The Foxy MBA's Guide to Everything Important

Tomorrow

Halloween is especially special if you live in Las Vegas. It is tomorrow.

I just thought I'd mention it.

Notes On My Not Yet "Coming Out"

I took a six-hour nap yesterday, and I followed it up with eight hours of overnight sleep. I have been very frightened that I am losing a part of myself, the part capable of understanding love, by not sleeping well. (Most people would be more scared by sleeping 14 hours out of 24, but I'm used to my sleep patterns being volatile since I contracted fibromyalgia.) At least my concern is more about whether I can bring all of myself to a relationship rather than whether I am enough of a property that I will be permitted to play the game at all. It is frightening enough being polyamorous (and chronically ill) in this society without having to worry about any stripped gears on my part.

There is a part of me that is very sad about what my new activities mean to Pattie. But she and I have talked about the matter for years, and we agreed that if it ever reached the point where her illness was hampering her to the point where she just didn't have the energy any more, I would be able to look elsewhere. Things have passed the point where a rational standard could be said to exist. But my being in the right (or, technically, our being in the right) hasn't made me any less sorry. I still feel small and sad.

Monogamy really is the last great taboo. It's the "perversion" that even self-identified "perverts" won't permit in others. It appears a common enough one, but the more "liberated" the standards become in a given area, the more restrictive they become. The trend strikes me as paradoxical, but perhaps the word "hegemonic" suffices to describe it, one group of people selling a second group of people down the river to get in good with a third group of people. (Political indignation does soften the stings somewhat.)

But I find myself so dreading a sacrifice of my integrity and of my authenticity that I don't even raise the issue. Do I really have to go to the Strip on weekends and get blitzed to bridge the gap? Would I have to do something that would make me deteriorate even more? It doesn't seem like this sort of thing would be regarded as incompatible with good health and healthy life. Or is it only okay when your "physician" signs off on it?

Caregiver Wanted. Hiring Now.

WANTED: Unpaid, live-in male caregiver. Work for overly dramatic employer/client who will have you on call 24/7, with your decision-making authority nonexistent at the same time you are held responsible for the well-being of the person in question. Obamacare gearing up to offer no checks on the situation. You will have no voice, you will be given no attention in the media, you will not even be able to list your activities on a resume. Career-ending opportunities exist. Come and fill the one role absolutely no one has discussed aloud in over 20 years of public debate over the American medical system, because, let's face it, there's nothing Americans love more than anonymous servitude as long as it is someone else's. Suckers please form a line to the left.

Once More, With Feeling

Every time a couple lies together, the relationship starts anew. It begins again, with the promise for their future overwhelming the caveats of their past.

Shireen

If you like Twitter, you might consider following Shireen Soussen. Her ID's are @thelastvirgo and @shireensoussen. She has a gift for short (sub-140 character) poetry, and the vagaries of love is one of her favorite topics.

MYSELF

When I wake up in the morning, I am myself. I am free from all restraints, all preconditions. I am the thing that a “society” should be engineered to protect. And I am all that I am. Specifically, I am awash in my sexuality, and the sexuality is not a factor to consider but a part of my identity. And I see no contradiction in writing about it.

When I first wake up, anything is possible. There is no fixity; everything is contingent. Then I remember where I am in history, and the sadness covers me. I cannot be the only one to see who I am, but I am not like most of you. I am different for a number of reasons.

I perceive a genuine break between me and the women I meet every day, every week (now it is not the “new day” but the “work week” that constructs my time spent). It is possible to have a lot of good fun and shared experience with someone who isn’t a lot like oneself, I can state from experience. But my personal growth has cost me a lot, including compromising my “career” badly. The most unforeseen consequence is that I AM NOT LIKE MOST OF YOU. I do not mean in a sense of differing opinions on topics of mutual interest. I mean that I went a different path coming out of school, and what I have come to understand has made me unlike the monoadult that this “society” seeks to produce.

I awake in the morning with something conceptual to share with all of you, perhaps not original but largely forgotten. (If it is derivative, I suggest, on a personal note, that understanding it at all has its merit.) But I am of the notion that there may be no one left capable of understanding my thoughts. If so, that means trouble for all of you as well, in a form you may not have suspected; read on.

I’ve carried this knowledge in me for some time. I’ve endured quite a few attacks, but the knowledge is sustained. It is what I would prefer to be discussing. But the necessities of life in “society” have forced me to concentrate my attention elsewhere. It has been an attrition war.

I don’t know what induces people to believe that a “sex advisor” should confine himself to discussions of gymnastics. Technique is key, but the real element of interest lies in the path to the bedroom and to what is constructed therein. The bedroom is itself a social milieu, and we spend our time there with different people over the course of our lives. We all transmit information in more ways than one while there, and we sometimes go back for a revisit with a previous confidant and draw upon what we have encountered since last checking in.

But that is only the beginning of what can be said to understand the matters at hand. Any number of epistemologies can be employed to approach this “rich data” (excuse me if I suppress a chuckle at this point: there’s no sexuality likek adolescent sexuality). Clinical psychology alone is not enough. Allopathic medicine is not enough. Making shit up isn’t enough. Most of all, the notion that there could be a “central authority,” a dispenser of canonical sex discourse, is untenable.

Foucault said that turning sexuality into a discourse was an attempt to suppress and control it. But I think he must have meant a canonical one. Certainly there had always been discusssion of the matter prior to his time (with the possible exceptions of the Victorian Age and the 1950’s). It is just that the discussion was decentralized and required no stamp of officiality. I want to suggest that he and I are on the same page in this respect.

There was writing about sex and sexuality as well. The writing was popular, it did sell, and it did not require a “governing body,” whether academic or legal in its scope, to hold forth on its merits. Books are pleasant in that they concede by their presence that they are not coercive: you can find them, finger them, and forget them, one after the other and without feeling the need to understand every one of them fully to feel you have benefitted from and enjoyed them. Intimacy with them is held always to a degree and not necessarily for more than a moment in every case, and one does not know going in how long the association will last. I hope my writing can be as satisfying to the reader in the future, and in the same way. You can, and will (if only implicitly), decide which books to remember and how well, and regardless of your decision, it is noted that a splendid time will have been had by all. I hope the analogy is not too heavy-handed.

Guest Author: Alyssa-Marie Pauline

Today we have a guest author: Alyssa-Marie Pauline from Portland, OR. I was surprised to discover this entry on her blog, as much of what this blog has been about has been the need for societal context to straighten itself out if love itself is to be preserved. I had been considering the reverse, the need for love to be preserved if society is to be overhauled substantially, and found more than one "independent confirmation" had surfaced in my world with the idea. Here is Alyssa-Marie's version:

What is Love? (Pass it along);

So I’d like to take a serious moment here (gasp, I know) - to speak my peace on a matter I feel very strongly about; Love. No, not the oy-he’s/she’s-so-fine-wanna-make-him/her-mine kind of love, & not the ‘honeymoon phase’-of-having-a-new-beau type of love either. The real thing; the love you hold that has no label to it, no strings attached. Just pure, straight from the soul, unconditioned, untainted love. Not sure what I’m getting at? Yeah, that’s the problem. In these times, love is a rarity. Some-THING many people cannot even grasp, because society has dealt love to be some generic concept. And just that, love is defined as some-thing, not simply as love. Allow me to elaborate, if you will;

Can anyone actually explain love? Even in the simplest of forms, say to a child - how would you define to them what love is? Think on that for a moment. What do you come up with? A lot of symbolic examples? Metaphors? An attempt at explaining an emotion? You might be saying, ‘Well, how else are you supposed to define love?’ — Aha - exactly my point. Defining love. Is there such? If you look up the word in the dictionary, it reads out that love is a strong emotion, a passionate affection, a personal attachment. But that’s merely an attempt to elaborate on some word. Again, we’re getting nowhere. Why? Because, my belief, Love is undefinable. It doesn’t need an explanation, or thousands of examples & metaphors. We don’t need to think on it. And we shouldn’t. Because love simply is.

If you’re to attach love to anything, make it an action. The small gesture of a smile to complete strangers, a compliment, a favor made (with no expectations), an honest remark to your friend (even if they won’t like what you have to say). Love isn’t a word to think about and define. Love is an awareness. Love is honesty. Love is happiness shared. Love is an action. And this is what we need in the world; naturally pure, non-judging, unlabeled, unconditional love.

So, I ask you to partake in this radical movement of mine. A love revolution. Where you don’t think on love, you do it. Start with yourself, your family & friends, then continue with neighbors and by-passers. Hold it in, pass it along.

*Radiate Love.*

Valentine's Eve

Valentine's Day is tomorrow. Whether you celebrate it or not is up to you. Either way is OK! Else it wouldn't be much of a love holiday.

Announcing New Joint Blog - CWD: Couples with Disabilities

We have a new joint blog on Psychology Today, examining coupling issues in the context of chronic illness. Today is our first entry. It is also our 19th wedding anniversary

Who Gets to Be Sick Today?

Saturday Morning

Sitting in a coffee shop having tea (I gotta be me) and playing with my PDA. I find my attention lingering a little too long on a twenty-something woman who is the only person in line but has been getting her order "filled" for the last five minutes. She showed up in sandals and socks and a tank top that must be on its fourth owner, and I am not half as deterred as I should be: I am, to put it bluntly, staring. I have gotten three rather perplexed glances from her, probably more concerned about potential criminality on my part than in perception of the retroactively obvious.

I have expended considerable effort to keep my attention from wandering from my wife during our marriage of 19 years. I could justify it easily enough by citing her declining health over the last decade, but the truth of the matter is that I seem always to have been wired this way. The only thing that has really slowed me down as a "cheat" over the years has been a strong construction of the notion and nature of personal integrity (the full scope of which is beyond the topic at hand). The conflict has NOT gotten less pronounced over the years: I have lost a step since I was 21, but I seem not to have lost any more than that.

Hunter Thompson used the word "atavistic" to describe Las Vegas in his book set in this city, and forty years later, the term still fits. It is a city that has had no business model beyond "People from other states can bring money here and leave it when they go away again. " It found a way to trash its economy DESPITE the gambling crescendo of the last twenty years. It is trying to sell its local culture as "LA Lite," but I expect residents of southern California would be sophisticated enough to laugh off the idea. The social environment of southern Nevada is too nouveau, too petty, too deliberately nervous, too lacking in relaxed and easy magnaminity to pass for the image or the reality of tens of millions of people screwing in hot tubs. (Another capsule characterzation of Vegas from Thompson: "Bush league sex." Consider yourself warned.)

I stopped apologizing to myself for my "polyamorous" (I hate that word) nature several years ago. But I find that Vegas indulges a "party atmosphere" only when it can be sure it has complete control of such an atmosphere, and unlike the locals, I recognize the implications. I've lived in enough different cities that I know how the local culture can vary on this point, and I know it isn't "just me." (I will refrain from suggesting that when you're losing to ATLANTA on this point, you have some work to do. ) And I know the woman in the sandals and socks and tank top is going home alone this morning and would be even if I had never put on a ring in my life. What happens here is only a simulation of enjoyment, and you knew that coming in, didn't you?

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone with SprintSpeed

New Blog by Pattie and Carl

Pattie and I will begin a new blog on the Psychology Today website on October 10! The title will be "CWD." The acronym officially stands for "Couple With Disabilites," but we have a few more ideas about what it should stand for, and as the blog progresses, you can be sure we'll throw them in. :) Here's the video announcement of the blog:

New Twitter Account

Readers of the Foxy MBA's Guide can also get tidbits via Twitter through following @FoxyMBA now. Get your sex to go!

Love is Revolutionary

This is going to be a fairly short and sweet thought, but it occurred to me today that the most revolutionary act is to love, especially in a capitalistic society. People who want to sell you something always want you to hate something: how you look, how you smell, how you think, how you talk and so forth. If you hate, then you are looking for a solution and they are all too happy to sell you one. But if you love, then you feel satisfaction and contentment. If you love you understand the world around you. If you love then all you need is more love.

Love is revolutionary. So today I will fight the good fight by remember who I love and who I am and who I can be.

For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extenty to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.--Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic, Sister Outsider

I wonder what kind of world it might become if we simply learned how to love.

Kiss Up!

Shouldn't you kiss at the beginning of a date?

The custom in the U.S. is to kiss at the end of a date, which has romantic appeal. I offer three reasosn why kissing at the beginning of a date is more attractive:

1. It offers some small but routine level of commitment. It signifies right away that what each of you has in mind is something that goes beyond the usual structures (let's consider saying "restrictions" instead of "structures") of society, that "for you," the rules are not only different, they start from a different place entirely.

2. If you are of different minds as to whether the custom should be followed, i.e. one of you offers and the other refuses, you have some time set aside (and coming up immediately) to negotiate the matter instead of having a door slammed on it (usually literally!). The idea in dating is to facilitate commonality. It is not to secure one's "boundaries" to an airtight level of impenetrability, then dare someone else to undo one's good work. If there is a lack of understanding regarding the matter, it should get more talk time than what kind of wines one prefers. Moreover, if ulterior motives are at work, refusal can be a "tipping of the hand," as we say here in Las Vegas. If one person cannot stand to kiss the other, the issue of why there is a date scheduled at all is begged.

3. There is a strong possibility in my mind that the ideal is to kiss both at the beginning AND at the end of a date. Perhaps not, but wouldn't one err on the side of caution?

Apples

I had an "alphabet book" when I was young. An "alphabet book" is a book pairing each letter of the alphabet with a word beginning with that letter. Mine also had a photograph and a short explanation of the word in question for each letter. The first word, the word for "A," was "apple." The photograph was of a large, red apple. The description talked about apples for a bit and ended with, "The first bite of an apple is the best, but the last bite is good, too."

That's what I think, too.

Carl reads "Whales Weep Not" by D.H. Lawrence

I did a reading of a poem by D.H. Lawrence that I thought fit the PDAnation theme nicely. Here is the link to the video of the reading:

Carl reads "Whales Weep Not" by D.H. Lawrence

I looked over Lawrence's poem yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised at how the themes of public love, or at least overt love, and big love were handled so masterfully. It's almost like he wrote it just for the PDAnation YouTube channel. :)

We talk about sex and food at PDANation

The Real Problem With Marrying For Money

It is said:

"Marry for money and you'll earn every penny."

Does anyone actually take heed of this warning in practice? If anything, if you marry for anything ELSE, you are considered by this culture to be an idiot.

More to the point:

It is also said that you can have a lot of fun in the bedroom with someone you dislike. I know my way around the bedroom well enough to admit that there is truth to this proposition (excuse the term). But can you have any such real fun with someone you neither like nor dislike, indeed, someone for whom you have no "feelings" except enough contempt to have married them for money?

Response to P: Top Seven PLUS!

I enjoyed the radio interview. I am not like my celebrated wife in one respect: I don't worry about "getting it all said" in such a venue but about getting in two or three major moments of impressive insight/cleverness out of ten or so that I prep to address intelligently. This is supposed to be a conversation, and I do worry about turning it into a lecture, especially one that isn't technically pertinent to (or workable within) the show format. I use the leftover airtime and the resulting slack to score style points: celebrity theory looms large in my lifestyle.

I do have an "agenda" where sexuality is concerned, however, and I don't want to leave the impression that I came to this blog with nothing to say about its most prominent issue. I could have continued for another two hours of interview time if I'd wanted to get really verbose. Here are the top seven issues about which I would have had the most to say:

1. MONOGAMISM The biggest racket in the history of civilization. I don't think the words "being set up to fail" are strong enough to describe the situation. But the absurdity continues, and one concludes that society is deliberately maintaining the standard, with heavy penalties for early withdrawal, because society loves nothing more than it does a good old-fashioned no-win scenario.

2. VEGAS It's odd that no one talks about local culture here, at least not the way one gets to hear about the vagaries of various neighborhoods (indeed, various STREETS) in New York City, e.g. Las Vegas is a major fashion center, an entertainment center of sorts, and has other claims to cultural presence, if not depth. Sin City has, in a way that most urban centers cannot even aspire to have, the potential to be a place with a lifestyle, not just a life. But it went in under eighteen months in 2007 and 2008 from being a strong economy and a "best-kept secret" to compulsively playing poor. Nobody wants to tell Vegas stories any more except about how we're all doomed unless we adopt all of Sandoval's budget cuts and let Harry Reid strip away (excuse the expression) the last elements of uniqueness about the place. There are several reasons why such posturing is poisonous not just to the construction and maintenance of valid local culture but to love and libido; it is almost enough to point out that it is so far from having a party atmosphere once you get half a mile off Las Vegas Boulevard that you begin to wonder if residents are deliberately having as little fun as possible until the "downturn" is over just to be on the safe side. "Paris in the spring" it ain't. P.S. Henderson is even worse, of course.

3. XENOPHOBIA A great deal of the airtime was spent talking about prejudice in one form or another. I could have talked about it a lot more, if I'd been inclined. To keep things as relevant to sex and sexuality as possible, I will just point out here that stigmatization doesn't mix well with the erotic, and conversely (and this is another point I could have discussed at length and may later), a greater emphasis in society on seeing to it that the erotic goes well would probably wash away a lot of the momentum of stigmatization.

4. SOCIAL CONTEXT The path leading to the bedroom is as interesting as what happens once everyone has assembled there. Placing sexuality in social context opens the discussion to a lot of the real dynamics at play, and it is exciting in its own right. Sexuality has a path that extends backwards some distance from the bedroom, a fact that some people know intuitively and others figure out rapidly.

5. CLINICAL SEXUALITY I've mentioned before in this blog that I have mixed feelings about clinical language having taken over "responsible" sexual discourse in the English-speaking countries. The case against begins with (1) Foucault's contention that attempts to turn sexuality into a discourse are coercive, and (2) the prevailing impression that sexuality is to be shaped to fit so that it doesn't interfere with the mores and mechanisms of society is a reversal of priorities: sexuality is a strong element of identity, and the goal of society should therefore be to preserve it, or at least to work around it. I stop just short of arguing that fucking is the only thing that IS relevant as a practical matter.

6. THE OTHER 95% OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION One of the more appalling elements of the culture on this continent is the belief that the residents are uniquely qualified to address sexual matters and to dismiss the possibility of contribution by offshore populations developing their own views of such matters. I leave the observation as its own case statement and speculate on how hypocritical it might finally be for such methodological mediocrity to go hand-in-hand with a supposed distaste for sexual assault, in symbolic forms as in material ones. As Spivak called for a "worlding of the world," I would call for a "worlding of the erotic" and of discussion about the erotic.

7. IT'S ALWAYS TIME FOR SEX I am suspicious of the partitioning that goes on regarding sex and sexuality: this time of day is not "appropriate," that location is not "appropriate," &c. I tend to think a lot of the boundaries have been set just to discourage and even to stigmatize sexuality itself: the real message behind fencing it in is that it is the sort of thing that deserves fencing in. The arguments for such boundaries should have and do have a heavy burden of proof to sustain. Otherwise, the idea that the local culture is "sex-positive" is as much of a joke, and for the same reasons, as the signs designating "free speech zones" that now dominate, and indeed could be said to define, the local culture.

Sexuality has endured despite centuries of attempts to end it, or to gear it exclusively to the ends of certain groups of people. I don't mean to imply above that all of the pissing in the pool by such oppressive social entities has ruined it or destroyed the possibility of its growth. I do mean to say that for the pissing in the pool to have reached the point where it is considered the "responsible" and "rational" approach to the subject is a real coup. And anyone who wants to engage in any other sort of potentially valid approach to the issue has to understand he is facing a discursive hypocrisy of legendary proportions. Perhaps the defining feature of the erotic is that it bugs the hell out of some people for no good reason and that these people have gone to great lengths to suppress it and hand each other laurels for their benevolence and wisdom in so doing. The net result is that the subject becomes closed for discussion, and everyone "just knows" that that is optimal. The oppressive effort didn't just have control as a goal; it had rectitude as one. It really wanted to be in the right. It isn't, and to know that it isn't is the beginning of the individual's journey towards real rewards in this area. Suddenly there is more to talk about than we can even fit into the day. But simultaneously, and for the most rewarding of "reasons," there is the release from the oppressive construction of "reason" and no obligation to "get it all said." And I did mention that that appealed to me, didn't I? :)