A piece on NPR this morning about Squirrel Hill and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting mentioned that it was a "safe" neighborhood.
The devotees of armed force like to remind the rest of us that no place is safe. And they are right. Unless you are in some super-fortified safe room -- in which you are a prisoner of fear -- you may encounter an evil person any time, anywhere. But the odds are better in some places than in others.
I lived in a safe neighborhood in West Annapolis in the 1980s. Just a few doors up the street, someone was murdered in their home. As I recall, that was a spousal murder. It was still a murder. A couple of years later, on a slightly sketchier residential street in Edgewater, the guy next door wigged out on PCP and fired off a few rounds at something imaginary before sprinting up the street stripping his clothes off. Years before that, in Coral Gables, Florida, I found a .32 slug from our crazy neighbor flattened against the wall of our house. She was a drinker, who kept the pistol at the head of her bed. Good thing the houses in that neighborhood had thick masonry walls. We never heard a shot. She could have done it any time, even before we moved in. Just another day.
Mass shootings and ideologically motivated murder have increased in this country since the mid 20th Century, adding to the ongoing death toll that merely stems from the ugly side of human nature. Our own citizens subscribe to enough homicidal ideologies to supply us with atrocities that require no invaders or sneaky terrorists from abroad. We rate the safety of a neighborhood on its record of crime and violence. But ideological violence leaps over the local customs between neighbors, the consensual agreement to live and let live.
Safety depends on consent. The residents of a place agree that they will work with and around each other without resorting to forceful confrontation. They will respect each other's boundaries. In the best cases, they will enjoy the experience and expanded point of view brought to them by a diverse population. But even lacking a diverse population of residents, people can cultivate a peaceful attitude if enough of them choose to do so.
All this is for nothing, the armed and dangerous crowd tells us. The only path to peace is through the threat of mutually assured destruction or by eradicating everyone who holds an opposing viewpoint. Anything less is cowardly.
For decades now, the promoters of an armed society have been telling us that anyone must be prepared for a gunfight. As the rhetoric creates an ever more paranoid and volatile population, their prophecy fulfills itself. I see armed men all the time, just going about their lives: shopping, gassing up the truck, serving on town boards, with at least one gun visible. With permitless concealed carry, they could have a couple more tucked in various crevices on their person. A couple of weeks ago it was a scrawny young dude with a 12-pack of beer under one arm, and a handgun bigger than his skinny thigh almost pulling his jeans down as he climbed into his truck.
The Second Amendment cancels out the First, if the threat of armed response is what makes people shut up and ignore each other's behavior. Flip the bird at someone who drives like a sociopath and you may find out just how much of a sociopath he is. It was always true. Anyone might have a gun, regardless of the laws. But the more we enable and encourage the idea that deadly force is normal, the more of it we will see. Deadly force may be a last resort, but feel free to hop right to it with only the briefest glance at other options on your way by. Homicidal ideology plus an arsenal of firearms leads you right to Squirrel Hill, or a grocery store in Kentucky. It breaches the agreement of safety wherever it arrives.
Every time I've considered carrying a gun I've decided that it would probably make a situation worse rather than better. Because we do not yet live in an actual war zone, by the time you know that deadly force is justified you have probably already lost that battle. Our stereotypical movie cowboys of the mythical old west weren't fighting off muggers. They were calling each other out in duels. Or the sodbusters were engaged in guerrilla warfare with the ranchers. Or the gang of outlaws would sweep down on the town, where the brave sheriff and his deputies would pick them off. In every case, the participants knew that they were in a defined conflict. It was right there in the fictional script.
The racists and antisemites in this country who want to eliminate people they deem undesirable are eager to define the conflict and declare war. They have no use for conventions of safety. Perhaps they would feel differently if they were immersed in a lengthy conflict that destroyed a lot of property and killed a lot of their friends, but you'll never convince them of that by imagination alone. They imagine glorious victory and rivers of blood from their enemies. The same optimism has ushered in every war since the first pre-human picked up a stick and showed his tribe-mates how great it was to bust heads.
That first war led to the proliferation of sticks. A secret weapon is only a secret until you use it. Then everybody wants one. And no one imagines themselves on the receiving end of it. That reality sets in later, when the glorious conflict turns into a quagmire. And people start to yearn for peace, rest, and safety.
Monday, October 29, 2018
Monday, October 08, 2018
A drunken preppy snot on the Supreme Court
Only the people in the room at the time know the absolute truth about what happened between Christine Blasey (Ford) and Brett Kavanaugh. Each side has its adherents. One side is wrong. There is no debate.
Setting aside that specific issue, the crisis served as a pressure test that the nominee failed. He demonstrated that he is not impartial or dignified or resistant to stressful confrontation. Perhaps that explains why he was comfortable as a law clerk and then on the bench, because in neither case does he have to face adversaries in argument. He was doing research, running errands, and then, after he was appointed to his first judicial position by George W. Bush, he got to sit up there in the black robe and preside over the lowly combatants presenting their arguments before him.
The expensive incubators of the leadership class in this country can't help but foster a climate of unquestioned entitlement to rule. Your Type A achievers already have more than a little of the psychopath in their makeup, just to have a strong enough ego to play to win all the time. You will sometimes win in spite of yourself, but if you want to make a habit of it you must feel that you deserve to prevail. You have to convince yourself that you are at least as good as everyone in the field. When that field has been distilled from the most powerful families, over multiple generations, your ego has to be that much more aggressive. You hope that they're driven to do things society finds beneficial, because they're going to do them anyway.
My own experience as a preppy snot was limited to two years in a fairly minor boys' school in Maryland, after two years in the school just down the road from it, that was coed through sixth grade, and girls-only through 12th. That school was trying to go coed, so they added boys to a grade at a time going up. I could have attended with the first class of boys that went on to graduate from there. Instead, I did as the boys had done in prior years: I went up the road to the one that bolstered the masculine image.
It sucked. I hated it. But it was a good experience to have had. The entire student body seemed to fit itself into a bullying hierarchy. That was educational.
Abused people become abusers. No doubt some of my later actions through the years, the ones I look back on with the most shame and chagrin, stemmed from trained responses I had to the world view created by a culture of bullies and their subjects -- not to say victims. Victim is a very specific role defined by the amount of helplessness and degree of damage suffered. I was miserable, and suffered a lot of symptoms of stress, but most of the immediate oppression went away when I finally snapped and punched somebody in the face. That sums up the boy/man view of interpersonal relations completely. Punch somebody. Repeat as necessary for the relief of whatever is bugging you.
My older brother attended that boys' school for four years, graduating in 1971. He told me about how the boys in his class who lived nearby would go home and drink alcohol at lunch. Their weekend and vacation parties were legendary. We didn't hear anything about gang rape or contrived ways to get young women to have sex with them, only that young women did. The Sexual Revolution was intensifying rapidly from 1967-'71 (and beyond), so a lot of young women were up for more adventure than might hitherto have been the case. It's the alcohol that stands out, given the role of that liquid in the recent shameful circus in the Senate.
My father had been a scholarship student at Browning from 1939 to about 1943. He has never told me stories of underage drinking there -- he saw more of that from fellow Eagle Scouts when he worked for the Boy Scouts of America in New York. He did recount visits to the homes and Long Island "cottages" of some of his classmates who extended some degree of friendliness -- but never equal status -- to this funny little guy from Paris, who got in not because he was connected, but because he was merely smart. Smart doesn't get you shit unless you can convince the privileged people that you can do something to make them more so. He was unable to do this. Classmates of his went on to do things like inherit the New York Times.
In my own teen years in public school, I knew that some of the kids were having very wild parties and going to bars with fake IDs. It's a teen thing, not just a preppie thing. What sets the prep culture apart is their assumption of superiority. Even if an exlusive school requires community service, it's reaching down to help, not pitching in on a struggle that they share in any way.
People can and do learn from their past mistakes and become better people as a result. Or they settle in and become better at being the kind of jerk they were then, only with more experience.
The newest addition to the Supreme Court destroys forever our longstanding illusion of an impartial judiciary. Law is about interpretation. No jurist can be impartial, because the very act of deciding depends on point of view. A result may run counter to expectations, but always for an interpretive reason ultimately formed by ideology. No matter how convoluted the connection may be, any decision they hand down has to satisfy their philosophy. Everything that this young man passes judgment on will pass through the filters of his education, experience, mentors, and vision for the world. There's no longer any point in trying to guess how he will fulfill his duties. From now on we have to deal with how he actually does.
Setting aside that specific issue, the crisis served as a pressure test that the nominee failed. He demonstrated that he is not impartial or dignified or resistant to stressful confrontation. Perhaps that explains why he was comfortable as a law clerk and then on the bench, because in neither case does he have to face adversaries in argument. He was doing research, running errands, and then, after he was appointed to his first judicial position by George W. Bush, he got to sit up there in the black robe and preside over the lowly combatants presenting their arguments before him.
The expensive incubators of the leadership class in this country can't help but foster a climate of unquestioned entitlement to rule. Your Type A achievers already have more than a little of the psychopath in their makeup, just to have a strong enough ego to play to win all the time. You will sometimes win in spite of yourself, but if you want to make a habit of it you must feel that you deserve to prevail. You have to convince yourself that you are at least as good as everyone in the field. When that field has been distilled from the most powerful families, over multiple generations, your ego has to be that much more aggressive. You hope that they're driven to do things society finds beneficial, because they're going to do them anyway.
My own experience as a preppy snot was limited to two years in a fairly minor boys' school in Maryland, after two years in the school just down the road from it, that was coed through sixth grade, and girls-only through 12th. That school was trying to go coed, so they added boys to a grade at a time going up. I could have attended with the first class of boys that went on to graduate from there. Instead, I did as the boys had done in prior years: I went up the road to the one that bolstered the masculine image.
It sucked. I hated it. But it was a good experience to have had. The entire student body seemed to fit itself into a bullying hierarchy. That was educational.
Abused people become abusers. No doubt some of my later actions through the years, the ones I look back on with the most shame and chagrin, stemmed from trained responses I had to the world view created by a culture of bullies and their subjects -- not to say victims. Victim is a very specific role defined by the amount of helplessness and degree of damage suffered. I was miserable, and suffered a lot of symptoms of stress, but most of the immediate oppression went away when I finally snapped and punched somebody in the face. That sums up the boy/man view of interpersonal relations completely. Punch somebody. Repeat as necessary for the relief of whatever is bugging you.
My older brother attended that boys' school for four years, graduating in 1971. He told me about how the boys in his class who lived nearby would go home and drink alcohol at lunch. Their weekend and vacation parties were legendary. We didn't hear anything about gang rape or contrived ways to get young women to have sex with them, only that young women did. The Sexual Revolution was intensifying rapidly from 1967-'71 (and beyond), so a lot of young women were up for more adventure than might hitherto have been the case. It's the alcohol that stands out, given the role of that liquid in the recent shameful circus in the Senate.
My father had been a scholarship student at Browning from 1939 to about 1943. He has never told me stories of underage drinking there -- he saw more of that from fellow Eagle Scouts when he worked for the Boy Scouts of America in New York. He did recount visits to the homes and Long Island "cottages" of some of his classmates who extended some degree of friendliness -- but never equal status -- to this funny little guy from Paris, who got in not because he was connected, but because he was merely smart. Smart doesn't get you shit unless you can convince the privileged people that you can do something to make them more so. He was unable to do this. Classmates of his went on to do things like inherit the New York Times.
In my own teen years in public school, I knew that some of the kids were having very wild parties and going to bars with fake IDs. It's a teen thing, not just a preppie thing. What sets the prep culture apart is their assumption of superiority. Even if an exlusive school requires community service, it's reaching down to help, not pitching in on a struggle that they share in any way.
People can and do learn from their past mistakes and become better people as a result. Or they settle in and become better at being the kind of jerk they were then, only with more experience.
The newest addition to the Supreme Court destroys forever our longstanding illusion of an impartial judiciary. Law is about interpretation. No jurist can be impartial, because the very act of deciding depends on point of view. A result may run counter to expectations, but always for an interpretive reason ultimately formed by ideology. No matter how convoluted the connection may be, any decision they hand down has to satisfy their philosophy. Everything that this young man passes judgment on will pass through the filters of his education, experience, mentors, and vision for the world. There's no longer any point in trying to guess how he will fulfill his duties. From now on we have to deal with how he actually does.
Tuesday, October 02, 2018
About male privilege...
The President of the United States today said that it is a "scary time for young men in America."
Men have been shaken by the wave of hostility coming at them from women all over the United States. And by men I mean mostly white men, but in gender issues the relationships become more complicated. Let's focus on the white dudes for right now, since they are the most egregious offenders.
You don't have to want to be a domineering asshole to find yourself the beneficiary of generations of domineering assholes. In fact, as a member of a privileged class it is basically impossible to separate yourself from your advantages.
Witness the rage of privileged white males in government who face a challenge to their anointed candidate for the Supreme Court. Witness the quivering indignation of the man himself. They know that they face the biggest challenge ever presented to their ability to rule with impunity over women and minorities. This is life or death for their way of life. Maybe the patriarchy won't fall immediately if Brett Kavanaugh doesn't get a seat on the Supreme Court, but the battle has solidified opposition to it. Losing it will weaken them further. Winning it, on the other hand, will fortify their defenses for an indefinite period. One can only hope that in either case the movement to end their hegemony will lead to a better world, not just another hegemony.
All I can say to white men -- as a white man -- is that this would have hurt a lot less if y'all had accepted it well back in the last century. Maybe your fear even then was fully justified, and the paybacks would have been hell. We'll never know now, will we? And the paybacks really will be hell now. They will continue to ramp up steeply as long as you drag your feet.
I will admit that I never gave it much thought when I was growing up. I worried about how I would earn a living. I wondered if I would be able to get a job that would keep me in the lifestyle to which my parents were accustomed, because I knew nothing else. As far as I knew, we weren't rolling in dough. My father did okay, but he and my mother had both been children during the Great Depression. They grew up with competing urges of compulsive thrift battling against the desire to live large. Everyone in America looked up to the wealthy. At that time, that automatically meant white people.
Add religion to this and you can write off a lot as God's responsibility. "God has a plan." "God will care for them." May God help them, because I won't do more than toss an occasional charitable donation at the problem."
No one that I knew of ever said anything about massive lifestyle changes to balance out the prosperity.
See how any discussion of white male privilege veers into economics? Daddy gives the allowance, see? Daddy gives Mommy the housekeeping money, and she'd better not blow it. The lucky wife gets a bigger allowance. Maybe she exerts her power by henpecking her man into bringing home more money and letting her get away with whatever she wants.
You heard almost nothing about the accomplishments of women.
Mostly white men did the hiring and firing, and engaged in the dirty business of politics and government. Rooms full of cigar smoke and self congratulatory flatulence were no place for a lady. The women who broke into those citadels had to be able to deal with that, and were changed by it to become something similar to their opponents. We are only now finally seeing women present their point of view without justifying it to masculine values. They may have gotten the vote in 1920, but they were still subject to the coercion of the male establishment.
Be afraid, white men. You're very close to finding out what it's really like to be a disadvantaged minority. I'm afraid, because I look like you. As much as I wanted things to be different, I was already in the minority of the privileged majority. I alone could not have stopped this. I had enough to do, weeding out the programming I had absorbed, as I learned to recognize each piece of it. Because you cherished dominance so much, and feared equality, you will soon be distinctly unequal for a while. The first effect will be the loss of credibility of a white male speaker or writer. It will be automatic suspicion and dismissal of ideas put forward by a white man. It will be a higher bar of proof, and greater scrutiny of sources and reasoning. The shoe will be on the other foot. You'll have to face prejudice just because, at long last, enough people are tired of your shit.
You want to know why there's black pride, gay pride, feminism? Y'all made that. Then you try to answer it with white pride, and white identity, and hetero male dominance. You made the whole situation happen.
We cannot know whether some other subgroup in human evolution would have appointed itself the Asshole Emperors of the World if white people hadn't done it. We live in this world, and in this world the gang that's on top right now got there by being the best at not playing nicely with others. You accepted life as a competition. When you were at the top of the game you could have changed how the prizes were distributed. Instead you just tried to be the biggest winners in the history of the world. Winning streaks end, boys. They always do.
Men have been shaken by the wave of hostility coming at them from women all over the United States. And by men I mean mostly white men, but in gender issues the relationships become more complicated. Let's focus on the white dudes for right now, since they are the most egregious offenders.
You don't have to want to be a domineering asshole to find yourself the beneficiary of generations of domineering assholes. In fact, as a member of a privileged class it is basically impossible to separate yourself from your advantages.
Witness the rage of privileged white males in government who face a challenge to their anointed candidate for the Supreme Court. Witness the quivering indignation of the man himself. They know that they face the biggest challenge ever presented to their ability to rule with impunity over women and minorities. This is life or death for their way of life. Maybe the patriarchy won't fall immediately if Brett Kavanaugh doesn't get a seat on the Supreme Court, but the battle has solidified opposition to it. Losing it will weaken them further. Winning it, on the other hand, will fortify their defenses for an indefinite period. One can only hope that in either case the movement to end their hegemony will lead to a better world, not just another hegemony.
All I can say to white men -- as a white man -- is that this would have hurt a lot less if y'all had accepted it well back in the last century. Maybe your fear even then was fully justified, and the paybacks would have been hell. We'll never know now, will we? And the paybacks really will be hell now. They will continue to ramp up steeply as long as you drag your feet.
I will admit that I never gave it much thought when I was growing up. I worried about how I would earn a living. I wondered if I would be able to get a job that would keep me in the lifestyle to which my parents were accustomed, because I knew nothing else. As far as I knew, we weren't rolling in dough. My father did okay, but he and my mother had both been children during the Great Depression. They grew up with competing urges of compulsive thrift battling against the desire to live large. Everyone in America looked up to the wealthy. At that time, that automatically meant white people.
Add religion to this and you can write off a lot as God's responsibility. "God has a plan." "God will care for them." May God help them, because I won't do more than toss an occasional charitable donation at the problem."
No one that I knew of ever said anything about massive lifestyle changes to balance out the prosperity.
See how any discussion of white male privilege veers into economics? Daddy gives the allowance, see? Daddy gives Mommy the housekeeping money, and she'd better not blow it. The lucky wife gets a bigger allowance. Maybe she exerts her power by henpecking her man into bringing home more money and letting her get away with whatever she wants.
You heard almost nothing about the accomplishments of women.
Mostly white men did the hiring and firing, and engaged in the dirty business of politics and government. Rooms full of cigar smoke and self congratulatory flatulence were no place for a lady. The women who broke into those citadels had to be able to deal with that, and were changed by it to become something similar to their opponents. We are only now finally seeing women present their point of view without justifying it to masculine values. They may have gotten the vote in 1920, but they were still subject to the coercion of the male establishment.
Be afraid, white men. You're very close to finding out what it's really like to be a disadvantaged minority. I'm afraid, because I look like you. As much as I wanted things to be different, I was already in the minority of the privileged majority. I alone could not have stopped this. I had enough to do, weeding out the programming I had absorbed, as I learned to recognize each piece of it. Because you cherished dominance so much, and feared equality, you will soon be distinctly unequal for a while. The first effect will be the loss of credibility of a white male speaker or writer. It will be automatic suspicion and dismissal of ideas put forward by a white man. It will be a higher bar of proof, and greater scrutiny of sources and reasoning. The shoe will be on the other foot. You'll have to face prejudice just because, at long last, enough people are tired of your shit.
You want to know why there's black pride, gay pride, feminism? Y'all made that. Then you try to answer it with white pride, and white identity, and hetero male dominance. You made the whole situation happen.
We cannot know whether some other subgroup in human evolution would have appointed itself the Asshole Emperors of the World if white people hadn't done it. We live in this world, and in this world the gang that's on top right now got there by being the best at not playing nicely with others. You accepted life as a competition. When you were at the top of the game you could have changed how the prizes were distributed. Instead you just tried to be the biggest winners in the history of the world. Winning streaks end, boys. They always do.
Monday, October 01, 2018
The sex itself
I won't pretend that I banished my desire for sexual contact with women. I can no more do that than a gay person can become un-gay, or a trans person decide to ignore the inner being and conform to the outer plumbing. I am as attracted as I ever was.
This says nothing about whether I should be allowed it, or my odds of ever again getting an offer.
Regardless of my success ratio, I wanted to give as good as I got. Considering my darkest failures, that assertion seems laughable. Considering my best performances it inspires mirth as well. Both of those were in my thoughts as I guided my behavior starting in my 30s toward the most polished sexually neutral demeanor that I can bring myself to present, at all times and in all places. I started realizing years before the current wave of awareness that women needed relief from men's conscious and unconscious efforts to coerce or persuade. And I'm a dick. I can look back on years of unfounded arrogance.
Self denial takes conscious attention. If you happen to be young enough for your sexual behavior to matter, remember that the choice is always whether to indulge, not whether to want in the first place. If anyone were to ask, I would say that a man's regret will be stronger for times that he indulged than times that he didn't. It's not about being noble, or being canny enough to avoid some kind of entrapment. It's about the intrusive, invasive nature of men's apparatus, and the irrevocability of penetration. You can pull it out, but you can't un-enter.
Even in fantasy, it has become impossible to imagine a permissible scenario, nor does memory provide any comfort in the absence of any corroborating witnesses. As Meg Ryan taught us, don't believe what you want to believe just because you want to believe it. In addition, you might never know what motivated a woman to be with you in the first place. And if you're smart, you won't ask. You might not be flattered. Not only that, the past is untouchably gone. Your chances of flying to Pluto are way better than your chances of ever repeating something you can remember in vivid detail.
If you're a well brought up young man, or if -- without external intervention -- you've never had an improper thought, consider yourself very lucky. I had to cut my way through thickets of predatory impulses, often with companions who brought fertilizer instead of pruning shears. Most of the impulses were not overtly predatory, but objectifying women at all is fundamentally predatory, even if you believe that you love them and don't think that you could ever hurt one. Desire itself is the emotion of a consumer. Hunting urges bred down are what make border collies great herding dogs.
Sex can be fun. It can also be horrendous in a huge variety of ways. Sexual behavior connects to the most primal parts of our being while at the same time appealing to acquired tastes that are wholly intellectual. The primal urge intrudes like a pop-up ad in the middle of something unrelated. It arrives like an unsolicited dick pic.
No man can ever understand the full extent of a woman's experience of sex. I don't care what you shove how far into what opening, it isn't going to be the same. And I guarantee that you cannot realistically imagine it. Hanging over a woman all the time is the prospect of impregnation. Even if both parties in a consensual encounter have taken redundant steps to prevent fertilization, the anatomy itself was designed for it and the most basic prompting seeks it. Recreational genital stimulation works around this in a number of ways. Even there, consent is not the whole story. What you might consider the beginning of a beautiful phase of long term exploration she might consider an experiment best discarded and forgotten. Even if she was really good at it.
Alternative methods raise another whole flock of questions. Is there a simple answer under all of the layers of possible motives? When you finally peel back all of the persuasive pressures, is the answer to whether she really gets off on that thing you really like a simple and perpetual, "no?" The answer probably changes with age, at the very least. It also fluctuates from moment to moment in the flow of feelings emanating from that spot in the lower abdomen that seems to connect directly to the brain and create the crucial link to success or failure of a pleasurable impulse.
Age changes everything. Returning to the primal prototype, sexuality is a preoccupation of young adults. Unrestrained by other conventions, the interest begins early in the teen years and continues to a finish line that varies by individual. Some people are ready to walk or run from it within a few years. When life expectancy was under 50, your average person probably died still horny. Because inside of every old person is a young person wondering what the hell happened, people who may be well beyond attractive youth, perhaps even physically incapable of participating, may still be plagued by the memory of what used to be possible, that they would love to try again.
Age and a sense of personal mediocrity probably do a lot to bolster my ability to be deferential. I'm good at what I'm good at, but that's a pretty narrow band. I struggle at a lot of other things, and that makes up the bulk of my life. Be assured that I don't see myself as handing down wisdom from a mountain top. I'm just sharing what I've learned from trudging along one particular road of life. Maybe it will prove helpful to someone.
This says nothing about whether I should be allowed it, or my odds of ever again getting an offer.
Regardless of my success ratio, I wanted to give as good as I got. Considering my darkest failures, that assertion seems laughable. Considering my best performances it inspires mirth as well. Both of those were in my thoughts as I guided my behavior starting in my 30s toward the most polished sexually neutral demeanor that I can bring myself to present, at all times and in all places. I started realizing years before the current wave of awareness that women needed relief from men's conscious and unconscious efforts to coerce or persuade. And I'm a dick. I can look back on years of unfounded arrogance.
Self denial takes conscious attention. If you happen to be young enough for your sexual behavior to matter, remember that the choice is always whether to indulge, not whether to want in the first place. If anyone were to ask, I would say that a man's regret will be stronger for times that he indulged than times that he didn't. It's not about being noble, or being canny enough to avoid some kind of entrapment. It's about the intrusive, invasive nature of men's apparatus, and the irrevocability of penetration. You can pull it out, but you can't un-enter.
Even in fantasy, it has become impossible to imagine a permissible scenario, nor does memory provide any comfort in the absence of any corroborating witnesses. As Meg Ryan taught us, don't believe what you want to believe just because you want to believe it. In addition, you might never know what motivated a woman to be with you in the first place. And if you're smart, you won't ask. You might not be flattered. Not only that, the past is untouchably gone. Your chances of flying to Pluto are way better than your chances of ever repeating something you can remember in vivid detail.
If you're a well brought up young man, or if -- without external intervention -- you've never had an improper thought, consider yourself very lucky. I had to cut my way through thickets of predatory impulses, often with companions who brought fertilizer instead of pruning shears. Most of the impulses were not overtly predatory, but objectifying women at all is fundamentally predatory, even if you believe that you love them and don't think that you could ever hurt one. Desire itself is the emotion of a consumer. Hunting urges bred down are what make border collies great herding dogs.
Sex can be fun. It can also be horrendous in a huge variety of ways. Sexual behavior connects to the most primal parts of our being while at the same time appealing to acquired tastes that are wholly intellectual. The primal urge intrudes like a pop-up ad in the middle of something unrelated. It arrives like an unsolicited dick pic.
No man can ever understand the full extent of a woman's experience of sex. I don't care what you shove how far into what opening, it isn't going to be the same. And I guarantee that you cannot realistically imagine it. Hanging over a woman all the time is the prospect of impregnation. Even if both parties in a consensual encounter have taken redundant steps to prevent fertilization, the anatomy itself was designed for it and the most basic prompting seeks it. Recreational genital stimulation works around this in a number of ways. Even there, consent is not the whole story. What you might consider the beginning of a beautiful phase of long term exploration she might consider an experiment best discarded and forgotten. Even if she was really good at it.
Alternative methods raise another whole flock of questions. Is there a simple answer under all of the layers of possible motives? When you finally peel back all of the persuasive pressures, is the answer to whether she really gets off on that thing you really like a simple and perpetual, "no?" The answer probably changes with age, at the very least. It also fluctuates from moment to moment in the flow of feelings emanating from that spot in the lower abdomen that seems to connect directly to the brain and create the crucial link to success or failure of a pleasurable impulse.
Age changes everything. Returning to the primal prototype, sexuality is a preoccupation of young adults. Unrestrained by other conventions, the interest begins early in the teen years and continues to a finish line that varies by individual. Some people are ready to walk or run from it within a few years. When life expectancy was under 50, your average person probably died still horny. Because inside of every old person is a young person wondering what the hell happened, people who may be well beyond attractive youth, perhaps even physically incapable of participating, may still be plagued by the memory of what used to be possible, that they would love to try again.
Age and a sense of personal mediocrity probably do a lot to bolster my ability to be deferential. I'm good at what I'm good at, but that's a pretty narrow band. I struggle at a lot of other things, and that makes up the bulk of my life. Be assured that I don't see myself as handing down wisdom from a mountain top. I'm just sharing what I've learned from trudging along one particular road of life. Maybe it will prove helpful to someone.
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