergy strive to censor sex from public media yet little objection is made to a movie with violent gore and excessive murders but a mere glimpse of a woman's nipple and all hell breaks loose.

Given all the hullabaloo about Janet's nipple sneaking a peek at the Super Bowl a few years ago, is it any wonder why the world of fetish and S&M is still so misunderstood and feared?

Tell a vanilla about your love of spankings, of latex, of the thrill and arousal from being choked, of taking control over another, of the desire to be humilitated and watch the sheer atrocity of it all slowly spread across their face like a wild fire. We live in a society that believes it is sexually liberated, and yes, compared to some cultures, like Islamic cultures, we are far more sexually liberated but it only is as long as you consider missionary sex with less than ten partners in your lifetime liberating. Yes, we have come to generally accept sex outside of marriage. Yes, we have started to accept interracial couples and slight fetishes. No, we are not mutilating women to keep them from being sexually active or forcing women to cover their body for fear of the effect they will have on men like some cultures. But as The Ethical Slut states, "so much of our culture is based on shame about sex. The oppression of women, of cultural minorities, oppression in the name of the (presumably asexual) family, and oppression of sexual minorities. We are all oppressed. We have all been taught, one way or another, that our desires, our sexualities, are shameful."

Why is it that we must continue to live in sexual secrecy? We either must pretend to be someone we are not, maintain secrecy about our sexual desires, never have the courage to bear our sexual fantasies, or be shunned and condemned for our true sexual liberation. Our ability to openly embrace our sexuality. Our ideals of freedom come with limitations when it comes to sex. While we generally are a tolerant country, our tolerance does not spread equally among all variants of the human sphere. Sex maintains to be one of the greatest taboos of our civilization, that is unless perhaps you are married and practicing your missionary techniques.

In an article by Erwin J. Haeberle, he states "It is therefore hardly surprising to find that the celebrated "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" says nothing about people's right to control their own bodies. The document only cites the "right to marry and to found a family" and to choose one's marriage partner freely (Article 16). There is no mention of a right to sex education or sexual fulfillment, the right to free choice of a sexual partner or type of sexual activity, a right to contraception or abortion. Nor is this merely an oversight. Unfortunately, there is little doubt that even today the General Assembly of the United Nations would overwhelmingly reject any official declaration which dared to affirm these rights. Too many member states still consider sex legitimate only within marriage and for the purpose of procreation."

Is it truly any wonder that we are still so sexually restricted? In an age where everything in the media is perpetuated by sex, we still can not only embrace or indulge our own fantasies. We must seek them out secretly for fear of being labeled in a negative light.

As a sexual deviant, how do you cope with the pressures and limitations society puts upon you? If you prefer a more vanilla lifestyle, what is your stance on those who do enjoy a little pain or other sexual fetish? Who do you blame for societies limited perspective on sexual acceptance?

02 March 2008

I ain't saying she's a golddigger but....

In the 80s it was Madonna's 'Material Girl.' In the 00s it is Kanye West and Jamie Fox's 'Gold Digger.' It is the media perpetuation of the perception of women as nothing more than money and status hungry fiends. In Jane Austen's 'Pride & Prejudice,' one of Mrs. Bennett's opening remarks to her husband concerning Mr. Bingley's arrival in the neighborhood is, "A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!" only helped perpetuate this stance for almost two hundred years now. Women across the world want to marry up. Men are quite aware of this notion, although today's endearing term for these women is 'gold digger,' but have you ever stopped to reflect upon why so many women want a man with status, power and wealth?

Surely it has crossed your mind that a woman's desire to have status and money stems form an inherent mooching and chocolate gene whereby she can thus spend her days on the couch watching an endless stream of soap operas while devouring box upon box of bon-bons while on rare occasions providing her husband with some sort of sexual gratification to keep him complacent. Hopefully by now, you have discovered this notion to be completely rooted in myth. If not, try the following on for size.

Let's go back to the beginning. To the most basic fact of sex – reproduction. Men are quite efficient limitless sperm producing factories that roughly produce sperm at the rate of 12 million per hour. Women, on the other hand, always prone to quality, produce a limited number of approximately 400 ova in their lifetime. Before the rise of condoms and birth control, one act of sexual intercourse for a male required, and to this day requires, minimal investment but for a woman can result in an obligatory and energy consuming minimum investment of 9 months. It is this greater initial investment by a woman that makes her a valuable, but limited resource, and also a highly selective mate. Since women of the past risked enormous investment as a consequence of sexual intercourse, evolution favored women who were highly selective. So how did this risk of pregnancy impact our evolutionary desires?

Men differ in thousands of ways and yet only a handful of traits became necessary in a woman's selection criteria. Over hundreds of thousands of years, women's selections focused laser-like on the most adaptively valuable characteristics. Evolution favors men who possess attributes that confer benefits rather than those that impose costs. Why? For hundreds, if not thousands of years, a woman's sole financial resources and security was solely dependent upon a man. It is for this reason that preferences for outie belly buttons and blonde hair and blue eyes did not evolve as our selection criteria. Only traits that insured the survival of a woman and her children became our preferences. While each woman assesses needs individually based upon her unique circumstances, there are a few prevalent universal traits and there is always the assessment on a man's value by looking beyond his current position to his evaluated potential.

Go ahead, continue thinking all women are merely shallow gold diggers but also know that the most ancient and pervasive basis for female choice in the animal kingdom regarding mate selection is his economic capacity. Consider the female Grey Shine bird who chooses her mate based upon his cache. Each male builds a cache comprised of prey animals to use to attract female mates and the males with the largest cache win. Scientists proved this point by decreasing some of the males caches and then noting the lack of female response to those males; thereby clearly demonstrating the females desire to have a mate who can provide for her and her offspring. In humans, a man's power, status and wealth are equitable to the Grey Shine's cache of prey.

Why the need for commitment and monogamy? Throughout evolutionary history, women could garner more resources for children through a single spouse than through several temporary sex partners. In times when women were expected to run the household, care for the children and not enter the business world, how else were they expected to secure their and their children's survival if not through finding a mate who could adequately provide for them? In a world where men made all the rules and kept women behind closed doors, how else was our race to survive aside from women developing preferences for the men who could sufficiently provide food, shelter, defend their territory, protect the children, tutor kids in hunting and the art of war, in the strategy of forming alliances, and transfer status. Items certainly not securable through temporary sex partners.

In 1939 a study was conducted on 18 desirable mate characteristics. The study concluded that women rank financial prospects as two times as important as men. The same study was replicated in 1956 and 1967 and the results were the same. Unfortunately for power challenged men, the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s failed to change this. Thinking of venturing elsewhere in the world? Think again, the international studies produced very similar results. Women across all continents, all political systems, all racial groups, all religious groups, all systems of mating place more importance than men on good financial prospects.

Face it, women desire men who command a high position in society because social status is a universal cue to the control of resources. In the US, high social status positions are indications of good financial prospects as well as stable providers. In ancestral times, a man's social status was a clear indicator of resources and his ability to provide for a woman and her children as well. It is only natural that this desire has passed on through the ages. While women can earn as much income and achieve the same social status as men now, we can't expect thousands of years of evolutionary imprinting to transform overnight. Besides as Kissinger so eloquently stated, "power is the most potent aphrodisiac." Don't believe him? Look at Donald Trump's wife.

As hierarchies are universal features among human groups and resources tend to accumulate to those who rise in the hierarchy, women solved this adaptive problem by acquiring resources by preferring mates who are high in status. That's right boys, we all want to marry up, despite our own ability to achieve power and monetary success. While modern birth control has eliminated our need to be as selective in choosing sexual partners, our psychology and preferences have evolved over millions of years and will not be changing any time soon. So, how do modern men get women? Easily. Take lessons from Donald Trump.

Considering a woman's evolutionary preferences but her own ability to obtain that which used to be solely obtained through a man, do you think it will be problematic in the realm of dating and relationships?