Dating sites were still pretty taboo when I was 16, Of course, as a 16 year old, I had no business being on a dating site (according to the dating sites, anyway. Dating is for adults ONLY!). I didn't let that stop me, though. One of my best friends and I were very frequently trolling dating sites, responding to ridiculous requests from men with equally ridiculous requests of our own, consisting mostly of preying on men's fear of women putting anything in their assholes. While there really is no excuse for playing into homophobia (by the way, my guys, science is pretty insistent that you'd all LOVE butt stuff. It doesn't make you gay. Stop being so one sided...if you can put something in my asshole, I should be able to put something in yours. Don't knock it until you try it, weenies, let me milk your fucking prostate) (I am just kidding, I do not want to do that), at 16, my comedic balance was far less centered. While I'm no master of the formula of comedy=tragedy+timing almost 20 years later, I have a much better grasp on how to not stoke societal fears to amuse an audience of one.
That being said.
Steffie and I had a fuckton of fun with my ridiculous as fuck profiles. Steffie used her profile for real, meeting the occasional dude and eventually meeting her first long-term boyfriend since we had been friends (they were together for a LONG fucking time. Too long, if you ask me, Tristan was a walking, talking piece of fucking trash that even trash didn't want to claim as one of its own), but not me. I am not too proud to admit that I thought online dating was weird, and I wasn't about to play around in that madness, so I opted instead to trample on the dating hopes of real people, and to dish out weird shit to dudes who just wanted to jump onto the "let's fuck immediately, my cock is so big" message bandwagon right off the bat. In retrospect, I was really kind of asking for that, because I made my profiles as salacious as I could, doing my best to insinuate that I was an actual, literal streetwalking lady of the night. Though, ironically, I would fucking LOVE IT if prostitution were legalized, and women could profess honestly on dating profiles that they're prostitutes WITHOUT people haranguing them sexually because of their profession, because even having the headline "seedy whore seeks to hone head giving skills", which was the tagline I used on Match.com (which I eventually got kicked off of Match for using. Took them two months to catch on to my shenanigans back in the heady days of profiles not being screened before they went live), and even having a profile that speaks to sex with the real life liberalism that I myself take, nobody deserves to have their dignity and humanity ignored so people can talk to them like sex slaves. In retrospect, I wasn't ACTUALLY asking for men to message me about shoving their cocks down my throat because of my profile. No matter what I put on my tagline, I still deserved to be talked to like a person. Get to know me on a human level before you tackle me with requests for the bombest deep throat of your life, and you're pretty fucking sure to get it, if we connect.
While I regret using homophobic fears as a really shitty attempt to be subversive against a patriarchy that honestly doesn't give two shits about my response to dudes being gross, and it fought against nothing, I don't regret making men squirm enough to respond to me asking them if they liked getting fucked in the ass because it's something I was into doing by calling me an ugly cunt, or a sick bitch, or to fuck off because that shit is for fags (these are real life responses), or railing me for having the audacity to think they're into that sort of shit, who the fuck did I think I was for talking to them that way. Flipping the script on men who think it's acceptable to dehumanize women is still a fucking laugh riot to me, despite how gut-wrenching the reality of all of that is. I know I taught them nothing, and cognitive dissonance is an insanely powerful demon so pointing out the folly would have been as pointless as the entire outing, but something about it made me feel better about being a woman.
I stopped trolling around (on dating sites, anyway. I spent a good deal of time trolling pretentious as fuck webzine subscribers, because being condescending is THE in thing, obvi) and after my son's dad and I broke up, I changed my tune about the strangeness of dating sites, and I hit OKCupid HARD. I thought that their set up was fun and silly, and it seemed to cater to my age demographic, so I went for it. I went into it expecting a lot more vulgarity directly into my inbox, but I only got maybe three icky messages a week instead of several a day. I found a lazy, antisocial groove on OKCupid. I talked to lots of men, and of the men I gave my number to, only 40% of them got gross with the quickness. Mostly, dudes waited until they felt they had earned familiarity with me in enough bulk to send me unsolicited dick pics, or in one REALLY ballsy show of how fucking INSANELY confident men are, two videos in succession: one of the guy jerking off, and the second of him fucking another woman. Bravo, I guess? I had a lot of fun with my responses to things like that, too. I remember I got an unsolicited (they're ALWAYS unsolicited, let's be honest. Unless I am fucking you, I'm not asking for pictures of your dick, and even THEN, it's less because I want to look at it and more like an insurance policy against the safety of whatever pictures I'm sending you) masturbation video from some guy RIGHT AFTER I gave him my number, so I created a gif of a cartoon hand I drew and cut out and taped to a pen stroking a 2D dick I had drawn on another piece of paper. I really thought I had saved the video, because it was so god damn funny to me, but it doesn't look like I did. On second thought, I think it's on my previous phone. Which is somewhere in my house, because my husband is a fucking pack rat.
Anyway, this all has a point.
As I get older, the experience I have with men soliciting me on any platform (including real life) has flatlined, and I have mixed feelings about this. The vast majority of me is pleased to be so old and ugly that I'm invisible to men and they won't bother with me unless it's an apocalyptic scenario, and old snatch is better than no snatch, but the other part of me realizes I'm married to a 42 year old smokeshow that is seriously slumming it with me, and I panic at the idea that I am invisible to men because:
1. What if I need to initiate a preemptive affair strike??
2. My sexual value has decreased to the point where labeling myself as a seedy whore seeking to hone her head giving skills wouldn't be met with abhorrent levels of deviant enthusiasm from men, but instead skepticism that my ugly ass has had sufficient experience to make the slumming it for blowies route a viable option, so what happens if my marriage falls apart and I need to find penises to enjoy?
3. Nobody wants to believe they're as unattractive as their deepest nightmares tell them they are, and understanding how invisible to the gender you're interested in is the fastest way to realizing that you are, in fact, repugnant.
It's been a long time since I was hit on or paid attention to, or made to feel sexually wanted and viable (even by my husband, because I am pretty fucking positive that his "attraction" to me is just poorly disguised complacency). So imagine my surprise when some dude messaged me on instagram to wish me a happy new year at 1am on Tuesday, and when asked if we knew each other, answered by saying no, he just thought I was beautiful.
Now.
It is Wednesday, and he is still chatting with me, because I'm pretty well accustomed to not wanting to be rude to people who are trying to connect with me as a person, and I respond to the messages he sends me. He sent me a picture of himself, unsolicited (but at least it wasn't his dick, he has that going for him), so I responded by saying I'm married, but he has pretty eyes, and I'm a photographer, he should let me photograph him. I only partially meant it, I was more trying to be creepy and weird enough that he would leave it at "happy new year", and we could go our separate ways. Instead, he counters with being interested in having his photo taken, and he'd have a hard time not flirting with me. I cannot imagine how free and wonderful life feels as a man.
I'm not sure what this says about my self-esteem, or how fucking jaded my own history of internet use has made me, but I feel like this is the fucking STRANGEST catfish there ever was. I find it hard to believe that this is a legitimate person (and even if they are, that they have a legitimate attraction to me), though this is hardly my main point here.
My take away from this is how much I resent my husband for having the flirtations he's had with people while we've been married. He's going on a three month mission in two months, and I told him if he comes home with some kind of dick disease, it's divorce central. I definitely mean it, but it's really bullshit that he's gotten to have the freedom out of our marriage that he agreed he didn't want anymore when I broached monogamy (which we didn't always have). I've offered that freedom back to him, always with the warning that it's a two way street, and open doors for him mean open doors for me, and he always shoots it down as something he is wholeheartedly against, and when he'd continue flirting with women, and skate on the lines of inappropriate without any thought to how often the line was crossed, it was always my marriage that was crumbling, not his. He was having the relationship he wanted while I sat around like a fucking dumb, fat fuckwad. He may not have been fucking anybody...I'll never know if he was or not, he swears he wasn't...but he was way outside the bounds of acceptable behavior for a husband, and I HATED not being able to do the exact same thing.
When I was letting Dan trample all over my feelings like a drunk elephant with no depth perception, I exorcised my hurt by cheating. I suppose it wasn't ACTUALLY cheating, since he refused to call me his girlfriend, I never got to do things with him and his friends, and my existence wasn't validated as anything more than a talkative body pillow with a vagina, but the fact remains that I tossed my vagina all around town because I didn't know how else to make myself feel better. I've always had this problem where I want to hurt people as much as they hurt me, but I think I've only ever been successful at verbally insulting someone enough to match how wounded I was, and it was, admittedly, an insanely cheap shot. Effective, but cheap.
I've tossed around the idea of having an affair and telling Derek about it, for several reasons. One, cheating is a really effective way of hurting someone. It fucking digs at you forever. My daughter's dad cheated on me, and I'm still not over it 16 years later. I have never understood why I wasn't good enough to be faithful to, or why I wasn't deserving of the "I want to fuck someone else" conversation before the actual fucking happened. I remember Dan telling me that he had had a hard time being faithful to me while we were together, and I felt so smug because I hadn't had any trouble being faithful, but I also remember thinking that I had never WANTED to do what I did, I was just hurting. That isn't an excuse at all, but I hadn't been interested in those men, they were just a means to an end. It still hurts that there was a cognitive struggle on his end because I wasn't fulfilling enough, or worthy of having an honest conversation about how he was struggling with our relationship, whatever kind it was. In fairness, I didn't tell him he was hurting me and I slept with half of the fucking army and a quarter of the airforce instead, but listen, I am the victim here for sure. /s
Two, my primary argument when Derek makes me feel like an ugly piece of shit is asking him how often in our relationship I've made him feel that way. Like he couldn't trust me, or like I was interested in someone else, or like he wasn't enough for me. He always says never. And I think that kind of trust and understanding that your spouse loves you and wouldn't ever intentionally hurt you is too soft a place to be. Sometimes, the demon on my shoulder whispers to me that Derek needs a shake up so he doesn't forget that maybe other dicks might want in on this vaginal action, and he shouldn't get complacent or assume that this is effortless. What better way to teach someone that they have to work for your continued affections than to give them away freely to someone that isn't them? THERE ISN'T ONE.
What hurts the most is not the sex, or the interest of sex, with someone else. Sex is just sex. It's a totally natural and awesome thing. It's the one-sidedness, with one person getting all the fun and the other person sitting around thinking the world is problem-free, and the person they trust most in the world isn't out there betraying the fuck out of their trust. It's the feeling of stupidity and blindness that leaves me the most unsettled. If Derek told me he wanted an open relationship again, it would definitely hurt my pride. A lot. My ego is extremely inflated, but also so fucking delicate and fragile that hearing concretely that I wasn't satisfaction enough would crush me....but only for a couple of days. I truly would appreciate the honesty. I've been more honest with Derek than with any partner I've ever had my entire life. When we started dating, I told him I wasn't interested in a relationship, because I wasn't over my ex yet, and when he asked if we could be in a for serious relationship and tell people we were seeing each other, I told him he was moving too fucking fast for me, and he was free to keep himself drenched in strange until I was ready for a relationship. I told him Dan and I still talked, I read him all of our emails so I wasn't hiding anything from him. When my male friends have tried to get all salacious with me, I tell him straight away. Not just because I don't want to be accused of hiding that kind of thing, but because I've had enough people act a certain way behind my back, and I carry enough regret about my actions when I was with Dan, that I promised myself I would be an open book in my next relationship. That's the thing that hurts second most. When honesty isn't matched, that creates such a shitty fucking imbalance, and it doesn't matter how much Derek insists that he's not being a shady fucknugget anymore (and I haven't busted him doing anything that makes my vagina want to cry), I will never, ever trust him fully ever again. At best, he will earn 75% of my trust back.
And that's when the demon whispers at me again. "Maybe you'll trust him again if you fuck someone else." It's a fucking nefarious little shit, and the still angry part of me thinks that's insanely sound logic. The rest of me knows that's not the case, but I have such a hard time knowing that some stranger on instagram telling me I'm beautiful doesn't make him feel threatened at all. I mean, I'm glad he knows I wouldn't do anything shitty to him, but fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, it feels really shitty that there's no pulse quickening on his part. I get nervous about my staying power knowing other people are breathing in our neighborhood, but I'm sure I don't need therapy.
Sometimes, I really think relationships are one of the cruelest social inventions. Not to like, diminish slavery or anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment