Cultural Misogyny Scrolls You on Tinder

I write a lot about the experience of desire, attachment and online dating both in poetry and in essays and in general online. I listen to a lot of men and women complain about the aspects of online dating, commitment, and relationships; and I read a lot of other writing (mostly geared towards women) about how to get a partner, keep a partner, play the game, etc. What I don't read or see a lot about is talk around the bigger picture of how our ideas of love shape attachment, shape relationships, shape our experience of sex and dating and how this translates to a world where we either choose to value and champion love or we don't.

When bell hooks writes in her book All About Love that we can't both have casual sex and casual relationships and want a world filled with love as well, that we can't engage in one act of treating people as though they are expendable and also want to have love in our lives: I believe this is true. But I also am a product of a culture that didn't raise me on love, a marriage that wasn't built on love, numerous relationships that did not hold love, and an addictive cycle of recreating abusive situations that mirror what my early attachment template named love. It took me a long time to even understand that what I thought was love, was in fact not love, and that what I wanted was something I didn't even know about, but I was keenly aware of the lack and not my fantasy and my fiction of what it would be when it arrived. I've been on Tinder watching and tracking abusive cycles of behavior around men and thinking about how that positioned me as a woman. This particular example involves a white hetero male- top of the food chain- and me, a bisexual white woman. But even within those narrow parameters, I want to show you how cultural misogyny is insidious and how it thrives on shame and anger and hatred, because if you've been paying attention, you know that the microcosm of what occurs in private between two people is a small stage of a macrocosm effect of how we treat humans. It is inside of our humanity, it is an infection inside of our species that is tearing us all apart. See we can't relate to the top of the food chain, the most powerful majority in this culture because they both hate and desire the same object: And it's killing all of us.

It is KILLING ALL OF US. And it is not our (read: any person of color or female identifying gender or nonconforming gender or sexual orientation not defined as exclusively straight or child or not identifying and passing as straight white man)  fucking job to fix this.

STRAIGHT WHITE MEN:  THIS is your fucking job to fix. 

Context: I matched with this person, a straight white male, on Tinder on Monday. We texted a bit throughout the day and he told me he wanted to meet someone to fall in love with, he also wanted me to send him naked pictures, and he probably sent me about 40 texts or so throughout the day. He sent me an unsolicited picture of his penis during this, and I sent him no naked pictures in return, which is why probably, on Tuesday, he sent no texts until 8:30 at night. 

And I want to be really clear here before we begin that in no way am I framing him as bad and me as good, him as aggressor and me as victim, him as some lust rager and me as an angelic virgin: See we both lose. We are both losers in this game that we didn't sign on for called cultural misogyny. The game makes men feel powerful and women weak. It offers the illusion of safety and protection for an elite few under the guise of shaming and diminishing the rest of us. But it's a lie. 

We all lose. If you are a man and you desire what you hate, if you want to possess what also sickens you and makes you think "weak" and "vulnerable" or "sensitive" than you have already lost. 

If you drank the cultural misogyny kool-aid that tells you to "grab them by the pussy," you did so at the cost of your humanity. And maybe you don't realize it yet, but it was a high cost to pay. 

And if you are suffering, it's because you keep paying. Not because women won't fuck you or love you or listen to you or understand you. 

You paid the cost of your humanity to be on top in the game. 

"Come fuck me" is the battle cry of broken men. Cultural misogyny has created this chasm between "men" and "women," this binary reductive narrative between the have's and the have-not's. And it should come as no surprise that this is the root of resistance to any gender noncomformity. You can't have a top and a bottom without clear differentials of power. Am I right? 

The reality of blurring the lines between "male" and "female" classifications means cultural misogyny would have to up its game. Who holds the power, well clearly straight men still, but against whom. Against people you actually don't want to fuck. Against people you might want to fuck. Against people who don't want to fuck you.<------- p="">

See cultural misogyny is a lazy philosophy: it was created by men to oppress women. But if we don't know who the women are and if we have others we want to oppress who aren't women,  if we have men who won't be oppressors, who don't hold power in the economy of "straight male" then what? 

If you are a straight white men feeling really attacked right now, welcome to the bottom of the game. We've been waiting for you. 

Come fuck me

is the battle cry of a broken man. 

It holds the illusion of a demand. But it is begging. It is begging to be touched and seen and held and loved. But it doesn't know the language. It doesn't even know the definition of the emotion that is causing this lack: It's been told, it's sex. It's been told it's desire. 

Pornography has nailed into the mind: You don't want to connect with another. What you want is to obliterate another, to use another, to take from another. This what you want. This will make you feel good. This will satisfy you.

And none of it is true. 

Come fuck me. And the slipperiness of misogyny is that women answer the call. 

We have been sold the exact same message. We get none of the power but we get sold the exact same message. And whatever it is we want is lost in a sea of framing that objects us to this body we hold out hope for in finding some measure of humanity left within.  

It's a fool's errand. 

If we laugh and call them Fuckboys, it does not address the problem. If we get angry and call them Fuckboys and complain to our friends, it does not address the problem. 

They say Come fuck me. And a woman will come. 

Because she's been led to believe one of two things: 

This is as good as it will get and at least I'm not alone.

Or

Maybe I can change Come Fuck Me to Come Love Me. 

Cultural Misogyny makes us ALL fucking idiots. 

Connection is what makes us human. The ability to connect. The ability to celebrate each other. The ability to feel safe with one another. Love is the strongest, most powerful emotion in the world. It has the power to give us what we most need, to heal and create and be our best selves. And we are so afraid of it. Ask yourself, why are we shamed into being afraid to love? 

Who does that serve?

How are we framed if we say: Come Love Me.

We are framed as weak, vulnerable, needy, clinging, emotional, effeminate. 

Nothing could be further from the truth: Do you know the emotional bravery and resilience it takes to honestly say to another being: come love me. 

Pornography instills through imagery the idea that sex is power. That the ability to fuck and have a big dick somehow translates to having some power. 

Do you see how ridiculous this set up is? 

No one threatens another person with their ability to love. 

No one says on the offensive: I loved the shit out of the last girl I was with. I loved her so much she knew she was respected and cared for consistently. I have a big 9inch heart that I use to just love and respect all beings. 

That's not threatening. 

But a big dick is a weapon. The ability to fuck someone is a weapon. We say you're fucked when it's not good. See sex in this sense is not sex: It's violence and it's abuse.

And Cultural Misogyny is all about normalizing abuse. 

Cultural Misogyny protects men. And women shelter under the men who are protected by cultural misogyny because they've been told they will be protected too. That's how abuse works: It lies to you. 

It says: It's ok. Come here. I won't hurt you. See I want you. 

Then it rapes you. Then it beats you. Then it degrades you. Then it hates you.

Then it says: Come here. I won't hurt you. See I want you. 

Endlessly.

Being a bisexual woman is sexy when it feeds a man's fantasy of multiple women he can abuse for his pleasure. But he can also slip it off and use it to pin you to the floor. Because if you are not a straight white man in this scenario. You lose. 

It would be easy to dismiss this person as not very bright. As someone clearly struggling with some anger issues and rejection issues and basically acting out like a small child when not getting their way. And that's all true. But what is also true is that this is a man, not a child. 

This is a man who is a father to two sons. 

This is someone who is teaching future men how to treat women. 

This is a man who has a mother and who has sons who have a mother, and presumably some love was felt for one of these two, perhaps both at some point. 

So how do you love women and hate them. What does that do to a person? 

How do you raise your sons to hate the being who housed and birthed them. What does that do to a boy? 

It doesn't matter if it is a truth that this person is or is not with someone else. 

If they are, clearly what they feel is not love as their actions do not indicate love. 

If they are lying, they clearly do not understand love and so lack it in their life.

And at the end of the day, the person you are with is you.

That's the only person you are ever with.

And if you hate what you desire, then you hate part of you. If you abuse what you also want, you are abusive and you are in exact opposition to love.  The only truth in all of these statements is the bald faced lie of being able to be in love with anything in a state of cultural misogyny.

You cannot love truly what you cannot see clearly. 

And right now, men: You cannot see us. 

You are blinded by the hate fed to you as power, fed to you as privilege, fed you as safety and "locker room" talk and women being "so sensitive" and how strong you are and how you don't need to "feel" things or get too "attached" or talk about your "feelings."

ALL of these narratives are fucking stupid: STOP WASTING OUR TIME

Men: Is this the world you want? 

You have the power to stop this. It's the only power you have. 

I have two daughters and a son and this power game: It is not ok for any of them. 

I don't want my son to speak like this to women. 

I don't want a man to speak like this to my daughters. 

I don't want my daughters to speak this way to men. 

I don't want anyone who wants love and affection to use power and abuse to get them. 

I don't want sex to be violence and abuse when it is anything but that. 

But it will happen if we keep holding up the smallest messages we send to one another in private as ok when they really are abusive to all of us. 

GHOST: ménage à trois

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In the infamous "GHOST" pottery scene, Demi Moore’s character, Molly, and Patrick Swayze’s character, Sam, have a seductive moment while both shaping a phallic mold of clay on the pottery wheel. The “other” in this instance is the phallus on the wheel, which they both grasp. And it is the most seductive source of the scene, not the later images where they fumble through clothes groping each other as The Righteous Brothers croon in the background. It is the initial moment when their hands, wet and covered in clay reach out to grasp and hold the phallus, to stroke and mold around the head of it: That leaves the impression.

The subtext of the cuckolding of Sam is woven throughout the film. Or the reality of the triangulation of desire, that the ultimate state of seduction is not on the body but is on the mind’s knowledge that desire is being witnessed.

In an incredible beyond the dead cuckold scene, the ghost of Sam witnesses his former friend now murderer, try to seduce his fiancé. Carl makes a move spilling coffee on his shirt in order to remove it so that he can display his masculine chest, a nod back to the opening scene in the film where two shirtless men, Carl and Sam, flank a diminutive overall wearing Demi Moore as they sledge hammer a wall down. Three bodies, some partially clothed, covered in sweat and grime wielding heavy tools as they demolish a wall. The question of desire here is whom does Carl actually desire? Does he desire to possess Molly or to possess Sam whose life he will take or both? Is Carl metaphorically the phallic mold on the pottery wheel that if Sam and Molly could have reached out to grasp would have changed the arc of the story? Did Sam and Molly take Carl to bed after this initial renovation scene and we missed it? Is it the missing link as to why Sam’s best friend seemingly went off the rails, murdered Sam for a measly 80K and then preceded to follow it up by attempting to murder two women.  Or is it because they couldn’t take him to bed, they couldn’t enact the unspoken desire created by their triangle because their heteronormative coupling outline did not allow it.  Or are we to believe Carl is just evil and this is just the evil men do?

Sam ends the cuckold scene where he is silent witness to Carl’s seduction of Molly by knocking over a picture, essentially finding his ability to enact his will upon the scene even without his corporeal body to stand in place. This is pivotal because the other underlying desire in GHOST is belief.

Does desire occur in the body or the mind? Does love lie in language, actions or in our will to believe in it?

Parameters of desire: Demi Moore’s body versus Whoopi Goldberg’s body

what is the fluidity involved in the traditional ghost story as transitional from here to there, alive to dead, between worlds… corporeal or spirit.

The most complicated threesome in the movie is enacted on the women's bodies. 

Of course it is.... the most complicated threesomes in every movie are enacted on women's bodies. 

Whoopi Goldberg's character, Oda Mae Brown, agrees to allow Sam to inhabit her body in order to have a physical form to touch Molly.  The complications of a white man inhabiting an African American woman's body in order to enact desire on a white woman's body is such a nesting doll of political and ethical difficulties that I would have to dedicate another blog post just to this one scene. 

The way that this scene is filmed speaks to how difficult the subject matter is: Once Sam inhabits Oda Mae's body, we never see her body touching Molly's. We instead enter a fantasy where we bear witness to Sam, now incorporeal again, having a tender scene with his wife. This heteronormative fantasy is so powerful, we literally suspend the reality of what is happening. 

Think about that for a minute: We forget what is happening when we are presented with a powerful hegemonic fantasy. 

This is how culture works.  Thankfully, Goldberg won an Oscar for this role, because the amount of emotional labor she probably had to do to perform this scene is beyond language. The suppression of self to be more palatable is never not vicious.

“And I won an Oscar because of Patrick Swayze,” Goldberg said. In her 1991 Oscar speech, she thanked Swayze, calling him “a stand-up guy.”

The first time I touched a penis I cried. Surely, this scene holds some meaning.

"Mimetic Desire" as Rene Girard explains it is the desire for objects or people influenced by others. So our desire then is not our own, but influenced by the other's desire. We enact and are subjected to mimetic desire every day endlessly. It is the basis of all advertising and marketing, but how does it then slip into the language of love? 

Online dating is the epitome of mimetic desire in the domain of romantic desire. An endless scrolling of available choices dilutes the possibility of specialized desire to nothing. When confronted with endless possibility, we believe the fantasy. We forget the reality in order to believe the slip of the camera, which shows us we have choices and options; we are indeed in control of our relations with others. The opposite of freedom is actually the possibility of infinite choices that don't feed us, but in fact deplete us. See Capitalism. See Consumerism. See what we have done to the place we call home in the name of being an "urbanized" society. 

How do we confront risk when faced with it all? And/ or if we do dissolve the notion of specialized love are we as a species actually ready for the idea of unconditional love. 

I'm fascinated by the changes in the conversation from when I began dating as a teen in the early 90s to today with options in contrast to monogamy that exist now. But what I find is the conversations and ideas around open/ poly/ ethical nonmonogamy are leading before the practice. And perhaps this is how it must go. Perhaps the idea must be taken into the community, disseminated and then practiced before the actual concept can take root. 

Most people I've met who either successfully or unsuccessfully practice any of the above rules of relationship parameters seem to still operate in the sphere of specialized love and the sphere of specialized love requires hierarchy, and hierarchy then leads to power struggles. 

Srećko Horvat in his book: The Radicality of Love states: 

This is the meaning of "falling in love." We take the risk, whatever the consequences might be. Even if we are aware that this fatal encounter will change the very coordinates of our daily lives, we insist on it precisely because of that. What else is there to be done?

What can be done?

What can be done?

Perhaps we could remember we were a species who did not always fall for the trap of specialized love, perhaps we can remember as a species that control of people begins in the roots of how we are taught to love and how we receive love. And that no equality or freedom exists when we love one above another. 

Perhaps...

The Righteous Brothers’s 1965 cover of “Unchained Melody”

Oh, my love
My darling
I've hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time

And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?

I need your love
I need your love
God speed your love to me

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea
To the open arms of the sea
Yes, lonely rivers sigh, "Wait for me, wait for me
I'll be coming home, wait for me"

Oh, my love
My darling
I've hungered, hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time

And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?

I need your love
I need your love
God speed your love to me

Nonnormative Desire: NaPoMo Day 1

"Desire is the essence of a man, that is, the endeavor whereby a man endeavors to persist in his own body"   -Spinoza


desire in the sense of priority: behind what to what
relegate compartment the "prime" life outside
of much difficult for me, consolidate
or a how much allowed space
by extension how it manifests
by repression how it manifests
& if not privileged, channeled
a narrowing begins to shallow root
fistfuls of danger to the lip
exposed to trail in a mere human
skinned version of lovely
for me nothing, easy
& need, a bellowing reminder
could not come swiftly 
to think of ourselves formally
and foremost sexual absent of other
is the epicenter of rupture in representation




[ when we met three years ago, i said, i don't ever want to be in a monogamous relationship again. we agreed to live in each other lives open to the reality of our desires. and it was naive to think that would be the edge of it. that the negotiation of property isn't always happening. what we agree to is being here by choice and not ignoring what we need. or is it to privilege desire to need. is it hedonistic or pathological to submit. can't you be filled with the properties of worth by the work you do, the dailiness of survival threatening to trample. escape hatch we disappear into the normative spheres of distrust, how another pulls self into a void of expectation. i think distinctly about the holes blown open. shot through your life is the trauma played out on your body before you could even articulate the purpose of this vessel and it maps all the way down. to the deep core at which being filled means being a woman, being filled means i have to take it, that strangeness. embody the quick assault of intrusion & how the excision of control means i must be a kind of broken that can't heal lick its own wounds to satisfaction. the reason i often choose bodies other to mine is that i understand them less. what must occur in the mind of the intruder. the mind of the one who can't stay. here where i hold you, old familiar of how we began. once upon. a linking we were all mostly made from star dust. and it all shines the same. ]


"what is considered real and true is a question of power"  -Foucault

"Pussy like girls, damn, is my pussy gay?
It's a holiday- Play with my pussy day!
Pussy this, pussy that, pussy cakin'
Pussy ride dick like she a Jamaican
Pussy stay warm, pussy on vacation
You loose bitches need a pussy renovation
You can eat it with a pussy reservation
Pussy 'bout to get a standing ovation"

-Nicki Minaj

Day 14: Fantasea Gaze, babygirl

“babygirl got options, right?” –Azealia Banks

“In the pornographic scene, there is nothing for me to say” –Luce Irigaray

babygirl knows a type of owning

babygirl says you own it &  you do

babygirl silhouetted made rock hard

indigenous, a marbleized pressure, a sense

of urgency fissures: babygirl doesn’t blur

pain is a way of unhooking

babygirl to another this is a type of dissolving

when the strap, when forcing

babygirl knows a take is taking

neck taut, a gasping, babygirl

feminist porn is a fantasea, watering

under a gaze he makes her lick

the sweet pulse and called bitch she

when he meant receptacle, when he

intended stuck, cardboard a dolly

cascade of images if it pleases him

there are so many lines between what

you can do, think you can string

to string a phrasing

stuffing of words : a gagging

a throttle lip of panic

babygirl drips & drips, so good, so easy

there’s a hurting  then a hurt

babygirl calculates a breaking

she’s a hole of wreck & wonder

& then filled filling, he follows orders

it’s hard to forget what it is: babygirl