Author Archives: tacit

Movie Review: Captain America: The Winter Wonderland

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I know, as I have mentioned before, approximately fuckall about the Marvel comic universe. I have heard of Captain America, but I’ve never read any of the comic books nor seen the first movie. So when the Internetverse was all abuzz for this new movie, filmed on a budget $95,000,000 higher than the cost of India’s Mars probe currently winging its cold and lonely way to the Red Planet, I was quite possibly the only citizen of the United States not consumed by the fires of anticipation. What wonders would the movie bring? How would it advance the franchise? Beats me. I don’t even know who Captain America is.

I am talking, of course, about the second (but for me, the first) installment of the Marvel cash juggernaut:

As the movie begins, we see Sonic the Hedgehog Captain America out on his regular morning jog, where he’s trotting around Washington’s tourist attractions at an average speed of approximately 40 miles an hour without even sweating, because sweating is gross and Captain America doesn’t do gross things. He zips past the Comic Relief, then zips past the Comic Relief again, then zips past the Comic Relief yet again–you know, just to make the point. The engage in dialog, of the sort that tells you we will be seeing more of the Comic Relief later in the movie. The plot wedges here for a few moments when suddenly, Sonic America Captain Hedgehog is notified that a Situation has developed and he should Prepare For Extraction. Quite why he’s out jogging when it’s clear he is in far better than great shape and has superhuman abilities is never adequately explored, given that we as the audience are left with the distinct impression that failure to get enough exercise is not really on the good captain’s surrealistically short list of character flaws.

The rest of the movie goes something like this…

Clicky here! But beware, here be spoilers.

“We are not given a good life or a bad life.”

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I haven’t been writing much here lately, because I have been hard at work writing our book about polyamory. At 160,000 words, it’s well north of the New Testament and a bit north of The Two Towers in size. It turns out polyamory is complicated, and we have a lot to say about it.

However, I’m taking a break from writing about polyamory because I’ve started seeing this meme pop up all over the Internetverse, and it’s reached the point where I have to say something about it. I think it’s symptomatic of the problem of privilege.

I get what it’s trying to say. Really, I do.

But it’s wrong.

Yes, some people are given a bad life or a good life. We do not all start from a neutral place. Take this kid, for example. He would, I’m sure, be quite happy to have been given a life that was neither bad nor good:

This photo, by South African news photographer Kevin Carter, won a Pulitzer Prize. It documents the effects of famine in Sudan, in which more than 70,000 people died. Carter later committed suicide; in his suicide note, he wrote, “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain…of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.”

Look at this kid. Then look at wealthy heiress Paris Hilton, out doing what she does best (which is, near as I can tell, “getting photographed partying”):

Then look back at the slave labor camps in North Korea, which are used to punish political dissidents “to the third generation.” People are born in these slave camps, grow up, and die (often of torture, beatings, or starvation) here, without ever knowing anything else.

The meme might more accurately say “white middle-class Westerners born into progressive democracies are not given a good life or a bad life.” But to be fair, perhaps that’s what’s meant by “we.”

For those who aren’t white middle-class Westerners in progressive democracies, there most definitely are good lives and bad. Not all lives have the same opportunity for choice and direction. Not everyone can choose to better their conditions; those born into North Korean Labor Camp 15, which is believed to hold as many as 30,000 slaves, certainly can’t.

Like I said, I get the point of the meme. I am a huge believer in empowerment myself; I have written a great deal about how the choices we make affect our lives, for good or ill.

But I also recognize that, to a large extent, this is a privilege–one that should properly belong to everyone, but doesn’t. Not everyone can choose to make their lives good or bad. The way we’re born matters; Paris Hilton can shrug off bad choices that would destroy many people who are born into a less privileged position, and just keep on keepin’ on.

Yes, make choices that make your life better. Yes, move in the direction of greatest courage. But when you do, don’t forget to be grateful that you can. It’s not your fault that people are born into situations horrifying beyond anything you can imagine, but it’s your responsibility to acknowledge that not everyone is in the same position as you are. Some people are given a bad life. If you’re not one of them, you’re fortunate, but don’t forget they exist.

And if your response is “lighten up, it’s just a Facebook meme!”–perhaps you aren’t paying attention.

Winter is coming

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My sweetie Shelly has written another blog post over at More Than Two. I hope one day to be as wise, compassionate, and insightful as she is.

This post is called “Winter Is Coming,” and it’s about how entering relationships that disempower us can destroy us, even if we knew the conditions when we signed on. There’s a good deal of stuff about the relationship history between her and I in there, and some of that was painful to me to read.

I think there are warnings in here for anyone contemplating a prescriptive polyamorous relationship. We often say that any relationship structure is A-OK as long as the people involved consent to be there. I am not entirely sure that’s true. There are some arrangements which, by their very nature, are not only thickly sown with the seeds of coercion, but almost guaranteed to allow those seeds to germinate…and the cost is very high.

You can read the essay here. Here’s the teaser:

But primary/secondary structures tend to leave a special kind of emotional wreckage. While I freely admit that it is often a mutually beneficial model for all involved, there is a hidden trap. Because sometimes we walk into this structure, with heart in hand, and sometimes our partner meets us there. And then the structure becomes a maze of slamming doors and booby traps. When your partner meets you with real intimacy and love within an externally enforced and non-negotiable framework of limitations, the emotional experience of the relationship is of being simultaneously pulled in and violently shoved out. The cognitive dissonance is even worse. Self-advocacy is often interpreted as homewrecking, and disruptions to the status quo are seen as a hostile act. Remember, you signed up for this, you’re breaking the contract, you’re the bad guy. But don’t be cruel and break his heart, don’t be disruptive and speak for your own. just… just want something else, feel something else, BE SOMEONE ELSE.

So, there is a special place, at the bottom of all of that, where you realize that the only truly “right” thing you can do is just… find a way to disappear. But not with an explosion (you drama queen). Just find a way to disappear quietly so that no one notices. Do the right thing and just…go away.

Large-scale hack attack against Twitter?

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I woke up late this morning, had breakfast, made some tea, checked my Twitter feed (as one does), and in amongst all the pictures of cats, half-naked selfies, BDSM porn, and links to articles about neurophysiology and evolutionary biology that make up my Twitter feed, I noticed something very odd. About 15% of my Twitter followers were posting things that look like this:

And imagine my surprise when one of the accounts posting these types of messages belonged to me; namely, my Promiscuity Keepers Twitter feed, where I post links to articles about sex and sexuality.

So it appears there’s a pretty large attack going on against Twitter right now. I am not sure if the attack is simply a brute-force hack against account passwords, or if the hackers have somehow penetrated Twitter itself and made off with lists off accounts and (hashed? hashed and salted? exposed?) passwords. Because of the suddenness and number of accounts compromised, my gut says it might be an attack on Twitter’s servers directly, rather than a brute-force attack against individual accounts. (The password I use is, of course, a long string of letters and numbers, rather than, say, the word “password” or “secret” or the other hideously insecure passwords people often use.)

I logged in to my Twitter account (after some faffing with Twitter’s “forgot my password” link) and discovered something interesting: The hackers are authorizing malicious Twitter apps with read/write access, presumably to mass-broadcast spam to many Twitter accounts at once.

Resetting a password on a hacked account without revoking access to these malicious apps will allow the hackers to retain control of the account. It’s possible the hackers are using these malicious apps to gain control of the hacked accounts directly, by forging permission to allow the account to authorize the apps.

In any event, the Spamvertised links all point to a Web site hosted by a German Web hosting firm called plusserver.de. It’s a Russian-language file-sharing site, and each of the Spamvertised links claims to be a driver package for some model of computer.

Naturally, I downloaded one of these files, then uploaded it to Virustotal for analysis. And, unsurprisingly, it’s malware:

InstallMonster is a malware package designed to cheat online advertisers out of money for the virus writers. Whenever a user of an infected computer clicks on certain Web links, the malware changes the link in such a way as to make it seem like the click came from a revenue sharing, advertising, or affiliate marketing site, and the malware writer receives a small commission for the click.

The malware is sold openly from a Russian-language site called getfile.eu, hosted by a Web hosting outfit in Cyprus called hostzealot.com.

So to recap: Attackers are gaining access to large numbers of Twitter accounts and using them to spam malware. The malware is an off-the-shelf package designed to allow its users to profit from click fraud; the malware authors operate a site hosted on hostzealot.com. The compromised Twitter accounts have read/write access granted by malicious Twitter apps. They’re being used to spread links to the InstallMonster malware, probably not from the malware’s actual authors, but from people who’ve bought a copy of InstallMonster and customized it to direct money to them. (That’s increasingly the way the malware industry works: people create turnkey malware kits which they then sell to other criminals.)

IF YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT IS HACKED: It’s not enough just to change your password! You must also go to your Apps control panel in your profile and revoke access to the malicious apps!

Rant Part II: How Not To Be a Dick To Women

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With all the pushback on (and off) the Internet to any suggestion that perhaps men could maybe refrain from treating women poorly, one might get the impression that we were talking about, say, taking all the money the NFL normally makes in a year and investing it in fusion power research or something equally unreasonable. How, the thinking seems to be, can men reasonably be expected to act like decent human beings toward women when we have all these throbbing biological urges? I mean, what if we see a woman, who’s, like, totally hot? Surely acting like a decent human being doesn’t have to apply to women who are totally hot, does it? If we treat a totally hot woman like a human being, how will she know we want to put our pee-pee in her sex burrow? And what about women who don’t make Mister Happy happy…if we treat them like human beings, how will they know we don’t find them attractive?

It’s madness! I mean, really. Treat women as people? All of them? Without constantly getting all up in their faces about whether we want to sex them or not? That’s just…it’s just…it…

…well, it turns out it’s really not that hard to do.

Listen, guys, here it is. You just…think of her like she’s a person. Someone who’s a friend, even. And then you act accordingly.

Listen, I know it sounds totes whack. It goes against everything we’re taught to believe about maximizing our chances of getting to do that thing with our pee-pees. But bear with me. All it takes is a little practice, and then you, too, might be a guy who’s a decent human being and totally not a complete shitcamel.

Let me walk you through some scenarios, so you can get a feel for how this works.

Scenario 1: You’re approaching a door. There are people behind you.

If you hold the door open for people, congratulations! You’re a decent person.

If you hold the door open for women, but not for men, danger! You’re probably a misogynist.

If you hold the door only for women you want to put your pee-pee on, guess what? You’re a shitcamel.

Scenario 2: You’re on an online dating site. You spend six hours pouring your heart out in a carefully crafted message to this cute little something something whose soulful eyes make you think she could be the light of your life, and whose big bazoongas make you want to do that thing with your pee-pee. After you send it, she doesn’t email you back.

If you just go about the rest of your life, go you! You’re a decent person.

If you write her a follow-up email telling her that she owes you a response, uh-oh. Misogyny ho!

If you send her a follow-up email filled with (a) every swear word at your disposal, (b) vivid descriptions of what a bitch she is for wounding you so grievously, (3) angry rants about what unpleasant fate should befall her, or (4) pictures of your junk, I’m afraid the prognosis is: shitcamel.

Scenario 3: You see a woman talking about how creepy it is to hit on women in elevators.

If you listen respectfully and adjust your behavior and expectations accordingly, woohoo! You’re a decent person.

If you respond with a defensive lecture about how you’re totally not one of those guys and she’s just trying to say that all men are rapists, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but that that’s your misogyny.

If you go on a rant about how she’s totally saying all men are rapists and she deserves to be raped for it…well, there’s only one mathematical equation that accurately models your reaction. You = shit + camel.

Scenario 4: Women are talking about how linking birth control to employment insurance policies basically means their boss gets to tell them how to have sex. You:

…listen to what they’re saying, think about it, and realize that, actually, it is pretty messed up that the person who hires you gets to tell you how the insurance benefits you earn as part of your labor should be used, and having an employer making your decisions in the bedroom is kind of creepy. Go you! Decent person!

…say “well, you know, the employer is paying for this insurance, so the employer controls how it’s used.” Wait, what? The employer is paying a salary too, does that mean the employer gets a vote on what you buy on Amazon.com? Bzzt. Your misogyny is showing.

…say “well, you know, that slut can just pay for it herself if she wants to go slutting around.” Hello, shitcamel! One hump or two?

Scenario 5: You’re out chilling with the boys, and someone tells this absolutely hysterical rape joke. It’s funny because she is violated against her will! Get it? Get it?

You put on your best blank “no, I don’t get it” face, turn to your friend, and say “No, I don’t get it. What’s funny about women being violated again?” Score one for being a decent person! Extra special decent person points if you deliberately construct a social group of people who already get why that shit ain’t funny.

You don’t say anything. After all, if you don’t laugh, that means you’re not like those guys, right? Bzzt! Wrong. If you just sit there, they might assume you’re a little slow, but hey, you’re still just like they are. Sorry, your misogyny (and privilege) are showing.

You laugh, because nothing is as absolutely hysterical as talking about women getting violated! Plus, when those feminist harpies start shrieking about how uncool it is, you get exasperated because clearly they just don’t get it. For God’s sake, it’s only a joke! Free speech! Free speech! Heigh-ho, shitcamel! What’s your camel-made-of-shit encore, putting on blackface and joking about Negroes wanting the vote or something? They’re all just jokes, right? Free speech!

Some thoughts on privilege: Look, it isn’t about your guilt.

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I participate in a lot of online forums about polyamory. It’s almost impossible to talk about polyamory without eventually talking about OK Cupid, which is arguably one of the best places online for poly folks to meet each other (I met my live-in partner zaiah there). And it’s almost impossible to talk about OK Cupid without talking about how often women tend to get harassed on online dating sites. Any online dating sites.

And, it’s almost impossible to talk about how often women get harassed, on dating sites or anywhere else, without a whole succession of men trotting up to say “well, I personally don’t harass women! Women act like all men are harassers! I’m totally not like that, and I don’t understand why women don’t talk to me online! I totally deserve to have women talk to me online! If I spend my time writing an email to some woman online I am entitled to a response, even if she doesn’t want to date me!”

And, of course, from there it’s just a short hop to talking about male privilege, and as soon as that happens, inevitably those same men trot up again to say “this talk of privilege is just a way to try to make me feel guilty!”

And I gotta say: Guilt? Seriously? You think it’s about guilt?

Guilt is for things you can control. Feeling guilty over things you can’t control, like the race or sex you were born with, is silly.

If you think talking about privilege is about making people feel guilty, you’re completely missing the point.

It’s about being a decent person.

People who are privileged may still struggle, may not always get what they want, but the whole point is they have a lot of advantages over other people. Advantages they can’t see. Advantages they don’t know about.

Talking about privilege is about awareness, not guilt. When people don’t know about the advantages they have, they act in messed-up ways that show insensitivity to others. Like, for example, telling women who experience harassment on a scale that men can’t even understand how they should feel about it, what they should do about it, and why they should, like, totes respond to ME because I’M not like that! I’M not one of those entitled jerks, and therefore I DESERVE a reply!

The purpose of understanding your privilege isn’t to make you feel something. Not guilt, not shame, not anything else. It’s to help you understand that you have a set of things you take for granted that other people don’t have, so that you can change the way you act.

Got nothing to do with feelings at all.

Change the way you act in small ways. Like, not telling women how they should feel about sexual harassment. Like, not telling inner-city blacks that the police are their friends. Like, listening when women talk abut harassment, instead of just saying “oh, you’re saying all men are harassers.” (Hint: No, they’re not.) Or saying something like “well, I just don’t see color.” (Hint: Not seeing color is something you can only do if you happen to be the privileged color. When you belong to an oppressed minority, you don’t get the luxury of not seeing your status.)

Change the way you act in medium ways. Like, if you are a man with a normal social circle, statistically you probably know at least three harassers and at least one rapist. Seriously. So, when you’re with a group of your friends and someone makes a racial joke or a rape joke or talks about how women are bitches or whatever, speak up. Remember, if you don’t say anything, those harassers and that rapist in your social circle–and yes, they are there, even if you don’t know who they are–assume you’re on their side and think the way they do.

When people make cracks about sending a woman into the kitchen to make a sandwich, or talk about how they’d sure like to get that hot chick drunk and bend her over the table, speak up. Say it isn’t cool.

Yeah, it’s uncomfortable to speak up when all your friends are yee-hawing and back-slapping about how absolutely hysterical that rape joke was. Deal with it. The discomfort you face speaking up ain’t nothing on the discomfort women face just walking down the goddamn street.

Change the way you act in large ways. Don’t vote for political candidates who talk about how only lazy blacks are on welfare or blab about “legitimate rape.”

People aren’t telling you you’re privileged to make you feel guilty. People are telling you you’re privileged because privilege is a system and an institution that benefits you and that you participate in without even knowing it. When you know about it, maybe you can stop participating in it. Maybe, if you’re brave and willing to pull on your big-boy pants, you can even put yourself on the map against it when the folks around you are participating in it.

More Than Two blog: Ethical relationship agreements

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I’ve just posted a new essay over on the More Than Two book blog. This essay literally came to me in a dream; I had a dream that I was working on this blog post with Eve while we were working in a nuclear power plant, and for some reason I had long hair. There were also inspectors and other things to contend with in the dream, as there always are.

Anyway, when I woke up I raced to the computer and started writing it down, and it came out pretty close to what it was in my dream. The essay is about ethical agreements in poly relationships; it’s an attempt at answering the question “Well, aren’t any poly arrangements OK as long as all the people involved agree?” Here’s the teaser:

Communication, honesty and consent are values the poly community promotes heavily, and these ideas do seem to be intrinsic to strong, ethical relationships. But the more I think about these ideas, the deeper the rabbit hole goes.

Communication and honesty are complex topics that can easily fill a book. Consent seems more straightforward; either we agree to something or we don’t, right? I’ve often heard people say, “As long as everyone agrees to a structure or a set of rules, everything’s good.”

On the surface, that seems reasonable. And yet, I think it’s easy to lose track of how slippery the idea of “consent” can be.

There are a lot of ways to run off the rails on the way to a seemingly consensual agreement. I woke up this morning thinking about this, and somewhere in my foggy pre-caffeinated state I tracked down three ways that an agreement might appear consensual without quiiiiite rising to the level that would be ideal for ethical relationships…

You can read the entire blog post here. As usual, feel free to comment here or over there.

Imaginary Light

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Last month, my sweetie Eve and I celebrated our one-year anniversary with a trip into Oregon’s desert. I took many pictures, which I may one day find the time to post and write about, but I particularly like this one: the sun setting over the John Day Fossil Beds.

Blog post: What if my polyamorous partners don’t get along?

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On the More Than Two blog, we’ve written about a question asked by one of our backers: “What do I do if two of my partners don’t get along with each other?” We’re certainly getting a workout with our backer questions!

This blog post is a dialog between Eve and me. Here’s the teaser:

Franklin: I’ve been in this situation from every angle: having a partner who doesn’t get along with one of my other partners, being the person a partner’s other partner doesn’t cotton to, and having a partner who’s involved with someone I don’t particularly like. […] When you’re the one who’s in the middle, caught between two partners who aren’t getting along…well, it kinda sucks. It can be easy to end up feeling pulled in two directions. I don’t have a magic solution, though I certainly admire the problem.

Eve: In my experience, it can be hard to hold multiple relationships together without the active support of all your partners for the other relationships, especially if you live with one of them. Situations where partners are just tolerating each other may have a steady undercurrent of stress that can be damaging and hard to manage. But it can be done, and whether you can or want to do it depends a lot on your own coping, communication and boundary-setting skills; your emotional health; and how important both partners are to you.

I don’t have a solution, either, but I think we can offer some management strategies.

The whole post is here. I’d love to hear from folks who’ve been in this position! Experiences? Thoughts? Strategies? Feel free to reply here or over there.

Greta Christina: Guest blog post: Poly ethics

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I’ve written a guest post on Greta Christina’s blog about ethics in a poly community. Here’s the teaser:

It’s difficult to talk about polyamory without hearing the expression “ethical non-monogamy.” There’s a bit of a sticky wicket, though, in that we rarely talk about the definition of “ethical,” beyond the obvious “don’t lie to your partners.” That’s a good start, sure, but it’s not enough to construct an entire foundation of relationship ethics on. When we’re living in a society that proscribes everything except heterosexual marriage between exactly two cisgendered people of opposite sexes, how do we even start talking about what makes an ethical non-monogamous relationship? Where do we turn for ethics? What distinguishes an ethical relationship from a non-ethical one? Are ethical relationships egalitarian, and if so, how does that align with BDSM relationships that are deliberately constructed along the lines of power exchange? If two people make an agreement and then present that agreement unilaterally to a third person, who is given few options other than accept the agreement as-is or walk away, is that ethical? What happens when people make relationship agreements, and then their needs change? What are ethical ways of revisiting and renegotiating previous agreements? How do we even define “ethics” in the first place, without resorting to religious or social conventions? What does it take for a person to make ethical relationship choices that aren’t aligned with a religious tradition or a cultural norm?

These are some of the issues we intend to address in our polyamory book, More Than Two, which is going into its last week of crowdfunding now.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can read the entire blog post on Greta Christina’s blog here.