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The fifth horseman of the relationship apocalypse

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If you’re at all familiar with the world of the relationship self-help insustry, you’ve probably heard of the Gottman Institute, an “evidence-based research institute” that explores romantic relationships.

The Gottmans claim to be able to predict with a high (greater than 93%) degree of accuracy which married couples they see are headed for divorce. Leaving aside the issue of selection bias—healthy couples are less likely to seek relationship counseling—they claim to have identified four factors they call the Four Horsemen of the Relationship Apocalypse: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling. Once those become part of a relationship dynamic, stick a fork in it, it’s over.

Now, I tend to be deeply skeptical of quantifying relationship dynamics. Which is not to say there aren’t certain dynamics that can be recognized, it’s just that there tend to be a lot more of them than a lot of relationship gurus think, with quite a bit more nuance and overlap than folks who like pigeonholing are perhaps comfortable with.

For example, I do think different people express love in different ways, and it’s important to recognize the ways you express and receive love. I don’t think there are five love languages, though. I think there are a lot more than five.

But I digress.

The relationship landscape once the apocalypse comes. (Image: Catalin Pop)

And so it is with the Four Horsement. I don’t disagree for a second that once these dynamics start to dominate a relationship, it’s done.

I just think this particular apocalypse is heralded by more of a posse. There are more than four dynamics that herald the end of things.

I got to thinking about this when I fell down a rabbit hole reading about zygote development a couple days back (as one does). Not because of evolutionary psychology or any of that silliness, but because vertebrate embryology follows a predictable pattern. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and all that jazz.

That got me to thinking about hyenas, which got me to thinking about an ex from long ago, which got me to thinking about warning signs I should’ve seen but didn’t.

So a bit of history. Back in 2006, when I was still living in Tampa and dating a woman named Shelly, we went to Busch Gardens together and watched the hyenas, which inspired a blog post about the nature of beauty.

Brief recap: A lot of people who look at the hyena exhibit were like “man, those are sume ugly dogs.” But of course, hyenas aren’t dogs; they’re not even close to dogs. They’re more related to cats and mongooses than they are to dogs. If you judge the hyena by the beauty standards of a dog, of course they’ll seem ugly—they’re quite poor approximations of a dog. If you look at them for what they are, they’re quite lovely in their way.

A photo from that day, back when my digital camera was really rather shitty

They look a bit like dogs, especially in the shape of their faces (which are much more canine than feline), because of convergent morphology—a process by which creatures living in the same environment with the same general lifestyle will tend to converge on an optimized shape for that environment and lifestyle. Orcas and sharks diverged a very long time ago, but converged on the same basic shape. Ditto for creodonts and carnivores—there were bear-like and cat-like creodonts, even though they weren’t all that closely related to modern cats and bears. (And don’t even get me started on crabs—ultimately everything wants to be a crab).

Our relationship was still rather new at that point—we’d only been together five years—and I clearly remember saying that hyenas were a great example of convergent morphology, and Shelly saying something along the lines of “one of the things that I love about you is that you’ll use expressions like ‘convergent morphology’ in eveyday conversation, not because you’re trying to show off but just because that’s you.”

I remember it so clearly in part because something particularly jarring that happened a few years later, after she’d starting a monogamous fellow who was okay with her shagging other women but didn’t like her playing with other penis-bearers, so she told me that we would no longer be lovers “but,” she assured me, “we will always be partners and always be family.”

We’d gotten somehow on the subject of evolutionary biology—I don’t remember how—when I described something as an example of convergent morphology and she rolled her eyes and said (paraphrasing) “Why do you have to use expressions like that instead of just saying they evolved to look the same?”

It’s quite jolting when someone you love tells you that a thing they once really liked about you is a thing they find annoying. It tends to stick in the memory.

I think this is a fifth horseman. (How many horsemen are there? I don’t know; I’m not even sure it’s a useful exercise to try to list them all.) This isn’t the only time I’ve seen it, of course, but it’s the first time I ever experienced it.

In the start of a relationship, some people have a tendency to find everything about their new partner amazing and beautiful.

This isn’t universal, of course. Right now, Eunice and Joreth and I are reading Dorothy Tennov’s book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being In Love with an eye toward doing an episode of our podcast, The Skeptical Pervert, about limerence. None of the three of us is particularly limerent, but the book definitely describes this phenomenon—obsessing over every detail of the object one feels limerence for, finding all of them uniquely enchanting. The book describes one person’s experience of limerence this way:

“Once I fall, really fall, everything about her becomes wonderful, even things that would otherwise mean nothing at all are suddenly capable of evoking curiously positive reactions. I love her clothes, her walk, her handwriting (its illegibility would seem charming, or if it were clear and readable, that would be equally admirable), her car, her cat, her mother. Anything that she liked, I liked; anything that belonged to her acquired a certain magic.”

That magic can, it seems, fade when the limerence fades.

Now me personally, I think limerence sounds absolutely awful, and I’m grateful I don’t experience it. (Which is not to say that I don’t have problems of my own, of course. I tend to accept red flags when I shouldn’t, thinking of them as quirks that help make this person who they are, something I’ve spent quite a lot of time working on with my therapist. But that’s a whole ’nother essay altogether.)

I don’t want to go into whether or not limerence is itself a long-range advanced scout for the Horse Posse of the Apocalypse (I think it might presage problems down the road, though I could be wrong), but I definitely think that when the day comes a thing you once found delightful about a lover now exasperates you, the end is, as Rorshach might say, well and truly nigh.

There’s a thing I’ve seen where creeping disenchantment begins to overcome a relationship, perhaps when someone is annoyed or frustrated, and all the things that were once sparkly and delightful become irritating. Many people project their present state into the past, losing touch with the way they once felt and assuming that their emotional state now is the way Things Always Were.

I can’t imagine what it must be like for such a person to square in their head that present emotion with past action. Regardless of where it comes from, though, that is definitely one of the Stampeding Herd of the Apocalypse, and it might, I think, be productive to be aware of it when it happens.

I don’t necessarily have a solution, mind. But if you see this happening in oyur relationship, take note: the wheels are coming off, and if you don’t do something to change your trajectory, you’re likely headed for a crash.

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“The thing that makes you a good lover,” she said, “is that you listen to me when I tell you what I want, and you believe what I say.”

The second-sexiest organ of the human body. (Photo: Taisiia Shestopal)

We’d just finished a quite lengthy and vigorous round of fun, involving a crop, a gold-toned Sharpie marker, and several hours of vigorous and sweaty activity, during which I did at least two things I’d never tried before. (As a side note, I love the incredible, almost incomprehensible vastness of the human sexual experience. Even after decades of highly exploratory, experimental sex, there are still vistas unvisited, experiences untapped. I remember, ages ago, seeing a social media post by some naive dudebro who complained that sex was boring to him because “I’m eighteen years old and I’ve done it all.” No, my dude, you haven’t. If you lived to be eight hundred years old, and you did something different in bed every night for that entire time, never repeating the same thing twice, you’d still not have time to do it all. But I digress.)

I was surprised, at first, when she said it. “Listening to what I want and believing what I say” doesn’t seem like it should be that high a bar to reach. I mean, this is basic, preliminary stuff, right? It’s a bit like saying “the thing that makes you a wonderful cook is you turn on the stove,” right?

But the more I unpacked it, the more sense it made. It turns out this one weird trick is both more effective and more difficult than really it ought to be.

The result.

Okay, so if just listening to someone talk about what they want and believing them is key to being a good lover, why don’t more people do it?

For starters, most of us are indoctrinated from an early age to surround sex with walls of shame and fear. Especially women. Women who know and advocate for their sexual desires are “tramps,” “hos” (or among the less literate, “hoes”), “sluts,” whatever. I’ve seen people—sexually insecure guys, to a one—ask questions over on Quora like “my girlfriend said she wants to do [$Thing], does that make her a slut?” Not once or twice, but over and over. This is, apparently, something that a lot of guys have a great deal of anxiety about. Dude, chill, don’t you want a lover who, you know, likes sex?

And of course the flip side of that, the people who are frightened that they’ll be judged if they ask for what they want, that what they want makes them “weird” and therefore unacceptable.

“I want to try 69 in bed, but I’m afraid my boyfriend will think I’m weird.” ”Is it weird that I want to tittyfuck my girlfriend?” “I have fantasies about having sex while I’m tied up, does that make me weird?” “Is it weird I like feet?” “Is it weird I like having my nipples sucked?” The Internet is filled to overflowing with questions like this, and it breaks my heart.

A good general rule of thumb: If you’re worried about being “weird,” you will never be good at sex. Just imagine if we applied this level of fear to anything else: “I want to try sushi, is that weird?” “If I want to take my girlfriend to a Thai restaurant, will she think I’m weird?”

Now, these aren’t new observations. But still, the level of fear and shame around sex is a tragedy. People agonize over whether or not their tastes are too far outside the pale for any lover to accept them, and at the same time agonize that their penis isn’t big enough for them to be good in bed. My dude, no, you aren’t a good lover because you have a colossal dong, you’re good in bed because you know every lover is different, every person has different tastes, and you communicate openly about sex.

Who knew, right?

So, I mean, it’s one thing to identify the problem, but it’s another to propose a solution. The problem is long-term indoctrination into a cult of secrecy and shame. You don’t overcome a lifetime of those lessons just by waking up and saying “okay, I’m going to be open about sex now.”

So allow me to propose a solution.

Woman with sex toy

My Talespinner and I met, as people often do, online. Early on in our acquaintance, we talked about our sexual fantasies, and spent endless hours exploring fantasy worlds together.

I don’t mean in the sense of “What are you wearing? Ooh, I’d love to bend oyu over right now.” I mean in the sense of constructing fictional characters and settings together, and exploring what happens to those characters, often in graphic detail. In other words, using the first sexiest organ of the human body.

The nice thing about telling interactive stories about fictional characters is it’s a safe, fun way to explore the places where your fantasy worlds overlap. (In fact, we had so much fun doing this, we ended up creating a shared-world fantasy about characters in a dystopian society that my co-author Eunice started participating in. Shared-world anthologies are fun!)

If you’re uncertain about your creative or wirting skills, reading erotica to each other, or even just putting snippets of erotica that really works for you, is another way to do the same thing. You create a space apart from the real world where it’s possible for you and your partner(s) to share your fantasies and explore the interesting bit of the Venn diagram, the place where they overlap.

And who knows? You might just find that while you were busy feeding your anxiety that your partner would think you’re “weird,” they were just as weird as you.

Which, of course, brings us back around to the “listen and believe what I say” thing.

It’s important to choose partners who don’t hear something out of whatever they imagine “ordinary” to be and say “eww, isn’t that weird?” But it’s just as important to be that person.

If you want to be a good lover, you will never get there by hearing something that surprises you and saying “eww, that’s weird.” You can’t expect your partner to share if oyu don’t make it safe to share. (Yes, I know, hashtag #ShouldBeObvious, but here we are.)

And finally, while we’re on the subject of #ShouldBeObvious, here’s a radical thought: Your lover knows more about their turnons and kinks than you do. If they say something gets them off, or they really want to try something, that might just mean—work with me here, a lot of folks seem to find this hard to believe, but it might just maybe perhaps mean that thing gets them off, and they really want to try it.

I know, right?

Everyone says communication is important to a good relationship. Part of that is, well, believing what your partner says. After all, that person is the world’s leading expert on being that person.

A Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon of your very own!

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Whilst the extended polyamorous netowork and I were in Barcelona, we took time out from seeing the Sagrada Familia and doing…um, other stuff to take a ton of photos of the xenomorph sex toy prototypes.

I’m still working through the mass of photos, bit by bit, but in the meantime I’ve actually put the hiphugger strapon up for sale!

That’s right, now you can order your very own hiphugger, for all your xenomorph ovipositor violation needs.

These things each take about three days of fussy, fiddly work to make, so for the foreseeable future I will only make one of them a month. First come, first served, and yes, they’re expensive.

If you order one, I’ll make it specifically for you, in whatever color you like.

We had a ton of fun doing the photo shoot, and got pics of some other xenomorphic goodness as well, including the xenomorph pacifiers and nipple pasties. (Yes, I made xenomorph pacifiers and nipple pasties. What can I say? My parents brought me to see Alien when I was, like, 12 or so, and it scared the holy hell out of me for the next thirty years.)

Now my nightmares are yours too. You’re welcome.

Thankful and blessed

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I met my Talespinner online, as is often the case; when you live much of your life on the online, you frequently encounter people there. We started talking on Quora, then moved to Discord when she invited me to join a pen and paper role-playing game she runs, and eventually it came to pass we decided to meet in the real, the world of atoms and molecules.

I invited her to Barcelona with me to the extended polyamorous network get-together. And so it was that our first extended meeting also overlapped with her first meeting with my other loves and their other loves.

I am privileged to have an extended polycule made up of extraordinary people, people I am profoundly grateful to have in my life. That really came home for me when my Talespinner told me she had been a little nervous to meet my other lovers, but she found them to be incredibly warm and welcoming, and from the very beginning she found herself accepted by them. “I never had the feeling I was auditioning,” she told me, “or trying to prove myself. It’s as if I was important to you, and that was good enough for everyone else. They took it on your word.”

Me, Eunice, and my Talespinner cuddling in the orgy pit in the villa in Barcelona; photo by my wife.

It’s taken me a long time to get here, but at last I feel like I understand exactly the qualities I want in my lovers, and I can now spot those I don’t in a way I never could before. I am privileged to be surrounded by extraordinary people who love me exactly for who I am, and words cannot express what a joy that is.

I have, in the past, let people close to me who loved me, or thought they loved me—but.

But only. But only if I toned it down. But only if I changed the way I presented myself. But only if I changed my habits. But only if. Don’t do that, do this. Don’t spend your time that way. Don’t say that. You’re wonderful but you’d be even more wonderful if you’d do as I say.

And y’know, for a long time, I put up with that. I believed it was necessary. “Good relationships require compromise,” people often say, and I thought that’s what compromise looks like.

And I regretted it Every. Single. Time.

The poet e e cummings has a wonderful quote:

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

It is perhaps a bit ironic that all of my current partners identify as solo poly, yet they are far warmer and more open than the partners I’ve had who’ve said they wanted closer, more “family-style” polyamory. There’s a deep truth there I’m still working to tease out. I wonder, in my more cynical moments, if kitchen-table polyamory isn’t sometimes the goal of those who want their extended network close because that way they’re easier to control; that is, if there are at least some people driven toward that kind of relationship more from fear than from desire for connection.

Something to think about.

I am absolutely grateful that I have, finally, built a social circle, a network of friends and lovers who truly love me for being me. Every single one of them, without one single exception. There is no joy in the world greater than that of being seen, really seen, by another human being who loves what they see.

“Incompatible with Biblical Morality”

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A while back, some wag left a comment on one of my Quora answers stating that I am, quote, “incompatible with Biblical morality.”

Which is a fair cop and no mistake. I mean, he thought he was being insulting, but there it is: I am indeed incompatible with Biblical morality.

So I made a T-shirt.

I put this on my social media, and right away people started messaging me to say they wanted one. Which isn’t what I expected—it’s a rather odd thing to say, which is part of why I made it a shirt—but hey, apparently there are a lot of us.

So I’ve made it available at Villaintees.com, for those of you who, like me, are incompatible with Biblical morality and proud of it. You can even get a sticker and a coffee mug!

Unexpected hospitals, oh my

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So a couple weeks back, I ended up hospitalized for three days after seven hours of sex.

Not because of the sex, mind, though that would make for a much more interesting story. After we finished, I started feeling what I thought was indigestion, and…

Hang on, wait, lemme back up. I was in Missouri, because…

No, wait, not back far enough.

I started out in Florida. My mom was diagnosed with cancer last November, so I’ve been spending a fair bit of time shuttling back and forth between Portland and Florida, as I help my dad care for her.

And not incidentally take tons of photos of her cats, which, and I say this purely objectively, are two of the most gorgeous felines ever to grace humanity with their presence. I mean, look at these two!

That’s Thelma (right) and Louise (left), and those names should give you a hint as to their attitudes and general disposition.

Anyway, I went to Florida in September, and from there flew to Springfield, MO to see my Talespinner and attend a sci-fi con with her. One of the cool things about being a writer, I can work from anywhere I have an Internet connection.

At first, all was good. No, scratch that, all was lovely. We had a wonderful time, that included a seven-hour marathon sex session during which we gave the xenomorph facehugger gag a thorough shake-down test cruise (verdict: it works splendidly but still needs a few design tweaks).

After that and some Chinese takeout, I started feeling a bit yucky. Yucky enough that we set out at 2AM for some Rolaids at the local Kum & Go, which, hand to God, is actually what they call convenience stores in Missourt.

The Rolaids didn’t work. In fact, in the span of about three hours I went from “I think I have indigestion” to spewing blood from both ends, quite literally. It was…distressingly disgusting.

So, long story short, I ended up in the hospital. For three days. While they put an endoscope down my throat and discovered a tear in my esophagus and a hole in the lining of my stomach. Both of which they fixed, but yeah, that was even more unpleasant than you probably think.

Side note: they shot me full of Dilaudid, which is injectable hydromorphone, think heroin but less kind and fuzzy. That honestly sucked almost as bad as the spewing-blood part. I will never understand why people use opioids recreationally. Dear God.

Anyway, I got to ride in an ambulance! Not as much fun as TV makes it seem. The guy riding in the back with me spent most of his time on his phone.

The doctors aren’t entirely sure what caused the malfunction, though the leading hypothesis is a bad reaction to a drug my Portland doctor put me on to control nightmares from complex PTSD. So, y’know, that’s a thing.

Still, a successful trip both to Florida and to Missouri, hospital stay notwithstanding. Apparently I have a $17,000 hospital bill heading my way, because I live in a savage country with a healthcare system optimized for profit, and there’s some question about whether or not my insurance will cover it, so that’s also a thing.

Had a blast at the sci-fi con. Think I’ll probably attend rather a lot of cons in 2024.

Virtue or virtue signaling: how do you tell?

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[Note: This entry originally started out as an answer on Quora. If you want to keep up with my writings, I’m most active over there these days.]

Most people want to think of themselves as basically “good people.” Many people want to appear to be good people, particularly to their friends and social group. The cynic in me believes that few people are all that concerned with being good people, because being a good person is hard work, requiring careful analysis of complex, nuanced situations, dealing with ambiguity, and occasionally being forced to confront uncomfortable facts.

Enter Virtue Signaling, a way to express to your tribe that you uphold the tribal values without, you know, doing that hard, uncomfortable work! Gain all the advantages of conforming to the norms of your social group without any of that messy ethical stuff!

In the US, the political right loves to accuse the political left of virtue signaling, but this is something that knows no political divide. The rural conservative who throws away his Bud Lite because Budweiser gave beer to a transgender activist, or smashes his Dixie Chicks CD, is engaging in virtue signaling just as much as the liberal who posts “boycott Avatar 2!” on his Twitter feed without ever intending to watch the movie in the first place.

Emory & Henry College defines virtue signaling this way:

The action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments to demonstrate one’s good character or moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue. Modern examples of Virtue Signaling are posting opinions that you do not share on social media in order to gain popularity and reputation.

And, in the spirit of complete honesty, I admit I’ve done this. I’ve offered opinions on people and situations about which I was uninformed, because I wanted to be the good guy but didn’t want to take the time to better inform myself. (In fact, the times I’ve done this, I would’ve strenuously denied that was what I was doing, because of course I knew what I was talking about, even though I didn’t know the situation or talk to the people involved…I let my own narratives about How The World Works fill in the blanks for me. We human beings understand the world through stories; the narratives we accept, often without realizing it, inform the way we perceive the world.)

So, with that in mind, what separates genuine virtue from virtue signaling? How can you tell?

I would like to propose a set of guidelines that, I believe, makes separating the two rather easy:

Virtue signaling is cheap and costs nothing. You’re literally sending signals to improve your standing with your in-group; it will not cost you socially with your in-group by definition. It always goes with your in-group, never against it.

Virtue may cost you something—socially, politically, or financially. It sometimes may not match the expectations of the people around you. Holding to virtue might occasionally put you at odds with your in-group.

Virtue signaling has no nuance, no shades of gray. It boils everything down to bumper stickers: Jesus Is Lord. Make America Great Again. Eat The Rich. Kindness Is Everything. Because its purpose is to communicate that you belong with your in-group, it’s made up of simple slogans that champion the in-group’s values in simple, easy-to-understand ways.

Virtue allows for nuance. Virtue requires looking at complex situations and making informed choices, rather than relying on bumper-sticker deepitudes. Virtue isn’t about clearly-defined good guys and bad guys; it requires constant engagement.

Virtue signaling is about the person doing it. It’s a way to say “Look at me! Look at me! I share your values! Look at me!” It centers the person engaging in it: “everyone, see what a good person I am because I support the values of my in-group.”

Virtue is about the thing. It doesn’t grab the spotlight or seek attention. While a virtue signaler is on YouTube talking about how great they are for shining a light on the fact that homelessness is bad (don’t forget to click Subscribe! And sign up for my Patreon!), virtue is out there with a hammer building houses for Habitat for Humanity.

There’s actually a Bible passage about this: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.” Virtue signaling is out there praying loudly in the middle of the street; virtue takes place off stage, with sleeves rolled up, doing the work to find the facts and minimize harm in a world where there’s not always a lot of adulation in it and sometimes things aren’t as simple as they seem.

Virtue signaling is about identifying who’s one of Us and who’s one of Them. We are good, noble, just, patriotic. They are evil, corrupt, traitorous dogs.

Virtue is about living, inasmuch as is possible, a life of kindness and compassion, rooted in truth, empathy, and generosity.

Virtue signaling is about keeping safe by rigidly enforcing and policing the boundaries between Us and Them through purity and moral conformity. It turns on itself. It eats its own. It seeks out those on our side who are insufficiently pure, insufficiently dedicated to our ideals. It frequently spends as much time savaging those on Our side as attacking those on Their side.

Virtue is about living in an imperfect world where people are not always 100% pure 100% of the time. It’s about genuine harm reduction, not moral purity. Harm reduction is, as my crush and co-author Eunice once said, “ethics trying to live in the real world.” Where virtue signaling is proving one’s moral purity in a vicious game of Last Man Standing, virtue is about making the world just a little bit kinder, a little bit better, not just for those who pass the moral purity litmus test, but for everyone.

Virtue signaling tells you who the good guys and the bad guys are.

Virtue is understanding that nobody is purely one thing or the other, so the best approach is to treat others the way you would have them treat you—ir, if you’re genuinely virtuous, to do unto others 20% better than they do unto you, to correct for subjective error.

In other words, the key takeaway I’d like to propose is this:

Virtue signaling is about bettering your own station by persuading the people in your social group of your moral purity. Virtue is about bettering the world for everyone.

Thoughts on bullying and pain

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[Note: This entry is based on two of my answers on Quora. If you want to keep up with my writing, that’s the best place to do it these days.]

So I’ve been spending some time lately thinking about the psychology of bullying, and why bullies seem unhappy when you live a good life once you’ve escaped their reach.

And I think I’m at least a bit closer to understanding.

Bullying, like many other forms of abuse, is ultimately about power and control. People who feel out of control in their lives—perhaps due to problems in their family of origin, perhaps because they don’t have a strongly developed sense of boundaries or sense of self, whatever—often see controlling other people as the only way to feel safe or to reclaim a personal sense of power.

I mean, this isn’t like, an incisive and cunning insight or anything. We’ve known this since the dawn of time. Abuse is about power and control—that’s pretty much both axiomatic and definitional whenever you talk about abuse. Basically any book on abuse or bullying will tell you that.

Hurt people hurt people.

Again, not an incisive and cunning insight. Eunice and I found this graffiti whilst doing some urban spelunking in a ruined mansion when we were in New Orleans together:

Do hurt people hurt people? Is that why bullies bully?

Yes, as far as it goes. That is, do I believe “hurt people hurt people” is true? Yes. Do I believe it’s the whole truth? No, I don’t.

On a surface level, yes, it’s obviously true. You see it often when people break up—they’ll lash out at each other. Anger is part of grief, and anger frequently causes people to do hurtful things.

But I also think the real harm is more often done not by people who are hurt, but by people who are scared.

Image: Alexandra Gorn

Fear is the mind (and relationship) killer

All the books on abuse and bullying, all the research, all the anecdotes, point in the same direction: the core of abuse is power. Whenever you see two people pointing fingers at each other and calling each other abusers, look to the arrow of control. One of them will be exerting, or attempting to exert, power and control over the other. That’s the abuser, always.

But people who exert power over others, in intimate partner relationships, rarely do so because they wake up and say “Hey, you know what? I enjoy being bossy. I think I’ll control my partner today!” (I mean yes, that can happen, but it’s not the norm.)

Most people driven to control in intimate relationships do so, I believe, because they’re acting out of fear. The control is a means to an end, not the end itself. They’re afraid of losing the relationship, or of being abandoned, or whatever, and exerting control becomes a bulwark against the fear, the only way they feel safe. “If I control who my partner socializes with, I can make sure nobody steals my partner.” “If I control where my partner goes, I can calm my fear that my partner is sneaking around behind my back.” Whatever.

The thing about fear is it drives us to extremes,. Often, like insecurity, it drives us to do the exact things that will cause what we fear to come true.

Control is rooted in fear, and a controlling person often lashes out if their fear comes true. Anyone who’s ever worked with intimate partner abuse will tell you the single most dangerous moment for an abuse victim is when they leave the abuser. A person who has lost control of their partner is extremely dangerous, and will often say or do anything to try to re-assert that control.

Fearful people are often people who were hurt in the past, especially as children. Control becomes a dysfunctional, maladaptive way to try to prevent being hurt or abandoned again.

So yes, hurt people hurt people on a surface level—anger is part of grief, and angry people lash out. But the real harm is most often done not out of hurt, but out of fear, and specifically out of fear that becomes need to control.

So. If abuse is about power and control, and abusers often exert power and control out of fear, why then do bullies hate that you live your best life later on?

Because it shows that you have escaped control. You are thriving, your life is wonderful, you are surrounded by joy and love…

…without them.

They have failed to alter the trajectory of your life. They have failed to trap you in the muck with them. You’re accomplishing things, without them. You’re building joy, without them. They can no longer reach you. You are a living testament to their lack of control.

Abuse is about power and control. Your escape from the bully’s control is a personal affront that highlights whatever damage drives the bully to bully in the first place. It affirms the bully’s fear: I have been abaondoned. I am not loved. That’s intolerable.

Some Thoughts on Donald Trump’s Appeal

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[Note: This entry started out as an answer on Quora]

A lot of my liberal friends seem baffled by the fact that 45’s supporters seem…remarkably unfazed by the fact that Trump keeps announcing he’ll do things he never gets round to doing. Like, for example, when he said he’d post overwhelming evidence of his innocence and a vast conspiracy at a press conference…then when the day of the conference came and went, he’d present it in court at his trial. As with the tax returns he promised to release after e was elected that somehow he failed to release, this seems a pattern.

“Don’t his supporters notice?” my liberal friends say. “Doesn’t that bother them? When will he show us this evidence, anyway?”

That actually isn’t the right question.

It isn’t the right question because the answer is obvious. There is no evidence. There was no evidence. There never will be any evidence. He’s had plenty of chances to offer evidence and he hasn’t.

And, of course, we now know that he didn’t present any evidence at a news conference—he canceled the conference before it started, and now he’s claiming he will present this “evidence” at trial.

It is embarrassingly, painfully obvious that he doesn’t have anything.

So that’s not the right question, given that the answer is so obvious.

What is the right question?

The right question is “since it’s plain as the nose on your face Trump has no evidence that the election was in any way stolen, and since he keeps saying over and over that he does but every single time he says he’s going to show us this evidence he doesn’t, why do people still believe him?”

And the answer to that question says something fascinating about human beings.

Back in 2011, a Christian radio preacher named Harold Camping predicted the end of the world. He encouraged his followers to give up all their earthly possessions, sell their houses, and use the money to buy billboards warning that the end of the world was coming.

Of course, May 21, 2011 came and went and the world kept on turning.

You’d think this would have caused his followers to abandon him. It did not.

This actually wasn’t Camping’s first rodeo. He’d predicted the end of the world before, on May 21, 1988.

And then again on September 6, 1994.

When May 21 came and went, ol’ Harold, not one to give up in the face of, you know, reality, predicted that the world would definitely definitely end, for realsies, on October 16, 2011.

So far, so boring. People’ve been predicting the end of the world for as long as there have been people in the world. That’s not the interesting part.

Here’s the interesting part:

When each day came and went, the faithful didn’t lose faith, they became more faithful. They became more convinced.

In 1956, a psychologist named Leon Festinger wrote a book called When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. In that book, he made up a term for people who struggle to reconcile a sincere, passionate, earnest belief that doesn’t align with reality. He named this psychological phenomenon he was studying “cognitive dissonance.”

His hypothesis: When you believe something that turns out not to be true, such as when you believe a preacher who tells you the world is going to end on a certain date and then nothing happens, it takes work to get your head around the fact that it didn’t happen. It takes effort. It takes labor.

You have to unpack your belief. You have to look at yourself. Why didn’t it happen? Why did I believe it was going to happen? How can I explain to myself that I accepted a belief that wasn’t true? Does this mean other beliefs I have also aren’t true? How can I tell? How can I be sure? Does this mean I have poor judgment in the people I choose to believe in? Is it possible that those people in a different tribe, the ones who kept telling me that my belief was wrong, could be right? Am I part of the wrong tribe? What else have I been wrong about?

All this is deeply difficult and deeply unsettling.

You would think that a religion that preaches the end of days to its followers would lose all its followers when the days don’t end. That doesn’t happen; in fact, its followers become more fanatic and more faithful and more likely to believe their preacher, because (and this is the bit that blows my mind) it’s actually easier—it’s less work, it’s less effort, it’s less painful—to reject reality than to reject a belief you’re emotionally invested in, reject a tribe you consider yourself part of, or reject an authority figure you believe.

One of the most potent tools for rejecting reality is what Festinger called selective exposure.

Selective exposure means you only talk to people in your tribe—your fellow believers—and refuse to listen to anyone else. You only watch media that reinforces your belief, and go out of your way to avoid media that doesn’t. You read, watch, and listen to only the things that reinforce your belief, and the stronger the cognitive dissonance, the more you isolate yourself in a bubble that rejects reality and confirms what you already believe.

So when Donald Trump says he is going to prove that the election was stolen, then he doesn’t, that creates cognitive dissonance, just like when a preacher says the world is going to end on May 21 and then it doesn’t.

And, of course, some people will wake up when the proof never materializes or the world doesn’t end and say “okay, fine, he was lying.”

But a lot of people won’t. They’ll accept any excuse: Oh, I miscalculated the date from the Biblical signs, it’s really October 16. Oh, my lawyer told me not to show you the proof, I’ll how it to you at my trial.

Paradoxically, the more dates come and go, the more the faithful cling to the belief that next time it’s definitely gonna happen. Just like Charlie Brown thinks next time, Lucy will definitely let him kick the football.

At this point, Donald Trump’s remaining followers are acting and behaving pretty much exactly like members of a cult. They sincerely believe that next time, he will show them proof that the election was stolen, and when he doesn’t, they’ll believe whatever excuse he gives them, and believe that the time after that, he will definitely show them proof that the election was stolen.

You cannot argue them out of it. You cannot point out that it hasn’t happened yet and it’s never going to happen. No combination of words, no evidence, no proof exists that can change their minds, because changing their minds is simply too painful. It would force them to confront that they have spent all this time, all this effort, all this money following the wrong man.

You have to recall that the people who still follow Trump have probably given up a lot. They’ve given him their money, yes, but they’ve also lost friends, lost family, endured being ridiculed and called stupid…and so they’ve turned inward, they’ve made a new tribe with new beliefs.

And now, at this point, to admit they were wrong? That means they lost their money for nothing. That means they gave up their friends and family for nothing. That means all those jeers were true. And, more than that, they would have to give up the new tribe they’ve created and the new friends they’ve made.

You really think there’s a combination of words you can say that would make them do that? No way.

Adventures in TSA

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In which our hero has alien sex toys scanned for bombs, and urethral sounds confiscated…

Okay, so. I travel a bit, sometimes internationally, and so it was I found myself jetting off to Barcelona for a vacation with the extended polyamorous family a few months back.

I have, as those who follow this blog know, been working for several years on a Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon, inspired by (a) my lifelong fear of the alien from Alien (a movie my parents took me to when I was, like, 11 or 12 or something, thinking it was like a new Star Wars…no exaggeration, I had nightmares aout that alien for more than 30 years after), and (b) a suggestion by my wife that I should make a sex toy inspired by the alien, because she loves to push my buttons.

In fact, a photo of one of the early prototypes ended up going mad viral on the Internet, and I’m told has even been uploaded to the official Sigorney Weaver fan page, which means Ms. Weaver has likely seen it. 0.o

Anyway.

I cast four prototype xenomorph hiphugger strapons and one xenomorph facehugger gag in the runup to Barcelona, with the idea that having multiple lovers in the same space would be a fine opportunity for a xenomorph gangbang, truly a test of the design.

So it was I packed all these xenomorph hiphuggers in my luggage and jetted off to Springfield, MO, to meet my Talespinner, who would be accompanying me to Spain.

You would not believe what this looked like on the X-ray. Sadly, they refused to allow me to take a pic.

The problem started quite early. Whilst carrying my luggage aboard the plane, the X-ray showed a suitcase absolutely packed with aggressive alien endoparasites, which, as you might imagine, elicited some…excitement at screening. (I didn’t put them in my checked bag because it was mainly filled with photographic gear and clothes.)

The bag got bounced, the TSA checker opened the lid, and gentle reader, if I could have photographed his expression and shown it to you, you would know that it is possible for surprise to take on human form.

Within minutes, there was a crowd around the table: the TSA inspector, the woman running the X-ray, and two other people, all of them staring in slack-jawed astonishment. The TSA checker called for his superior, who was like “What the…?” One of the other TSA screeners said “Holy shit, that looks like the alien from the Alien movies!”

TSA screener: “Should I—”

Supervisor: “Yes.”

And then they, hand to God, scanned the hiphuggers for explosives.

Eventually convinced the hiphuggers weren’t actually bombs, they allowed me to board, where I sat in a chair that through the miracle of Science flew through the air.

But that’s not the end of the story, oh my no.

When the time came for us to head from Springfield to Barcelona, I re-packed everything, in no small part because of the way TSA freaked out about the xenomorphs, but also prompted by the need to rearrange in order to fit two rather large studio lights for the xenomorph photo shoot we had planned. (That was an adventure in itself; the tripods for the studio lights were an inch and a half too long to fit the suitcase, but fifteen minutes with a hacksaw soon fixed that.)

We set off for the airport, confident that this TSA experience would be far smoother. Alas, it was not to be.

During the rearranging, I’d put the more conventional sex toy kit in my carryon whilst the hiphuggers ent in checked baggage with the studio lights, UV-reactive body paints, UV blacklight, and other miscellaneous orgy supplies.

I did not know, Gentle Reader, I did not suspect, that I had planted the seeds of my own undoing.

For you see, in my conventional sex toy kit I’d placed my collection of sounds. If oyu don’t know what those are, I won’t disturb you with the details, except to say that I had about ten or fifteen and they looked like this:

The TSA guy…

…confiscated and threw away the sounds.

When I asked him why, he looked me straight in the eye and told me, you could stab someone with them.”

You. Could. Stab. Someone. With. Them.

Words…words fail. Whatever danger these may pose as a weapon, Gentle Reader, let me assure you that the 100% sustainably made, biodegradable wood cutlery they gave us aboard the plane would be a far better stabby weapon in every single axis.At this point, it’s hard to escape the perhaps paranoid conclusion that my name exists on some TSA list somewhere. I had a slab of Barcelonan chocolate in my computer bag on the way home and it got scanned for explosives every single time I went through security.

They do it with malice.