Skinny

The girls in coming of age stories are sooooooo often skinny.

The heroine is thin (often “reed thin”) while her best friend is plump, has breasts, and is (or is becoming) interested in sex. Or, rather, tantalizing boys and men.

The thin heroine is perceived by the thoughtless world as the plump girl’s aide de camp. We know better.

This set up pissed me off as a girl – plump, with breasts – and pisses me off now.

Laziness. Just annoying laziness. Give a character tits as a shorthand for an interest in venery. Feh.

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Someone is wrong on the internet

Their sexuality is all about gender.

Mine isn’t. I do care what’s in someone’s pants. I have desired male and female people. I desire them on the basis of their bodies. Not their gender.

Desire

I hate when I read yet another woman declaring that she’s asexual.  I expect to read a particular narrative, and I’m rarely wrong.

A woman in a long term (ten years or more) relationship with a man (often her husband, sometimes the father of her kids) no longer enjoys (or never much enjoyed) sex with her partner. He was [one of her first five sexual partners | the first man she bedded and liked | her first non-abusive relationship]. He wants a slew of sexual stuff that at best leaves her neutral.  Mostly she doesn’t want what he wants or him.

Then she has an epiphany. She’s asexual! Of course she doesn’t want to bang him.

But they don’t have to break up.  Because it’s not that she doesn’t like him as a lover.  It’s not that he disgusts her (and he does). The issue is she that she’s off all sex. And always was.

Why don’t I celebrate?  Why don’t I believe?

I doubt this narrative because I live in a society in which women’s sexual desire is frowned upon.  It’s (almost) ok if a woman wants everything and every man.  Particular desires though, or changing desires: those are frightening and wrong. Men don’t react well to hearing “Nah, not you.” But “Nah, no one. Ever” is believable.  That situates blame correctly: an aberrant woman.

 

 

Recursion

I post in a few places on the internet.

People who frequent those places probably think I go on about everything endlessly.

I post much less than write though. I write some eloquent opinion or brilliant advice. Then I read it again delete at least half of it. Sometimes (about half the time) I just cancel the whole thing.

After all, who wants to read a self-serving anecdote about me?

Not the same

Many years ago I told my mother I was seeing a woman. “Oh yes,” she said “I have feelings for women too.”

“Ma,” sez I, “I don’t have feelings for J. I fuck her.”

And yeah it’s still true. I don’t have feelings for men or women. I fuck them.

Mine

I don’t want to do other people’s aikido.

I hadn’t thought until recently that I want to do my aikido.

I have only recently accepted that there is such a thing as my aikido. There are a few insights I’ve had that are uncommon. I have an approach to learning.

The insights aren’t (that) new. The recognition that they are insights is.

Huh.

Titanium

I’m fairly high ranked.

Last summer, the technical committee approved a rank promotion for me.   The two people on the committee whom I know best started treating me differently.

One of them has been talking to me about his training, how he perceives aikido, what he’s trying to accomplish when he teaches. (He used to just tell me jokes.) Sometimes he’ll repeat some of what he’s said in class.  Sometimes it’s different.

For years I’ve taken his classes when I could, because there’s at least one moment of  shoshin.

Recently though, I sometimes get something else.  Not every technique. Not even every class. I don’t think I’m figuring out what he does any better than in the past (and I don’t care really, I don’t want to do what he does). Instead, after being befuddled by whatever he’s doing, I start my technique and it is more than technique.  Well, no, of course it isn’t.  It’s lighter, stronger, joyful technique.

Even though I get this expansion most frequently in his classes, it’s not unique to them.  I’m starting to be titanium all over.

Yippee!