[733] Truth Rapists

I feel like if I don't write about this now while I don't feel anything, the thoughts are only going to become corrupted by anger that cause them to drift further away from what needs to be explored.

I really don't know how to begin. I say this often, but this time it's really important because the different parts that need to weave together actually speak to one larger point and isn't a million random roads trying to make sense of it all. Keep this in mind if any one damming sentiment starts off a paragraph, as that was just a door or window into the house I'm trying to construct.

I was finally de-friended by my ex. In her words, “I can't justify you as a friend.” She explained that she couldn't figure out how to defend herself, or me, when I came up in conversation. Instead of attempting to anymore, better out of sight and out of mind.

What was she being asked to defend? Well, to start our conversation she straight up asks the million dollar question, “Did you rape Girl?” I go, “What the fuck? Fuck no?” You see, for several months, not only has the “overly masculine” tenor of our friend group in common come under question, spurred on by #metoo, but the sole player who set everyone up to fail in general was zeroed down to me. That failure consists of either setting the party conditions, condoning shitty behavior, or otherwise being completely unable to change or recognize when what I'm doing has made someone uncomfortable.

I feel for the sake of trying to keep coherent, and relative brevity, we need to pass right over a discussion of endless interpretations, the fallibility of memory, fickle nature of feelings, and otherwise previously noted angry agendas one might bring to that conversation.

But to quickly put a bow on my understanding of the night and girl in question. I sat down on a couch next to her after a bit of dancing. She rubs on my leg. I rub on her arm. Wink wink, nudge nudge, I literally ask her if she wants to go fool around. She says yes, follows me upstairs, through the living room, outside to the side of the house, quick little make out, quick enough sex to not encounter anyone on a smoke break, and we head back inside. I, in an open relationship, sit down next to my ex and say, “Dammit, I just had sex with Girl.” She laughs and goes, “Really? Why?” The only answer that makes sense is drunk and generally horny.

I don't know about you, but people who rape don't seem to ask the girl if she wants to have sex, do it semi-publically, and then sit down next to their girlfriend and talk about how dumb it was to fool around with someone they weren't attracted to. It was perhaps rude, or crass, or slutty, but the way you call it rape is from a collection of forces I hope to describe going forward.

I've been on the outs with, at least the females, of that college group for some time. You know, or maybe you don't, when no matter what you say when or how it will always be wrong? I'm not saying you even did something wrong, but you've found a person that were you to bring them flowers, they'll tell the world you tried to cause them an allergic reaction meant to kill them? Well, I was getting a lot of that. Often, this is related to me as a difference between “thinkers” and “feelers,” so named. While I want to analyze and break down words, they just want to call me a name, make sure I believe it, and we both walk away healthier or better for it? In that I understand they felt really bad and it manifested as a measure of how terrible I am, therefore now we're better?

Honestly, in the years I've been writing, not a single person has ever bothered to explain why this is better, mature, healthy, or something I should just accept.

So, with one of the girls it was jumping down my throat about relaying my desperate feelings under an article she posted about dying polar bears. You see, I'm not allowed to feel, or tell you about it. That spiraled into a whole thing I've already written about. Then, another girl comes to town and I text if her and her boy want to hang out. A follow up text resulted in a clap back, in modern parlance, essentially shuffling me back in my corner for daring to ask or want to hang in the first place. Probably the first pin in these cascading examples of “fuck that guy” was a wholly terrible conversation where I, probably stupidly, decided to try and gain insight from another girl about my ex, another, highly liked, saga that I thought required a breakdown.

Mind you, none of the guys who are with these girls have given me shit nor changed their attitude, nor said they were right on board with setting me adrift on the ice sheet for my misdeeds or words. Either all of these girls are with complicit lying cowards, or they've all accepted something vital to a lasting relationship that I ignore to the degree in which I seek to alienate myself. It's not an either/or, but it also is.

So I've got angry girls, who I've made so before #metoo, who are every ounce of the chatty gossip dick heads that everyone I hung out with was or is, cooking for months. Now Girl, fairly good friends with one of them, shares her story. Damage I've managed to do in the last 2 or 3 years, combined with the reimagining of the past with fervent moment energy, more than enough for more contributions to the cascading damnation of my character, a galling man, no less.

Can you take all that in as one or two pieces, or one or two windows? The next part is more personal and about my relationship with my ex.

I've said many times I knew we were doomed to fail. I wasn't looking forward to it, but I knew, like I generally always know, people. I don't mean generally. I mean individuals. I know what's running their machinery. I know it despite my convoluted ways of attempting to describe. I know it in ways that I try to contradict in efforts to be “normal,” in some Hollywood or cliché fashion. The only reason I know it is because I was forced to look and pay attention in order to avoid causing myself harm. So, I know that she never “loved” me, in the broadest sense of the term. I know, in the least condescending way the idea can be conveyed, that I started the relationship a jaded old whore, and she was an enthusiastic child.

What do children do? They play with things. They test things. They're generally open to new experiences. That's great! For a jaded old whore, yet also overgrown child, like myself. I can make it fun and lead her into worlds and behaviors she wouldn't necessarily pick by herself. This is key. I'm a novelty. I'm not “[redacted]” at this point. I'm a point of intrigue and a tool for her self-actualization. It's worth noting, I don't even have to claim this as conjecture, she literally described her process this way yesterday evening.

I also frame it like this because I hesitate to simply regard her as “maliciously selfish.” I believe the naivety overrules malcontent. I don't think she played me, but I do think she was playing with me. I, like a romantic fool, took my feelings and time investment and willingness to be open to more than my high-school forlorn teenager perspective, and ran with it. I had the hottest girl. She had qualities I thought complimented or I might learn to adopt a measure of. She had interests independent of mine. She seemed to surround herself with a measure of also caring, informed, or otherwise worthwhile individuals. Can't really ask for more, on paper. So, how do you justify having a tool in your arsenal that's outdated?

Here I think it's worth noting that for all of my worries concerning my potential malevolence in manipulating people or treating them as objects, or hell, even direct condemnations of my character alleging as such devoid of all evidence, my crowning testament on my built up concept of “friends” was to do the exact opposite of this kind of behavior. It was live and let live. It was meet people where they are. It was accept their quirks or habits or issues as them, and just be a good goddamn friend. For that matter, it's still what I believe in, even if I persistently stab or have forgone more monolithic conceptions of “friend.” Even if my slutty behavior registers as a measure of shame or regret in someone else, I don't think sex is unfriendly, unless you're a rapist.

We've got child-like love interest, women of a certain age pairing off and resentful, the cultural zeitgeist of every man is a rapist devil, my general, at least questionable, behavior and attitude compounding over years, and then I serve up hundreds of blogs discussing fucked up topics or ideas and picking apart what it means to manipulate or relate, throw in a few niggas here and there, and the soup never stops blending. How could anyone justify that? As an idea, even before a tool. What kind of horrible monster did these poor girls find themselves entangled with?

The only thing I wish to testify to my character, because god knows my words are horrible, is the opinion of the friends who don't behave like that. It’s the relationships I've had since high-school or elementary school, who don't entertain for months or years the idea that I'm a rapist before they choose to call or ask me about it. What are friends for? Gossip, intolerance, and vitriol? No no. They're supposed to let you know what's fucked up. They're supposed to see and relate things to you, that while maybe obvious to them, you've pathologized. Should I trust the message after it's gone through the process described above? Do I need to look inward at my horrible soul in a way I never have before now that finally, all of these people who've, on significantly less serious issues, shown themselves as hostile witnesses or implacably biased juries?

Maybe now we've got 5 or 6 windows: Zeitgeist shit storm, I'm an impossibly (so much I don't even exist!) easy target, complicated mess of feeling-based judgment thrown in gossip-cycle, general children and child-like proclivities abound, and my “hopeful” (willful?) blindness about what I perceived to be things as “as good as you can get” with regard to friendships beyond the realm of my “quasi-sociopathic” ones.

Still with me? Then a quick reiteration and aside.

One of the things that concerns me considerably more than choosing to do something stupid is the idea that I would be wildly surprised by how much damage I'm causing carrying on in the way I do. The Girl who claims rape? That fucking sucks to think that all the atmosphere and ideas and work I've put towards trying to stop having sex vilified or be used as this all-encompassing testament to misused power or misunderstood connection would be regarded as “he possibly raped someone” by the people most involved in creating that fucking atmosphere! And no, I didn't say it sucks that she would feel that way. It does. But that's, honestly, not something I can understand without throwing everything about me and how I understand the world off a cliff. Today we talk about things like “affirmative consent.” We say things like, “she can't give consent if she's drunk.” By the overtly-”safe” and, if not at least often impractical, metrics of today, I apparently couldn't give consent either, as I'd been drinking too, or should have taken her word “yes” and accompanying head nod and follow as a warning of impropriety?

And what kind of person who isn't wholly behind a cliche hippie-adjacent sex ideology (I've never heard of them taking to rape either) takes to the page, twice now, to delineate his potentially shit behavior? Methinks he doth protest too much? Fuck you! You can't protest ridiculous irrational debasement of people enough. Would I be the first to introduce you to the cultural psychosis that is Trump?

Let's try to bring it home.

All of this is to attempt to speak to the house in which your mind rests. Is your opinion the rumor mill, or the investigation? Is your concept of “friend” the direct confrontation and open acceptance and engagement, or the punching bag? Is your first impulse to deny there's a person there at all, or to give them such the benefit of the doubt that you'd earnestly hope and spend 5 years with them, and then not even be angry or blame them after the dust settles and you figure out how talk about it? I figured out how to talk about it, she figured out how to get rid of her old tool. I'm willing to get into the weeds of drunk sex behavior, because I'm not ambiguous about where I feel I sit in relation to the people I've had or wanted to have sex with. Has the thought “Yeah, I'm gonna fuck this bitch and she's gonna like it and can't stop me” ever crossed my mind? Not until now in order to write it or without more irony than there's words for. Is that a melodramatic depiction meant to disguise my otherwise sly and corrupt soul that could justify anything? Of course, if you want it to be. I don't have 740 blogs of insight into my being and hundreds of relationships or sexual encounters over years that should give me the benefit of the doubt. Girl felt bad that for 2 dissatisfying minutes, I turned her as slutty as I am. Just like the girls felt bad that I chose to question when they put words in my mouth, or described feelings I didn’t have, behind something I said they disliked.

Who, right now, is leaning towards a sentiment that I'm trying to bash or unfairly stereotype women? Can the ones who feel that way even see the previous sentence? Because what I did was stop and think about my phrasing. I took my opposition's side and imagined what they feel like as someone's ex, or who empathizes hard-core with any girl who's felt violated. And I know that, while I, explicitly, am making a larger point about the lens from which to view the world and the people in it, I have juxtaposed a “relationship story” against a less than deferential tone about #metoo, employed trigger words like “gossip” and “naive” with regard to women, and denied myself the opportunity to demonize sex or masculinity as inherently evil and precarious. Clearly, I just don't understand the depth of the feelings that should render my perspective mute. I'm basically Trump.

Now, go on, opposite-world engine, do your thing. I'll hide behind my enablers and words until it's time to execute. Because, again, I already know what you want, and how you go about getting it.